Roast Mojo Pork by Roy Choi as seen in Chef
How hard can it be: Pretty straightforward, takes a full day though
Overall Flavor Rating: 5/5
Recipe: From The Chef Show website in tandem with seemingly the same recipe on the Goop website. Served alongside fried plantains from Serious Eats.
What went well:
The pork roasted beautifully. When it came out of the oven, tears welled in my eyes.
The marinade for the pork is dynamite. It tastes SO good and the delicious citrusy/garlicky flavor lingers in your mouth for seemingly days on end.
Since you can’t buy just the amount of mint that you need for the marinade, you have plenty left over to make mojitos.
What went poorly:
Completely miscalculated the size of the brining vessel that would be required.
We didn’t actually have enough brine so we had to supplement on the fly.
Turns out it’s pretty hard to grate an orange if you try to do it after you’ve already juiced it.
This is part one of a multi-day sandwich adventure. You can read the second part of the adventure here.
Ever since I first watched Chef, I’ve wanted to make the Cubanos they make on their food truck. This past weekend, I found myself with a bit of extra time and decided it was finally time to take ‘em on.
“But Nick!”, you say, “Isn’t this write up about roast mojo pork?”. Well yes, you’ve got me there. I had originally planned on just making cubanos and being able to buy all of the ingredients from the grocery store. According to the official Roy Choi + Jon Favreau recipe, it should only take 40 minutes! But little did I know, that cook time casually assumes you have roast mojo pork on hand, which takes a cool 18 hours. And now, you see how what seemed like a simple 40 minute adventure turned into a multi-day project.
Fear not though, we did end up making cubanos so this is really just Part 1 of a two part sandwich making series.
Ok so how do you actually make the roast pork? The first thing you need to do is to brine the pork for about 12 hours. The only hard part about this is getting all of the ingredients together, since there is rather a lot that goes into it. We used store bought orange juice rather than juicing oranges ourselves because some quick research estimated we would need to juice approximately 20 oranges (hahahaha. no.). It’s also worth noting that we halved the recipe since it makes 6 pounds of pork which is just way too much. Oh, we also kinda winged it on the fresh herbs and went with whatever quantities came in the “Herb Assortment” at the grocery store.
After writing that, I feel like one of those people in the comments on a recipe that says “It was great! I used tofu instead of chicken and then did a teriyaki glaze instead of tomato sauce. I’ll definitely make this chicken parm again!”.
We used a boneless Boston Butt instead of a bone-in pork shoulder because Whole Foods was all out of pork shoulder.
Once you’ve got everything together, you throw it in a bowl and mix it all up. You can see that we didn’t chop up the herbs, we just roughed them up a bit and called it a day. We were making this after getting back from dinner on Friday night and my desire to pick tiny leaves off of tiny stems was quite, quite low.
Once everything is mixed up you throw in your pork! As you can see, we vastly overestimated the size of the container we were going to need.
Ok, no worries, no worries. We just need to move the pork into one of our smaller bowls.
Well crap. Even after we had moved the pork into a much smaller bowl, the amount of marinade that we had was simply too little. In no uncertain terms, this really sucked. We had already cleaned up all of our other stuff and now we needed a small, awkward amount more. We settled on throwing in a splash more of orange juice, water, rice vinegar, and salt and praying that it was ok. How much did we add? Not a clue, we just kept adding a bit at a time until we could put the lid on and everything was covered as seen below.
Once we were satisfied that the entire thing was brining, we put it in the fridge to do its thing for 12 hours.
End of Act 1
Act 2: A Bright Porky Future
*A rooster crows, the sun is rising, it’s time to roast some pork*
After letting the pork soak up flavor overnight, we were finally ready to cook it! Oh wait, just kidding, it needs to sit for another two hours covered in a different saucy mixture. Ok let’s make that.
Making the marinade is fairly easy provided that you own some kind of blending apparatus. If you don’t, I can only imagine that this would be a right pain in the ass. The marinade is simply a bunch of stuff blended together on high speed until you get this almost neon green sauce.
One important note here is that when you go to prep your fresh squeezed orange juice, make sure you’ve already zested as much as you need off of the outside. It’s surprisingly annoying trying to grate an already juiced orange.
We goofed here.
I will admit that there are rather a lot of ingredients that go into the marinade. If you’re like me, you can simplify your life by refusing to buy fresh oregano and just throwing in a good bit of the dried stuff.
