Fruitman Kitchen Basics: Roast Pork

Frequent readers and eagle eyed fruit people will notice that the Fruitman Kitchen uses a reoccurring set of basic building blocks throughout its recipes. Part of this is the fact that home cooking often means cooking a large amount of one thing and reusing it in different ways. Another part of this is that growing confidence in the kitchen means finding what tastes good to you and using that as a building block toward more ambitious combinations. Fruitman Kitchen Basics lays out these basic building blocks for the Fruitman Kitchen.

The sheer variety of cuts of pork that work well roasted make this an endless quest for perfecting your roast. Once you’ve mastered this, you will end up with tender, flavorful pork that you will be able to add to ramen soups, vegetable stir frys, fried rice, or just a tasty sandwich. One of these roasts usually lasts 10 days in my fridge.

Ingredients
3lb of a cut of pork suitable for roasting: pork shoulder, pork loin, pork belly, pork spare ribs, up to you, but ideally it should be more than 2″ thick.

The Fruitman Marinade: 1 cup mirin, 3 tablespoons miso paste, 1/2 cup mustard, 1/2 cup fresh grated horseradish, red chili flakes. zest of one orange.
The marinade has three basic parts that you can choose on your own.
Dry aromatics: I like red chilly flakes, orange zest, paprika, rosemary, sage
Oil: Sesame oil works well, but up to you. I will also include miso in this category.
Acid: This is vast. Rice wine, vinegar, lemon juice, yogurt, mustard. I normally like to build a marinade after choosing the acid.

• 

• 

Instructions
In a large mixing bowl, combine all of your marinade ingredients and mix together.
Add salt and pepper to your cut of pork and submerge in marinade.
Place the marinade and the pork into a sealed bag and refrigerate overnight.
it could also be a pot or pan, but make sure the whole pork is submerged.
If your marinade is heavily citrus based, do not marinade for longer than 8 hours.

Preheat oven to 350.
Place pork roast on an oven tray, and salt and pepper, and pour the marinade over it.
Cook the pork to an internal temperature of 145F, total cook time depends on the cut, but the internal temperature will be the same.
With a big spoon, scoop the liquid in the oven tray back over the top of the roast, every 20 minutes while cooking.
Once internal temperature reaches 145F, remove from oven and brown the edges over high heat in a pan. You may also broil the exterior, make sure to place on closest oven rack level to broiler if you choose to broil.
Once browned, let the pork sit for 10 minutes.
Take the pan juices and heat over high heat to make a gravy. These should begin to bubble and thicken. Add wine for additional aromatics.

View this post on Instagram

I feel like in the midwest of the usa they sell whole racks of ribs at casual neighborhood grills for one person, like those places where you get a bib, a wet nap ™️, and a dream. Anyway, this one is marinaded in a horseradish miso mirin bath overnight, slow roasted at like 250 for a few hours, and then broiled. I think I could eat it all at once and quickly for sure. I don't think there's a happier moment for a cook than when a comrade you cook for eats a whole plate in two minutes. Once we can have people over again, I will make another whole one of these for someone to eat all at once.

A post shared by Raul Zbengheci (@fruitmankitchen) on May 5, 2020 at 12:20pm PDT

Slice the pork and enjoy!