Pork
Pork meat
evokes strong feelings of hate or love or even adulation, as pigs have lived in
symbiosis with most humans for the last 7000 years. Polynesians used to take
their pigs with them on their canoe explorations, while in Europe pigs lived a
more sedentary life getting fat for their future sacrifice. Because of the
pathogens they sometimes carry, a long cooking process is customary.
Although pork meat production has
received the same emphasis on cost-cutting as chicken and turkey, from breed
selection to a dubious diet, it seems its taste has suffered less. It lends
itself particularly well to grilling and roasting, its surface browning easily
and forming a delicious crust. This is true for noble cuts and even more for a
“juicy” rack of spare ribs. Pork meat fat content has diminished in the last 30
years, but not enough to make it less delicious.
We routinely bake spare ribs, thick
pork chops or the whole center cut rib roast, mostly with the bone. Blade
shoulder is also delicious if you can find it. Our favorite way is to season
the meat with garlic. This is best done by stabbing it in different places: you
will then push a generous amount of salt, pepper and a clove of peeled garlic in
each small opening. Doing it this way will strongly flavor the meat around the
clove and lead to delightful discoveries for lucky guests when the meat is
sliced later on. Pitted olives or fresh ginger root could also be used the same
way.
Trim off most of the fat.
Season with garlic, as indicated
above.
Salt and pepper the surface of the
meat.
Bake in the oven on high heat for 1
hour to 1½ hour or more, depending on the volume of the roast.
Add water to the dish and baste
regularly.
When it is cooked, cut in serving
pieces.
Salt and pepper each piece
individually.
Serve on a dish with its cooking
juices and the selected accompaniment: spaghetti, potatoes, string beans,
cauliflower or even chestnuts in season.
Get some thick pork chops. Trim the
excess fat. Salt them.
Brown them in a bit of olive oil in
a cast iron pan or Dutch oven on medium heat.
Add unpeeled garlic cloves, 4 to
each pork chop, and lemons cut in quarters, 1 lemon per pork chop.
Reduce the heat, cover and cook for
45 minutes.
Check how everything is going, mash
the lemon quarters with a fork to express the juice. (1)
Cook again on the lowest heat for 40
minutes more, until the meat is tender and you obtain a vivifying residual
cooking juice.
Charcuterie, in French, refers both
to the shop (salumeria in Italian) and to the preparations they offer (salumi
in Italian) mostly based on pork meat and lard, preserved in endless
variations: jambon (ham), pâtés, rillettes, confits and sausages -
fresh, dried or smoked. Started as processes of preservation, these
preparations are now liked for their own peculiar resulting flavors.
In the US, the market is just not
there and foodies prove very health conscious. Local cooked hams are generally
laced with sugar and pâtés and terrines are pale imitations of the original
products, but you can find good prosciutto and salami, mostly imported from
Italy or locally made in the same tradition. Unfortunately, French and German
products are mostly absent.
Lamb is popular in many places in
the world, especially in central Asia and the Middle-East where it was first
domesticated and where nomadic life, then religious reasons led to its
preeminence. This meat is often strongly flavored, depending on the age and
diet of the slaughtered animal and unappreciated by a fair number of people.
Its consumption is relatively low in the U.S. (2)
Fortunately, for those who like it,
lamb can be prepared in a number of ways: roasted or grilled, as well as
sautéed, stewed, and even boiled, as in the North African couscous.
I have just one bit of advice: Do
not prepare too much. It is not as good cold as other meats, and I feel it
cannot be re-heated without an off–taste.
Do these very simple brochettes
deserve a recipe? I would answer “rather not” in terms of complexity. Cutting
up lamb into ¾ inch cubes is rather easy and grilling it also. What is left?
You have to pour a teaspoon of ground cumin in your plate and season your meat
to your taste with salt, pepper and cumin. Still, why is it so addictive?
Chances are you are not going to
travel to Iran any time soon. Me neither. This is why we sometimes revive a
recipe which Iranian friends shared with us more than 40 years ago. It may not
be as authentic as it should be anymore, but I hope the spirit is intact.
