pork

Buta no kakuni: Japanese Braised Pork Belly

maki — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:42:34 +0100

Today is my mother’s birthday. In her honor, here is one of the few meat dishes that she still allows in her diet: braised pork belly, or buta no kakuni. It’s amazing that she will still eat this, because basically pork belly is bacon without the smoke or salt cure. And in buta no kakuni the bacon, I mean belly, comes in big chunks of layers of meat and unctuous pork fat.

Pork belly recipes exist in other cuisines, especially around northern Europe, but I can’t really stand most of them, even if people in Germany and Britain rave about roasted pork belly with crackling. (The crackling part is ok, but the meat part…I don’t know.) I like fat in moderation as much as anyone, but that amount of gelatinous pork fat is rather hard to bear. That is unless it’s been slowly braised in a salty-sweet liquid for hours and hours, until both the fat and the meat melt in your mouth.

Very similar recipes exist in Chinese (from Peking-style especially) cuisine, and a great Okinawa speciality is rafute. This is a bit like rafute but has a bit more spice and things in it, so it’s closer to the Peking style I think. Either way it’s a great treat once in a great while. It’s definitely a cold weather dish.

Buta no kakuni (Japanese braised pork belly)

About 450g / 1 lb pork belly
2 Tbs sugar
1 piece of leek (about 6 inches / 15 cm long or so. You can use the green part too.)
1 large piece of fresh ginger
1 star anise
3 Tbs. soy sauce
2 Tbs. sake
2 cups water

Cut the pork into cubes about 1 inch / 2cm or so square. If the skin is still on, leave it on. Heat up a large pot with a heavy bottom. Sauté the pork belly cubes, without any added fat (you don’t need it…) until browned.

When the meat is browned, scrape it to one side and put the sugar in the fat that’s accumulated on the bottom, and stir around until it’s a bit caramelized. Stir and toss so the meat gets coated by the sugar.

Add the rest of the ingredients, bring to a simmer and lower the heat. Put a lid on and let it simmer gently for about 3 hours, turning occasionally.

To serve, dredge the pieces carefully out of the very oily cooking liquid, and peel of the thick layer of fat that’s on the skin side of the meat. Drizzle a little bit of the cooking liquid over the cubes.

We have this with very plain vegetables, like broccoli with wasabi sauce. Pickles (oshinko) are good to have too. Hot, plain rice is essential. To eat, take a small piece and put it on top of your hot rice, and let the sauce and fat sort of melt in. A little goes a long way.

A bit about my mom, Michiko

She’s in her mid 60s now, but one of the youngest and spryest ladies in her 60s that I know. She loves food, but unfortunately since retiring a few years ago she developed a very severe case of IBD (we suspect it’s due to the stress she went through when she was running a busy restaurant in midtown Manhattan), and really has to watch what she eats. Nevertheless she really enjoys life…often I’m not sure who’s the mother, she or I! Here she is bouncing happily with some buskers at the Nurenberg (Germany) Christmas market last year.

One thing that is great about her is that she brings a fresh sense of enthusiasm to everything. Whenever she comes to visit me in Switzerland, I get to see things through her eyes, so that even in the throes of grey, dull winter in Zürich, life seems to be fun again. It’s great to have a mother like that.

Poached and marinated pork (Nibuta)

maki — Tue, 08 May 2007 18:34:52 +0200

With summer just around the corner, I like to think of food that can be made well ahead and tastes great served cold, or at least cool, to keep me out of a hot kitchen. The vegetable part of this is usually taken care of with seasonal vegetable salads and the like. If the protein part means meat, I like to have pre-cooked pieces tucked away in the freezer.

One of my favorite cold meats is poached and marinated pork, or nibuta. (Ni means to cook in liquid, and buta is pig.) It’s very easy to make, stores beautifully in the refrigerator for about a week or much longer in the freezer, and of course, tastes great - savory, slightly sweet, and very juicy. It can be sliced very thinly or julienned for one-dish meal salads or in sandwiches, or chopped up and added to stir-fries, wraps, and so on. It’s a great addition to a bento box. It can be cubed or coarsely ground and used instead of char siu (roast pork) in steamed buns or bao. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

There’s one unusual ‘secret ingredient’ in the poaching liquid, umeboshi or pickled plum. You can omit this if you like, but adding just one umeboshi seems to de-fat the meat a bit more than just poaching, plus making it taste a bit cleaner and fresher in an interesting way.

