Overnight Slow-Roasted Pork

Recipe courtesy of Jamie Oliver, taken from his cookbook "Cooking with Jamie"

OVERNIGHT SLOW-ROASTED PORK

Serves 12

2 tablespoons fennel seeds
1 tablespoon sea or rock salt
2 fennel bulbs, trimmed and roughly chopped
4 medium carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
3 onions peeled and roughly chopped
1 bulb of garlic, cloves unpeeled and roughly smashed
Bunch of fresh thyme
1 11–13 lb piece of pork shoulder on the bone, preferably free-range or organic, skin scored
Olive oil
750ml bottle of white wine
1 pint chicken or vegetable stock

Jamie says: "Pork that's cooked this way gives you the most meltingly tender meat. This is the last job we do in the evening at the restaurant before we go home, so that when we get to work the next day we have the best roast pork to serve for lunch—you can do the same at home, as it's incredibly easy. This recipe only works with a whole shoulder, so it's an ideal dish to serve on Christmas Day when you have a lot of people around (as long as you remember to put it in the oven on Christmas Eve!). Ask your butcher to prepare you a shoulder roast from the whole shoulder as you would a shoulder of lamb."

"P.S. This is a fantastic celebration meal, but before you go out and buy your meat, make sure you've got a pan—and an oven—that's big enough."

1. Preheat your oven to maximum.

2. Smash the fennel seeds with the salt in a pestle and mortar until fine.

3. Put the roughly chopped vegetables, garlic, and thyme sprigs into a large roasting pan.

4. Pat the pork shoulder with olive oil and sit it on top of the vegetables. Now massage all the smashed fennel seeds into the skin of the pork, making sure you push them right into all the scores to maximize the flavor.

5. Put the pork in your preheated oven for 20 to 30 minutes or until it's beginning to color, then turn your oven down to 250°F and cook the pork for 9 to 12 hours, until the meat is soft and sticky and you can pull it apart easily with a fork.

6. Tip all the wine into the roasting tray and let it cook for another hour to give you a perfect sauce.

7. Once the pork is out of the oven, let it rest for half an hour before removing it to a large board. I like to brush off any excess salt from the meat, then I mash up the veg in the pan using a potato masher. Add the stock to the roasting pan, put it on the heat and boil until you have a lovely intensely flavored gravy (you can thicken it with a little sieved flour if you like but I prefer mine light). The pork is great served with some good cranberry beans, braised greens, your roast veg mash and tasty sauce.

PENELOPE COOKS THE PORK

My butcher says an 11 to 13 pound pork shoulder is a special order—"I'm not even sure they come that big," he told me, "and I've been doing this 30 years"—and sold me two 6-pound shoulders, or butts, as he put it, instead. These fit nicely side by side in my roasting pan, which is an oval ceramic one, about 20 inches long, with a top. I had the top off for the first half hour, and on for the rest of the day. I started cooking at 9 A.M.; the pork was gloriously melty by 3 or 4, and still so, when I turned it off at 6:30. You pour a bottle of white wine in for the last hour or so. After you remove the pork, all that wine is boiled and reduced to stunning sauce.

Oliver says he likes to serve the pork with cranberry beans and braised greens; he doesn't offer recipes for either, which is sort of irritating. (I served salad and Dinner-Lady Carrots, too.). After the soaking and cooking, I tossed the beans with olive oil, parsley, and lemon, and they were dull. Oliver, of course, could make them sing in some incredibly simple but zingy way. I wish I knew what that was.