Birthday Porchetta

Our friend Beth had a birthday recently and we hosted a bunch of former colleagues over to celebrate the occasion.  

To celebrate I made a porchetta.  If you are not sure what that it is, it is a lovely Italian method of delivering porky goodness, fat, and crispy skin all in one dish.  This cannot be made spur of the moment because the "rolled meat" needs to rest in the fridge overnight to allow the skin to dry out.  That is the key to the crispy, crackly skin that everyone wants to eat.  The "roll" is a pork belly long and wide enough to wrap around a pork loin.  Costco is a great place to get both a very large slab of pork belly as well as a whole pork loin that can be trimmed to fit the belly. The belly is prepped with an herb paste of parsley, basil, rosemary, mint, lemon balm, lemon zest, garlic, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes and fennel pollen.  The last is what makes the dish, so hunting around for somewhere that sells it is important.  Naturally, Amazon will provide but try to find a local purveyor if possible.  If you can't find any, fennel fronds will be a good substitution.

Ingredients

1 large skin on meaty pork belly

1 pork loin that is either the width or length of your belly piece

3 cloves of garlic

1 lemon, either zested or find removed in thin strips, no pith please

2 large handfuls of PICKED parsley leaves

2 medium sized sprigs of young rosemary (how do you know if it's young?  Is it easily bendy and the                         stems are green not woody and brown)

2-3 sprigs of basil, leaves picked

2-3 sprigs of lemon balm (I have it in the garden, and it amps the lemon flavor a little bit) optional

2-3 sprigs of mint

1/2 t citric acid or crushed up vitamin C tablet (why you ask?  it keeps the herb paste greener)

1 t hot pepper flakes or to taste

salt and pepper

olive oil, minimal

1 T salt

1 t baking powder

Method

1.  Flip the belly meat side down and pat dry.  There will be lots of wrinkles and crevasses in the skin.  Push them out to be as flat as possible.  Decide how you are going to wrap the pork loin.  Can it go along the long edge of the belly and be completely encased or does it have to go the short way to get totally encased.  This is all dependent on the thickness of your pork loin.  If it is a monster, then it will only work being place parallel to the short side of the loin.  If it was a smaller pig, then it might not be so thick and you can place it along the long side of the belly.  Or if you want a longer thinner porchetta, you and use multiple pork tenderloins placed end to end to run the length of the belly.

2.  Then take a VERY, VERY SHARP KNIFE. (this is key, you will be slicing just thru the skin and hopefully not into the meat and a dull knife will not cut it (pun intended).  You have decided on the direction of your "roll", cut the skin on a diagonal that way when you are tying up the belly the strings will not fall into the slices and cut into the meat.

 These cuts in the skin are a bit too deep, but the illustration is for direction of the cuts.

3.  Flip the belly over, pat dry and trim any scraggly bits on the meat side.  If the belly is uneven in its thickness, trim it as best you can to be even.  Try not to sacrifice to much of the meat on the belly.  Square, as best you can, the belly along the edges so that presentation will be pretty from both ends. Pretend roll the loin in the belly so that you can see a) where to trim loin, b) where the belly may overlap itself.  You are going to trim off the belly meat but leave the skin uncut if there is an over lap so that the only thing that overlaps is skin.  

4.  Open up your pretend belly roll and trim your loin to fit.  Remove any fat cap from the loin as well as any bits of silver skin or tendons.  You are now going to butterfly the loin a bit so that there is that pretty swirl of green in each slice.  This doesn't have to be a beauty contest, slice thru the loin as if you were going to cut it in half the long way but leave at least 1/2 inch of meat uncut.  Then do the same with the halves that you have made.  Place butterflied loin to the side.  On the meat side of the belly, make shallow diagonal slices so that the herb paste has somewhere to get into. Put aside.

5.  Herb paste is made with any convenient tool, processor, mortar and pestle, hand chopping, your choice!  I used a stick blender and a tall container.  

Into your choice of tool but the garlic cloves, lemon peel, citric acid, parsley, rosemary, lemon balm, mint and basil and grind up to a paste.  If you need a little help use only a small amount of olive oil.  From experience, I can tell you too much and it just oozes all over the surface when you are tying up the roast making grabbing the strings very difficult.  

6.  Sprinkle salt, pepper, fennel pollen, and hot pepper flakes over the meat side of the belly and into the slices that you made do the same in the butterflied loin.  Use about 1/2 - 3/4 of the paste you made and spread over the belly into your shallow slices.  Place loin in the direction you chose to roll and rub the remaining paste into the cuts you made earlier,  Any remaining paste can be rubbed on the outside of the loin.

You can see that there isn't a ton of herb paste.  Just enough to flavor and color the meat.  Too much and it overwhelms the taste of the pork itself.  

Now comes the tricky part, it is at least for me!

 

7.  The roll.  You will need a lot of precut strings to tie this baby together.  Roll up the loin in the belly and double check that you have either an overlap of just skin, or your two ends meet perfectly together without overlap.  Either is fine.  It is important to encase the loin because it will cook at a different rate that the belly and you want a juicy result, not a dry loin in a strip along the bottom.  If necessary adjust your trim so you have your preference.  Measure out a string that will completely encircle the roast with a lot of room.  Now cut about 10 - 16 of the same length.  