You will need:
×
1 lb. of
lamb, cut in small pieces
×
1 large
sweet onion
×
2 cloves
of garlic
×
1 lb.
tomatoes, peeled and seeded
×
1 tsp. of
turmeric
×
1 tsp. of
ras-el-hanout (see Spices. Intended to replace the similar Persian advieh)
×
¼ tsp.
saffron.
×
1 cup of
split yellow peas
×
Juice of
1 lime ( in lieu of the traditional “limu amani” dried limes)
×
1 lb.
sautéed eggplants (see Vegetable section)
×
Salt and
pepper to taste
Chop the onion, salt, and brown in
the pot until golden.
Cut the meat in 1-inch thick pieces
and salt.
Add the meat in the pot and cook
until brown, stirring regularly.
Cover with water, add garlic,
turmeric, tomatoes, saffron and ras-el-hanout.
Simmer gently over a low heat for
about 30 minutes.
Add the split yellow peas and cook
for another 60 minutes or until the meat is tender.
Check from time to time.
Add a little more water if needed.
When you are satisfied, salt and
pepper to taste.
Cut the sautéed eggplants in squares
and place them on top of the stew, pushing them in gently to permeate them.
Cook for 10 minutes more. Pepper
again. Add the lime juice.
Serve with steamed rice, possibly
partially flavored with saffron or turmeric. (3)
This combination of flavors is
deeply satisfying. Let’s double the recipe…
In France, veal is the premium
delicacy meat. The best veal meat is white, coming from a calf that has come to
the end of the nursing stage. If you don’t travel to Europe, you may never
experience its delicate taste. It can be cooked the same way as beef, roasted
or simply grilled. It is usually cooked longer than beef, but, if you like your
beef rare, you will enjoy your veal rare too.
Like lamb, it is seldom consumed in
the U.S. and only a few cuts are generally available today, mainly for stewing
purposes. However, it is too good to ignore and this is why I offer too many
recipes. You may also spend some time in France some day and want to try it.
No other meat can be an alternative
to veal. However, even if it needs longer cooking times and will end up drier,
pork meat would be your best bet as a tasty replacement.
This is a great way to experience
this meat’s taste at its most natural. The first essential step is therefore to
select the best piece (rib, tenderloin or top sirloin for example) and its
thickness, 1-inch or 1¼-inch. Then, it is only a matter of waiting until the
meat is cooked, rare if possible. Salt, pepper, sprinkle a minced clove of
garlic over it and the juice of one lemon.
There are several ways to prepare this dish, an old
family favorite, depending on the tenderness of the cut you can obtain and the
time it will take to cook it. You will need:
×
1½ lb. veal tenderloin, cut in 1
inch-thick “tournedos”
×
½ sweet onion
×
8 carrots, sliced
×
2 cloves of garlic
×
Juice of ½ lemon
×
Salt, pepper.
Peel and chop your carrots into 1/8-inch thick slices.
Mince the onion.
Heat up a Dutch oven with some olive oil.
Salt the meat slices and brown them on both sides.
Throw in the carrots and the onions, salt.
Reduce the heat, add the garlic now place the meat on
top of the carrots and let it simmer covered, for about 20 minutes or more,
making sure nothing burns.
Add the lemon juice to deglaze.
Cook for 5 minutes more. Pepper to
taste. Basil or lemon thyme would complement this dish beautifully.
If your meat is tender, everything
will be cooked as it should be, with a nice mix of soft and crisp and very
little concentrated juice. If your meat is not as tender, you may have to add
water and extend its cooking time, incorporating carrots much later. This would
practically become a stew.
Like so many others, this spring dish was born from
looking at what was available in our kitchen that day and finding inspiration
from a combination of ingredients: beautiful small artichokes, appetizing green
garlic, and dough left over from a pie the day before.
Looking for a way to cook the artichokes so they
wouldn’t be dry in the end, I decided they should be slightly braised with a
thick slice of veal originally intended for other purposes, and green garlic of
course. The result was stunning!
You will need:
×
½ lb. shortcrust pastry dough (pâte
brisée)
×
1½ lb. veal tenderloin, cut in 1
inch-thick “tournedos” (you could also use thick scallopini)
×
8 or 10 small artichokes
×
1 green garlic
×
4 tbsp. verjus or juice of ½ lemon
×
Salt, pepper.
