def: \a-'myuz bush\ [Fr. amuse the mouth] 1: a small bite before the meal begins. 2: greeting of the Chef de cuisine. This site is all about Foodie Stuff.
The time had come. I had a beautiful pork belly on my hands from Miss Maggi and Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie, some pink salt(nitrate/nitrite haters read Mr. Ruhlman's solid rant about the truth here - hint, you've been having them all along even if it says NO NITRATES) and Bruce Aidell's Complete Book of Pork. The planets had aligned.
During my cooking day with Ali we had mixed up Ruhlman's basic cure for bacon and we popped it in a cambro and tucked it away in the fridge for a week to rest up, tighten up and exude away.
During the week I ordered some wood chip, more like sawdust from here.
On Sunday I pulled it out of its resting place, rinsed the cure off and patted it dry.
I filled a half steam table pan (one of those grocery store disposable aluminum pans) with some of the wood shavings,1 pint of hickory and 1 pint of cherry, lit a few briquettes in the chimney and laid them on the shavings.
The grate went on the porky goodness was nestled on top. The vents on the top and bottom of the grill were open and I popped in a thermometer to ensure it hung in the 80-120F cold smoke sweet spot.
Husband and I continued our PURGE of the basement in anticipation of laying a new floor and periodically I would check the pig. A few times I had to add a few more white ash briquettes and shuffle things around and once or twice I think the temp might have climbed to the high 130's, but generally over the 5 hour period it was pretty consistent.
Here she is in all her smoke lacquered, porky, piggy, beauty resting and waiting to be sliced and eaten. I will NEVER go back again. This was hands down one of the easiest, highest gratification projects I have tackled. Go on, you know you want to make it.
Alasdair (Ali) will be heading back to England in a week for school and won't be back until his half term break in October so I took a day off work and we made plans to have a cook-a-thon. Ali's main intent was to play with the Thermomix(TM) and convince his parents that it is the next tool he needs in his arsenal.
With no clear plan for what we would do I picked up a mish mash of items including a whole pork belly from my pal Maggie when I placed my meat order for work that week.
I spent the morning plowing though my cookbooks to decide on a plan. I started with Bruce Aidell, Martin Picard, Ruhlman and Keller and in the end I took the pork belly brine from Ad-Hoc and combined it with aspects of the one in Under Pressure.
We cut a nice piece off the belly and set it up in a brine of kosher salt, pink salt, sugar in the raw, bay leaves, peppercorns, thyme and rosemary. We set that up in a cambro and it went into the fridge. I'll follow up on how I finished those later, but right now I have half of it in rendered pork fat in a 200F oven for 6 hours for confit and the other half in 82.5C in the circulator for 12 hours. Both will set up and chill overnight as long as Irene is nice and keeps the power on.
Then we mixed up the bacon rub from Ruhlman's Charcuterie and rubbed another nice piece. That one is currently parked in the upstairs fridge in a cambro for the next 7 days. Next weekend I will follow Aidell's formula for cold smoking it over hardwood sawdust in my Weber if I can get my hands on any. Too bad the thermomix won't grind up the chunks of my cherry tree that Irene is sure to knock down today. I could make my own dust.
I still have two other pieces tucked away in the freezer for later projects. Once we dispensed with the porkie items we wanted to get the cheesecakes in the oven.
These are gluten free (crust is GF flour, almond meal, melted grass fed butter and a pinch of salt) and the filling (1 lb cream cheese, 4oz sour cream abt 2 T sugar in the raw, lemon zest and juice, a tweak of vanilla and 2 eggs) we used little ramekins and cooked them in a water bath for about 30 mins.
Since we made all this up as we went along we realised after that we probably should have shaved 5 minutes off the oven time but they were still very good. We made a topping of Maine blueberries cooked down with a drop of water, a pinch of sugar, some stem ginger in syrup and a splash of port.
While these were baking we tackled the Thermomix projects. First up was making a homemade version of the crack known as NUTELLA. He toasted up some hazelnuts
and while they cooled some sugar went in the TM and was ground fine.
