PORK SOUP IN 12 EASY STEPS
1. Buy a pork shoulder (bone-in!) or a fresh ham, if you can find one. Get the biggest piece of meat available, always. Make sure the skin hasn’t been trimmed. If there’s no skin, you might as well just get some cereal or tofu or a poppy seed bagel.
2. Put a shitload of garlic in the food processor with lots of cumin and rosemary and fennel seeds and chili flakes and salt and pepper and some olive oil so it turns into a paste. You can put whatever you want/have in there. If you don’t have a food processor, just mash it up with a mortar/pestle or something.
3. Make some slashes in the skin with a sharp knife. Don’t cut the meat though. Rub that pig down all over with the paste.
4. Wrap it up in plastic, put it in the fridge. Go to bed.
5. Get up early and put it in the oven, on a rack, in a roasting pan, at 450 for about half an hour, with the skin up. Then turn it down to 250. You might want to go back to bed.
6. After about 10 hours, Take it out and let it rest. Otherwise you will ruin everything and hate yourself. (A fresh ham will only need about 3 hours.) Make some other stuff to eat with it. Pour all the fat into a jar and put it in the fridge once it cools. It’s your new best friend.
7. Have about 10 people come over, and make sure they each bring a bottle of red wine.
8. Cut the meat up. It will fall apart and the platter will look like a big delicious mess-pile. Cut the skin, which should be crunchy, into chip-sized pieces and serve them in a separate dish, so you can see which of your friends are smart and which don’t know how to live.
9. Don’t give your dog the bone. He might choke to death or cut his throat open with bone shards. He also might try to kill you if you give it to him and then change your mind and ask for it back, so just skip that. Anyway, you need it. You’re unemployed.
10. The next day, put the pork bones in a big pot of water along with some other bones, like chicken necks or wings. Add whatever other stuff you have around, like fennel fronds, onions, garlic, carrots, or even the ribs you trimmed from the greens you’re about to add (step 12), plus salt and pepper and some herbs, like a bay leaf and some thyme.
11. Let that stuff simmer for a few hours, until it’s broth and not just garbage water. Strain it. Let it cool so you can skim fat off the top.
12. Chop up a bunch of bitter greens like escarole or mustard greens or dandelion. Invite someone really cool over and cook the greens in the broth. Then add the leftover pork shreds. Serve it with some Parmigiano-Reggiano. You’re famous.
8 months ago