×
Fresh oregano
Prepare the artichokes by taking away the outside
leaves (see Vegetable section).
Cut the hearts in slices 1/8 inch thick and keep them
in cold water with lemon juice to avoid oxidation and maintain color.
Chop the green garlic.
Roll out the dough in thin rectangles of about 2 by 4
inches and precook in medium heat oven for 15/20 minutes until golden.
Heat up a skillet with some olive oil.
Brown the veal tournedos and throw in the artichoke
heart slices.
Brown the veal on its other side, salt and pepper.
Add the green garlic and the juice of ½ lemon.
Turn down the heat, cover, and let simmer at low heat.
Take the pies out of the oven.
Spread artichoke slices in one layer only.
Sprinkle with chopped oregano.
Place in the oven again for 5 minutes.
Serve in individual plates with a veal tournedos as
centerpiece, its artichoke pie on the side, and a few remaining artichoke
slices sprinkled all around. Distribute the cooking juices in every plate. If
you need more, just deglaze your pan with 4 or 5 tbsp. of water.
Of course, this is intensely satisfying.
This well-known dish is just one of
the many stew variations that you could make with veal shanks, which are among
the toughest parts of this otherwise tender animal. The peculiar taste in this
recipe comes from a combination of tomatoes and orange, inspired by a
delightful experience in Venice, off the beaten track.
You will need:
×
2 lbs.
veal shanks (about one-inch thick)
×
1 large
sweet Mayan onion
×
1½ lb.
carrots
×
1 lb ripe
tomatoes
×
½ cup
white wine
×
Juice of
½ orange plus grated zest
×
Olive
oil, salt, pepper, rosemary and thyme
×
1 pan
with high sides and a lid
Salt the veal shanks. Brown them for
5 to 10 minutes and set them aside on a plate.
Mince the onion and slice the
carrots.
Brown the onion and carrots slightly
in the pan for 10 minutes on medium heat.
Set the slices over the carrots and
onions. Add the wine, tomatoes, cut in quarters, and herbs and cook covered on
low heat. You can add the grated zest of an orange after a half hour.
Continue cooking on low heat, partly
covered for another half hour.
Check if the meat is cooked. Reduce
the sauce if needed and add the juice of ½ orange.
Salt, pepper to taste.
Serve with white rice.
In the area of France where I now
live, this is the ultimate stew, originally made from leftover pork, chicken or
veal mixed together. Now it is mostly made from freshly purchased cuts. The
essential flavors coloring this dish come from mixing celery, olives and
mushrooms. Regarding mushrooms, locals still swear by rehydrated dry cèpes
(boletus edulis, also called porcini in the US like in Italy). These do have a
strong flavor but can be replaced by fresh common mushrooms or even shiitake
mushrooms.
The preparation is identical to the
recipe above, except you must mix meats. Veal and pork will do fine.
Sauté the mushrooms (1 pound) just after you have browned the meat, before
adding the onion and carrots.
Limit yourself to one tomato. Add 2
celery stalks, cut in 1-inch pieces and 1 cup of green olives 30 minutes before
the end.
Potatoes do well in this flavor
environment. The easiest way is to add them at the same time as the olives and
celery. Leave the potatoes on top of the preparation without stirring if you
fear they will not stay firm.
This is so simply delicious. It can
be even better with pork sausage added, and maybe some bay leaf.
This long cooking cream-based
archetypical French dish is traditionally served with white rice. You will
need:
×
2 lbs.
veal (cut for stew)
×
1 minced
sweet onion
×
2
turnips, cut in 8.
×
1 leek
×
2 garlic
cloves
×
2 cups white
wine
×
1 egg
yolk (for thickening)
×
1/2 lb.
common mushrooms
Cut the meat in 1-inch cubes and
salt them.
Brown them in a deep pan on medium
heat.
Add minced onions and sauté until
golden.
Add everything except for the
mushrooms.
Add the wine, and some water to
barely cover the ingredients.
Cover and cook for 2 hours on low
heat.