After everything is ready there’s nothing fancy, you just throw it into your blender contraption (in our case, an immersion blender).
And then you blend. Kind of crazy how green it gets.
When the marinade is complete, your entire kitchen should smell fantastic. At this point, you should definitely dip a finger (or a spoon if you’re a health inspector) into the marinade and give it taste.
Now you’ll need to get the pork out of the fridge. During this step I got brine all over the place because I thought it would be smart to pour the brine out into a strainer rather than just pull the pork out and brush stuff off of it. Don’t worry though! After making a mess, I still had to brush stuff off of the pork because the peppercorns had embedded themselves in every little nook and cranny. After a quick rub down to knock all of the peppercorns loose, the pork will finally be ready to accept marinade.
To coat the pork, we first poured some marinade right on the pork and I gave it a good rub down. The technique for this is similar to applying sunscreen when you accidentally put on too much.
Once the pork was covered in marinade, we put it in a plastic bag with some additional marinade and gave it a shake. Then we put it on a plate (food safety and all that) and let it soak.
I should note that we reserved some of the marinade in a small container so that we could use it as a sauce later. If you’re planning on doing this, don’t get pork in all of your marinade or you’ll be in for a bad, food-poisony time.
After the pork has had a chance to marinade for two hours, you pull it out and put it on a wire rack on top of a (very) foil wrapped baking sheet. Unless you have some weird love for cleaning, you definitely want to wrap your baking sheet in foil.
When you take the pork out of the bag, don’t throw away the extra marinade that’s leftover! Pour it out into a bowl. You need it to baste the pork every hour or so.
When you are satisfied with the level of marinade on your pork, it’s time to put it in the oven. How long and at what temp? Good question! You’ll note that The Chef Show’s recipe unhelpfully says “Slow roast pork shoulder until 170°F internal temp (should still be a light pink on inside)”. Wow. Great. So helpful.
Fortunately! On Gwyneth Paltrow’s “lifestyle website”, Goop, there’s seemingly the same recipe but with more instructions. I cannot vouch for anything else on the Goop website so I don’t want to hear any complaints if you buy magic crystals or something and they don’t ~realign your energies~.
Anyways, you put the pork in at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for 3 to 4 hours.
The recipe says to baste it with the marinade throughout cooking, which we interpreted to mean once every hour. That worked out pretty well and we ran out of marinade after our third basting, so I am confident in saying we nailed that part.
Below, you can see the pork after just an hour in the oven. Already the top fat cap was starting to get some nice color on it.
After two hours, our apartment smelled incredible and things were really starting to look good.
After three hours, things looked fantastic. We gave it one final brush down with marinade and put it back in for another 30 minutes to get us up to the recommended 170 degrees.
Once the pork is out of the oven, it’s showtime! Er, well, it’s almost showtime. The pork needs to sit for a bit since 1) it’s really hot and 2) it needs to rest.
While the pork is resting, it’s the perfect time to make an appropriate side to go along with it. We decided to make fried plantains following Kenji’s recipe from Serious Eats. Frying the plantains went almost perfectly except for the fact that I didn’t read the note on the recipe at all. The note states that ripe plantains are almost completely black. Our plantains were a vibrant yellow. Whoops!
We pressed on with our unripe plantains since it was the only thing we had to make as a side. Making them is really simple, you just fry them in a shallow pool of oil until they look good.
When the plantains are done, it’s time to slice the pork. Oh man is it good.
To plate your pork and plantains, start by doing that artsy sauce smear thing and then realizing that you still need to work on that one. Next just throw everything on your plate and liberally apply the reserved marinade on top as a sauce. Note: here you’re using the marinade that was set aside at the very beginning, not the marinade that the pork sat in (again, food poisoning).
When it’s all plated up it looks fantastic. Just look at that.
And as a bonus, if you had to buy too much mint you can now make a mojito to go along with it! If you didn’t have to buy too much mint, feel free to purchase more and then make a mojito.
How was everything? Amazing. Even the not-yet-ripe plantains were delicious. 10/10 would make again. I went back for a second round of everything even though I was full to the point of self-loathing.
“But what about the cubanos?!”. I know, I know. Stay tuned, Part 2 of this sandwich adventure will be out soon.
Update: Part 2 is out now!