The nuts went in, and some dark chocolate and we milled it, wiped down the bowl and added some cocoa powder, butter and milk. Heat it up to 50C and set it to stir and 6 minutes later...
better than Nutella.
I cleaned it out and we made a quick mayo and then Ali wanted to make a custard so he whipped one up in under 6 minutes with nary a scarmbled egg in site. I want to apologise to Siân now, because he is going to be bugging her for the next 6 months for one of his own.
To make up for the pain of hearing about a TM and since Ali is Mr. Molecular Gatronomy these days with his textura, glycerin and maltodextrin I thought I would make him learn to cook a traditional, or as husband would say, proper, English dish to bring home for his parents.
Lancashire Hot Pot is one of husband's favorites and it is very simple to put together.
Salt and pepper and then sear off some nice lamb loin chops.
Remove them from the pan for now and add in 1 chopped Spanish onion, 1 diced rutabega (swede), 2 or 3 diced carrots and 2 or 3 stalks of celery chopped.
Keep the dice a good size maybe an inch or so, because these veg will cook for 2 hours later. Stir them around, season well with salt and pepper and when the onions start to soften sprinkle over 2 - 3 TBS flour. Stir well. Add 8 ozs veal demi (I get mine from D'artagnan, but you can omit this if you can't find it and use more veal stock) and 1-1/2 cups of veal stock. Add in 1 TBS chopped thyme leaves, 2 bay leaves and 3 TBS worcestershire sauce. Taste for seasoning.
It should have a kick from the worcestershire, if not add a bit more. Nestle the lamb chops back in. Make sure the stock comes right to the top of them, if not add a bit more.
Take some yukon gold potatoes, I can't give you a quantity here because it depends on the size of your vessel, but we had a 14" All-clad pan and we used about 7, and slice them about the thickness of a popsicle stick with either a knife or a manodline and then shingle them in circles to cover the whole surface. Season well again with salt and pepper. Dot with butter.
Put a lid on and pop this in a 325F oven for 1 hour. After an hour remove the lid and back into the oven for another hour until the potatoes are soft, some of the liquid has reduced and the potatoes have begun to brown. Gently stick a knife in and test on of the lamb chops. If everything seems ready and you want the potatoes a bit browner, pop the whole lot under the broiler for a few minutes.
Around 6:30 we packed him up and shipped him home to continue cooking his hot pot. We've already made plans for another cooking fest in October. I need to start plotting.
This is a 10 minute of prep time recipe that will knock your socks off. Big flavor, incredibly moist (even as leftovers!) and it will make your neighborhood smell like an Italian street festival minus the ubiquitous peppers and onions if you live in New England.
In a food processor toss in 12 or so peeled cloves of garlic, 2 TBS of fennel seeds that you toasted lightly in a pan until they were fragrant, 1 T kosher salt, 1T ground black pepper, 2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes, leaves from 1 sprig of rosemary.
Puree this all up in the food processor and then add enough olive oil to make it a paste. Rub this all over your 5 - 6 pound pork butt (shoulder) preferably butterflied open like a book so you can spread the flavor everywhere. Once it is nicely rubbed roll it up and tie it in a nice bundle and let it sit in the fridge overnight.
I have a Weber kettle grill so we started 1 chimney full of hardwood charcoal and when it was ready we laid it on either side of the grill leaving the center open. We tossed on a few longer burning charcoal briquettes to keep the fire going. I speared the pork onto the spit and started it spinning. When the chimney cooled enough to handle we lit another chimney full and added more coals on each side. We put an aluminum disposable roasting pan down under the roast to catch the drips and prevent flare ups. The lid went on and it did it's nice slow spin, spin, spin for about 2 hours. 135F - 140F is your magical temperature for delicious porkie doneness. I happened to have my iphone by nearby and not my usual camera so these pictures are not the most brilliant in color, but you get the idea right?
We took it in and let it rest for 15 minutes and sliced. See the delicious juice! not only was this good for dinner, but unlike most pork it was great and still moist as leftovers. I made staff lunches with sliced porchetta, apple/jalapeno jelly, mayo and romaine. I just had mine on a salad.
