Simons slow grilled paprika pork

Photographer: Kate
Serves 8-10

A few weeks before Christmas a bunch of our Chief Engineers had an off-site day. We got ourselves right out of the office and hired a small community hall out on the nearby peninsula.  It’s set by the water at Hoopers inlet and is surrounded by small farms and bushed areas. It was a really good day of thinking big thoughts and looking at big plans without the normal distractions of the office. I think the sum total of traffic we heard all day was about 3 cars. We figured it made sense to take our cooking seriously too, so we threw one of the big 48” grills on the back of the truck and rolled it straight off onto the porch at the hall. Sorted.

My job was dinner. We made a big coleslaw, some green salad, and cooked some flat-bread on the grill, but the star performances were from the three joints of meat – lamb, beef and pork. All three were seared on a high heat in the afternoon then put into aluminium trays and left to cook slowly. So we finished the day with a beverage in hand, sitting outside on classic old wooden benches, looking out over the estuary, with bellbirds hanging out in flax bushes all around us, tucking into some properly good eats. The (food) highlight for me was this pork with smokey paprika.

When we re-created this back in our kitchen at the office, we served it up as a delicious cold meat for a sandwich with Kate’s fennel salad posted last week.  All this goodness layered up inside a crusty baguette with a little hot and smoky paprika yogurt sauce. Yum (again).

INGREDIENTS


A nice piece of pork shoulder (ours was around 3kg)
2 Tbsp smoked paprika
2 Tbsp brown sugar
1 Tbsp salt

Hot and smokey sauce
2 cups greek yoghurt
1 Tbsp smoked paprika
Hot sauce to create your desired level of heat
1/2 tsp salt

To serve
Crusty Baguette
Salad

METHOD


1. Mix together the ingredients for the rub
2. Score the skin of the pork and dry the meat really well with paper towels.
3. Cover the pork all over with the rub making sure it gets into all the creases and scores in the skin. Leave for 1 hour before cooking.
4. Heat your grill or bbq to high and get it nice and hot to sear the meat.
5. Sear the meat, aiming for a nice criss-cross pattern on all sides, then place in an aluminium tray.
6. Move the tray to the side of the grill and leave one burner on the other side running on low (indirect cooking). Close the hood and let the magic happen.
7. Allow the pork to cook (resisting the temptation to keep opening the hood as this will slow the cooking time considerably) until the internal temperature of the pork is over 70°C. The cooking time will depend heavily on how much meat you’re cooking and how hot your grill is, for us it took around 3 hours.
8. Rest, then carve/cut/rip up, and dig in.