I’m finding myself very uninspired to cook lately. It’s still so darn hot out. The only thing that seems to save me from the kitchen lately are crock pot & one pot meals. Nothing elaborate. Nothing fancy. Just hearty, home cooked goodness.
I hesitate to even complain about the heat, because we have indoor AC & meat in the freezer. Can you imagine having to heat a a wood stove to cook on, indoors, without AC like the early settlers? And cooking meat while it’s fresh since there weren’t refrigerators back then. My mind is blown thinking about it. Modern day pro-tip for crockpot use in the summer months: Plug your crock pot in outside.
With a half a beef, a couple dozen chickens, and a whole pork in the freezer – the possibilities are endless. One thing we started doing in the last few years is getting all the “unsavory” parts & pieces back from the animal when processed. Liver, heart, jowls, fat, ox tail, hocks. All of it. This makes for a very diverse, very prepared freezer situation.
The further I go in my self taught cooking journey, the more I notice that the majority of people I personally know, don’t eat the unsavory bits. When did it become unpopular to eat from nose to tail? Was it when chicken nuggets became easier to prepare than a good steak? Or has America mostly been the land of plenty for the majority of its people that these bits not considered “high on the hog”, were undesirable & useless? If you have any extra time to go down that rabbit hole, there is a lot of interesting history to unpack about offal in America. I tend to think everyone during the Great Depression would have loved a pork hock or some liver, and certainly our ancestors didn’t consider these cuts waste.
Regardless if you think we’re in another Depression, or your wallet feels like you’re in one, these unsavory bits are typically included in the price of your processing, meaning: You’re throwing money away if you don’t keep them. Uncured cuts (like liver, heart, jowls, hocks) are free. They’ll literally go in a gut bucket if you don’t check yes on your cut sheet.
We prefer to get our hocks uncured, as we’ll have more uses for them besides throwing them off in a pot of beans. While one tends to think of a pork hock as primarily bone, it has so much meat to offer. And when cooked just right, offers the most tender, juicy, melt in your mouth, fall off the bone meat. Kind of like a chicken leg.
So without further ado, I share this slow cooked pork hock recipe, to hopefully inspire you to think outside of the box, to create something deliciously memorable you & your family will always enjoy.
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RECIPE – SLOW COOKED PORK HOCK
2-3 Pork Hocks, uncured, thawed completely
Salt & Pepper
Flour (just enough to coat your hocks for braising)
1/4-1/2 cup Lard/Tallow (or your choice of cooking oil for braising)
Garlic & Rosemary (optional, but really give that flavor punch)
1 quart Beef or Chicken Broth
1 large crockpot
3-4 russet potatoes, washed and cut into large chunks
3-4 large carrots, washed and cut into large chances
2-3 onions, peeled & cut into large chunks
1/4 -1/2 cup Apple Cider Vinegar (to deglaze your pan after braising)
Directions:
Heat your cooking oil in a pan/pot on the stove – say medium heat. Salt & Pepper your thawed pork hocks, then dredge them in the flour. Put your hocks in the hot pot with oil, and let it simmer /form a light crust on each side, turning them as needed to get everything braised the best you can. Remove hocks to a large crockpot, and return to the hot oil pot, adding garlic & rosemary. Stir vigorously & then deglaze this oil/flour/garlic/rosemary combination with 1/4-1/2 cup of Apple Cider Vinegar. It’s going to steam & make all kinds of noise, but keep stirring & then quickly remove from heat. Pour the contents of the pot over your pork hocks in the crock pot & add 1 quart of beef or chicken broth. Cover & cook on low heat for 4 hours. At the end of 4 hours, add in your cut vegetables to the crockpot, cover and cook on low for another 4 hours. You should be able to easily pierce the vegetables with a fork when they are finished cooking.
At this point, you should have quite a bit of juice in the crock pot. If you’d like a “gravy” to top your meat & veggies, you can remove part of the juice into a small pan, add some corn starch & wisk vigorously over medium heat until it thickens.
The easiest way to get the meat off the bone is with kitchen tongs. You shouldn’t need a knife. The meat is so tender & should literally fall off the bone.
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So there you have it. An unsuspected, underrated cut of meat that really knocks it out of the park when it comes to dinner. On a whole pork, you get 4 hocks, so that’s 2 meals for a family of 4.
If you don’t have access to a whole pork, you can contact your local pig farmer for information about one or a local processing facility to see if they can give you recommendations on where to source your pork. If purchasing & storing a whole pork away in the freezer isn’t your thing, you can ask the butcher at your grocery store if & when they’ll have fresh pork hocks available.
So what do you think? Yay or nay? Would you eat pork hocks like this? If you do, let me know what you think!
-Randi
Elston Farms 