Well, as yesterday was Mother's Day I got a chance to try another pork shoulder experiment under the guise of "Let me cook you a wonderful Mother's Day dinner, dear". I needed garlic and onion powder so I managed to find a local Asian supermarket where I'd hoped to be able to raid their vast array of spices. They had plenty of variety, but mainly staple curry ingredients, no sign of the onion or garlic. Tesco it is then. I did pick up this to try out though:
(You can click on the pics to make them bigger).

Rajah BBQ Seasoning. Worth I try, I thought.
The pork shoulder was a 2.5kg piece from Tesco. Seems like their 'Everyday Value' range is the only on that includes a bone-in shoulder joint, but at £8 for the whole joint it's a cheap way to experiment even if the meat isn't best quality.
I mixed the Rajah stuff up with some onion and garlic powder and added some brown sugar to get the sweetness up. Its principle ingredient was salt, so I wanted to get some more flavouring in there. Here's the shoulder all rubbed up the day before:

Into the oven for six hours at 125°C (I wasn't confident enough to try Tiny's suggestion of overnight at 100°C just yet), then foiled for another hour and the heat kicked up to 175°C. Left to rest well wrapped for another hour after coming out. In the meantime I went about making some sides; a fresh and zesty (no mayo) coleslaw from the recipe
HERE and a mayo-based one knocked up from the advice in the
Basic Coleslaw thread. The vegetable base for both slaws was the same: white and red cabbage, carrot and onion. Also chunked up a few sweet potatoes and coated them in olive oil and paprika for roasting.

Well, when the pork was ready to be served up I was a little apprehensive, waiting to see how easy the pull would be. Thankfully the advice from here has been stellar and the joint was robust enough to handle, but the meat just pulled away from the bone so easily. Congratulations gents, you made me a hero for Mother's Day.


The Rajah seasoning wasn't great to be honest, very salty and not a great deal of flavour to it. I made my last rub from scratch and I think I'll continue to do that as it was a much better result than this stuff.