Porktopia

Porkgasm

2009-03-11T03:00:00Z

Since I'm a thinking man, it's only natural that America's public obsession with bacon would get my mind working - working on developing some sort of monstrous dish suitable not only for display on glutton blogs, but for true gustatory pleasure. Needess to say, I have very little time for inedible novelties or anachronistic horrors.

I was inspired by the famous Bacon Explosion and this cute little guy, but they both seemed a bit unambitious. And I'm a lot more ambitious than my semi-yearly blog updates might indicate...

Anyway, I started with a little bit of pork:

You might notice that there's no sausage in this picture. That's because you can't buy sausage made out of...

...bacon. I'm not sure what a "pork jowl" is, but mixed with flesh in the right proportion, it made it through my grinder just fine.

I used this bacon base for a fairly typical country sausage - adding salt, pepper, thyme, and nutmeg to taste.

While waiting for Catherine to show up with some essential ingredients, I roasted the pork belly. I'd never cooked pork belly before, but I'd seen this recipe recently, and thought it would be pretty good.

It was:

Now I know how pork cracklings got their name - that skin is crunchy!

Anyway, I knew going into this thing that one variety of sausage wouldn't be enough. And since I used bacon in the first one, I bet you'll be able to guess what went into the second...

(it is that ham-shaped item in the bottom of the picture... I wish I'd actually had some ham that looked as good as the pile of fresh pork).

For contrast, I ground this sausage extra finely and added a ton of pimenton de vera, salt, pepper, and a puree of roasted pepper, hot pepper, and garlic.

Assembly time:

I started by laying a healthy layer of the country sausage on a piece of foil, and topping it with sliced pork belly...

...then, I added some bacon and smoked sausage...

...and rolled it up. After that, we covered it with (you guessed it)...

...ham.

Next, I added a layer of the peppery sausage...

...and turned it over to Catherine and Casey for shaping and decoration:

(the feet have sausages in them)

I didn't want the ears and tail to get all black and gross, so I took them out, and threw the pig in the smoker. I don't have a scale, but I think it weighed close to 15 pounds...

It was finished in a couple of hours.

Don't touch! That is not your meatpig, Christine...

The inside was just as realistic as the outside...

My guests were all total gluttons. I even had two vegetarians and one person with a failing gall bladder try it out (they had half slices). I was disappointed that no observant Jews or Muslims showed up, because I think they would have had to eat some too. Most of us ended up with nightmares and stomachaches. They were well-earned. At the end of the night, there was only enough left for one little sandwich the next day. I ate it for breakfast, on white bread, with barbecue sauce and ketchup.

My New Toy

2008-05-23T23:16:21Z

Going to try it out this weekend with a brisket and a lump of pork...

Beef Jerky I

2008-05-15T01:00:00Z

I started lifting weights a few months ago, and have ever since been attempting to consume the oft-suggested gram of protein per lb. of bodyweight per day. To accomplish this feat, I decided to start making - and eating - a ton of beef jerky, for the following reasons:

1. That is a fuckton of protein to eat every day. Seriously. About four dozen eggs' worth.

2. I am not about to start quaffing whey shakes morning, noon, and night - real food is way better

3. Jerky is DELICIOUS!!!

]]> Ingredients:

Beef

Marinade

(I'll have some real jerky recipies for you down the road - but as you might suspect, pretty much anything that's salty, spicy, sweet, or a little bit of each will work for this.)

Procedure:

The first recipes I read suggested using brisket, so that's what I use. You end up with very nice long chewy strips of jerky, but about half of it is fat that winds up being thrown out. I might give a different cut a try one of these days...

If you're using brisket - and buying a whole brisket, not one of those little shriveled-up abominations from the supermarket, you'll have some work to do. Each brisket seems to have two main pieces of lean meat, with a thick slab of fat one one side and another in between. Start by removing the easy-to-reach fat:

Then begin to separate the top chunk of lean meat from the rest of the brisket:

Once the pieces are separated, remove the fatty slabs. I'm a bit more wasteful than I'd like to be, but practice will eventually make perfect.

You end up with a lot of fat. I throw it out, because I can't think of anything else to do with it. I'm not about to turn my apartment into a rendering plant...

Now slice the meat. I like to go across the grain (this makes the jerky a bit more tender), but going parallel works just fine. Use a long, sharp knife for fastest progress and best results. Aim for 1/8" slices, and definitely stay under 1/4."

Toss it in a bowl, and pour on your marinade. I used a mixture of light and dark Chinese soy sauce, chili-garlic sauce, sesame oil, ginger, garlic, powdered star anise, black pepper, and a little bit of sugar. Anytime you use ginger or garlic, it's a good idea to puree everything very well, so it can all soak into and stick to your meat. A relatively small amount of marinade goes a long way. I'll have suggested portions for you one of these days, but I'll need to pick up a scale first - and I have another upcoming purchase that will be documented here which takes precedence.

