The Best Honey-Glazed Pork Shoulder Recipe | America's Test Kitchen

-A holiday roast does not need to cost you an arm and a leg, but it may require a shoulder. Pork shoulder that is.

Bryan's here, and he's going to show us how to turn a pork shoulder into a beautiful roast. -Pork shoulder, also known as pork butt, when it's cut from higher up on the hog there.

It is an absolutely wonderful cut. It's affordable. When cooked right, it's tender, juicy. It's one of my favorite cuts. -Definitely my favorite. Yep.

-So it requires very little upfront work. We're just going to do a dry brine. -Okay. -Okay. So we're going to combine 3 tablespoons of kosher salt with 3 tablespoons of light brown sugar.

Just mix that together. So this is really going to play to this salty sweet combination -- sugar and salt.

Kind of like bacon or, you know, char siu -- those iconic salty sweet dishes. Alright. So that's all set there.

Alright, so this is a 67 pound bone-in pork butt. And it's called pork butt because they used to cure them in barrels which were known as butts. -Right.

-But it is definitely a shoulder cut. So we're going to give that a 1-inch crosshatch. So 1-inch crosshatch pattern.

We're going to go about 1/4 inch deep just through the fat cap. And this is going to help the fat render a little bit more easily in the oven.

And it's also going to help that salt penetrate as it sits. So we're going to rub this all over our sugar salt mixture all over the pork, so we'll do about half of it on this back side here.

I've gone ahead and lined the countertop with plastic wrap. And the reason I like to season the pork on plastic wrap is because if you're just going to season it on a board, all the sugar and salt you throw onto it bounces off.

Now that we're seasoning it on the plastic wrap and we wrap it all up, it's all going to stay in contact with the pork.