Takes all day, with little active time
Serves a party
Our own recipe!
This recipe is taken directly from a January 2016 blog post of ours.
The New Year has rung! It is officially 2016, and the BOTL Farm was ringing in the new year with our standard practice of eating and a small amount of drinking. This year, we invented a new recipe for delicious sous vide roasted pork that we will share with you now. Let's get started. You will need the following:
Ingredients
1 pork shoulder, preferably wrapped in pork skin that you didn't know what else to do with
1 punch bowl in the fridge filled with leftover gelatinous chicken stock, that may or may not have had pork bones in it when the stock was made, and definitely has an intense fat cap on top
A cabinet with a lot of spices
Aan enamelled dutch oven
A sous vide machine. We use the ANOVA original model that is so cheap that Williams-Sonoma doesn't even carry it, but we find it works quite well. Our machine doesn't support bluetooth, WiFi, RFID, NFC, WAN, cell towers, or satellite uplink, however it does have a touchscreen
An electric stove top. Honestly this is optional, if you have something better we would strongly recommend it
Preparation
We understand that this is a strangely specific list of ingredients, and you should understand this was what we found in the kitchen and not necessarily what we planned to use. You may find other things in your fridge that perform similar functions, and if so we encourage you to use them and follow your heart.
With your ingredients assembled, we can begin by executing these steps:
- If you were sous viding eggs for breakfast, wait until those finish up and then immediately remove the pork shoulder wrapped in pork skin from the freezer. If you find the vacuum bag is insufficient for keeping water out, wrap the pork shoulder in an additional gallon size ziplock bag which was likely purchased by your host family from Costco. Place the pork in the sous vide machine and press the buttons on the sous interface repeatedly until you see a temperature that satisfies you. The temperature doesn't matter, we'll remove the meat long before it reaches that temperature
- Around 11:30am, when breakfast is long gone, you're working on lunch, and you're starting to think about the pork you want for dinner, remove the pork from the sous vide machine and transfer it to the enamelled cast iron dutch oven
- Season the meat. We used an old family recipe, called "the spices we found in the spice cabinet." We started with a generous helping from the cumin bag, it was more than a teaspoon and less than a cup. Several other spices were added
- Use a ladle to pierce the fat cap on the punch bowl of chicken stock, and add several gelatinous scoops of stock to the cast iron pot containing the pork shoulder. Your sense of the universe will tell you when to stop spooning
- Place the cast iron in the oven, and set it to 375 F. This is the temperature needed for the macaroni and cheese dish that you are cooking next to the pork. Once the mac and cheese is done, turn the temperature down to 250 degrees F
- A few hours later, when you go out to the bar, turn the oven off because that's the responsible thing to do when you're leaving the house to go to the bar
- When you return to the house, turn the oven back on, probably to 250 degrees F again
- When all of your other dinner fixings are ready, including but not limited to bread, raw zucchini, left over salad, small parts of slider burgers, left over mac and cheese, home made bacon with or without gland parts, and a strangely large bowl of chopped parsley, remove the pork from the oven.
- Carefully cut the pork into chunks that look like they could fit into your mouth, and transfer to a serving dish. Place on table
Ding! You've just replicated BOTL Farm's 2016 New Years sous vide oven roasted pork. Pat yourself on the back, and enjoy the new year.
Tips
No tips. That recipe stands on its own.
Last Modified: 2025-08-22