Don't be afraid of throwing a big roast on the grill! For those who are spitless and need to cook this in the oven the recipe is based on this if you need oven directions.
Summer you say? So hot you can only eat salads and look at homemade gourmet popsicles? Well not in New England buddy. You've heard of the Mason Dixon line, that mistical invisible divider of the North and the South? We're currently living north of the mason dixon of sumer weather, we are firmly planted in early cold wet spring even though the calendar indicates we are not so many days from July. I want to have the urge to just toss something on the grill and whip up a gorgeous salad of fresh garden grown greens but mother nature has decided that I will whip out my crock pot and hunker down with stew instead. FINE! I can play that game.
On Thursday I raided the chest freezer in the garage and found a pork shoulder I had brought back from a farmer in Maine kicking around in a dark corner, I tossed it in the fridge to thaw and headed off to work. I knew it would end up as some semblance of pulled pork, I just wasnt sure what country the pulled pork would be from. Thursday went by without a chance to research any recipes and I headed home without stopping at the store. Friday I ended up staying home to update the work calendar so I had to raid fridges and pantries and in the end I settled on Italian.
I prepped everything in the morning and then wandered upstairs to my computer to work on the calendar. Sometime around 3:00 my house started to smell like my Italian grandmother had been in the kitchen all day. It was in the slow cooker on low for about 7 hours, but I'm pretty sure it would have been fine to eat after around 5 hours. We had it with cauliflower that was tossed with garlic, olive oil and lemon juice and roasted. Caulifower and tomato sauce are a match made in heaven, trust me on this.
Slow Cooked Pork Shoulder in the Italian Style
2- 28oz cans of tomatoes (I chose one whole and 1 crushed and both were fire roasted.)
5 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
1 large Spanish or 2 small yellow onions cut to 1/4" dice
1 carrot grated finely (My Mom always added carrot to her sauce)
1 red chili chopped, seeds included (you could also use dried crushed red pepper to taste)
olive oil
1 pork shoulder 4 - 5 lbs
Kosher salt
4 oz guanciale or pancetta diced
6 cloves garlic, peeled
1/4 - 1/2 cup Italian flat leaf parsley
2 cups dry red wine
6 - 8 sage leaves
1 sprig rosemary
handful of thyme
First make your sauce. In a heavy bottom pan drizzle a few tablespoons of olive oil. Add the onion and the garlic (don't worry, since the pan is cool the garlic won't burn), cook this over low heat until everything is nice and soft and just starting to get some color. Add the chopped hot chili and stir for 30 seconds. Add the grated carrot and cook 1 - 2 minutes or until carrot is soft. Turn up the heat, tip in the crushed and whole tomatoes and their juices (again, don't worry about adding the tomatoes whole, you'll chop them with a spoon as you cook) and bring everything up to a high simmer. Turn the heat down and cook for 20 - 30 mintes stirring ocassionally and chopping up the whole tomatoes with your spoon as you go. Cook until some of the liquid evaporates and the sauce thickens. Season to taste with some kosher or sea salt.
While the sauce is cooking salt the pork and let it rest.
Make the soffrito: In a food processor pulse the guanciale or pancetta, garlic cloves, thyme and parsley until fairly smooth.
In a heavy bottom skillet or dutch oven add 1/4 cup of oil. When the oil is shimmering add the soffrito and stir. It will begin to melt into the olive oil and smell very fragrant. Add the sage leaves (whole is fine) and rosemary. Be careful to not burn the garlic, adjust the heat if neccessary. Cook 2 - 3 minutes. Pour this into the crock pot.
Return the pan to the heat and add the pork starting with the fat side in order to render some fat for the pan. Turn the shoulder and brown evenly.
While this is browning the sauce should now be done. Add this to the crock pot with the soffrito.
When the roast has browned add it to the crock pot squishing it down nicely and nestling it in the sauce. Add 1 cup of red wine to the pan and deglaze scraping up and brown buts ad reduce by half. Pour this into the crock pot and add the 2nd cup of wine.