Poached and marinated pork (Nibuta)

One 1 kg (2.2 lb) or so lump of pork roast that is not too lean

It’s best to make this with a cut of meat that isn’t totally lean, so don’t use an expensive cut like tenderloin or filet. It should have a little marbling, just like ham. Quite a lot of the fat will end up in the poaching liquid, which you can just throw out or skim off.

Kitchen twine to tie up the meat (optional)

For the poaching liquid:

1 bunch of green leek tops
1 big piece fresh ginger, sliced
1 umeboshi (pickled plum) (somewhat optional)

For the marinating liquid:

2 cups regular dark soy sauce
1/4 cup sugar (or sugar substitute)
1/4 cup mirin
1/4 cup sake
1 tiny bit (not a whole piece) of star anise

If you want your pork to be nicely shaped, tie it up with the kitchen twine neatly. You don’t have to do this if you can’t be bothered.

In the meantime, put the green leek tops, ginger slices, and umeboshi in a pot with enough water to cover the pork. Bring to a boil, then put the meat in. Lower the heat until it’s barely simmering, put on a lid, and poach for 90 minutes. Let cool a bit in the liquid.

In the meantime, combine the marinade ingredients in a smaller pan and bring to the boil. Let cool.

Put the marinade and the still warm, drained pork into a plastic bag. Close tightly, and place in a bowl to catch any leaks. Let marinate, turning every so often, for about an hour or more. Store in the refrigerator until cold.

It can be kept like this in the marinade in a tightly closed container in the refrigerator for up to a week. Or, take out of the marinade and store in the freezer (optionally cut into smaller pieces for easy use and defrosting). Best served cold and thinly sliced.

Notes

The marinade itself can be defatted (put it into the refrigerator until the fat has congealed, then strain) and used as a sauce, either on the meat or for other dishes. It keeps for about 2 weeks in the refrigerator.

You could try to use the poaching liquid as a soup base, but I don’t find the flavor that good somehow (the ginger and leek combo make it too strong) so I just throw it out.

[Edited to add:] Ideally defrost nibuta in the fridge overnight, rather than in the microwave which can dry it out.

The umeboshi idea is one I originally read in one of Katsuyo Kobayashi’ many cookbooks.

Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, Part 3: Pigs

maki — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 08:52:02 +0100

Last night I finally watched the third episode of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It (BBC site), as it aired instead of recording it for later viewing, fast-forward button at the ready. (Links for the Part 1 review and Part 2 review.) In this episode, it was the turn of pigs to be slaughtered. (Warning: some gory details follow…warning put here since a reader complained about a previous entry. When animals get slaughtered, it is gory.)

Surprisingly, I didn’t find it as traumatic to watch as the cow and lamb episodes. Perhaps I’ve already gotten more used to it. The procedure for killing a pig is similar to that for kllling a lamb: the animal is stunned with an electric shock to the brain, rapidly hung upside down with hooks, and the throats are cut and the animal is bled. The blood wasn’t kept, though since the British do consume pig’s blood in the form of blood pudding, at least some pig’s blood must be reserved somewhere. (For a great account of a pig killing for the purpose of obtaining the blood to make boudin noir, French blood sausages, see Jeffrey Steingarten’s It Must’ve Been Something I Ate.) Also, instead of skinning the animal the whole pig was put in a sterilizing and boiling tank of sorts, which cleaned and softened the skin so that the bristles could be easily shaved off. Because there was no skinning the whole procedure from live animal to prepared carcass took a lot less time than with the other animals.

It’s quite clear that the small, family run abattoir being shown is about as good as it gets when it comes to conventional animal slaughtering. The farms where the animals are reared, while not organic and free range and so on, also seem to have very high standards. The government vet / expert commentator said that large slaughterhouses also have all the officials on hand to inspect things and so on, but when hundreds of animals rather than a handful are being killed at a time things must be different. They said that Britain has very high standards for anti-animal cruelty and good husbandry; I can’t imagine what takes places in many other countries. (I believe that Switzerland has fairly high standards too…but most farms here aren’t that large either. And Swiss meat is very expensive.)