Starting at one end squidgy the string under the roast to the middle.  Continue adding strings to each side of the roast leaving them all untied for the moment.  Think about portioning here and place your strings accordingly.  I'd say every 3/8 - 1/2 of an inch apart.  Here is the difficult part for me, tying the butcher's knot.  This is a link to watching it done slowly.  I have had to watch many videos over and over again in order to tie things.  You need to pull the strings tight so that the loin is tightly enclosed in the belly. You also want the knot to be down away from the presentation side of the meat, for prettiness sake.

Now continue to tie these knots alternating on each side of your first string, think about portioning when you are doing this and keeping the string taut while tying the knot.  The strings make excellent spots to cut the finished product.  

8.  Admire your work.  Take pictures to amaze your friends.  

Put the tightly tied roll on a rack on a foil lined roasting pan.  (Side note:  this baby will shed fat like nobodies business, so choose your pan wisely.  The rack needs to keep the meat above the copious amount of fat that will be rendered.  I did not do this this time, and the fat spilled over the top of the sheet pan I used and filled the oven tray below it as well.)  

Wipe down the skin, you want it free of oil and errant bits of herb paste.  Take the 1 T salt and 1 t baking powder and mix together well in a small dish or cup.  Place the roast seam side up and rub a bit of the salt/BP mixture all over the seam and exposed sides of the belly.  Turn to coat one side then the other and finally put the roast seam side down and rub the top with the salt/BP mixture.  What does this do?  It changes the ph of the meat so that the skin puffs up and gets super crispy.  Works for turkey too, just saying.

9.  Put the roast in the fridge over night uncovered so that the skin dries out even more.  

10.  Remove from fridge the next day.  Make sure that you have enough room to put in the roast raised out of the anticipated fat and set oven to 300-325°F (based on your oven).   Insert a probe thermometer into the thickest end of the roast.  Do not pierce the skin, push probe into the loin from the open end.  Roast uncovered until the thermometer reads about 170°F.  If the skin is not already crispy and lovely burnished brown, remove from oven and increase oven temp to 400°F.  Put roast in and watch closely for about 10-15 minutes. 

10,  Let rest for at least 30 minutes tented with foil.

11.  Slice using a serrated knife into thin-ish slices because this is an incredibly rich meal.  Ideally each slice should have a lovely swirl of herb paste decorating it.  It will take will power not to start ripping of pieces of skin as a cook's treat.  

Curing Meat with CELR-12

Earlier this spring I bought a CELR-12 unit from Tablesmith.com.  I had heard about this unit from a YouTube channel that I follow, and here is their website twoguysandacooler.com.  The YouTube channel is all about making sausage and cured meats, a fabulous site with a wealth of information on making sausage.  The host, Eric, was doing a review of the CELR-12 after having taken it for a spin by making cured pork tenderloin, coppa, and bresaola.  I was so intrigued that I went to Tablesmith and ordered the unit.  

The unit is a box that needs to be plugged in and three hoses that get thread through the drain port of any cooler.  You need a drain hole, otherwise you will need to drill one into the cooler.  Ideally, the drain hole should be 3/4-7/8 of an inch in diameter.  It needs to accommodate all three hoses.  You can remove the caps from the hoses and reattach them if necessary.  However, over time, it will make the connections loose.  The guys at Tablesmith have thought of everything, included with the unit are little clamps that you can use to hold a loosened hose onto the caps.  Marshall, the developer and creator of CELR-12 has been really wonderful. He has answered my newbie questions and has been very supportive.  Thank you.

How does the unit work, you may ask?  It keeps the cooler at a constant (nearly constant) temp that you set, and circulates the cool air throughout.  It has a crazy wide range of temperatures, from 28°F to 140°F.  I have only used 55°F for the curing of the meats.  The humidity is kept about 85-88% and you will need to empty the little drip tank and dry the bottom of the cooler every now and then.  

I used the same recipes that Eric published on the two guys site and followed them to a tee.  The results were, (drum roll insertion here) spectacular.  You will need to purchase collagen sheets and those can be gotten from The Sausage Maker or from Amazon, but patronize the business first please.

The pork tenderloin was a bit too soft for my taste, and that could be because I didn't have a good enough deli slicer to cut it paper thin.  The pork tenderloin, coppa and bresaola were outstanding in their look and in their taste.  Click the link below to open up the recipe pages.

Recipes

What I learned by doing this:

1.  It's fun!  I used to use Umai bags to make these sorts of things but it just didn't have the same taste or smell as this does.  And it's the smell that is fabulous.  The collagen sheets need to spritzed with a "warrior" mold culture (all explained very well on the 2 guys channel).  This is a penicillin type mold, very similar to that on brie cheese that colonizes quickly and fights off (get the warrior name) other molds from getting established.  The smell is intoxicating.

