Get in my belly

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.

• Pig heads are heavy. Like 15 pounds heavy, which wouldn’t be so bad if one didn’t leave said head in a freezer on the other side of Brooklyn and have to schlep it home on the G train.
• Pig heads don’t have obvious handholds once the ears have been removed. When manipulating a head to get it from one pot to another, the natural tendency is to jam one’s fingers in the eye sockets. It’s not unlike a bowling ball that way. And it wouldn’t be so bad if the eyeballs weren’t still in there. Glad I’m not one of those people that can’t stand touching their eyes. Or other people’s eyes.
• For some reason, brining overnight gives pig heads nosebleeds.
• Pig heads have extremely coarse, bristly dark hair that looks an awful lot like — um, nevermind.

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.

Yes, that’s a pig, riding a sausage.

It ain’t right, but I sho’ like it.

We did Big Bob Gibson’s smoked shoulder pulled pork.

We did Mike Mills’s babybacks.

And we did Ed Mitchell’s whole hog pulled pork. Twice.

I, for one, am totally grateful for the abundance of ramen in NYC.

Ippudo’s shiromaru ramen has a sweetly porky, buttery broth. The akamaru has a red sauce (that seems like it must be at least partly chile oil, the way it beads up in the soup) that tastes familiar, but I can’t place it. Pleasantly firm noodles on the skinny side — I think I prefer the heft and girth of Setagaya’s, and I think you get more noodles there too, but these were equally tasty.

Jeremy said his pork was some of the best pork he’s ever had. Unfortunate that I didn’t get to try any of his, since my slices were rather dry and the fat a bit waxy. Jeremy probably would have licked the bowl clean if he weren’t so polite and well socialized.

Quality-wise, as far as noodles-in-soup goes, I think this matches Setagaya, but the deep marine essence of Setagaya’s broth totally has me in thrall — I think I’ll give S the edge. But I’ll go back to Ippudo for sure. They’ve got a lot more seating and it’s more comfortable too.

There is also a sweet bar:

and this is what I’ve turned out of the kitchen in the past 24 hours:

My mom’s sparerib recipe and the other stuff we ate with it.

Richard Olney’s chicken liver terrine. My first terrine ever. The recipe requires you to squish the raw livers with the other ingredients (breadcrumbs, spices, sauteed onion) with your hands. And yeah, somehow the quantity didn’t end up quite right. Also, I didn’t have any normal lard around, so I sawed off some slices of my slab bacon (by far the most difficult part). Watch out for those weird stringy veins; they’re a pain in the ass to extract once you’ve already pulped the livers and are covered in chunky, oozy glop.

Made in the Le Creuset terrine I handcarried from France to Italy and then to NYC. Goddamn, it’s heavy. The terrine’s kind of a cute little guy, isn’t it?

Breakfast this morning. At the Greenmarket fishmonger, my eyes were instantly drawn to the bucket filled with creamy, faintly coral-colored lobes striped with delicate veins. It’s flounder roe, she told me. Sold. Almost as good as shad roe but with a less assertive flavor. I can’t help but think about all the millions of itty bitty little eggs (you can kind of make them out in the photo, the little white specks) that make up one of these lobes and how many potential flounder are now swimming in my belly. I pan-roasted it in butter.

Can’t have terrine without it: Jim Lahey’s wonderful no-knead bread.

I’ve recently had a flurry of food-related activities that I wanted to share with you all—a slice of the LA good life, if you will. In celebration of Kate’s birthday, Kristin and Debbie (of Evil Wives Productions) threw her a German-themed party, aka Katefest. Which included: four different kinds of tasty sausage including some spectacular weisswurst; red cabbage that transcended the category vegetable; imported sauerkraut; candied bacon (!); a Mar Vista caucus to determine whether Debbie’s German chocolate cake or Kristin’s Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte was better; and rousing beer stein-holding competitions to see which graduate students could withstand the pain to achieve eternal fame and glory (i failed ignominiously). Good times, good people. I’m considering asking the Evil Wives for a North Korean party of my own.

Other good times with good people: my first trip to Din Tai Fung where I discovered that the soup dumplings I’ve had before were supersized; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s community weekend opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum where we felt like we were at Ikea (sorry Renzo) but were again moved by Richard Serra’s Band; and the return of porkday, this time featuring a tourtière wherein ground pork, beef, onions, various spices, and some leftover portobellos were browned, shoved into a pie-crust with some creative porcine venting, then shoved into an oven, and then shoved into our greedy mouths. Plans for a Melton Mowbray pork pie showdown are in the works.

p.s. Trader Joes has had a plethora of awesome packaged fruit, including freeze-dried mangosteen!

Exhibit A.

Salt-roasted pork loin I made for Carl and Karl. It’s The Week’s reprint of Russ Parsons’s recipe in the LA Times (whose site isn’t pulling up the recipe). I don’t know why I’ve never used this method before; it is easy. The hardest part is making sure you have about a pound of salt lying around to make the paste you’ll need to cover the loin. All you have to do is thoroughly brown the pork on all sides, mix the salt with some rosemary and enough water to make a paste (which isn’t all that much water, it turns out; better less than too much, I discovered, since it won’t stick if too wet). Roast for 20 minutes at 400F. (Wednesday Chef actually has the recipe. I did my potatoes separately, which was fine.)

Exhibit B.

Another reason to live in the Bay Area. As if you didn’t already have the Berkeley Bowl, June Taylor Jams, Rancho Gordo, and Cowgirl Creamery.

Cosentino is a man after my own heart.