What was repeated several times on the show is the simple fact that, if we want humanely produced meat, we have to pay more for it. I think it’s quite clear that if we want food that has been ethically produced, be it meat that’s slaughtered correctly or fair trade chocolate or organically grown produce, we have to wean ourselves off of going after the cheapest stuff. Not everyone can afford to do that though, or wants to do that. I may be a fairly serious food person but I go for what’s on sale and stuff a lot of the time too - I like saving money as much as anyone. It is a dilemma, with hard choices to make. After watching this program though, I’m leaning more than ever towards the paying more option.

Tonight is the wrapup show where we’ll see a little of what happens with chickens. I guess we won’t see live slaughtering of the birds, since the featured abattoir probably doesn’t do poultry. Again…if you can, please try to watch the show, especially if you are an omnivore.

Pig Pig Pig

maki — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 06:02:44 +0100

Apparently, yesterday (March 1) was National Pig Day in the U.S. Who knew that such a day existed? In any case, Serious Eats outdid themselves with a whole slew of fun posts of a porcine nature. My favorite out of all the bacon homages and so on was actually the one about Paul Gauguin’s ham painting. Now, that’s a good looking piece of pig.

One of my favorite literary mention of the humble pig in its edible form appears in Little House In The Big Woods, the first book in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It describes how the family carefully used every bit of the pig that they had kept over the year. They made big hams, bacon and sausages from the scraps (stored in a barrel of snow). The tail was roasted as a treat, and the bladder was blown up like a balloon for the children to play with. There’s probably no animal that is as useful as the pig.

Masterchef challenge day 24: Pork chops in Cider, Prune and Apple Sauce With Red Cabbage; Rhubarb with Two Creamy Cheeses

maki — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:34:53 +0100

It's the final day of the Masterchef ingredient test challenge that I set out to do some weeks ago. My thoughts on the whole experience will follow, but here is the last ingredients list:

Red cabbage
Apples
Swede
Cream cheese
Cider
Prunes
Pork chops

I can't say that this last list was overly inspiring to me, but I made a dish that while not particularly photogenic, did taste pretty good. The key here is the absolutely yummy sauce, made from cider, apple cider vinegar, chopped up apple and prunes, chopped leek, light cream and the pan juices from the pork chops. I cooked the red cabbage in cider also, and they came out crispy yet tender. Accompanying this was some good old mashed potatoes.

A key ingredient is the cider. Cider in this case means a sort of apple wine, that is fermented with about 7 to 8% alcohol. It's not the kind of fresh apple cider you see in the U.S. It's sort of similar to hard cider, and you can certainly use that. In my case I used something called Apfelwein trüb, which is an unfiltered, lightly alchoholic (4.4%) unsweetened apple beverage with about 10% pear juice.

For my second dish, I cheated just a bit by using rhubarb again, with a big spoonful of a mix of equal parts cream cheese and quark with a bit of sugar. But I think one of the basic ideas pushed by the Masterchef series is that how important it is to cook with seasonal ingredients, and that's what I'm doing here. If I were doing this at the time when the show was filmed, then I would have done some sort of baked apple thing.

Quark is a type of fresh cheese that is sold in Germanic areas; it's rather similar to French fromage blanc. Fromage blanc is sold in "gourmet" stores in the U.S. (I've seen it at Whole Foods and Fairway in New York.) You can substitute plain yogurt, which would be a bit more loose and acidic, so you may want to add a bit more sugar. In the U.K. you should use Greek yoghurt. Please follow the very easy recipe for baked rhubarb in my recent entry.

To finish this meal within the alloted 50 minutes, start preparing the rhubarb and putting it in the oven. Then peel the potatoes and get them boiling. Shred the cabbage and start cooking them, sear the pork chops, make the sauce, and finish off the pork chops. If you have more time though, I would recommend slowly simmering the pork chops in the sauce for at least 40 minutes or more longer. Meat is a funny thing: first you have tender, rare-to-medium stage, then you get rapidly get to tough as leather stage. After that though if you cook it long enough it will soften and relax. So remember: for tender pork chops, cook then briefly or very long.

Unused ingredient: swede. A swede is the British name for those big, purple-necked turnips. There are very few vegetables I dislike, and swedes are one of them. I love the tender little white Japanese turnips but these big, flavorless, often woody swedes are not worth coming near a plate, in my opinion.

The following amounts serves 4 people.

