Modern meat is becoming progressively fragmented. Cows become roasts, roasts become chops, chops become fragments, and these fragments' essence is imparted to a sort of edible mardi-gras pearls. The price paid for a piece of meat is increasingly inverse to the amount of it actually on your plate, leading to the extreme example of El Bulli where for the price of a secondhand Mitsubishi you are presented a plate with no actual meat on it at all.
Clearly, something is wrong.
When we think of glorious repasts, we do not imagine a series of extracted essences lovingly ingested through nasal inhalers. Great feasts are defined by sturdy fare. Of chunks. Of slabs. Real meat.
It necessary to begin the counter-revolution against this new paradigm of anaemic, wimpy food. My oven is now a forge for weapons against this strange future. I am now a Roast Warrior.
And, with fairly minimal expense, you can be too.
The production of glorious meat-lumps is traditionally relegated to the bourgeois food-elite of professional chefs. As evidenced, these so-called "experts" have colluded against the common man, and it is necessary to take things into our own hands. They have perpetrated a myth of the need for elaborate preparation involving laborious spice insertion and broilers hot enough to smelt tableware.
Until very recently, I was afraid to engage the mighty roast, sadly confined to my puny burgers and chicken wings. However, there's a secret weapon permitting even proles like you and me to produce amazing roasts: The brine.
As opposed marinades, which affects only the surface of meat, a brine imparts flavor deep into the flesh. Immersing meat in a flavored broth containing sugar and salt draws the liquid into cells via osmotic pressure, increasing the moisture of the meat while imparting flavor deep past the surface. The end result is both extremely juicy and evenly flavored throughout.
While one may brine fish, chicken, or (if desperate) possum to great effect, the technique is best suited to pork. Low-rent cuts like loin roasts can be acquired for less than ground beef, though not without cause: As my mother so frequently demonstrated throughout my youth, pork is easily overcooked, rapidly dessicating from delicious dinner to something not unlike boot leather. However, with a little prep and a lot of precision, you too can enjoy a champagne roast at burger price.
This is a bone-in loin roast, composed of a rack of ribs attached to the loin. I bought it on clearance from the local supermarket at just $2.99 a pound. It's a college-student-friendly piece of meat.
Less friendly is the bit of bone attaching all the ribs together. Ideally, one might simply ask ones' friendly neighborhood butcher to remove it entirely. However, if you purchase your meat from the freezer counter or (like me) are too thick to remember to ask, you'll need to do do it yourself..
Traditionally, this sort of thing is done with a bandsaw, a rather extraordinary object capable of cutting through femurs like a hot spoon through margarine. Because I don't have one of these, I had to improvise.
Yes, those are garden shears.
The trick is to divide the bone between the ribs - you don't have to remove it completely. This allows the roast to be divided neatly into attractive chops.
