Huge Smoked Ham Hock

Ham hocks. HAM HOCKS! The most underrated cut in the entire pork universe, and I will die on this hill, I will plant a flag on this hill, I will build a small cabin on this hill and live there with my opinions. A ham hock is collagen and smoke and fat and bone and it turns ANY pot of beans, greens, or split pea soup into something your great-grandmother would weep over. And she was a tough woman. Took a lot to make her weep. A ham hock did it.

Here's what nobody tells you. Most people see a ham hock at the grocery store, wrapped in cellophane, looking like it lost a fight, and they walk RIGHT past it. They reach for the boneless skinless something — a sad little puck of protein — and they leave the BEST flavor in the store behind them. Cookbook authors hate this trick. Restaurant kitchens cut this corner. Don't. A smoked ham hock is two dollars of pure soul.

I had a pot of beans at a roadside stand once — outside a gas station, of course, all the best food is in or near a gas station, food chemists agree — and I asked the man what he did to them. He looked at me for a long moment. He said, 'hock.' That was the whole conversation. Hock. One word. I drove home and bought four. Now this recipe is the long, low, slow simmer that turns the hock into the soul of a one-pot meal, and you get TWO things out of it: a pot of beans that tastes like it cooked for three days, and a pile of pulled, smoky pork that you can pile on toast with a streak of mustard. Two dinners. One hock. Easy math.

Beautiful. A pot like this gets better on day two, even better on day three — if you can hold out that long, which you cannot, you will eat it tonight and tomorrow for breakfast, which is fine, I won't tell anyone. Skim the fat off the top in the morning, warm it slowly, splash in a little more vinegar to wake it up, and serve it over rice or with a piece of bread thick enough to fish out the broth. A two-dollar ham hock just fed your whole week. Don't say I never gave you anything.