Cook on low for 5 - 7 hours or until the pork shreds easily. There will be a good deal of fat that has risen to the surface. Just skim it off with a spoon before you remove the pork and stir everything together. Place the pork on a platter and either slice, chunk or shred it. Serve the sauce on the side to pour on everything. No really, everything. So good!
A little photo pictorial of last weekend's projects. Today I am researching pork belly ideas. What will it be this weekend?
Painted pork bones roasting for pork stock.
Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble...
My mini kitchen upstairs in the old kitchen. We have yet to remodel the space for another use so it is currently my sous vide set up. In the bag is a chunk of pork tenderloin rolled in my house spice rub (hot paprika, smoked paprika, garlic powder, toasted onion powder, onion powder, cracked black pepper, thyme, oregano, cayenne, etc) with added fennel seeds and a dusting of fennel pollen and a piece of butter. We love the fennel in this house. Vaccum. Into circulator at 60C.
After 3 hours, seared in a red hot cast iron pan. Juices from bag poured in at last minute to glaze the meat.
Sliced after a nice rest. Perfect. Don't fear the pink people! Even husband - SIr Picky Pants who claimed he hated sous vide cooking and liked things cooked 'the normal way' polished his off, smacked his lips and said delicious. After a withering glare from she who had to listen to the winging and moaning about me not cooking dinner 'the normal way' he conceeded that sous vide is good. *sigh* Chalk it up to another battle between the Brit and the American won.
Summer has come early to New England for the first time in as long as I can recall. May has felt very much like June, the garden is out of control for this early in the season and even though we have had a few nights that have threatened us with frost, I feel remiss for not having my tomato plants in their pots already. I know that I am pushing things, Memorial weekend is the traditional plant your tomatoes weekend in my neck of the woods, then again Gran always said have your peas in the ground by St. Patrick's day which found me one year planting in a snow storm. Who am I to question Gran's wisdom?
Summer of course means salads, salads of all kinds and shapes and colours. I consider salad like a good tapas meal, little bites and nibbles of this and that all available on a plate for combining various ways on a fork. No taste bud burnout and new combos in each bite. Given my love of all things bitter it comes as a surprise that it took me 45 years to like frisée. I used to call it the lettuce that bit you back with its vicious looking spines sticking out of a salad like coral on a beach. A few tries later and some encounters with some lovely softer leafed frisée has changed my perception entirely. The impetus for this salad came when my pal Maggie at Kinnealey sent me some gorgeous Salumeria Biellese Guanciale when I ordered guanciale last week.
I've had it from La Quercia and Niman Ranch before but nothing and I mean nothing beat this pig cheek. Marbled, cured, piggy porky heaven.
My other latest obsession are agrodolce or sweet and sour cipollini onions. I had a pint one day that were languishing around so I found a Mario Batali recipe that didn't cook them in balsamic. I like them well enough with the balsamic but I feel like it drowns them out a bit and I wanted something lighter tasting. His recipe is simple. Peel your onions, in my case a 1 pint container. Add to a sauté pan with 2 TBS olive oil, 2 - 3 TBS white vinegar, 1/4 cup water, 2 TBS sugar and some salt. Cook at a good simmer until the onions are knife tender and then lid off to let it reduce and glaze a bit. I store them in a crock in the fridge and have them with everything. They are very, very addictive.
Spring is also the season of the fava bean, broad beans to those of you on that island over the pond, the worlds most labor intensive, delightful, vegetable. Piss and moan about artichokes all you want, for maximum work, waste and also reward the fava bean wins hands down. First you choose the tightest freshest pods, far more than you think you will need, and then if you are me, sit down and join the 11+ class on a Wednesday night and chat with them all as you shuck them from the pod. Proceed to then discard most of the weight of the product you bought in the trash, those empty pods weigh a lot and take a lot of real estate. Since the burners are all in use, go and join the 9-11 class in the other kitchen who just happen to be blanching asparagus and quickly blanch and shock your fava beans in ice water. Go back across the hall again to the 11+ class and sit down and peel the outer tough layer of each and every fava bean off. Pare a 3 lb purchase down to, oh say, 6 ounces of beans. Those were later sautéed with some teeny, tiny mushrooms I bought at Russo's in olive oil and garlic. Foolishly I did not get the name of the mushrooms and of course I haven't seen them there again. They were like tiny representations of toadstools you might find in Alice in Wonderland, a bit like these. We had some for dinner one night and the leftovers were sprinkled on the salad.