Check and cook a little bit more if
needed.
Meanwhile, sauté the mushrooms
briefly and add them to the rest of the dish, including cooking juice if any is
left.
Transfer the contents to a separate
dish. Salt them if needed and pepper.
Start reducing the remaining broth.
When it has reached the consistency of a syrup, turn down the heat, add the
cream, and cook for 2 more minutes.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Off the heat, add an egg yolk if you
want to make this preparation even creamier.
Re-assemble all ingredients.
Serve immediately.
Actually, this dish should be tasted
only with a very neutral accompaniment or none at all. Just try dipping a piece
of good baguette-like bread in the sauce. This is heavenly.
You have now achieved the same
culinary heights as Madame Maigret, Simenon’s famous detective’s wife. I hope
he does not appear in the doorway with his smelly pipe. That would ruin
everything.
No proper recipe for this preparation everyone knows
but still goes very well with a plate of tomato sauce spaghetti, or just by
itself, the way the Milanese eat it.
Just dip scallopini in flour, then in a beaten egg and
then in a plate of crumbs. Fry slowly over medium heat on both sides. Salt and
pepper. Eat.
I almost forgot to mention this Périgord recipe, a
regular childhood dish and the object of constant competition among the
family’s cooks. Again, I will give you a simplified but tasty version.
You purchase large and flat enough scallopini and
prepare a small volume of ground pork based stuffing (see Stuffed Tomatoes in
the Vegetable section). You then place some stuffing in the center of each
scallopini and roll the scallopini up into a fat “roulades” which you need to
secure tightly with kitchen string.
This can now be cooked in a Dutch oven with a mushroom
sauce according to the following sequence:
Brown the scallopini in olive oil for 10 minutes.
Add in ¼ sweet onion, minced and ½ lb. of chopped
mushrooms and sauté for 5 minutes on high heat.
Deglaze with 1 cup of white wine and 2 tbsp. of cognac
or just 1 cup of dry sherry wine.
A cup of stock would be useful at that stage to ensure
ultimate richness in flavor.
Cover and let it simmer for an hour and a half, adding
water if needed.
This preparation always came as a huge appetizer on
the way to the center piece roast and without accompaniment. If you want to use
this recipe for a main dish, neutral steamed potato slices could be added.
Beef seems to be Americans’ favorite
meat in all its forms, a natural human preference for the ultimate red meat
made even stronger by the national myths of the Wild West, freedom loving
cowboys and vast grazing expanses.
However, beef is under attack on
many fronts: Red meat is inherently cancer-causing if you have more than 11 oz.
per week, and rates jump by 60% if you like your meat grilled and well done!
Cattle are now overly raised on corn products and even protein, with a
profusion of hormones and antibiotics to crown it all. Even the highest beef
quality, US Prime, offers risks of its own: The marbled appearance means more
fat, which makes it taste better but makes it less healthy. (4)
As in so many cases, moderation is
the solution: we do not need to have beef every day and eating a steak once in
a while might be less dangerous than crossing the street. My preference would
be for grass-fed, organic, and cooked rare, grilled or roasted, with a rich gratin
dauphinois or some healthier string beans.
This traditional recipe is based on
two separate aspects, grilling over grapevine canes and a coating of shallot
butter. I have selected these cuts because they are the closest thing to the
French Entrecôte, but many other premium cuts will do.
Grapevine canes, gathered in
vineyards after pruning, provide a nice and aromatic cooking medium for
grilling anything, in this case meat. You can, of course, use any other
available methods but no true Bordeaux native could accept that.
Once your meat is ready, salt,
pepper and spread minced shallots and softened butter on top. Serve quickly.
After all, if we must sin, let’s do
it all the way.
This dish should satisfy beef
lovers, cream lovers, and pepper lovers. Sometimes they are the same people.
You will need:
×
4 steaks,
about 1-inch thick.
×
½ cup
cognac or brandy
×
3 tbsp.
black peppercorn
×
1 tbsp.
green peppercorn
×
1 cup
whipping cream
×
Salt
Crush the black and green
peppercorns coarsely by rolling a bottle over them and applying all your
weight.
Heat up a skillet with some olive oil.
