Thread by @ElSandifer

Just made the best pork roast of my life, so here’s a food thread. One of these days I’ll remember to, like, take pictures of this shit. But until then, here goes. Meal was: pork roast, mashed potatoes, romano beans, and acorn squash.

I’ll start with the pork. For pretty much all of my roasts, I use the reverse sear, as developed by @kenjilopezalt. Basically, you roast the meat at a low temperature, then finish it at a high one. In this case, I used the added twist of doing the slow cook in the smoker.

(My smoker is the Bradley electric smoker, which is delightfully cheap for everything it can do because it’s on the razor/blades model of locking you into their wood chips. If you think owning a smoker is your kinda thing, it’s my recommendation.)

So I cooked the pork (seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic, and rosemary) in the smoker for two hours, to get it to about 145, then pulled it. The other trick I’ve come to with roasts lately is to baste them in a lightly acidic mix between the low cook and the sear.

In this case—and I’ll tag @Alongcameacider here since it’s of interest to her—I did what I think of as an inverted vinaigrette. 3 parts liquid, 1 part oil, some mustard to emulsify. The liquid was a bottle of wild seedling wild fermented cider from a local cidery, Black Duck.

It was a very good cider, but a cidery whose style doesn’t really appeal to anyone in the house. Notably, it’s very sour and acidic, so perfect for this use. Brushed the meat down with my inverted vinaigrette, put it in a 500 degree oven for about 10 minutes to finish.

The squash I did on the grill, basting the fleshy side with an apple cider vinaigrette. Late in the process, I poured some of the cider into the cavity on each squash, then two minutes later went “FUCK I FORGOT I WAS DOING GRAVY” and carefully poured it back into my measuring cup

This was ultimately fortuitous, as the squash picked up the flavor nicely, and I will remember this trick for later.

Mashed potatoes were basic skin-on garlic mashed, although with the added trick picked up from Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat of using sour cream in the mashing, which spruced them up delightfully.

And the romano beans were just roasted in the oven alongside the pork with some salt and olive oil, then dressed in a sauce I’ve started using for veggies a lot.

The basics of the sauce: mince up some garlic, soak it in a quarter cup of lemon juice for 15+ minutes with salt and pepper. Add sunflower lecithin and 3/4 cup olive oil, and blend until creamy. In this case I augmented with a sliced up apple and a quarter cup of the cider.

This is a fantastic all-purpose sauce. Would make a great salad dressing, you could dip a thin-sliced flank steak or some grilled chicken in it, roasted potatoes would be great in it. A real winner of a sauce.

Like a lot of things I make, it’s extendible/swappable. Use different acids, add herbs, do or don’t do the apple. You need the stick blender and the lecithin to get the creaminess/puree the aromatics, which are both a little specialist, but seriously, this stuff is gold.

And then the gravy. It’s a basic roux gravy. seriouseats.com/recipes/2016/1… can teach you the basic technique—ignore all the turkey gizzards bits and just focus on step three of the recipe.

Puling that up, I’m amused to see the soy sauce recommendation, which I hit on independently tonight to add some body. And of course I used the cider I’d panickedly poured out of my acorn squash. That and a quart of chicken stock made a wonderful sweet yet savory gravy.

So the cider appeared in 3/4 dishes plus the gravy (so tacitly on the potatoes as well), and provided a unifying theme for a smokey early autumn dish. An absolute winner, and you can expect a lot of these tricks and side dishes to come back on Thanksgiving.