Made myself some pork roast today, by adapting a recipie from the Gourmet cookbook to work with a Crock-pot slow cooker.
The basic ingredients:
- 4 pound pork tenderloin roast cut
- juice from 6 limes
- 8 cloves of garlic
- 1 Tbsp of ground cumin
- 1 Tbsp of dried oregano
- 4 Tbsp kosher salt
- several splashes of cider vinegar
- several splashes of orange juice
- In a smallish bowl, combine the garlic (minced), cumin, oregano, and about half of the salt. Add the juice from the limes. Mix well, and let sit for 10 minutes.
- optional: heat up a pan until you think it might melt, maybe with a little bit of oil in the bottom of it. I stuck with cast iron, and let it sit for about 5 minutes over high heat. Quickly sear the pork on all sides, for a minute or so, until just starting to brown.
- Cut 4 deep slices into the top of the pork, about 1 to 2 inches deep. Into each of them spoon a portion of the garlic/lime/etc mixture. You’ll probably have some left over. This is fine.
- Bind the meat with butcher’s twine. I don’t actually have any idea why, I just know that my mom does this whenever she cooks a pork roast, so I did too.
- Put in slow cooker, and add cider and orange juice to the bottom for moisture.
- Cook, on high, for about 5 hours.
- Pour what remains of the garlic/lime mixture over the top of the meat. Sprinkle the remaining salt on.
- Cook for approximately 1 hour more.
Let sit for about 10-20 minutes, unless you’re really hungry (I was) and then you can just dig right in.
Probably feeds about 4 to 6 people, or makes dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner again, and possibly a snack for the day after.
The gourmet recipie calls for doing this with a roast cut that has the skin on, and cooking it at a high enough heat the skin gets crispy. Doing it this way you don’t get the diversity of texture, but you do end up with a yummy meal.