The salad itself was simple. A bed of frisée topped with a few of those agrodolce cippolini, poached egg from my egg lady in Maine and the leftover fava beans (skip for paleo and primal) and mushrooms The dressing was guanciale sautéed until rendered and crisp, removed and drained and to the pan I tossed in a minced shallot sautéed until soft and added a final splash of cider vinegar. Fridge cleaning at its finest.
Lani at Heritage Hill Farm had sent out the email that it was time to decide if we wanted a half pig for next season because they were buying the piglets and wanted to be sure that everyone who wanted one in the fall was accounted for. I went out and checked the chest freezer in the garage and there is still quite a bit of Bernie in there, so I told her we would take our chances in the fall on a half pig being left, but I did place a definite order for 3 or 4 of her free-range (and I do mean free range, watch your step!) chickens for the fall. While I was rooting around in the freezer I spotted a package of country style ribs so I grabbed it and started contemplating how would cook them. Husband is not a huge fan of barbecue sauce and I really didn't want a braise. I'm all done with braising for the season, these days all I want is something with bright flavors and I really wanted to try my new Tuscan Grill. I've been dabbling in Korean dishes for awhile now and since husband loves heat and Asian flavors I dragged out my Korean cookbooks to see if anything fit the bill. While spending a lovely birthday gift certificate at the Mobile Bookfair recently (thanks heather!) I picked up The Korean Table by Taekyung Chung and Deborah Samuels and page 93 called to me.
The recipe starts with using a Sweet Soy base that I had already made when I tried the tofu stuffed mushrooms last week, I wasn't in love with that recipe, a bit too bland for me, but I still had a ball jar full of the sauce. I decided to add some gochujang to the marinade to add a nice kick of heat. It was perfect.
Around 5:00 I lit a fire in the fireplace so that the coals would die down and the firebox would be nice and hot by the time I was ready to cook. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and warm when in the afternoon and then later in the day it started to get chilly. So the windows were open wide and the fire was blazing. Perfect!
I made two quick banchan, those little side dishes you get in Korean restaurants. Sadly I had no kimchi, but we did make one of our favourites the leek salad. it is a perfect sharp foil to fatty cuts of meat.
The other one was just some nice ripe on the vine mini tomatoes we had kicking around tossed in some mirin, soy and rice vinegar and I also made a pot of sticky rice in the rice cooker to go with the pork.
Listen up, right now I am going to tell you an important thing to remember when you make this recipe! Double the sauce. Double it. Just do it - these are amazing, sticky, gingery, perfect little barbecued morsels of pork. You boil the marinade and use it as a glaze and it is amazing over the rice as well.
Bernie never tasted so good.
Barbecued Pork Ribs
Make the sweet soy base:
Sweet Soy Base
1/2c water
4 sliced cloves garlic
6 slices peeled fresh ginger
1 t black peppercorns, crushed
1c soy sauce
1/2c light brown sugar
1/4c red or white wine (I used Shaoxing)
Combine water, garlic, ginger and peppercorns and bring to a boil. Lower heat, simmer 10 minutes. Add soy, brown sugar and wine. Return to high heat and boil for 2 minutes. Remove from heat, allow it to cool. Strain it and store tightly sealed in the fridge.
For the ribs
Marinate 2-1/2 to 3 lbs of country style or meaty St Louis style ribs in the following mixture. (I did it for about 8 hours, but I could see overnight doing quite nicely as well). The ingredients below are for a single batch. Like I said above, I would highly suggest doubling it.
