As I said in an earlier post, the day to roast foods is Sunday.  I have the day to myself, my babies are helping me cook, and it’s just a pleasant way to spend the afternoon.  This weekend, my “victim” was a pork roast that I had thawed. 

Let me start by saying, while this recipe looks very detailed, it’s not that bad at all.  There are seemingly a lot of steps, but my mission is to bring you SPEED and more time to spend with your families, less time prepping food.  This recipe took me less than 10 minutes to prep, and the roast took about 5 minutes to sear, before going into the oven for a while.  And they’re pretty cheap in the grocery store (especially when you score a great sale), so it’s a win-win!

We’ve all seen pork roast in the grocers fridge.  When you buy a pork roast, it looks a lot like this:

Pork Roast, Raw

 Well, that sure is boring!

Annnndddd…….that’s where I come in : )

Let me help you spice it up.  First things first, you’re going to want to heat up the oven to 350.  After that, take some peppercorns (to your taste, enough to cover the top of the roast) and some garlic cloves (I used 4)  (Really, you can use garlic powder and regular black pepper and use it as a rub, if you don’t have peppercorns or whole garlic) and put them on a glass or plastic cutting board like this:

Garlic and Peppercorns, before the Crush

  Once tied up, you need to sear your pork.  I once thought that this was purely for aesthetics, browning the outsides and giving some nice color, but now I know that a good sear locks in the juices of the roast, too.  Over medium high heat, cover the base of a pot or stock pot with EVOO.  The best is grapeseed oil, because it can get really hot without releasing a bunch of smoke, but right when the oil is “wavy” looking and very hot, stick the roast in.  The purpose of the sear is not to cook the whole thing- it’s to quickly cook the outsides and give color, but keep the insides raw.

Here’s what it looked like when it went in for it’s sear:

Pre-Sear Pork with Peppercorns and Garlic Cloves

and once the sear was over on that side, I flipped it:

Seared Side #1

By now your oven has preheated to 350, and you can pop it in and forget about it for a while.  Mine was just under 2 pounds, and took about two hours.  You want it to read 160 degrees internally, on your meat thermometer that you hopefully ran right out and bought when I posted my Sunday Roast Chicken recipe. 

 Enjoy your roast, the one that (hopefully) looks like this:

Roasted Pork Perfection