Rôti de porc au miel et aux épices

Yesterday I cooked a pork roast. It was a boned shoulder roast that had been rolled and tied. I wanted to cook the roast on the rotisserie in our oven. We might not have this oven very much longer and we haven't been able to find a new kitchen stove that has all the features we would like to have, including a rotisserie, so we may have to give it up in some kind of trade-off.

You have to get the roast or fowl position correctly on the skewer to make sure the drippings fall into the pan of water during the cooking.

Anyway, my idea was to baste the pork with a honey-based, spicy sauce before it went into the oven and a couple of times during the cooking process. The ingredients in the basting sauce — sorry, no real recipe, because I was winging it — were 100 grams of thyme-flower honey; a little olive oil; splashes of white wine, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, and soy sauce; a pinch of ground cloves and a tablespoon of crushed red pepper flakes; good quantities of minced ginger and minced garlic; and finally, salt and black pepper. I cooked the sauce for a couple of minutes to blend all the flavors and melt the honey, and then I let it cool before spooning some over the roast.

Thanks to friends for bringing us a few little jars of different kinds of honey from Paris.

Getting the meat you want to roast onto the rotisserie is always a trial-and-error process. It's not hard to clamp it on, but it's not easy to judge exactly where you need to position the roast on the skewer. That means putting it on and then putting the whole thing in the oven a couple of times, before you turn the oven on, to see if it's centered properly. It took me three or four tries. That done, I was ready to baste the roast with the marinade and get it on to cook.

The marinade was just slightly syrupy — not too thick and sticky.

I always put a pan of water directly under the roast or chicken that I'm cooking on the rotisserie. The drippings from the meat, including the basting sauce, then fall into the water and don't burn in the bottom of a dry oven pan — you don't want to create a lot of smoke and the process is much cleaner that way. You can always boil down some of the cooking liquid at the end, while the roast rests, to make a dipping sauce if you want one. This pork roast, which weighed about 2½ lbs., or just over a kilogram, and it cooked for two hours at 350ºF (180ºC). I let it rest in a warm oven for 45 minutes before taking it off the skewer and carving it.