The meat from a 10 lb. brisket fits nicely in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. You don't need to let it sit long - a few hours is enough.

I threw the bag in the freezer for a week - both due to my schedule, and to see if it made any difference in the finished product. But the visions I've had of a freezer full of meatbags ready for drying will never be fulfilled. Freezing and thawing draw a lot of moisture out of the meat, and result in jerky that's not quite as chewy as ideal. You can even see the difference in the bag:

Into the strainer...

...and onto the rack.

I like to dry jerky at my mom's house - she has a pair of convection ovens with thermostats that go down to 135, while I just have a basic range that won't go any cooler than 170.

Even with the convection oven, you'll need to prop the oven door open a bit to let the steam escape. Jerky is not steamed. You'll also need to rotate the shelves and flip over the meat strips at least once during the drying process - more than once with a standard oven. The fact that the meat was frozen and thawed made it apt to fall apart a little bit when I turned it, but I was careful and didn't lose very much. The picture below shows it about two hours in, or halfway through the drying process. I didn't cut the strips with incredible consistency, so some parts dry much faster than others. This does not cause any problems.

Foil is essential (if you're using a standard oven, the elemt will burn through it a bit, though):

It shrinks a lot during cooking!

Be sure to let the jerky cool and air out at room temperature for half an hour before putting it in a bag.

Chili Verde

2008-05-08T01:00:00Z

I've experimented with this dish a couple of times before, but I don't really have a good reference point for what it's really supposed to be like. Granted, obsession over the "authenticity" of traditional dishes tends toward the comical - a cook's strident advocacy of the bona fides of their barbecue, borscht, or bouillabaisse generally rises in direct proportion to the number of widely accepted (and just as widely divergent) recipes for it.

Regardless, I've never tasted a traditional New Mexico chile verde. And since the only recipes I looked at when I made this batch were found on the internet, devoid of the exposition and context that makes the quality and, yes, authenticity, of a cookbook relatively easy to judge after just a few minutes of browsing, I decided to wing it.

]]> Ingredients:

~2-3 lbs. of good fatty pork (i.e. shoulder)

3 fresh big green chiles (Mine were poblano, although I believe Anaheim are more traditonal. They are both good.)

2 serrano or other hot chiles (to taste)

1 medium can fire-roasted green chiles

1 medium yellow onion

4-6 cloves garlic

4-6 medium ripe tomatillos

water or chicken broth

olive oil

salt

pepper

Procedure:

Cut the pork in at least 1 1/4" dice, discarding any too-large pieces of fat and gristle. Don't worry about getting big dry stewy lumps of meat - you'll be cooking this until it falls apart, and you don't want the resulting shreds to be too short.

Roast the large green chiles (and the small ones too, if you want). It's easy with an electric burner.

Tongs are a must, for a couple of reasons:

Peel, seed, and chop the chiles, and all of the other ingredients. Everything but the tomatillos should be chopped fairly fine, so that you'll have maximum surface area to brown.

Get your pot good and hot, throw in a decent measure of oil, and brown the meat. Remove when complete.

Toss in a little bit more oil, and saute the onions, garlic, and fresh chiles. The onions are the least apt to burn out of all of these, so I like to let them go for a few minutes on their own before adding the other ingredients.

Add the canned chiles and tomatillos and cook until everything's soft, 5-10 minutes. If you want chunky chile with lots of tomatillo skins that get in your teeth and make you furious, you can deglaze your pot with broth or water, put the pork back in, and cook. But Porktopians do not roll that way:

You'll get the best product if you puree the sauteed vegetables in a Cuisinart or blender before you deglaze your pot with broth or water, put the pork back in, and cook it. (In case you aren't familiar with the term, to 'deglaze' is simply to pour liquid into a hot pot that's been used for sauteeing and letting it boil all of the browned goodness off of the bottom.)

Cover, and simmer gently for two hours or more, until meat begins to fall apart.

At this point, remove the pot's cover, start mashing the meat up, and cook until you reduce the liquid to whatever consistency you desire. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper. This dish can be served as more of a soup, or as... I dunno what you'd call it, maybe just chile? It freezes really well, too.

This little piggy...

2008-05-02T06:12:41Z

...probably should have stayed home.

And he's not the only one. In these pages, you'll see the sad (and delicious!) conclusions of plenty more pigs - in whole or part - not to mention cattle, sheep, chickens, and probably a duck or two.

So why Porktopia?

Meatopolis and meatopia were already taken.