Fry the steaks on both sides until cooked, salt, and
transfer to a hot plate to keep them warm.
Empty the pan of its fat and deglaze
with cognac
Add the pepper and the cream. Let it
boil and thicken for a minute or two. Salt to taste.
Serve the steaks on individual
heated plates, with the pepper sauce on top and some string beans on the side
so you do not feel too guilty.
Machaca is a regional dish from
northern Mexico. In days before refrigerators, machaca was made with dried
spiced beef. The following recipe, coming from the Hispanic side of the family,
uses fresh flank steak, whose stringy muscle fibers can be made to resemble the
original consistency and flavor. Other cuts could be used, provided they supply
the long fibers needed for this dish. The combination of cumin, long-cooked
beef, chili and mild flour tortillas makes this comfort food impossible to
resist. You will need:
×
1 large
flank steak, of about 2 lbs.
×
½ sweet
onion
×
1 green
pepper
×
1
Jalapeño pepper
×
Cumin,
salt and pepper
×
Flour
tortillas
Cut the flank steak across
the visible fibers into long strips about 1½ inch wide.
Put in a small pot, cover with cold
water, salt, and let it come to a gentle simmer for about 1 hour. Skim
regularly.
Meanwhile, pour a ribbon of olive
oil in a pan at medium heat.
Cut the green pepper in small strips
and throw it in the pan for 5 minutes.
Cut the onion and sautée it the same
pan until golden.
Cut the Jalapeño pepper in small
strips and throw it also into the pan.
Turn off the heat.
Take the meat out of its pot and
work the meat strips with a fork and a clawing motion to break down the
individual fibers as finely as you can (or as coarsely as you wish!).
Throw the now stringy meat into the
pan and cover with the broth remaining from its cooking.
Add cumin to taste. 1
tbsp. should be enough.
Add salt if needed and
cook gently for about 20 minutes.
Taste, add chili pepper
if you want a spicier dish, but milder is more satisfying and addictive.
Salt and pepper to
taste. Transfer to a serving dish.
Heat up the tortillas in
a pan, serve, and invite your guests to fill them with machaca (not too much so
it does not overpower the tortilla), roll them up and enjoy. Supply extra paper
napkins in case.
This winter dish is the simplest and
most emblematic of French one-pot dishes, where beef and veal meats are
long-cooked with vegetables.
It provides you with 2 courses for a
meal, first a bouillon and then a steaming appetizing stew. You may be limited by
your pot size, but know that preparing a large quantity will always be
beneficial, as it leads to a better overall taste, a large volume of natural
broth and easily useable meat leftovers. Different long cooking meat selections
should be encouraged each time, so that, with time, you experience different
textures and tastes and select your favorite way.
The balance between cooking times
can be considered a fair compromise. It can be changed according to expected
balance between strongly flavored meat and strongly flavored broth. You will
need:
×
2-3 lbs.
of beef meat: chuck roast, shank, short ribs, oxtail, etc..
×
1 ½ lb.
veal meat: veal shank, eal breast, etc..
×
1 large
onion
×
8-10
carrots
×
3-4
turnips
×
2 stalks
of celery or ½ celeriac
×
1 Savoy
cabbage (optional)
×
3 leeks
×
Some
herbs : parsley, thyme, rosemary and bay leaf
×
4/6
garlic cloves
×
Salt,
pepper, cayenne, cloves
×
1 large
pot
Season the meat with garlic (see
Pork Roast above). This method strongly flavors the meat around the clove while
only faintly flavoring the broth, thus achieving more elegant results. Salt and
pepper the surface of the meat.
Drive 2 cloves into a whole onion.
Place the meat and the onion at the
bottom of the pot. (5)
Cover with cold water (4/5 times the
volume of the meat).
Start cooking.
After 20 minutes, when it starts
boiling, turn the heat to a simmer and skim the pot regularly.
Add salt to taste.
Meanwhile, you can peel and cut all
vegetables.
50/70 minutes after starting the
meat according to your patience, you can start adding the vegetables:
×
first the
carrots,
×
then the
celery 10 minutes later (with blanched cabbage if you so desire),
×
then, 20
minutes later, the turnips and the leeks.
