Showing posts with label pork. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pork. Show all posts
Rice with pork
Our housekeeper Sueko would be so proud. She showed me about fried rice when I was ten. We didn't speak each other's language so all that was worked out without speaking. Discounting sound effects.
But the thing is, I'm recalling her showing me at one stove at one little house and recalling her showing me at another stove at a different house and I know when my dad found her and his story about that which precludes the accuracy of the first memory and now I don't know what to remember. Anyway my first trials were with hotdogs and always tasted of catsup. And those are not Asian ingredients.
But you can, with one simple trick, impress your family members, loved ones, significant others, and certainly your dog, by fooling them into thinking you actually know what you're doing. Pour water into a ramekin or small bowl and dump it out. Pack cooked rice into the bowl then upturn the bowl of rice onto a plate and remove the bowl for a tight professional, or perhaps anally retentive, presentation.
Pork, broccoli, spaghetti, tomato sauce, cilantro
This was going to be pork and broccoli with a few noodles, then the noodles swelled up and took over. It is delicious beyond beyond human comprehension.
So get this:
* chile flakes, a lot of them
* vegetable oil, I used olive oil
* salt and pepper
* Asian fish sauce
* soy sauce
* honey
* pasta water
Salty things, something sweet, something hot.
But nothing bitter, and nothing sour. So it's lacking two taste elements that would make it a riot. What we have here is a well behaved party.
* crushed garlic
* one whole onion sliced lengthwise into slivers
* broccoli florets cut with the stems into long strips.
The pork is one of the loin chop things from yesterday cut into strips. The breading dissolves and thickens the liquid into a substantial flavorful sauce.
Breaded pork chop, spinach
Is pork a Saxon word? No, it's not you swine, it's French, porc.
You know how when you take a nice long bath and you stay in there so long you get all waterlogged and wrinkly?
Brining is like that except worse because the meat is dead.
The salt and sugar concentration is in a state of disequilibrium between the brine liquid and the moisture within the meat. First, water passes through the cell walls to equalize the pressure between them and then as the channels are opened and salt passes through it damages the cells further allows greater flow between inside and outside the cell walls until finally both pressure and mineral concentration are equalized. This is a chemical tendency of water molecules to seek equilibrium in pressure and also to equalize mineral concentration by passing through cell walls. It does that by itself. Molecules do. They move around.
I'm imagining.
Brine. As little water to cover to conserve precious ingredients like salt.
For a family pack of pork chops or whatever these bits are.
* 6 cups water
* 1/2 cup kosher salt
* 1/2 cup refined sugar
* 13 peppercorns
* 47 caraway seeds
* 56 mustard seeds
* 1/4 cup apple brandy
the pieces are brined, dried, dusted with seasoned flour, coated with seasoned milk with egg, then panko bread crumbs with butter rubbed in like a pie crust, providing oil to toast the bread and to protect the pork.
Pork and vegetables
I found this pork shoulder in the freezer whilst shoving things around in there to make room for the ice cream cake. Wouldn't do to have the cake get squished. The chunk of pork is cut into strips. I didn't know if there is a bone in there or not. I had no real idea what to do with it. I managed to break off a single strip while the whole thing was still frozen and cut the strip into chunks. Went paleo with it. The little pile of brown stuff is South River miso, the best in all the land, spooned out for condiment.
Tamales
Tamales can be anything; beef, chicken, pork, lamb, ostrich, iguana, howler monkey, prairie dog. Okay, maybe not so much those last four. All the tamales I made previously were chicken, and these initially were going to be chicken too but I changed that idea when I opened the freezer and saw a gigantic pork roast sitting there on the bottom, all forlorn and neglected. I thought the roast had a bone in it, and I wish it did have one because that could have contributed mightily to the flavor of the broth. Alas, no bone. It must have been one of those fancy-pants up town roasts. Whatever, it worked.
My largest pot is too small so the meat was seared in two batches. This is half.
Water is added plus a bunch of Mexican type spices. Mexican oregano, whole cumin seed, whole coriander seed, whole black peppercorn, bay leaf, sea salt. I held back with the intention of tasting later and supplementing if necessary but additions were not necessary. See? Now that there is what you call maturity! I no longer go dumping everything I think will work until at last I succeed in totally overdoing it.
These are all old chiles I had in a box. The red ones are marked "hot" but they are so old I suspect some of their intensity is lost to the atmosphere. There are five different types, all with different flavors and heat intensities. They were not tortured in a skillet as usual to activate their oils but rather just dumped into the water to cook with the pork for hours, along with an onion, quartered, and three large cloves of garlic, smashed to activate its sulfides. I also added a small bag of sun-dried tomatoes. Seeds rattling around everywhere. That explains why there are so many chiles around here, there are seeds all over the place. I can't get rid of them all. I think Mexican people just give up and leave a lot of the seed in there. It's making me neurotic.
The pork is cooked in seasoned water with chiles for hours. The liquid is allowed to cool with the pork still in it. If the pork is removed while still hot, it tends to dry out. So it cools in the liquid and is then pulled apart. This exposes more surface area, and the fibers act as mop that absorbs more liquid than it could otherwise hold.