2/3 cup of the Sweet Soy base
1 apple, grated (leave the skin on, we had jazz apples
5-6 cloves of garlic minced. I used the microplane
2 T dark sesame oil
1/2 c of minced scallions (green onion)
2 TBS of peeled, minced ginger. I have a ginger grater which really breaks it down nicely. I am sure in the end I had at least 3 TBS ginger
1/4 tsp fresh ground black pepper
2 TBS gochujang (Korean red pepper paste)
Fire up your grill. Remove the ribs from the marinade. Pour the marinade into a pan and bring to a boil. Boil 1 minute. Now you can use it as a glaze and as a sauce. Grill your ribs until cooked to your liking (all depends on thickness and how hot your gill is. Turn them every 5 minutes and brush with the glaze until they are cooked. Mine took about 15 minutes.
For the Leek salad:
5 - 6 leeks
2T Korean ground chili (in a pinch use Aleppo pepper if you can find that)
2T sesame oil,
2 clove garlic
1 T cider vinegar
2.5 tsp sugar
4 tsp toasted sesame seeds
In a bowl mix the chili powder, sesame oil, minced garlic, cider vinegar, sugar and sesame seeds. Season to taste with salt. Cut your leeks in half lengthwise and then across into half moons. Soak them 15 minutes in cold water. Lift the leeks off the water so the sand that has settled in the bottom is not poured on top of your leeks. Place them in a clean bowl and add the dressing. Stir well. I let these marinate for about an hour stirring occasionally. Taste them and sometimes I add more salt, vinegar or sugar depending on how potent the leeks are.
Ali was back home from the UK on another school break so I invited him over on friday for an all day cook-a-thon while my chimney guys came and repaired the flu for the living room chimney. All week I plotted and planned to try and decide what we were going to cook. In the end it was rather a hodge podge of dishes, but braise and simmer seemed to be the keywords.
I started at 9:00 getting the bones ready to roast for the veal stock. 30 pounds of veal bones hit the oven to get nice and brown.
Once the bones hit the oven we started the split pea soup. Bernie, my half pig from Heritage Hill Farm had a few gorgeous smocked hocks and one of husband's favourites is split pea soup. I thawed a hock out and tipped that in a pot with some sweated carrot, celery, garlic and onion, tossed in a few bay leaves and 1 package of green split peas, 1 package of yellow split peas and a load of water and set the white pot on a diffuser plate on a back burner to simmer away.
Meanwhile Ali kept checking the stock to see if we needed to skim the scum.
Next I had seen something over at Ideas in Food where they made perfect soft scrambled eggs using an Isi cream dispenser. I forwarded the link off to Ali who is obsessed with all things related to molecular gastronomy or new cooking techniques. I picked up a new Isi at Restaurant Depot on Thursday and set up the thermal immersion circulator on the counter. Eggs, butter, salt, hot sauce and skim milk were mixed and then poured in the canister. This sat in an 82C water bath for 1 hour.
We let the canister rest and added to nitrous charges and shook, shook, shook the canister, but sadly in the end we had to scrape out the eggs. 82C is below eggs coagulation point of 180F so we aren't sure why it didn't work so we will test it again dropping it a degree or two and doing it for a little less time.
They tasted mighty fine though.
While the soup was simmering and the veal stock gently bubbling we started on the osso buco. I'm not going to bother giving you the recipe because we loosely followed the one in Molly Stevens All About Braising and if you don't own that book yet I really don't know what you are waiting for. Every damn idea in that book is delicious. We started them on the stove and popped it in a low over to do it's work.
Here they are at the half point stage.
And here they are completed. At this point I popped it in the fridge and then last night as the teenage trick-or-treaters were stealing all of the candy in my bowl in one fell swoop, I reheated it in a low oven with a bit more of that fresh veal stock and made the risotto bed. Need I say yum?
The last project was a surprise for husband. I made him Lancashire hot pot and braised red cabbage. I'm sad that I don't have any pictures of this dish because it was gorgeous with a cap of perfectly placed potatoes in concentric circles on the top. I will definitely be repeating this one again. Lamb loin chops, dredged, browned and added to a ton of onions, carrot and swede (rutabaga or purple topped turnip to me and you), veal stock and a few other things simmered UNDER a crust of thinly sliced potatoes.
