The time has come to welcome our backyard patio into its delightful role as dining room. Entertaining outdoors, with smoky smells wafting from the grill, reduces the anxiety of more formal situations. Friends, sparkling aperitif in hand, relax easily into conversation around the grill.
The menu needs to reflect the chill atmosphere. Steaks or chops have their place, but larger cuts prove easier to get right. And ounce for ounce, a roast can be substantially less expensive. Beef chuck roasts and pork shoulder roasts turn tender with a low and slow, many hours-long approach.
Quicker cooking rack of pork makes an impressive dinner for friends in less than two hours. This cut, essentially seven or eight pork loin chops in one roast, offers lean moist meat and juicy bits at the bone. For the prettiest appearance, ask your butcher to trim the rib bones, also known as “Frenching,” so the bones look crusty brown after cooking.
Before grilling, insert skinny slivers of fresh garlic into the thickest portions of the meat. This trick infuses garlic flavor deep into the meat. A simple rub of salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, and grated fresh lemon, applied to the roast at least an hour in advance of cooking, seasons the exterior layers.
Set up the grill to mimic an oven. In other words, no heat directly under the meat. If you use a gas grill, simply preheat it, then turn off the burners that are under the meat, leaving the other burners on medium. For charcoal grills, preheat the coals in a chimney starter. When the coals are covered in gray ash and glowing red, carefully arrange them on two sides of the grill, leaving the center of the grill empty. I put a foil drip pan on the bottom of the grill to catch drips. A few soaked and drained wood chips, added to the coals or set over the gas burners, add a touch of smoke to the meat.
To serve the pork roast, use a very sharp knife to slice between the bones into chops. A generous spoonful of a fresh, herb-based blender sauce, aka Italian salsa verde, gilds the barely pink, moist meat.
A package of assorted mushrooms along with a large sweet onion, inspires a side dish to the pork. A spoonful of cheesy quick-cooking polenta, or browned polenta slices made from packaged premade polenta, keeps the cooking casual.
As for those grill-time aperitifs, a tumblerful of sparkling water with a splash of brilliant red, thirst-quenching Campari does the trick.
Grilled Lemon-Herb Rack of Pork With Salsa Verde
Makes 6 to 8 servings