Red Cabbage In Cider

1 small head of red cabbage, core removed and finely julienned
1 large onion, sliced thin
Buter or oil for cooking
2 cups cider
1/2 cup sugar
Salt and pepper

Heat butter or oil or a mixture of both in a large heavy pan. Add the onions, sauté a little then add the cabbage. Add the cider and sugar. Let it cme to a boil then lower the heat the cook, stirring frequently, over a medium-low heat for about 20 minutes or until the cabbage is crisp-tender. Season with the salt and pepper.

Pork Chops in Cider Apple Prune Cream Sauce

4 medium pork chops
1 cup chopped white part of leek
1 small apple, peeled, cored and chopped up
about 10 pitted pruned, roughly chopped
1 cup cider
2 Tbs cider vinegar
1 cup light cream (US: half and half)
Butter
Salt and pepper

Lightly season the pork chops with salt and pepper. Heat up a large nonstick frying pan. When the pan is hot, add a little bit of oil, and put in the pork chops. Brown the pork chops on each side, then take out of the pan and set aside.

Add about 1 Tbs. of butter to the pan, and sauté the leek until limp. Add the cider and vinegar, and add the apple and prunes. Stir around to loosen any bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. If you see any juice coming out of the pork chops, add that to the pan too. Let cook for a couple of minutes, then add the cream. Lower the heat and simmer for about 5 10 minutes over medium-low heat. Season with salt and pepper.

Add the pork chops to the sauce. At this point either simmer for a couple of minutes then take off the heat, or (better) simmer for 40 + minutes longer.

Serve the pork chops with the red cabbage and mashed potatoes, spooning plenty of sauce on top.

Two Creamy Cheeses

This is barely a recipe at all.

4 Tbs. cream cheese
4 Tbs. quark, fromage blanc, or plain yogurt
2 Tbs. sugar
a few drops of vanilla extract

Blend all together until the sugar melts.

Serve on top of cooked fruit, such as Baked Rhubarb.

Technorati Tags: cider, masterchef, prunes, rhubarb

Masterchef challenge, day 9: Pork Medallions and Bubble and Squeak

maki — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 15:08:50 +0100

The ingredients for the 9th day (1st day of the 3rd preliminary round) of MasterChef were:

Pork filet
Gammon - a kind of bacon
Fresh sage
Cider (I am assuming it was alcoholic cider)
Green beans
Potatoes
Pears
Blackberries

As I've written before, it's rather obvious that they taped this show during the summer or perhaps early autumn, because some of the ingredients are only in season at certain times. It's practically impossible to get ripe pears or fresh blackberries right now here in cold and dreary Switzerland, and fresh green beans are very expensive. We can get hard, unripe pears, frozen blackberries and frozen green beans, but it's not really inspiring to cook with such things.

I ended up making something pretty basic. Bubble and squeak, surely the dish with the cutest name in the world, is a traditional English or Irish dish consisting of mashed potatoes, onion, cabbage, and the drippings and gravy left over from a Sunday roast. I didn't have any drippings or gravy, but I wanted this bubble and squeak to just have the vegetable flavors so that was fine. I added a red pepper to the cabbage and onion for a little added sweetness, and one chili pepper for just a little bite.

The pork filet medallions are simplicity itself: just very quickly pan-fry the pork on both sides, and serve with a sauce that is made in the same frying pan. I used Calvados (an apple brandy) instead of cider since that's what I had in the liquor cabinet. We're lucky to have humongous sage bush in the garden that stays green all winter, so I was able to pluck a couple of leaves off for this, but if you will have to buy a bunch just for the two leaves and don't see a need for using the rest, just use a small pinch of dried sage.

This will serve 2 fairly hungry people. Have a green salad with this, followed by juicy oranges for dessert.

Unused ingredients: blackberries, green beans, pears, gammon (bacon).

Slightly spicy bubble and squeak

Note: the version in the picture is actually a bit burnt - you want it to be nice and golden brown, not brown-black. It was still very tasty though.

1/2 small cabbage, core removed (you want to have about 2 cups of shredded cabbage)
1 medium onion
1 medium sweet red pepper
2 medium potatoes
1 small red chili pepper
1 Tbs butter
1/4 milk
1/2 tsp. cumin seeds
Butter or oil for cooking
Salt and pepper

Peel and cut up the potatoes, and boil in salted water until tender. Mash it up roughly and add the butter and milk to make a slightly stiff mashed potatoes.

