A Shoulder to Cry For

We were planning a Mother's Day gathering at Mary's mom's house, around a dozen people, and we were in charge of the meat and potatoes.  A nice long-cooked pork shoulder came immediately to mind, but when I started looking at the offerings in the meat case at the excellent Seward Co-op all I was seeing were smallish shoulder roasts.  I went to the counter and asked the friendly Seward butcher--I'm pretty sure it was Karl, with whom I've chatted a few times, though we haven't been formally introduced [yes, it's Karl Gerstenberger; see his comment below]--I asked Karl if they had a whole pork shoulder in the back.  He said, yeah, he thought they did, but it was...big.  How big?  Well, let's see, said Karl. 

He went in the back and returned with a piece of meat of truly Flintstonian proportions (Pastures A'Plenty pork, I assume).  Once he took the shank out, I think it was still around 15 pounds.  I said:

"I'll take it.  I'm cooking for a crowd on Mother's Day."

"You're good to your mother," said Karl.

"Mother-in-law," said I.

"You're really good to your mother-in-law."

Well, I have a pretty great mother-in-law (I have a great mother, too, but she lives too far away: Hi, Mom!  Wish you could have been there...).  Karl asked what I was going to do with it, and I said I thought I'd just cook it a really long time, basting with cider.  We discussed the question of smoke, so good with this cut of meat, and I said I might do that.  The initial thought was more of a braise, but the meat itself dictated the final method:  I simply did not have a  pan large enough to braise a hunk of porcine exquisiteness that large.  Karl said he wanted to see pictures, and I said I could do that.  Hence, pictures:

Cooking the pork shoulder turned out to be an interstate affair--started Saturday evening at Bide-A-Wee in the Wisconsin countryside with a liberal salt and peppering, that's all.  We don't have a fridge there, but it dropped off to refrigerator temperature as evening came on, so the pork spent the night in the car.

In the morning, bright and early, I started a fire of oak and apple wood.  I browned the meat on the grill:

Then transferred it into this makeshift oven/smoker constructed of cinder blocks and pieces of some old farm implement we found in our woods:

After about four hours in the smoke the meat was not nearly done, but it had absorbed lots of smoke flavor. 

We packed up and headed back to Saint Paul, where the pork went into a 350 oven for another four hours.  I basted frequently throughout the cooking with some of our hard apple cider sweetened just a tad with maple syrup.  Only in the last hour of cooking did it really start to give up juices which, mixed with the cider baste, made a superb pan jus.

Mary made some biscuits.  I put together a potato gratin with a wild touch of sautéed ramps and blanched nettles mixed in--less rich that a gratin dauphinoise, the liquid was whole milk and chicken stock, and I tossed a bit of flour with the sliced potatoes and flavorings.

As we were getting ready to pack up and head over to Willie and Don's, I looked over the food waiting on the stove and said to Mary:

"Hey, look:  We made ham and scalloped potatoes!"

The meat was beyond, the potatoes, too, and the rest of the potluck was wonderful, as well.  A Mother's Day to remember.

Be good to your mother every day, and be good to yourselves, too.

Cheers, all~ Brett