Pork Shoulder Braised in Cider

Last week Kerri had pork braised in cider for lunch in a rather good gastropub (Great Queen Street on – you guessed it – Great Queen Street in Covent Garden) and wanted to try to recreate it. We had a look around for recipes but eventually just did our own thing.

We bought a boned, rolled shoulder from our butcher. We were planning to remove the skin and cook it separately to make lovely crackling, but the skin was full of rather dark hairs which didn’t look at all appetising, so we removed the skin and threw it away. This meant untying the string to remove the skin and then tying it up again and of course it didn’t go back into as nice a shape as it had started in.

We scored the fat, then seasoned the joint all over with salt and pepper. One recipe that we found said to make slits in the pork and insert garlic slices, which we do with lamb, but we didn’t do that. Another recipe said to rub it with a mixture of crushed fennel and coriander, which we didn’t do either.

We placed some onions and carrots into the bottom of a casserole dish, put in the pork and then added about 300ml of cider. We had planned to buy some decent English cider but forgot, and at the last minute all we could find was some sparkling French cider, which was interesting but didn’t taste particularly appley.

We braised the pork for two and a half hours, spooning some of the cider over then pork now and then. When it was done, we added some chicken stock and a dash of cider vinegar to the braising liquid to make a sauce. We also added some finely diced carrots, celery and onion to the sauce.

The result was tasty and very porky; probably due to the fact that our pig was apparently a very happy pig. Kerri said it didn’t taste much like the version that she’d eaten recently though; maybe we needed more appley-tasting cider and needed to baste it more often. Served with some yummy mustard mash and some steamed greens.