While the potatoes are cooking, finely shred the cabbage and sweet red pepper. Finely dice the chili pepper (whether you deseed it or not is up to your discretion - the more seeds, the hotter it will be.) Put the vegetables in a pot with about a cup of water, and the cumin seeds. Bring to a boil then lower the heat and cover the pot. Let it steam-cook until tender; add water if it shows signs of sticking to the bottom.

Thinly slice the onion and cook in a little butter or oil until tender. Add the steamed cabbage mixture and sautée a bit. Add the mashed potatoes, and mix thoroughly. Season with salt and pepper.

In a small, non-stick pan, heat up butter or a mixture of butter and oil until it's sizzling, then add the potatoe-vegetable mixture. Press it firmly into the pan. Lower the heat and let the bottom cook until brown and crispy, then carefully turn it over to brown the other side. (Alternatively you can cook this in a hot oven for about 20 minutes.) Flip it onto a plate, then cut into wedges.

Pork filet medallions with calvados-sage sauce

200g / 7 ounces of pork filet, cut into slices about 1 cm / 1/3rd inch thick. You want 2 or 3 little pieces per person.
1/4 cup of Calvados, or hard cider
1/2 cup or so of water
2 sage leaves, finely julienned, or a pinch of dried sage
1/4 cup creme fraiche or sour cream
2 tsp. butter
Salt and pepper

Heat up a frying pan with a little oil until it's red hot. Add the pork filet pieces, and cook for about 1-2 minutes on each side. You just want it to get browned, but be sure not to overcook it. Take the pieces out of the pan.

Pour the Calvados into the pan and rapidly stir with a spatula, scraping off all the bits stuck on the bottom. Add the water, and continue stirring and scraping. If the filets exuded more juice in the meantime, pour that back into the frying pan. Add the sage leaves and simmer briefly.

Add the butter and stir with the spatula or whisk very very rapidly so that it turns glossy and a bit creamy. Add the creme fraiche and again, stir rapidly. Season if needed with salt and pepper.

To serve, put a wedge of the bubble and squeak on the plate, and the pork filets. Carefully spoon the sauce over all.

Tonkatsu

maki — Mon, 05 Jan 2004 05:25:30 +0100

tonkatsu, breaded deep fried pork cutlets

Tonkatsu is a typical Japanglish word - ton is pig or pork, and katsu derives from the word cutlet. Tonkatsu is one of the western-style Japanese dishes that can be classified as yohshoku. However, tonkatsu is so popular in Japan that there are even restaurants that only serve tonkatsu and similar items such as kushikatsu (bite-sized fried bits of pork and other things on a skewer).

One of the key ingredients for tonkatsu, or any breaded deep-fried item in Japanese cooking, is panko. In recent years panko has been adopted by the trendy world of cuisine, but it's not anything special - it's just dried bread crumbs. The thing that makes panko unique is that the flakes are bigger and crunchier than the kind sold by non-Japanese food manufacturers.

You can buy panko ready-made at Japanese food stores, or make your own. To make your own, take off the crusts of day-old good white bread. Flake the white part of the bread by hand, not the food processor, which would turn the bread into powder. Spread out the bread crumbs on baking sheets and dry in the oven at a very low temperature until the crumbs are thoroughly try - not colored, just crunchy. You can store this in tightly sealed plastic bags or containers for quite a long time.

Tonkatsu (deep fried pork cutlets)

For 2 cutlets

2 pork chops or cutlets, boned. You can use the chop part, or use the filet part, whichever you perfer
1 egg, beaten
flour for dusting the cutlets
panko or dried bread crumbs
peanut oil for deep frying
salt and pepper

Trim the cutlets if necessary to get rid of any excess fat. (Note, some tonkatsu afficionados leave the fat on, but I like to cut it off.) Make small cuts all the way around the cutlet. This prevents it from shrinking and curling up when cooked.

Heat the oil to medium heat, about 160°C.

Lightly season the cutlets with salt and pepper. Dust the cutlets in flour, then dip in the beaten egg, coating the surface thoroughtly. Finally roll in the breadcrumbs.

Deep fry the cutlets in the oil, turning a couple of times, until golden brown. You can tell if it's done by poking it. If it feels firm, it's done. If it yields to pressure, then it's not done yet.

Drain thoroughly. Cut with a sharp knife into slices while still hot. Arrange on a plate with finely shredded cabbage, and condiments to taste: lemon wedge, mustard (not the French kind, but the English kind - plain mustard powder that's been reconstituted with water), or steak sauce.