Here's Ali prepping the cabbage for the braised red cabbage and in the foreground is the gratin dauphinoise he whipped up with the leftover thinly sliced potato from the hot pot. He had just made one last week when he took the Teens Cook: Julia Child class and this one was spectacularly good! Traditionally Lancashire hot pot is served with pickled cabbage but husband who professes to hate vinegar and all things pickled said he would have preferred having the pickled cabbage over the braised cabbage. Who knew? I can't keep up. Ali ate so much of the red cabbage raw his lips and entire mouth were stained deep purple when I eventually sent him home with his Dad. I also apologised profusely to his Dad since i introduced Ali to Ideas in Food, StudioKitchen, JB Prince, Le Sanctuaire and a few other dangerous places. He left as excited as a kid at Christmas since he finally found where to order an anti griddle and a pacojet. I don't think he shall ever be the same. He left on Halloween morning to go back to school for another semester but he'll be back for a long break in December and I have to come up with some plans to keep him busy!
Thus ended our long day mucking about in the kitchen. Yesterday morning I portioned and froze the soup and then strained and packaged up the veal stock, labeled it and divided it amongst the freezers for the long winter ahead. And I just have one thing to say about that stock.
Oh the silence around here is deafening isn't it? Well, I'll confess that there is some very big news coming soon, but I need to wait for some i's to be dotted and t's to be crossed before I share in the meantime I could use some crossed fingers okay?
Okay, now back in May when Mom called to tell me about the sign she passed on the road near our house in Maine I contacted Lani and had her send me a brochure and when I read it I had a passing thought about purchasing a pig, but really, where can one put a half a pig? Then over the summer when I went to visit Mom we stopped by Lani's farm and I met the pigs, chatted with Lani about what they were doing at the farm and decided then and there that I was going to try and make this happen. I started weeding though the chest freezer in the garage. I wrote to Lani and asked how much space it would take up, 2X2X2 feet in case you were planning, and so I arranged the freezer with a big space in the center to bring it all home. Lani and Mom and I went back and forth about dates. The closing date for Maine is set in stone once Mom buys her plane tickets and so the first weekend in October was it. Lani worked really hard to get the butcher and the smokehouse to coordinate. Emails flew back and forth and a time was set for the pass off. Mom and SD arrived just as the truck was arriving and 2 men loaded the pig into the trunk of the car and Mom wrapped a blanket around the box to try and keep it cold. PIGS in a BLANKET...GET IT? Alright, we thought it was funny. I met Mom on route 1 in Saugus at her favourite pizza joint and we loaded Bernie into two coolers and had lunch before their flight.
Back home into the freezer Bernie went and I assure you there was not one spare inch of space in that freezer! This weekend I broke out a package of the bacon to have for Sunday breakfast with some of Lani's eggs. If the bacon was a precursor of what was to come, we were in for some great pork. Lightly smoked and cured with I am assuming no nitrates because it was not that shade of nitrate pink we fried it up and had it with a golden yolk egg and plotted the roast for later.
I thawed out a 3.75 pound pork loin roast on the bone..mmmm...bones. I consulted Delia and Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall, Cooks and Pork & Sons, Bruce Aidelles, Anne Willan, Andre Soltner and Bourdain. In the end I decided to wing it and combine a few ideas, but I followed Hugh's Sizzle, Roast and Rest method.
I made a paste of garlic and sage from the garden and poked some holes in the roast and pushed it in. Then I salted it with flaky Maldon sea salt and popped it in a 450F oven for 20 mins. At the 20 min mark I pulled it out and smeared it all over in Dijon mustard and then pressed on a mixture of panko crumbs, black pepper and more fresh sage, I put in the temperature probe set to 150F and put it back in the now cooler 325F oven and cooked it for 20 minutes per pound OR UNTIL the temp timer went off. It took close to 2 hours.
