Bo Ssäm and Ssäm Sauce
I’ve been putting off making the bo ssäm for a while now, for reasons I’m not too sure of. It might have been the idea that Chang’s bo ssäm is quintessentially Momofuku or because I haven’t bothered to find myself a bone in Boston pork butt. Excuses aside, I finally gave my butcher a call and had him order me an extremely large piece of meat.
Twelve pounds of meat to be exact. Twelve pounds seemed like entirely too much for the intimate party of five I was inviting over for dinner so the nice butcher said he’d cut it in half to a sizeable six pounds. Mike wanted to go for five, but I figured one pound of bone and a pound of meat each. My justification: people eat more than one pound of chicken wings at a time, don’t they?
Making bo ssäm at home is dead simple. In fact, going to the butcher to pick up the pork butt might have been the most laborious part of making the bo ssäm, aside from being tortured by the delicious smell of slow roasting pork for over six hours.
Warning: staying in the house while making this will have you smelling like pork. Your clothes, your hair, your skin will all have that identifiable smell of meat. It’ll get so that you don’t even notice the smell until guests start arriving claiming, “it smells amazing in here!”
Don’t pat yourself on the back too quickly though, because after you rub on your final brown sugar salt crust and turn the oven up to 500˚F to create a crisp crust, the fire alarm will inevitably go off and guests will rush around waving tea towels and try to use a plastic bag to cover the smoke detector.
After the smoke’s gone and your sitting with your glorious piece of meat, you’ll note that it’s all worth it. The seemingly brunt brown sugar crust is phenomenal in the way that only caramelized brown sugar and meat can be. It’s the perfect meaty blank canvas for the bunch of sauces served along side.
The idea is everyone makes their own lettuce wraps with the melty, almost cottony soft, fall off the bone pork, rice and sauce. Sauce-wise, there’s an actual ssäm sauce recipe in the book, which turned out too vinegary for my tastes, but was well received by others. Personally, I loved my wrap with rice, kimchi puree and ginger scallion sauce best.
There wasn’t much conversation after we started eating, just a couple of “wows” and a lot of “mmms.” When the table goes silent with contentment, you know you’ve done a good job.
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Looks amazing!
I hope I’ll smell like pork very soon – irresistible!
No oysters? Shameful.
Slow cooked pork shoulder is always great. That crust is gorgeous.
The best part about having a large pork shoulder is left overs.
Am I right in thinking I just roast the pork butt for 6 hours?
Martha has the recipe on her site: http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/bo-ssam
Wow, this looks spectacular. I wonder if I could use the same preparation to make beef rather than pork?
I wonder if there’s a way to adapt the final sear to an outdoor grill instead of an oven.
Great job! Looks like the one I made for Christmas last year. Wow. Mmmm.
No pics of a complete wrap?
i would have loved if you had put up a picture of it sliced :p but yay for ‘pork butt’! i remember asking a butcher where i could find ‘pork butt’ and they just gave me a ‘what you talking ’bout?’ look and i just slowly backed away and said sorry..haha
but yes, brown sugar and pork. delicious.
Save me SSAM pls?!
How much did the pork cost?
I don’t remember the exact price, but I think it was around $30-40.
I found that leaving the first salt/sugar mixture on for cooking made it too salty. Did you remove the rub before cooking? I also found it cooked in about 5 hours, not 6. Did it take the full 6 hours for you?
I actually did remove the sugar/salt rub and I let the meat cook for the full 6 hours.
Hi! I’m in Vancouver too, and I was wondering where you ordered the bone-in pork butt?
I ordered it from Market Meats on 4th.
You can get a pork butt at almost any butchers – Windsor Meats, Jackson, any of the Granville Island butchers. You don’t HAVE to use a bone-in roast, you can also go with a boneless. A whole bone-in roast is over ten pounds. They bone-in is supposed to be better, but I don’t notice the difference after all that sugar/salt rub anyway.
Has anyone noticed that the Cactus Club is now carrying this on its menu? It is very close to Momofuku, except they don’t have oysters, the pork rub is a little different and they have added a mayo condiment.