Continue to cook without covering so
as to preserve colors.
20 minutes later, the pot-au-feu is
ready to be served.
Serve the meat and vegetables with
coarse salt. Each guest can put some of this salt in his plate and associate a
grain or two with each morsel. French people will also expect some Dijon
mustard and cornichons (gherkins), mainly to uphold the tradition. The purpose
of this tradition is probably to supply a contrast with the permeated delights
coming out of the pot. Whether you are doing that or not, your essential
objective should be to consciously enjoy the miracle of this osmosis of
tastes between meat and vegetables. Isn’t life great?
If you intend to have the broth as a
first course before, you will have to accept its fatty content. If not, you
will need to prepare this dish enough in advance to have time to take the fat
out, as indicated in the Soup section. This will involve re-heating the
Pot-au-Feu before serving it as a main course.
Meat and vegetable leftovers can be
used in salads or stuffings, for example for cannelloni pasta.
You should also try different major
variations on this dish.
The Poule-au-pot, made famous by French king Henry IV who wanted every
French family to have one for lunch every Sunday. In this dish, the main meat
ingredient was traditionally the old hen which did not produce eggs anymore,
properly stuffed. For the stuffing, see Stuffed Tomatoes in the Vegetable
section. A chicken could be used but will not hold well. You may have to
shorten the initial cooking time before adding the vegetables.
The hen may be replaced by a stuffed duck, which is in general
bigger and may take more time to cook. It is also very fat, which will make
elimination of the fat in the broth even more necessary. However, the heavenly
taste of the dish and all its components will offset the additional work.
Salt pork soup. In this dish, the main meat ingredient is salt pork.
A whole cabbage would now become compulsory. In the US, this dish requires some
planning as salt pork needs to be home-made 3 to 4 days before. To make salt
pork, purchase a rack of spare ribs, cut it in large pieces and salt it
liberally on all faces with coarse salt. Place the pork in a salad bowl in the
refrigerator, covered with plastic film, and rearrange once or twice in the
next few days. On soup day, rinse the pieces thoroughly and place at the bottom
of the pot. Do not add any salt to the soup, as the meat salt should be enough
to flavor the whole pot during cooking. For better results, you may prefer to
blanch the cabbage, cut in fourths in a separate pot containing water and one
teaspoon of baking soda before adding it to the soup.
Organ meats
Unless you have traveled outside the
US, you have never seen calf or pig heads decorating a butcher’s window or
kidneys nudged against one another or miles of tripe in a bowl.
In France, organ meats have risen
over centuries from a lowly status of stuff for the poor to sought-after
delicacies. Now, as distribution channels evolve and traditions get lost, I
feel they may have started on their long road to oblivion in French homes.
Fortunately, many French restaurants, including 3-star gourmet ones, still uphold
the tradition.
Before it is too late, you will have
to taste at least some of the best on your next trip to France: veal
sweetbreads, veal kidneys, or veal liver for example. Sweetbreads are the
easiest to like, all the more in a top restaurant where they will be prepared
to perfection.
If you are more adventurous, try pig
feet in a reputable place, or AAAAA andouillette, offered by many of the
traditional brasseries. (6)
(1)
Verjus could replace lemon juice quite
successfully. But w ho has any in his or her refrigerator?
(2)
Average consumption in the U.S. is now less
than 1 lb. per capita, vs 85 lbs. of beef. New Zealanders and Australians
consume respectively 60 times and 30 times the US amount!
(3)
Iranians often steam their rice over sliced
potatoes in the bottom of the pot. This means that, at the end of the process,
you have a crust in the bottom that everyone will fight for. Good ideas are
everywhere!
(4)
This practice translated into feeding cattle
“meat and bone meal,” which provoked an outbreak of mad cow disease in Europe
in the 1980s.
(5) Although
it is not traditional, I cannot resist adding a cup of green lentils at the
same time.
(6) AAAAA stands for Association Amicale des Amateurs d’Andouillette Authentique. Yes, it is a real organization (NGO by the way)
which only confers its honors after a blind tasting. Blissful are the
andouillettes they bless.
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