How to Properly Cook a Pork Roast

The taste to effort ratio is way up on this one. It takes ten minutes, then six hours in a slow-cooker. You do it like this:

Chop up two onions and a good-sized chunk of ginger. Line the bottom of a slow-cooker with it, along with some red pepper flakes. 

Take a pork roast, pat it with kosher salt, black pepper and a little bit of brown sugar. Heat up a cast iron pan with some olive oil until it begins to smoke. Gently place the pork roast in the pan so that it doesn't splatter, then leave it alone. After a couple of minutes (or sooner, if you smell something burning), turn it to a different side with some metal tongs. Repeat this process until all sides are caramelized, keeping in mind that now that the pan's hot, the other sides won't take as long. With the brown sugar on there, you have to be careful not to burn it. The more you use, the easier it's going to burn. 

Once your kitchen smells like a restaurant that you would want to eat in, you can place the beautifully browned roast on top of the bed of onions and ginger. 

Open a can of crushed pineapple and unceremoniously dump it on top of the pork roast. Add a few splashes of soy sauce. Put the lid on the slow-cooker. Walk away. Do some writing. 

Cook this thing on high for about six hours, turning it over about halfway through. After that, you can switch the slow-cooker to the warm setting until whatever else you're making is ready. Transfer it to a bowl with a little bit of the onions and pineapple that it cooked in, then let it rest for about ten minutes or so with a piece of aluminum foil loosely placed on top of the bowl. Then I tear it up by sticking those same tongs in it and gently twisting. If I did everything right, it should fall apart without being mushy.

In our house, one three-pound roast is good for about four meals. I might make sandwiches out of it, as I did this evening, but it also makes good teriyaki tacos with some carrots, red cabbage and fried flour tortillas, among other uses. I usually freeze some and put it in with other stuff whenever I don't feel like spending a lot of time in the kitchen.

This is a good way to eat pork, even if you don't dig no swine.