Home-cured Guanciale (or ‘Cheeky Pancetta’)

In the eyes of the layman (and I include myself in this category), charcuterie looks like pure magic. Admittedly slow, drawn out magic, but trickery nonetheless.

It is a true artisanal craft that, done properly, illustrates beautifully the idea that cooking can be alchemy. With just a few extra ingredients (usually salt, booze and a few herbs) it is possible to transform the mundane into something truly sublime.

There are few simpler pleasures greater than eating a thin slice of cured meat – the fat melting like butter onto the tongue, filling the palate with rich, porcine flavours. A loaf of warm bread, some good oil or butter and a plate of cold cuts can make for a very happy time indeed.

Having tried making cooked charcuterie, in the form of rillettes and pâté, I felt it important to embrace the next logical step: curing.

Preserving meat using salt has a long and noble tradition. Prosciutto, pastrami, baccala, salt beef, herrings – all are made in the same way and use the dehydrating properties of salt to help extend the life of produce.

Bacon seemed like the ideal place to start, given how easy it is supposed to be to turn a slab of belly pork into dry-cured rashers but these plans were shelved after a revelatory moment at west London Sicilian deli, Vallebona.

Guanciale is cured pork jowl. Cheeky pancetta, if you will. Given my history of trying to turn pig’s heads into tasty treats, one taste of this face bacon was all that was needed to convince me it was worth trying to re-create.

Popular in Tuscany and Umbria, it can be used in place of pancetta in a whole raft of dishes or simply thinly sliced and enjoyed with a glass of something cold and alcoholic.

But whereas pancetta tends to be on the expensive side, because guanciale utilises a cut that is often thrown away, it is incredibly cheap, not to mention surprisingly easy to make.

In short, it is everything anyone could possibly desire from an item of charcuterie.

If that has done enough to whet your appetite for dipping an adventurous toe into the dark art of meat curing, here’s how to do it.

First procure yourself one or two pig’s noggins and remove the jowls starting below the chin and, keeping as close to the jawbone as possible, working your way up until just underneath the eye socket.

[If this is too much, you could just order them ready trimmed from your friendly neighbourhood butcher]

This is a dry curing process (as opposed to making a brine) so mix together 200g of fine sea salt and 200g of dark brown sugar and add 10 crushed peppercorns, a couple of crushed cloves, a small handful of very finely chopped rosemary and a pinch of saltpetre.

Rub this mixture into both sides of the cheeks then pour a thin layer of it into a plastic container (make sure it has a lid). Pack the cheeks in and cover with a little more of the cure mix. Pop the lid on the box then put it in the fridge for 24-48 hours.

Commence thumb twiddling.

When you next come back to them, the cheeks should be swimming in a liquid that feels a lot like wet sand. This is water that has leached out of the cheeks (see, they look a bit smaller). Pour this off, repeat the salting process, replace them in the box and leave for another five days.

After a week they should be ready for drying. Remove them from the salt, rub them with a dry cloth and attach some butcher’s string to the thin end. Hang them in a cool place (no warmer than 18 degrees) for three weeks and hope to Buddha that they don’t fall prey to many of the potential pitfalls that could destroy them.

Re-commence thumb-twiddling or alternatively keep your fingers crossed so darn tight it begins to hurt.

Results to follow soon. In the mean time, how about saying ‘Hi’ on Twitter?

Just One More: Further Adventures with Pigs’ Heads

Sometimes things don’t always go right in the kitchen.

There is a wonderful book called ‘Don’t Try This At Home’ where fifty highly skilled chefs share their own personal culinary horror stories. It as an affirming read: to know that such artistes as Adria, Batali and Henderson can mess up gives us mere mortals reason not to hang up the sauté pan just yet.

Last week I attempted a rather adventurous process with my ingredient of the year, a pig’s head.

After removing the jowels, they were seasoned with salt, pepper, lemon and rosemary and cooked sous vide for about 8 hours. Once cool, the meat was shredded and fat removed from the skin. The shredded meat was then spiced and packed back into the skin, the whole thing rolled up into a crude sausage.

The inspiration was a Tom Kitchin recipe I saw in Coco – crispy on the outside with a hint of teeth sticking crackling and soft within, exactly the way pork should be.

Except it didn’t quite work. As the sausage hit the hot metal of the pan it split quite enthusiastically, the skin popping and sending the filling flying out onto the hob.

The cats ate well for three days.

And I declared that I’d had my fill of porcine head – that it was fun but I’d proved my point and, what’s more, belly is far, far tastier. ‘I can’t be arsed to cook one of these again,’ I uttered as I tipped the last of the snout into the rubbish and waved it goodbye, a piggy little eye looking up at me from the depths of the bin.

