Pig by name… – Taste Scene

If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to put me in bad form, it’s food going to waste. Whether it’s a dog ear of cheddar curling in the fridge or a few slices of chicken from the Sunday roast turning the use-by corner, I HATE having to throw stuff out.

Such is my aversion to wasting food I have even considered (seriously considered), buying a pig so that I could feed the pig the bits and pieces that we’re wont to throw out. The pig would then of course get the holly, and we’d have loads of left-over pork. Get another pig?

Apparently, the only leftovers you can’t feed a pig is meat. I don’t know why this is but I read it somewhere when I was researching pig husbandry at home. I still haven’t ruled the prospect out, although I also know that as social animals, pigs do better in small holdings when there’s at least two. And it would take a fair hape of purty peelings to keep two pigs happy and fat.

Another golden rule for keeping pigs is: Don’t give them names – for obvious reasons. The gulpin that I am, even I would have trouble eating bacon when it came from a porker named Daisy that I had reared from a piglet and cared for throughout her pighood.

Still, there might be a pig (or pigs) out there destined to have the surname Devlin as some stage.

“You’re a pig!”

Be that as it may, a pet pig (or pigs) would be a win/win in my world. They’d hoover up all the left-overs and in less than a year, they’d be ready for the chop (or chops).

On Tuesday night of last week I was faced with a gnarly problem of a big lump of pork turning the use-by corner on the very next day. It was a 4lb piece of pork shoulder (or pork butt if you’re reading this in the States) and had it meant taking a day off work to cook the thing, there was no way in God’s green earth it was going to go to loss.

Having done the whole pulled pork thang in the past (Mexican, Tex-Mex and BBQ) I decided that in order to save both the shoulder and my appetite for swine, I would do something I’d never done before: Jerked pork – Caribbean style.

Now, I have tasted jerked pork in the past, most memorably during a ten-day visit to the Caribbean and I can confirm that it is a world away from either Mexican, Tex-mex or BBQ.

So on Tuesday night I assembled the marinating ingredients, these were mixed in a slap-dash manner and then slathered all over the shoulder (or butt) and the ‘saved’ meat spent its last night in the fridge soaking up all the flavours of garlic, all-spice, chillis, Chinese five-spice, cinnamon and pineapple.

The next morning before I went to work and before I had even broken my fast, I dug the shoulder out of the fridge and extricated the slow-cooker from the cupboard.

The marinade had done its job so the meat went into the slow-cooker with a goodly dash of water and nothing else. Set to ‘low,’ the pork porked the bit out for the rest of that day, until I came home from work only to be met with a sauna-like thickness of heavily-scented air. They don’t but they should, make Yankee Candles flavoured with jerked pork.

Removing the pork from the slow-cooker, I chopped up the tender meat and discarded any large chunks of fat.

The juices went into a saucepan with a dash of soy sauce, some jerk barbecue sauce and some salt and pepper and that bubbled away until it was as thick as paint. This I used as a sort of dipping sauce.

So what did I do with the pork? It didn’t go to the pet pig called Daisy that I don’t have in the garden, that’s for sure.

Later that evening when the hunger was upon me, just before bed, I made a chunky coleslaw with onions, carrots, white cabbage and a few generous squirts of mayonnaise and then I set about making one of the tastiest Caribbean toasted sandwiches in living memory.

A buttered bap (outside and in) was layered with chunks of jerked pork, coleslaw, pineapple, sweetcorn and some hot chilli sauce and this was gently placed in a sandwich press and five minutes later I was eating the toastie and considering rubbing it all around me. Not to put too fine a point on things, but it was incredible.

It was such an immense supper that the next morning, I awoke in the greatest of tune as if energised and enthused by the previous night’s succulent meat and vibrant spices.

At the time of writing, a scant 24-hours after that epic Caribbean toastie, I am looking forward to round two tonight. Maybe some added mango and avocado? Maybe a Creole sauce? Maybe a bottle of Red Stripe to wash things down?

All of the above?

Maybe I won’t need a brace of pigs for the leftovers after all – not at this rate of going.

Incidentally, if you want the recipe, drop me an email at m.devlin@wearetyrone.com

Oink!