Cuban · Main
Lechón Asado
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a warm current of chile, an earthy, grounding base, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- 4kg bone-in pork shoulder, skin on
- 70g garlic (about 20 cloves)
- 35g coarse salt, plus 10g for the skin
- 12g ground cumin
- 10g dried oregano
- 5g black peppercorns
- 500ml naranja agria juice, or 350ml orange juice with 150ml lime juice
- 2 white onions, sliced into rings
- 120ml olive oil
- 3 bay leaves
Equipment
Mortar & pestle
The skills inside
Asado fireScoringRoasting in a hot ovenStraining & passing through a sieveMarinating: acid, salt and timeMashing & puréeing
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Score the skin in a close diamond lattice, cutting through rind and fat but stopping before the meat, then drive a thin knife deep into the flesh in twenty places to make pockets.
- Pound the garlic, coarse salt, cumin, oregano and peppercorns to a wet paste in a mortar, push it into every pocket, whisk the remainder into the sour orange with the oil, onions and bay and pour it over; marinate cold for 24 hours, turning twice. 600 min
- Lift the meat out, wipe the skin bone dry and rub it with the reserved salt; roast fat side up at 150C (300F), basting the meat but never the rind, until a probe slides in with no resistance and the centre reads 92C (198F), about 5 hours. 300 min
- Raise the oven to 230C (450F) and roast until the rind has blistered into crackling all over and taps hollow, 20 to 30 minutes; rest 30 minutes, then pull the meat into strands. 30 min
- Strain the marinade, boil it hard for 3 minutes with a spoonful of the pan fat and pour it over the shredded pork as mojo. 3 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Scoring 28 recipes
- Lift one cut open with a fingertip: it parts through the skin and stops in the fat beneath, showing a pale wall at its base. Any cut showing red or fibrous flesh has gone too deep; any that has not reached the fat has left the skin tethered, and it will tighten under heat.
- The lines run parallel at even spacing, roughly a finger's width apart, each carried the full length of the face and stopped the same margin short of the edge. Sight down them: lines that converge, wander or crowd at one end cook at different rates and read as careless on the plate.
- Each line is one clean draw of the blade held at a slant, not a sawn or doubled track, and it leaves a bevelled lip standing slightly proud rather than a vertical slot. The surface should be dry and cold, near 4C (39F), when it is cut; worked warm and slack it drags, and the blade tears where it should part.
- After cooking the cuts have opened and set, each a clear gap with firm browned walls. Lines closed back to faint scratches were cut too shallow or too straight down, and the surface has shrunk over them instead of through them.
- The piece lies flat and true when it is set down, with no cupping through the middle and no lifted, curled edge. A bowed piece means the tightening surface was never released, so it pulled the whole thing up and left the underside pale where it stood off the heat.
Where it goes wrong The blade was pushed rather than drawn, through a surface left warm and slack, so it went past the fat and into the flesh. The cuts bleed as they cook and the juices flood the surface, so it steams instead of crisping: the lines gape into wet ragged trenches, the flesh between them dries into hard ridges, and the skin stays leathery and pale where it should have blistered and set.
Roasting in a hot oven 56 recipes
- The oven was fully up to heat before anything went in, given time beyond the indicator light rather than judged by it.
- Every piece has air around it. Nothing touches its neighbour and nothing is packed to the edge of the tray, because crowded food steams itself in its own moisture and never browns.
- Colour is even across the whole tray, the tray having been turned at least once: no pale row at the back and no dark row at the front.
- It came out BEFORE the target temperature, not at it. Carryover keeps driving the inside up by several degrees after it leaves the oven, and that rise is part of the cooking rather than an error in it.
- The temperature was read at the coldest part rather than the easiest one to reach, and read again after the rest.
Where it goes wrong The tray was crowded, or the oven was not truly up to heat. The food releases steam faster than a cool box can carry it away, so it sits pale and slack, and the extra minutes spent chasing colour take the inside well past where it should have stopped.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.