Once it reached 150F I removed it from the roasting pan and let it rest on the cutting board covered in a nice blanket of foil.
It rested for 20 minutes while the root veg got a good blast of heat. It took every ounce of resistance I could muster to not start picking at the outside for a taste.
Finally we carved the pork. Moist does not even begin to describe this roast. And people can I tell you something? It TASTED LIKE PORK. REAL pork. Not today's cardboard masquerading as pork but the real deal the stuff I remember from my childhood. There was bone gnawing and lip smacking and praise to Bernie all around. I made a pledge when Bernie came home to the freezer that I was going to do my best to honour this pig. I plan to document every meal we make from Bernie and Lani...next year I want the head and the tail too!
One day in May when Mom was up opening the house Maine for the season I got a call. "You need to go on the Internet immediately! I just passed a sign on the road to Dan's house that said pork and poultry!". Google came to the rescue and that is how I first discovered the lovely Heritage Hill Farm. I wrote an email to Leilani and told her that in the summer we live around the corner and that I was really excited to find someone doing this in our neighborhood. Finally on my last trip up to visit Mom in August we drove by on a sunny afternoon and pulled in the drive trying to avoid all the chickens who were wandering about pecking in grass and the flower beds. Lani was in the garden and she poked her head up and said 'Sorry, no eggs today'. I hopped out of the Jeep with my camera and wandered over to the vegetable plot on the rise of the hill. Behind the vegetables were some longhorn steer wondering who this woman with the crazy devil horn hairdo was.
I introduced myself and Lani came down and asked if I'd like to meet the pigs. Would I? OF COURSE! So we sauntered across the lawn past the lovely old barn to the sound of large puppy barking his fool head off and came to the edge of the pig enclosure. They had wandered out of the wallow area though the ubiquitous old New England stone wall to the other area.
Lani called " here pig pig pig" a few times while we chatted and Mom said "Oh, here they come." And sure enough a mini herd of sure footed fat pigs came barreling over thinking that we were there to dispense some lovely restaurant leftover scraps. Some of the local restaurants supply her with scraps from prep and being the discerning pigs they are, we laughed to find out that they were not as enamoured with the local inn's scraps because they were compacted a bit too much for their delicate taste buds. Finicky!
She told me that her husband was in charge of all things with tails and she took care of the chickens and the vegetable CSA, but she knew they were Berkshire and some Berkshire/Tamworth cross. While I was admiring the snouts that were being presented through the fence Mom turned around and noticed the incoming chicken invasion.
"We're being raided by the chickens". Lani said they were just mooches and were always there when she fed the pigs to see if there were any good offerings for them. Besides the egg layers, she had a movable, well movable with some brute force, enclosure for the hens she was raising to sell as roasters sometime around late Aug/early Sept. I asked her about the cattle on the rise as I wasn't sure they were longhorns since the horns weren't really well, long. Again she deferred to her husband, the nose and tail man and said they were a cross, but she couldn't recall what they were crossed with. I asked about the abattoir and how they would deal with the cattle. They will be field killed and then brought to my local favourite meat market Ballard's to be processed. I had no idea Ballard's did that so when I swung by Wednesday on my way back home I talked to them about it. It seems the business started out just to process the meat for local hunters and then grew into a meat market. One of these falls I am going to ask the them if they would let me intern for a week. I'd love to really work with a whole or half beast. I've always loved butchery and the staff at Ballard's are seriously the happiest working group of people I have ever met.
We stood and chatted awhile longer about her produce CSA and this seasons horrid weather and the tomato blight as her father in law strolled past to head to the barn. It seems the tractor is not playing nice in the sandbox that day and he was going to see if he could be the tractor whisperer and get it going. Before Mom and I left I asked her how long I had to decide whether I would buy a half pig. Lani said until they are gone! So I emailed her last night because Mom is heading up the first weekend in October to close the house for the season and she could swing by to pick up my pig for me. She's going to check with the butcher to see when pickup might be, fingers crossed I could be having some lovely happily raised Berkshire pork this winter. Oh and Lani...the sign worked!
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