Nigella Lawson Slow Roasted Aromatic Shoulder of Pork

Ppaperdoll's Note:

A Nigella Lawson recipe printed in the December 2001 issue of Good Food magazine. I'll be making this for Easter Sunday lunch. It takes 24 hours to cook, but that's almost entirely passive cooking time, so this is really a simple recipe!

• Total Time: 23 hrs 45 mins
• Prep Time: 45 mins
• Cook Time: 23 hrs

Ingredients:

Servings: 12

• 9 1/2 kg pork shoulder, skin scored
• 6 garlic cloves
• 1 cm length fresh ginger
• 2 fresh red chili peppers (or 1 teaspoon dried red chili pepper flakes)
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 4 tablespoons rice vinegar

Directions:

1. The day before you plan to serve the pork, preheat your oven (make sure it's clean) to the highest heat possible.
2. Sit pork skinside up on rack in a roasting tin.
3. Chop garlic and ginger, and then pound to a paste in a pestle and mortar, add chilli or chilli flake and 1 tbsp of oil and 2 tbsp vinegar until spreadable.
4. Rub this paste all over scored skin, pushing it into the cut lines of the rind. Place pork in oven and cook 30 minutes.
5. In bowl that paste was in, pour the rest of the oil and vinegar. When pork has been in oven half an hour remove it from the oven, switch heat down to 120 degrees Celsius
6. Turn pork over (best to use oven gloves for this, though they will get dirty). Pour oil and vinegar over the underside (now the top of the pork)and put back in the low-heated oven for 23 hours.
7. About half an hour before you're ready to eat, turn oven back to the highest it will go, remove pork and turn it back crackling side up. Put it back in the oven for 30 minutes to get it hot and crisp. It may need another 10 minutes to get it really crisp.
8. Remove pork from oven, slice off the crackling and break it into pieces. Carve meat into slices and serve with crackling.