Like a true junkie, 48 hours was all it took to renege on my promise.

Brawns and braises and crispy fried ears are all well and good (and sometimes not so good) but it was a tiny transparent slice of charcuterie that convinced me it was worth obtaining just one more head from my butcher.

Guanciale is the perfect halfway point between pancetta – made from belly pork – and lardo, the cured back fat of a particularly chubby variety of pig. It is the cured jowl cut, the name coming from the Italian word guancia, meaning cheek. And it is delicious.

Some say the reason behind the popularity of chocolate is that it melts at body temperature – pop a piece in your mouth and you can feel it gently spreading across the palate as it transforms slowly into a liquid.

For me, charcuterie has the same effect. The fat in top quality cured meats should be near translucent at room temperature and should slowly dissipate once in the mouth leaving just a tiny morsel of intensely flavoured meat to chew on.

Guanciale did just that. It fluttered around the mouth like a delicate angel’s wing but then settled into tasty, porky goodness of the sort I’ve only tasted with the finest and ethereally thin slices of prosciutto.

What’s more, it convinced me that now is the perfect time to attempt some proper meat preservation. It should be ready by Christmas…

Pork Pies

Full many a glorious morning I have seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gliding pale streams with heavenly pork pie

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 33

We are a nation of pie lovers. That is undeniable.

From steaming hot meat and potato pies that grace chip suppers across the north to the crescent shaped Cornish pasty of the south, if it’s a scorching filling wrapped in artery clogging pastry, we adore it.

Legislative affirmation of this fact came just last month when the legendary Melton Mowbray pork pie was finally granted Protected Geographical indication by the EU.

It now stands proudly alongside such luminaries as Parmesan Cheese and Champagne. Only pork pies from Melton Mowbray can be labelled as such. Anything else is a mere pretender.

But pretenders aren’t necessarily a bad thing when they originate in your own kitchen.

Recent dispatches from New York saw me trying to re-create some of the tasty food that was consumed there. It was great fun, making pizzas and bagels and hot dogs and cheeseburgers.

So much so that it got me thinking – why not try it more often, with things that originate closer to home. Why not try to create in the home kitchen those foodie treats we know and love: doner kebabs, pink wafer biscuits, custard creams, marshmallows.

By using excellent ingredients and leaving out all the unnecessary bits and bobs it should be possible to cook versions of these treats to rival anything that can be found on the shelves. Artifice by more natural means.

Before I get started on the big things, I wanted to start small. Keep it simple.

If my girlfriend and I are ever out and attacked by hunger pangs it inevitably falls not to a chocolate bar to quell the cravings but to a pork pie.

There is something so satisfying about the combination of heavily seasoned meat housed in a crunchy yet melting pastry that just makes us smile. It is a rare treat, but a treat nonetheless.

We’ve been hunting for the perfect pie for a while. One whose meat:pastry ratio is spot on and where the jelly doesn’t overwhelm you with its strangely appealing yet vaguely disgusting texture. It’s a fine pie tight rope to tread and some get it right.

Others fail miserably. Hopefully now that the pork pie has some certification it will mark an end to any disappointments.

Recipe: Pork Pie

This isn’t a traditional pie. This is me freestyling, throwing caution to the wind and rolling easy. The result? A perfect picnic item, great served with homemade chutney, just erring on the side of sweetness.

For the filling you’re going to need some pork. Don’t scrimp here. Toddle over to your friend the butcher and ask him for some fatty shoulder or hand meat. While you’re at it inquire politely about acquiring some bacon offcuts. They shall be your new best friend and work out about a quarter of the price of regular bacon.

[I cannot believe I just shared my best culinary secret with you.]

Oh, and ask him to throw in a couple of pig’s trotters too, you’re going to need them later.

Once you’ve got hold of your meat, head home, turn on the stereo and get cooking.

800g pork hand (or shoulder) meat
300g cooking bacon (smoked or unsmoked, dependent on your preference)
Two trotters
A couple of onions
1 litre or so of chicken stock
Thyme, finely chopped
Sage, finely chopped
Cayenne Pepper
Ground ginger
Allspice
Nutmeg
Salt and pepper

For the pastry (taken from HFW’s Meat Book):
100g lard
100g butter
200ml water
Two eggs
550g plain flour

Your first job is to make the jelly. Split the trotters down the vertical and them to the stock and the onions in a pan, bring to the boil and let it simmer gently for about three hours.

