Life of Wry

I did my first Tasty.. you know those compelling 30-second, hyper-sped up food preparation videos that are forever making the rounds on Facebook that make cooking look fast and easy?

I saw one a couple of mornings ago–I’m guessing when I was particularly hungry–and thought, wow, that looks really, really good, and very easy… why, I’m making that for dinner. 

So, I did that. Here’s the result:

Cross-hatched and marinated a pork shoulder in soy, sugar, scallions and garlic (lots) for an hour:

Tossed some asparagus and diced potatoes in olive oil, sprinkled with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper, and arranged on oven platter:

Baked for an hour or so on 275:

Made a glaze of dark brown sugar, honey and soy:

Spread on top of pork and returned to a 500 degree oven for 20 minutes. Here’s the result:

Looks pretty good, and should have been, but for these problems:

• Recipe called for boneless, skin-on pork. Coop doesn’t leave the skin on, so the cross-hatching part didn’t work and the meat didn’t hold together well. Still, it might have been okay, if you like fatty meat, which I don’t. I’d rather use a loin or something far leaner. I think you’d get as good a dish, but maybe not quite as flavorful.. in that fat-adds-flavor way.. but more appealing.
• This one’s key: You have to wait until the oven reaches 500 before you put the meat/veggies back in. Because I just returned the platter to the oven and let the temperature rise while the meat and veggies were inside. The glaze, instead of forming a discreet, crisp top to the pork, warmed and spread all over everything, turning what was supposed to be a savory dish with a nice contrasty sweet, crusty top, into a sickeningly sweet, goopy mess. I didn’t get a photo, but at one point, while in the oven, the glaze had bubbled and frothed to souffle-ish proportions, covering everything in a lava-like layer… and I thought, uh oh, this is not good (it wasn’t). Once removed from the oven, the expanded glaze layer settled back down, but not before it had soaked everything on the platter, to very sticky effect. Add to that, the potatoes were strangely chewy.. not sure why. And the asparagus spears were tough-overdone, not crisp-overdone and they were soggy after being drenched in the sugary glaze.

So pretty much none of it came out edible.. another food fail.

On a roll.