I had a recipe from a blog that I read stashed away for a slow-roasted pork butt. Apparently, it makes killer pulled pork sandwiches. I normally throw a pork loin into the slow cooker for that, but I wanted to try this different cut and different method.
So pork butts (okay, it's the shoulder, not the ass, but it's still fun to say) went on sale at Smith's, so I bought one and prepared it last night according to the recipe I read. I even invited my mother-in-law over to share with her my culinary prowess.
Stories like this never end well, do they?
The directions called for 400 degrees in the oven for 30 minutes and then 200 degrees for five hours to slow cook it. I get it, that particular cut has a lot of connective tissue, and you have to cook it low and slow to soften it. But after six hours in the oven, my probe thermometer was only reading 140 degrees, when the recipe said it should be between 195 and 205.
I thought that bacteria was killed at 180 or so. The fact that this thing had been plodding along for six hours and was only up to 140 told me that one bite of that thing would kill us all from some strange food-borne illness. Dim was willing to eat it, but I said absolutely not. That butt was a death trap waiting to kill anyone who tasted it, I'm sure of it.
We ended up with Mexican take-out instead.
There must have been a typo in the recipe. Maybe the temperature was supposed to be 250 or 300. In retrospect, it's not really rational to expect a piece of meat to get up to 205 when the oven is only set at 200. But I wasn't thinking through that bit, I just trusted the recipe.
So out the door went a $15 cut of meat, and we forked out $40 for take-out.
That's such a pain in the pork butt.
Posted by Jen at February 20, 2009 12:14 PM