The liquid is processed separately into a smooth sauce. The sauce is taste-tested to see if it needs correction. It was different than I expected, and I did expect to adjust with more chiles in powder and flake forms, but I decided I did like the flavor a lot. It is mild and sweet and with lovely and appealing expanded chile dimensions, but virtually no heat. It would appeal to anybody, I think, even children. I do not understand where this chile sweetness comes from. I did not add any sweetener.
It is unusual to roll tamales with strips of chiles, but that is what I am doing with this batch. I could have just as easily bought a can of diced chiles and added them directly to the pulled pork, but I wanted each tamale to have a strip of chile as a surprise. These are mild.
Masa harina is same thing that corn tortillas are made of. It is corn meal treated with an alkali. This treatment that the corn undergoes with slacked lime (the chemical, not the fruit) loosens the outer husk of the corn and softens the interior making niacin available along with contributing calcium. Masa harina is a fine powder that readily re-mixes with water or any other liquid, here, some of the pork sauce, and water, along with butter because I didn't have any lard. Yes, LARD. I would have used it if I had any, and I thought I did. I was unwilling to go back to the store just to get lard, but it is an authentic ingredient. Can you imagine -- butter substituting for lard?
I saw Bobby Flay make these, or something like them, on Iron Chefs, using regular corn meal. At that moment I thought, "Oh, no. That's 100% wrong." The judge, Jeffrey Steingarten, bless him, picked up on it too and questioned Flay incredulously. Flay bullshitted his way through the questioning like a badass know-it-all, "Yeah, they use some kind of mix, but sometimes I like to use regular corn meal for its flavor." but it was clear he did not fully appreciate the joy and superiority of Masa harina and its contribution to Latin cuisine, much less its nutritional value compared to ordinary corn meal. Further, the process of treating grain with alkali is called nixtamalization, thus tamal, so wrapping a corn husk around a filling smothered in corn meal does not make a tamal without the nixtamalization. It would be simply polentization, or more prosaically, gritsifcation. Man, something is wrong with this spellcheck thing, it's suddenly putting red lines under everything.
This masa (dough) is pink because the pork sauce added to it is red.
Corn husks can be found at any grocery store here in the West and the Southwest. If you cannot find them, you can probably use banana leaves, but it will not be the same, and that's a shame. Some pages online say to soak the husks overnight. That is probably a good idea. I soaked mine for a few hours. They are always a little stiff. They are also irregular. Some work better for wrapping than others.
Hahaha, concha ↑ means shell.
There is nothing worse than a tamale that's all masa. Wet masa in this application equates to a wet tortilla. You wouldn't serve a tablespoon of filling on three corn tortillas, so the same idea applies with tamales. A very thin layer is applied to the wet husk.
Surprise! Chile. Now, who wouldn't be filled with glee and wonder to find a chile tucked inside their tamale? Nobody, that's who.
Most tamale cooks fold their tamales and leave one end open. I must admit that is an attractive idea. But I will be freezing most of these so they must be closed. At least I think they must be closed. So mine get tied with a strip of husk. Very Asian looking, don't you think?
Check 'em out, Checkemouters -- a veritable wall of tamales.
Steamed for twenty minutes in two batches. My pot is too small to hold them all.
Pork and eggs
This is my new favorite thing, meat cut into chunks, seasoned, dusted with flour and quickly fried. I just love it. The thing is, I can keep it in the pan then keep returning to it and nibble on it like a little monkey. I'm lazy that way.
Today it's pork.
The bread I made myself.
I cut off the tops and bottoms of the bread slices to make sticks to poke in the eggs. Fried 'em in the same pan as the eggs in olive oil. Like elongated delicate croutons. They're delicious.
Used jumbo eggs because I think they're cool.
Lamb meat loaf, ersatz gyros
There sure was a lot of that lamb. Still have some left frozen. And the pork too. This is ground lamb, pork, and beef. All very low in fat, and that will not do. Added olive oil, and to retain whatever fat those meats contain and the oil supplemented, I added my own sourdough breadcrumbs, along with a few eggs and some milk. Plus Worcestershire sauce s/p. Instead of shrinking, the meat actually puffed up like a loaf of bread. It's utterly delicious, but it's hardly gyros. Therefore, it must be considered a meatloaf -- the best meatloaf I've ever tasted. No brag. Just fact.
The sauce here is catsup and Worcestershire and I'm not going to do that again. I still have my own tzatziki so there is no point in using this second-rate red menace.
This batch produced two of these meatloaves. It was totally worth the effort of grinding and mixing the meat. If I would have added diced onion, I'd sweat them first to cause them to shrink before being packed into the loaf.
Pork, chipotle
OMG! I am such a shopper. I had no intention of buying pork, I was actually shopping for more index cards, but when I saw this for less than half price I threw it in my basket and thought of what I could do with it.
I browned the whole package in batches then cooked them under pressure with black beans that had not been soaked first. It worked well. Mixed in canned chipotles generously, which accounts for the color, then served with fresh lettuce, heirloom tomato and cucumber. I tell ya, this is delicious. Although I would not serve it for a party -- lacks universal appeal.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
