afterward. With shoulder, that’s a little more difficult—you
basically have to dismantle the whole thing to clean and
bone it properly. My solution? Use the same method I use
for the Texas chili con carne: rather than browning all of the
pork, brown only half of it, but allow the pot to develop a
rich, deep brown fond before adding the onions and the rest
of the pork. The coloring built up by the first batch of pork
is more than adequate to give the finished dish a rich, meaty
flavor. On top of that, the tender texture of the unbrowned
pork is far superior to that of the browned stuff.
Stovetop Versus Oven
The only question remaining was how to cook the dish.
Oftentimes, for short-simmered sauces, I’ll do ’em directly
on the stovetop, just keeping an eye on them as they cook to
prevent them from burning. However, for braised dishes that
need to be cooked for upward of 3 or 4 hours, the oven
shows a couple of distinct advantages.
On the stovetop, the stew cooks only from the bottom,
which can lead to food burning on the bottom of the pot if
you aren’t careful. An oven mitigates this by heating from
all sides at the same time. Moreover, a gas or electric flame
set at a certain heat level is a constant-energy-output system,
meaning that at any given time, it is adding energy to the
pot above it at a set rate. An oven, on the other hand, is a
constant-temperature system. That is, it’s got a thermostat
that controls the temperature of the air inside, adding energy
only as needed in order to keep the temperature in the same
basic range. That means that whether you are cooking a
giant pot of stew or the Derek Zoolander Stew for Ants, it’ll