BBQ US-Stylee

IT’S NATIONAL BBQ WEEK! FUCK! 7 DAYS OF PREORDAINED SUNSHINE AND NATIONALLY SANCTIONED SHITFACEDNESS! TO THE PARK WITH OUR DISPOSABLE TRAYS! IGNITE! BURN! DRINK! SMOKE! LITTER! VOMIT! Oh, actually, forget it, because we live in Scotland and it’s fucking raining. It’s not like this across the seas. I went to see my Real American Girlfriend in Richmond, Virginia recently, and despite their legendary intolerance of booze, spice, and the rest of the earth, those disarmingly polite and friendly Americans do hot sauce and hangover food better than anyone else. And so, amidst a hazy wonderscape of burgers, metal, and inverted cupcakes (RICHMOND RULES), I was introduced to Real American Barbecue. No doubt some readers will already be familiar with this magic: heftily seasoned pork shoulder, slow-cooked for a thousand years in a pit of smoking coals before being pulled apart, coated in barbecue sauce and thrust into buns. I’m not denouncing the intoxicated joys of blackening Lorne sausage in the weak Scottish sunshine, but for those two to three hundred rainy days, I present my indoor recipe for this relatively unknown pork phenomenon.

THE METHOD

I’m using a 2kg boneless pork shoulder joint, skin scored with a sharp knife at 1cm intervals. You’ll be slow-roasting the joint for about 6 hours, but as a general guide allow 40 minutes per 500g at 170ºC. First, marinade the pork for 8-24 hours in 500ml apple juice, 50ml cider vinegar, and some crushed garlic. Whilst the refrigerated pork happily imbibes, blitz together 2 cloves of garlic with an inch of cassia bark, 2tbsp fennel seeds, several cloves, 2 small chillies, 2tbsp brown (preferably molasses) sugar, 2tsp smoked paprika, and plenty of sea salt and black pepper to create a sweet and spicy rub. An hour before cooking, place the pork on a large board and use your hands to coat the meat thoroughly with the rub, adding a little olive oil if it won’t stick. If you find roughly massaging a bit of dead animal a little strange, then just close your eyes and imagine it’s the overworked shoulder of an unusually cold but widely desirable celebrity, and everything will be normal again. Whilst the shoulder rests for what remains of the hour, preheat your oven to maximum, and pour about 300ml of the marinade into a deep roasting tray. Briefly celebrate America by obsessively washing your hands and drinking watery, fizzy beer from a red plastic cup.

When the pork’s rested, place 4 onion halves together in the tray, and sit the pork on top. Cover tightly with foil and put in the oven. Give it 10 minutes, then turn the temperature down to 170ºC and leave it for 5 hours, basting occasionally if you have time. Hopefully your oven is no relative of mine which, with HAL-like distrust, turns itself off after 3 hours. Miserable pre-empting xenophobe.

After 5 hours, baste the meat, skim and reserve a couple of tablespoons of fat from the pan, and return the pork to the oven for an hour, without the lid. Use this hour to make sides. Home-made baked beans are a must. Dice 2 celery sticks, 1 onion, 4 rashers of smoked bacon, and 1 green pepper, and fry in the pork fat for five minutes. Stir in a couple of tins of mixed beans, before adding about 75g brown sugar, 2tbsp honey, 1tsp smoked paprika, 2 tbsp vinegar and a few good squirts each of tomato ketchup and mustard. Stir, add 2 glasses of water, boil, then simmer until you’re ready to serve. For a healthy coleslaw, finely slice red cabbage, onion and carrot (use a food processor), before combining with a little lemon juice and mustard, extra virgin olive oil, plenty of plain yoghurt, and finely chopped fresh herbs. Pumpkin seeds give a lovely nutty crunch to potato salad, being new potatoes cooked and cut bite-size, mixed with fresh chives, parsley, mayo, extra virgin olive oil and a dash of vinegar.

Almost there. Remove the pork from the oven, allow to cool, yank off the skin, and pull the meat apart with those dangerous hands of yours, discarding any fatty bits as you go. If your Vitamin D deficiency leaves you too weak to hand-shred, then two forks will also work, but by this stage the meat should be so tender as to be willing its own destruction. Fire the skin under a hot grill for crackling. Put the shredded pork in a large pan, add several tablespoons of the pan juices (skimmed of fat), smother with barbecue sauce and gently warm through. I’ve tried emulating the outlandish complexities of the sauce my lady gifted me for export, but home-made barbecue sauce is rarely comparable, so just buy in some good stuff. Serve on any kind of roll, topped with coleslaw and surrounded by beans, crackling, potato salad and many, many starred and striped napkins. Now, incorporating the words ‘porkulus’, ‘granfalloon’ and ‘cornball’, arrogantly misconstrue and bemoan the surface absurdities of U.S. foreign policy.