Next up, make the pastry. Melt the lard and butter into the water over a gentle heat. Don’t boil it. Sift the flour into a large mixing bowl, crack in the eggs and stir them in. Gently pour the water/butter/lard mix into a glass, take a big sip and pour the rest over the flour and egg. Mix together until a dough forms, knead for a couple of minutes. It may need more flour. When you have a verifiable dough cover it with cling film and get it into the fridge.

Finally, you’re going to need to dice the meat. Finely. And that means small. You could cheat and mince it but who wants a pie filled with sausage meat? Sharpen your favourite knife, crank up the music and get chopping.

Once you’ve transformed your great hulks of meat into delicately fine dice, it will need seasoning. When cold, food can taste bland – as such be generous with the seasoning, especially the salt. I’d go for a teaspoon of sea salt as well as a pinch of everything else and a good grind of pepper.

To check the seasoning, fry a little of the mixture off like a mini-burger and taste it (it’s a hard job but someone has to do it). Adjust as required.

By now your pastry should be cool and far more workable than it was before when it was all warm. Take a cricket ball sized handful (or a baseball if that’s your thing) and roll it into a vaguely spherical shape.

Squidge the bottom of a jam jar into the dough-ball and start working it up the edges:

Don’t be too precious – this is a pie, not something to grace the plate of a three star Parisian temple to haute cuisine. Once you have a rough outline, ease the jar free and pile in the filling. When you think it’s full, add another spoonful and ease the pastry around it.

Cut off a piece of dough about the size of a ping-pong ball (gawd bless sporting analogies), roll into a disc and top your pie. Crimp the edges together, brush the top with beaten egg, poke a hole in the lid and place into a roasting tray.

Repeat until out of dough or filling or both.

Bake at 180 degrees C for thirty minutes then turn the oven down to 150 degrees and bake for another twenty minutes.

Leave to cool on a wire rack and tend to your jelly. Trotters, being jam packed with gelatin, make an excellent jelly after simmering away gently for a couple of hours.

Strain your stock through a fine meshed sieve, return to the heat and reduce by about a third. To see if it is ready, spoon off a little of the stock in a small cup and refrigerate. If it sets, it’s ready. If not, carry on cooking.

Once the pies have cooled down you’ll need to get the liquid jelly into them, a procedure that those of you unskilled in veterinarian sciences might find tricky. I improvised with a syringe. I’ll leave it to you to find the best way (pouring is not, repeat not, the best way).

Try and resist the temptation to bite into your pies before they’ve been refrigerated overnight. They are best eaten outdoors with a picnic blanket under your arse and a bottle of something cold and beery in your hand.

For more high fat delights, follow me on Twitter.

Assiette de Tete de Porc or ‘How to turn a hog’s head into a delicate trio of starters’

Carnivorous detachment is something many of us are guilty of.

By that I mean there is a deliberate and tangible epistemic distance between product and animal. It’s one that we gloss over. Choose to ignore, and prefer to exist in a state of happy ignorance about where meat comes from.

Of course, when it really comes down to it we know that something, some thing, died so that we can consume the animal protein on our plate but there is a vast chasm between the casual awareness of this and the genuine hands on reality.

A few weeks back I went to a slaughterhouse. It was clean and quiet and had been shut down for the day. But the pervading atmosphere was one of death.

It was discernable not only in the smell, but in the walls, the floors, the shape of the pens and the grim actuality of the chains, hooks and instruments required to turn a cow (or in this case a water buffalo) into something the consumer is happy to eat.

There was no slaughter that day. But it wasn’t necessary to see it in order to have beliefs affirmed: that, for me, eating meat comes with a responsibility to appreciate the reality of husbandry, slaughter and butchery.

I’m not here to proselytise. Merely explain the position I’ve chosen to take and hopefully use that as a springboard for what follows.

Naturally there was a culinary dimension to cooking a pig’s head. It’s a challenge. A gastronomic gauntlet. A badge of honour, almost. But it also represents the face-to-face dimension of being a carnivore. Literally.

Where one can cook a steak with little thought to animal from which it came, a head doesn’t offer this luxury. It is clearly an animal, and one that we are familiar with. Looking at the apparent smile that seems to spread across the face of a dead pig one can’t help but think it is in a state of blissful ignorance as to its fate: the dinner plate.

I’d set myself the task of cooking a rather ambitious menu and then serving it up to brave diners who had kindly volunteered to accompany me on this little culinary journey. As a perfectionist, though, this wasn’t going to happen without a practice run.

The brain dish wasn’t a winner and certainly not worth the effort of cleaving open the head – a task which took close to three quarters of an hour. But the rest had potential.

