ad astra per alia porci
Make like you’re there: what to eat if you’re watching the Olympics in NYC. (My first TONY piece.)
And no longer timely, but just in case you missed it, here’s what I had to say about the UnFancy Food Show and New Amsterdam Market on WNYC last month.
Photograph by Carl
Dear Bacon,
On a conceptual and gastronomic level, I have no problem with bacon chocolate bars, egg and bacon ice cream, or bacon caramel. The bacon chocolate-chip cookie at Meatopia IV was pretty good too. (I do, however, draw the line at the Bacon Martini. That just doesn’t sound like a good idea at all.)
And you know you occupy a hallowed place in my kitchen, Bacon — you really do. I even keep the stuff that reminds me of you — there’s a jar of bacon drippings I leave right by the stove. There’s no one like you for cooking up greens. I’m even going to start curing a slab of you next week.
But I worry, Bacon.
I worry that you’re becoming too ubiquitous. That you’re trying too hard. That instead of being the life of the party, you’re becoming the joke: a little too eager to get shitfaced, jump on the table and dance. You’re That Meat that’s the last to leave, after the hosts have been hinting for an hour.
Your appearance in the lardons made for a good laugh — especially since they only tasted okay — but is that what you’re going for now? Laughs? You just want to make a spectacle of yourself? That makes me sad.
Why don’t we take it down a notch, Bacon? Just relax and be yourself. Everyone likes you already; there’s no one you need to impress, no need to get all dolled up and pretend you’re something you’re not.
Keep it real, Bacon, and you’ll always have a place on my plate.
Yours, even in lean times,
Winnie
[Warning: The following may not be suitable for the weak-of-stomach, the meat-averse, the meat-with-a-face-attached-averse, the animal-head-averse, the owners of pet pigs, and probably a few other people. Welcome, everyone else.]
Headcheese: A Recipe/Photo Essay
1. Take one freshly butchered head from a pastured Berkshire hog.
(Give the ears away to someone else at the butchering demo.)
2. Leave pig head in a freezer in Williamsburg until a suitable size pot is located in which to place it. (A 16-quart Le Creuset.) Fetch head and lug home on the subway.
3. Brine head overnight. Worry from the outset about it not being totally submerged. Wrestle with it every few hours to rotate it within the brine (it weighs a lot, you know). Ten hours in, worry a little about leaving it out during a 100°F-heat wave and then realize that the pot fits in the fridge if you leave the lid off. Put pot in the fridge for the last 14 hours.
4. Discard brine. Cover head with water and a couple cups of white wine. Throw in an onion, some garlic cloves, peppercorns, a bouquet garni of parsley, bay leaf, and thyme, and simmer for three hours until done.
5. Wrestle head out of the pot. Be careful — head is extremely, extremely hot and completely unwieldy. An extra pair of hands is useful. While allowing it to cool, strain the cooking liquid and reduce, reduce, reduce.
6. Divest skull of meat, giving your fingers first-degree burns in the process, reduce meat to bite-size pieces, and place in a terrine. Regret for a moment giving away those ears; they would have been such a lovely textural addition to the finished product. Ah well. Continue picking off flesh.
[For some reason, this photo seems to wig people out the most, so I'll leave it off this post. Must be the teeth.]
7. Continue reducing cooking liquid. Taste, add a lot of salt. Reduce some more.
8. Test cooking liquid for doneness by spooning some on a plate and sticking it in the fridge. Worry a little that there doesn’t seem to be any gelling happening. Continue reducing cooking liquid. Add some chiffonaded parsley to the bits in the terrine (all that beige needs a little perking up — the green is so pretty!).
9. Say “To hell with it” after an hour of reducing and pour the liquid into the terrine. Stick in the fridge overnight and cross fingers in the hopes that gelling will occur with time.
10. Experience equal amounts gratitude and elation when it turns out that there is, indeed, aspic holding all the bits together. Regret unmolding headcheese for a photo since there’s basically no way in hell it’s going back into the terrine all in one piece.
(Resolve to reduce cooking liquid even further next time for a stiffer set and to take home a trotter as well for added gelatin. Resolve also to cut meat into smaller pieces so the thing is actually sliceable.)
11. Enjoy headcheese for the next week and a half with some salsa verde.
Carl’s got the greenest thumb this side of the East River. Our basil plantings are out of control. And I am grateful for it. If I manage to get my shit together and make a megabatch for the freezer, winter will = pesto too.
Our fridge is full to bursting, what with the CSA and four people constantly “picking up something I found at the Greenmarket” several times a week. But Carl is on a sauce rampage tonight and has turned a quarter of the fridge’s contents into garlic scape dip (using butter beans instead of cannellini), cilantro chutney, and salsa verde (a condiment I could put on anything and everything, especially headcheese. And boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, poached chicken…).
God, I love summer.
On my list of Top 50 culinary mountains to climb, curing meat ranks high up there — along with constructing my own wood-burning oven, building a smokehouse, and keeping chickens. Unlike those other three, however, it’s actually not only feasible but really easy to cure meat at home in a New York apartment. So I did.
First, I brought home some Tamarack Hollow jowl. Mike’s jowls, unfortunately, are pretty badly butchered by his processors, but most of the city’s pork enthusiasts agree that his pork is the best, any way you slice it. I got one side, which was about 2.5 lbs, and I trimmed it to make it a little more uniform and to remove the gland. Why jowl and not belly? There’s something about the pure porcine sweetness of guanciale that I’ve always preferred to bacon. I don’t know if the fat is better (as I’ve heard) or what, but it just makes the best bucatini all’amatriciana ever. Bucatini all’amatriciana being the reason why I bother to keep regular ol’ bacon around in the first place.
Ruhlman’s pretty standard recipe has you dry-cure it in salt, sugar, pepper, garlic, and thyme for about a week.
And once all the moisture’s been drawn out of the muscle cells, it has to be hung out to dry. I put some string through one end and stuck it in the Metro shelving in the kitchen.
I was a little worried that the 100°F heat wave we had last week would deep-six the jowl, but turns out it’s fine. I somehow misread the recipe and left the guanciale to dry maybe a week or two too long, which means that it’s a little hard in places, but the flavor is good, and the fatty parts are excellent. I oversalted a little when curing, but it’ll make a fine amatriciana. And despite some initial misgivings about possible toxicity issues, I sliced some up and fried it in a pan and ate it. And I’m still alive to write this. Must be grateful for the little things.
Next up, I’ve got another jowl from the pig butchering demo I did a few weeks back, as well as a nice slab of belly. But first, some headcheese. Stay tuned.
I know Foo’s been getting her CSA share for weeks now (damn you, California), but ours only just began last week. I switched to Sweet Pea this year, which gets its veg from Garden of Eve over on Long Island. It pained me to leave Hearty Roots, but getting over to Greenwood Heights early on Saturdays was just a little too much to take on last year. Plus, we had the option of a fruit share with Sweet Pea, which is already repaying itself in spades. We’ve gotten two quarts of strawberries two weeks in a row now, and they nearly rival Berried Treasure’s tristars. This week’s batch were so ripe they had that jammy, almost-fermented sweetness. Which I love. They could be a little more generous with the rhubarb. One stalk last week. Two stalks this week.
[Thank you, Carl, for the photograph.]
Yes, that’s a pig, riding a sausage.
It ain’t right, but I sho’ like it.
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