How to Make Pork Confit Part 1/2 The Brine

How to Make Pork Confit Part 1/2 The Brine Alright, part one of our delicious pork confit recipe starts with a brine. Alright, what brine is some water, some salt, some sugar and some spices. You soak meat in that for a few days and the results, you're going to be amazed. This is a very simple, very ancient recipe and here we go. We’re going to start with our spice mixture. It’s a teaspoon of allspice berries, and again, you're going to read more about why are we brining and what it is, follow it on the website. So that’s a teaspoon of allspice, a teaspoon of fennel seed. We’re going to add a teaspoon of hot pepper flakes. Alright, those are red chili flakes, that’s the hot stuff. We’re going to put in one bay leaf and I'm going to just break up in a few pieces. You get a really nice black peppercorn, whole black peppercorn, about a teaspoon of that and again, you see how careful I'm measuring all this. And this is again something you really tell it to your own taste. This is kind of a standard brine spice mix. Four or five whole cloves, and then take your mortar and pestle and just grind it up, not super fine, not to a powder. You just want to break the stuff up. And as you crush those whole spices, all those are just delicious aromas and oils and flavors come out. Alright, let’s build the rest of the brine, very simple. The two just must-have ingredients here are salt and sugar, so I want you to put half a cup of salt and half a cup of sugar. I'm using white granulated sugar. Some people like to switch this up and use brown sugar, molasses, honey, maple syrup, things like that. Again, this is just my recipe that I stole. My spice mixture went in there and now, we’re going to add two cups of boiling water. So two cups of boiling water, I just put a tea kettle on and what this is going to do, it’s going to melt the sugar. It’s going to melt the salt. It’s also going to start to activate and kind of release all those delicious flavors from those crushed spices. And then you're going to give that a mix and very important, you got to let that cool. Before you go any further in this video, you can't pour hot brine over a pork shoulder. That’s not going to work. So I want you to leave that out at room temperature for just an hour or half hour, whatever long it takes to cool it down. You want to throw it in the fridge and do it later when you come home from work, that’s fine too. But that’s got to be cooled before you do this next step, you see me do right now which is taking a pork shoulder which is going to be—that’s about three pounds. Now make sure it’s boneless, very easy to find at the supermarket. You're looking for a pork shoulder roast, sometimes called butt, sometimes called Boston butt, again I’ll explain that on the site why they call a shoulder butt, sounds kind of funny but it’s true. So you're going to put your three-pound boneless pork shoulder, pork butt into a container that’s large enough to handle it plus all our brine, which is going to be the original brine which was the two cups of water and my spices and my sugar and my salt. But I'm also going to add about a half gallon of cold—just regular cold tap water. So, our cold water is in, we give that a little swirl around with the pork, mix all the spices together and all that brine together and then simply cover that, put your lid on, leave it in the fridge for 48 hours and you would have a brine to pork shoulder that in part two you're going to see me make into an amazing pork confit. Now again, you think you’ve had pork, you haven't had pork until you’ve tried this recipe. So you got a little teaser and that was part one, tomorrow you're going to see part two, what we’re going to do with this and enjoy!