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Special

Jacques Pépin Makes Pork Roast with Ratatouille

Premiere: 8/31/2022 | 00:05:25 |

The slow roasting of this dish makes for a tender and juicy pork. Pépin serves his with ratatouille, or stewed vegetables made up of zucchini, eggplant and tomatoes.

About the Episode

Serves 4

“When you buy a pork butt, you are buying pork that is cut from the shoulder of the pig. The story is that in colonial New England, the shoulder cut was stored and distributed in barrels known as butts, and somehow the name stuck. It is a cut with some fat that makes it flavorful, and, in this recipe, the long slow cooking makes it very tender.” —Jacques Pépin

Ingredients:

2 pounds pork butt
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
4 to 6 large cloves garlic
1 onion, about 10 ounces, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 eggplant, cut into 2-inch dice/cubes
1 zucchini, cut into 2-inch dice/cubes
1 large tomato, about 10 ounces, cut into 1-inch dice
½ teaspoon herbes de Provence or Italian seasoning
Chives or parsley, for serving

Method:

Preheat oven to 275°F.

Sprinkle the pork butt with salt and pepper, rubbing it in well. Cut one of the cloves of garlic into five or six wedges, and, using a small sharp knife, make five or six slits in the pork. Insert a wedge of garlic into each slit. Heat a Dutch oven over medium-high heat, and, when hot, place the garlic-studded pork butt fat side down in the pot. Cook, turning frequently, until it is golden brown on all sides, 15 to 20 minutes.

When the pork is browned all over, sprinkle it with the herbes de Provence. Add the onion, eggplant, zucchini and tomato. Roughly chop the remaining cloves of garlic and add. Season with salt and cover. Cook in the oven until the pork is very tender, 1½ to 2 hours.

Remove the cooked pork from the cocotte and let it rest for 10 minutes. Using a large spoon, transfer the vegetables and some of the cooking liquid to a serving platter. Slice the pork into thick slices and arrange on top. Sprinkle with chives or parsley and serve.

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"I feel that if Jacques Pépin shows you how to make an omelet, the matter is pretty much settled. That’s God talking. "
TRANSCRIPT

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Jacques Pépin, and this is "American Masters at Home."

(upbeat music) - I love a slow-roasted or slow-baked roast of pork.

And for that, ideally this is the pork butt, pork shoulder.

As you see, there's a fair amount of fat in it, but it's very moist and tender and so forth.

And what I want to do here, to start with, you put salt and pepper on top of it.

Rub on it.

And.

(pepper grinding) What I put here, little wedge of garlic like this, the real wedge of garlic.

About five or six of those.

And what you do, they are pointed as you can see here, you make a hole in there to push them into, into that hole.

Yeah.

To stuff them like this.

Okay.

Gives taste.

Yeah.

There.

Five or six, you can do that with a leg of lamb or with other things too, you know.

That's it.

And that, I'm gonna put that to brown here.

I don't need any fat in there (pot sizzles) and it should brown a good 15, 20 minutes until it's nicely roasted, all around.

And after that, around, I put what we call like a ratatouille in France, the ratatouille, the stew from the south of France.

I'm gonna cut those very coarsely.

Garlic.

(knife chopping) Onion.

(knife chopping) Okay.

(knife chopping) (knife chopping) Okay.

I have an eggplant close to 12 ounces, (knife chopping) and a zucchini about the same way too.

All right.

(knife chopping) And you can be pretty coarse with that.

(knife chopping) One last tomato here.

(tomato squishes) (knife chopping) Okay.

(pork sizzling) (pot clanks) (pot clanking) - Cover.

(lid clanks) - Okay.

(pot steaming) This is (lid clanks) nicely brown all around, (pork steams) as you can see.

Okay.

(pot clinks) That's it.

I'm gonna put like half a teaspoon of herbes de Provence, or Italian seasoning, about the same thing.

(pot clinks) And all of my garnish.

There.

(pot steaming) And a little salt on those vegetables there.

(pot steaming) And that's basically it.

(lid clanks) (pot steaming) - 275 degrees in the oven.

An hour and a half, two hours, I'll check it out.

And that's it.

Now, you can see it's very tender.

There it is here.

(tongs clank) Now the roast, now you have all of those vegetable around the ratatouille.

(dishes clinking) And remember, we didn't put any liquid in it.

Just (dishes clank) the natural liquid of the, the vegetables and the meat.

(food squishes) (ladle clanking) Okay.

(dishes clank) I could cut my roast in the middle here.

See, it's quite hot.

(knife slicing) (pork squishing) We put it in my vegetables here.

At the end, a sprinkling of herb on top of it.

(upbeat music) And here it is, shoulder pork, braised slowly, with the ratatouille around it.

Happy cooking.

- Thank you for joining me.

For more, subscribe to this channel, or watch here.

Thank you, and happy cooking.

(upbeat music)

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