New recipes rock my world. I love experimenting with new dishes, often adding and subtracting ingredients to make the recipe more satisfying. Naturally, in the last few decades, I’ve prepared pork shoulder in a crock pot, braised, or cooked it  simply in the oven. But this method was eye-opening, different. Before I began cooking I did some research on roasting a pork shoulder. I read about “bark”, a method to produce a crispy top coating, or crust for the fat. “Bark” adds crunch to the meat creating a new layer of flavor. 

I’ll share a bit of my early  history with pork. I did not eat pork until after I married, in my early 20s, because my parents were conservative Jews and followed some dietary Jewish rules, like not eating pork. However, once my father died when I was 10 years old, many rules we followed, vanished, like changing dishes…