Roast Pork Ragu

Any Sunday roast can be a Monday ragu, but pork shoulder is my go-to. It truly is the Madonna of meat - resilient and always ready for reinvention.

Even if you managed to overcook your roast pork you can still turn that dried out hank into something pretty impressive. Shoulder is all fat and muscle, so it's harder to kill than the T-1000. Invest a bit of time, a glug of stock and a tonne of butter and it will rise again.

Servings?

I don't know how much leftover pork you have in the fridge so let's presume it's 250g shall we? Obviously, scale the other ingredients up or down, depending on the size of your chunk.

Roast Pork Ragu

~ 4 servings ~

Ingredients

250g cold roast pork, roughly diced in 3-4cm chunks

1 onions, diced

4 whole cloves of garlic, squashed under the flat side of a knife

2 bay leaves

1 tsp salt

1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

2 tsp whole fennel seeds

1 tsp chilli flakes or 2 tsp fresh chilli

1 tbsp salt

50g butter

250ml chicken stock or white wine or water

4 tbsp tomato puree

Extra virgin olive oil - or more butter

To serve

500g dried pasta (Pappardelle is best, but whatever)

Grated Parmigiano

Handful fresh basil leaves, torn not chopped.*

Method

Heat a large pan on a medium heat and melt half the butter.

Smash the fennel seeds in a pestle and mortar. They don't need to be powdered, just broken up and squished a bit.

Fry the fennel seeds in the butter - don't let the seeds or the butter burn. When it smells amazing, it's done and you can add the pork, onions, garlic and bay leaves.

Let it sit over the medium heat and don't stir it too often. You want the pork, onions and garlic to catch a little colour. Saying that, if you burn the onions, it'll be irredeemably fucked, so don't wander off or get lost in Wordle.

When everything starts to look nicely browned, add the tomato paste and stir in to coat everything. Keep stirring, letting the tomato paste caramelise a little.

Time to stir in the wine, stock or water. White wine is best, but we're here to be resourceful so whatever you have works.

Now turn the heat down, cover the pan and let it simmer and reduce. If the liquid looks like it's all evaporated, add more. Don't go crazy, we're not making soup.

The magic happens after about 40 minutes when the onions break down to thicken the red glossy ragu and the meat begins to fall apart with a little squish of your spatula.

This is a good time to have a taste. Tangy, salty, chilli-y and fennel-y? Good.

Pasta time. I have a couple of valuable little tricks for you now. Take notes because this is pass-it-down-to-your-kids-grade information.

• Use just enough water to boil your pasta. The less water you can get away with, the starchier it will become after cooking the pasta. Starchy water is good because it helps stick the sauce to the pasta and adds a rich gloss. There's a caveat here. If you use too little water, the pasta will clump together in a gluey unevenly cooked mass. The trick is to keep the pasta moving as soon as it's soft enough to stir.

• Salt the water properly. This is not homeopathic medicine; Less is not more. Your pasta water should be as salty at the ocean. As a guide, 1 litre of water wants 10g salt. So for a standard 500g packet of dried pasta, you'll be tipping 50g of salt into about 5 litres of water.

• Life's too short to weight salt every time you cook pasta, so just do it once and remember what 50g of salt looks like. Oh, and if you switch the kind of salt you use from say granules to flakes, weigh it again because 50g of salt flakes looks very different to 50g of granules. Fuuuuck, now I'm boring myself so let's move on.

For this sauce, you'll want to undercook your pasta. You want it to be just left of al dente because you're going to finish it in a pan with the ragu, so it'll cook for another 60 seconds. Remember to save a cup of starchy pasta water before you drain it.

Toss your drained pasta into the ragu (about half a cup of sauce per serving) add a good splash of the starchy pasta water and quickly bring it all together over a medium-high heat. I also like to add a good plug of extra virgin at this point, but if you're already getting a little twitchy about the mass of butter you tipped in earlier, you could leave it out. Wuss.

Now serve with some fresh basil, Parmesan and an adult sized bib; That bright red tomato-infused oily sauce is a stayer.

* Why does your basil go brown at the edges when you chop it, but not when you tear it? A knife cuts its own path, straight through the poor little basil leaves' delicate little cell walls, whereas tearing allows the leaf to determine the path of the tear, leaving the cell walls intact. The same applies to mint, spinach and other sensitive salady greens.

What's that? I'm boring you with my food science am I? Well fuck off back to your brown basil then. I don't care.