2.  Every dry cure starts with a wet cure.  I found out the difference between Cure #1 and #2.  Cure #1 is for any project that dry cures for less than 30 days.  Not a day longer.  Cure #2 is for dry cures that last for more than 31 days.  The pork tenderloin used Cure #1 because it was only a 2-2.5 week drying time.  The other projects used Cure #2 because their cure took 34 days.  

3.  The collagen sheets are very, very easy to work with and do their job incredibly well.  They allow the moisture from the meat to escape, creating that supercharged high humidity environment with the CELR-12.

4.  Patience is necessary.  This is particularly difficult when you are getting to the end of the curing time.  You are weighing the product hoping to get to the target weight sooner.  But you can't rush it.  No matter how fabulous the smells are when you open up the cooler to pull out a project and weigh it.

5.  A good deli slicer is absolutely necessary to take advantage of the flavors, textures and aromas that your project emit.  Too thick and it just feels gummy in the mouth, kind of unpleasant.  

Now for the finished project photos

 You can see the darker ring around the outer edge.   The outside edge cured at a faster rate than the   center.  After cutting, you can bag it up in a vacuum  sealer bag and over a short amount of time the ring  with disappear.  Has no effect on the flavor.  Note the nice mold coverage.  The collagen sheet gets peeled off but the mold flavor goes through to the cured meat.

Pork Coppa

   The taste of this was out of this world.  It just

    melted   like butter on the tongue because of the

    amount of   intramuscular fat in whole muscle. 

    Again, the mold   provided a lovely depth of flavor. 

    I didn't have   ground Calabrian peppers so I used

    Calabrian pepper   paste on the outside of the

    muscle.  The little kick was lovely.

These are the whole muscles prior to cutting into.  You can clearly see the mold is covering them completely.  The coppa is at the top and the bresaola is the bottom one.

Here is the Bresaola.  It too had the shadow ring.  A short amount of time in a vacuum bag solved that.  Again, there was no impact on flavor or texture.

Here are the slices top is coppa and bottom is bresaola.  Soooooo damn delicious.

My next project will be a genoa salami following Erik's recipe.  

Best Ever "Fish Fragrance" Eggplant

This dish has no fish in it.  The name comes from the flavorings that are traditional used with fish in Chinese cooking.  It is a sichuan style recipe is often called Yu Xiang in restaurants.  This particular recipe comes from delish.com.  It is one of the best that I have used, bar none. 

The dish is simple, but if you don't cook Chinese food often you will need to get a lot of ingredients.  I was looking for a recipe that could use up the mountain of eggplants that my CSA gave me.  

Ingredients

3 Chinese eggplants, about 1.25 lbs, halved and cut into thick diagonal strips
2 t kosher salt

3 T cornstarch

Oil, divided

1 t ground sichuan peppercorns

6-12 dried sichuan chilis, stems/caps removed, cut in half and deseeded

1 T chopped pickled chili or sambal oelek or freshly sliced Thai chilis

3 T fermented chili bean paste, Pixian if possible

1 head of garlic minced, or equivalent cloves, divided

1 T minced ginger

1/2 t ground white pepper

3 green onions thinly sliced divided

1.5 T low sodium soy sauce (I used chinese light soy)

1.5 T rice wine vinegar

2 t Chinese Black vinegar

4 t granulated sugar (I used 3)

1/2 t MSG

1/2 c water or broth

2 t toasted sesame oil

Rice for serving

Method

1.  In a large bowl toss eggplant evenly with salt.  Let sit for 20-30 minutes, then gently squeeze out as much moisture as possible.  Drain and pat dry with paper towels.  Transfer to a dry bowl and then add cornstarch and toss to coat eggplant evenly.

2.  Heat a large skillet or wok over medium heat and add 2-3 T oil.  Heat until smoking.  Working in batches add some eggplant slices to the pan and fry until lightly brown on all sides, about 3-4 minutes.  Transfer to a clean bowl and set aside.  Finish the rest of the eggplant in the same manner.  Adding more oil if necessary.

3.  After frying the eggplant, remove the oil from the pan and add wipe with a wad of paper towels.  Heat pan again and add 2 T fresh oil to the pan.  After the oil is hot, add Sichuan ground pepper, chilis, bean paste, half the garlic, ginger, white pepper and half the green onions, stirring constantly until fragrant and the garlic is golden.  About 1 minute, do not burn.

4.  Return eggplant to pan, add soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, MSG, and water or broth.  I mixed all of these ingredients together in a single bowl ahead of time making sure that the sugar was dissolved.  Stir occasionally until the mixture thickens and becomes glossy, only a few minutes needed.  Stir in sesame oil, and remaining garlic and onions in final minute of cooking.  

5.  Serve with rice.

This dish was spicy but very well balanced.  There was the mala heat but it was tempered by that small amount of sugar and vinegar.  Absolutely delicious recipe and my thanks to the originator on delish.com,

I had a few strips of cucumber, onions, and carrots left over from a noodle dish the night before.  Perfect accompaniment.

I have made this subsequently from publishing here and I had a couple of red bell peppers that I stir fried with the ginger prior to adding the hot pepper paste and seasonings.  A welcome textural change.  I also had a ton of zucchinis that I treated exactly like the eggplant and it too was a lovely twist.