Cider Rubbed Spicy Pork Shoulder
with Lard Biscuits and Candied Onion Blackberry Jam
Ingredients for pork:
1 pork shoulder, sometimes called Boston Butt
salt and pepper
16 whole peeled garlic cloves
4 jalapeno chilies, quartered lengthwise
1 cup Foggy Ridge Sweet Stayman Cider
Ingredients for jam:
2 yellow onions, julienned
salt and pepper
Olive oil
2 cups cider vinegar
1 cup sugar
1 qt of blackberries
The morning before you want to eat, take a paring knife a make a bunch of 3″ deep incision. Push a whole garlic clove along with a piece of jalapeno into the pork. Pour cider all over pork. Season aggressively with salt and pepper, and let sit unwrapped on a plate in the refrigerator. Pull the pork out of the fridge about 2 hours before you fire up the grill.
While you light your grill, get your ingredients together. Once your coals have a nice coating of ash, rake ’em to one side, place a drip pan filled with 2 cups Foggy Ridge Cider (your choice of blends) along side, replace the grate and position your pork above the drip pan, not the coals. The goal here is nice slow cookin’. Put a lid on, and cook until the internal temp of the pork reaches 180 F and has been at that temp for at least one hour, depending on the size of the shoulder maybe 6-12 hours. Refill the drip pan as needed to keep creating a little steam inside the grill.
While the pork cooks, toss the onions with a little salt, pepper, and olive oil. Use a perforated grill pan to cook the onions over the coals, until they look and smell nicely grilled, about 10 minutes or so.
Once the onions are done, in a pot combine your cider vinegar, sugar, and the onions and cook down until the mixture starts to get thick and syrupy. Remove from the heat and add your blackberries, stirring to get ’em all together
When the pork is done let rest for an hour or so, then slice open a biscuit, pull some of that pork on it and top it with a little of the onion blackberry jam—that’ll be pretty good!
Ingredients for biscuits:
2 cups all-purpose unbleached flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup homemade lard or butter
2/3 cup milk
Preheat oven 450 degrees. In a large bowl whisk together flour, baking powder, salt, and pepper. Cut in lard or butter until it all resembles small peas.
Stirring with a fork, gently add milk to make a soft dough. With floured hands knead dough gently 4 times in bowl.
Put dough on lightly floured surface. Roll or pat the dough to about 1/4″ to 1/2″ thick. Cut with a floured 2″ cutter. Place the cut-out biscuits about 1″ apart on ungreased baking sheet. Re roll scraps together and cut out more biscuits. Push remaining scraps together to make one pull-apart biscuit (my favorite!)
Bake until biscuits are golden brown, about 15 minutes.
Collin, who used to chef at Lexington, Virginia’s Red Hen, thinks cider loves pig. Here is his Cider Rubbed Spicky Pork Shoulder, which dances quite well with Foggy Ridge Cider’s Sweet Stayman.
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