So, here it is. A first draft anyway. Complete with recipes

Trio of Pig’s Head

[NB – The only element of this I had help with was asking the butcher to remove the eyes. I have a funny thing with eyes. I was 21 before I could consider the possibility of getting contact lenses.]

For this you will need one pig’s head. Remove the eyes and discard. Remove the ears close to the head and wash well. Use a boning knife to remove as much of the cheek meat as possible, cut into inch long pieces and set aside.

Cut off about an inch and a half to two inches of the snout and discard (a large saw is probably the best piece of equipment for this).

Place the head and ears into a large stockpot with a crude mirepoix of carrots, onion, celery, leeks and garlic. Cover the whole lot with water and bring it to a gentle boil. Let it simmer for half an hour, skimming off any scum that rises to the surface. After thirty minutes reduce the heat and let it bubble away very gently for three hours.

To confit the cheeks, finely chop some rosemary and bay leaf. Salt the cheeks and sprinkle over the herbs. Put the whole lot into a roasting tray and add enough duck or goose fat to come halfway up the cheek pieces. Cook in a cool oven – about 125 degrees C – for three hours. Turn the pieces every half hour or so. Once cooked leave to cool.

Remove the ears and head from the stock pot and let them cool. Strain the stock through a sieve and then a muslin cloth, bring it back to the boil and reduce it by about half. Remove about 250ml from the pot and add it to another saucepan. Reduce that by half. This will make the setting jelly for the brawn pâté. The rest of the stock can be used to make soup.

Once the head is cool enough to handle strip it of its meat, of which there should be plenty – about 300-400g. Set to one side and discard the bones.

Take a deep breath. You’re almost there.

Confit of pig’s cheek

Remove the meat from the duck or goose fat and slice off the skin (which can be used to make pork scratchings – bake ina moderate oven for about 20 minutes). Use two forks to shred it roughly, a little like making rillettes. Heat the leftover fat and strain through a sieve.

Season the meat with salt and black pepper then stuff it tightly into a sterilised jar. Pour over the liquid fat, screw on the lid and let it cool. This should keep for weeks and is great served with cornichons and fresh, crusty bread.

Brawn pâté

Brawn is a rough and ready item of charcuterie usually made with the entire head with chunks of meat set into jelly. This is a more delicate, refined version, much more similar to a pâté or rough sausage. The jelly is almost indiscernible and is used predominantly as a binding agent.

Finely chop the meat. Season it with salt and pepper then add some chopped sage, about six or seven leaves. In a mixing bowl add about 50ml of the reduced stock to the meat until it starts to come together then turn out onto a square of cling film or tin foil.

Roll the meat into a tight sausage and leave in the fridge overnight. Once set, slice the meat into circles, fry in a little olive oil for thirty seconds each side and serve with salad leaves.

Crispy fried pig’s ears

These are delicious. Not just passable or ‘OK. For an ear’, but really tasty. A little like calamari but slightly tougher.

Thinly slice the ear and coat in seasoned flour. Make up a batter (I used the ginger beer batter again – it works really well) and deep fry the battered ears for about two minutes. Drain on kitchen paper and serve with sea salt, a little lemon juice and some mayonnaise or sweet chilli sauce.

Home Charcuterie Part Two – Making Pâté

After whetting my charcuterie whistle with a rip-roaring rillettes success, I thought the creation of something a little more adventurous might be in order. Being without certain items such as a meat grinder, nitrates and sausage casings, salamis and their ilk were out. I didn’t fancy smoking anything (not on a week night, at least) and I didn’t have the patience for curing. This left pâté.

If you have ever felt the pressing urge to experience life as a mentally unhinged doctor from a late Victorian gothic horror or empathise with the deranged protagonist in a David Cronenberg movie, then making pâté is an excellent place to start.

If, on the other hand, you prefer to see your food neatly packaged in cellophane bearing no resemblance to any living creature or are liable to feel a little nauseous at the sight of blood and guts then I’d advise you stay away. Well away. This isn’t for the faint of heart or the weak of constitution.

All good pâté begins with liver. Liver, like all offal, is a foodstuff that featured rarely in my childhood and only now am I tip-toeing into this murky world. My only memory of liver was being presented with a seething brown mass topped with a hemi-sphere of mashed potato during one school dinner. It’s liver, I was told.

With a trembling fork I lifted the tiniest possible piece to my mouth and took it between my teeth. I remember the harsh ferric smell and the gritty texture. I remember the dark brown colour and the slimy grey onions in the drab gravy. And I remember a swelling tide of bile making its way up my gullet as the weird meat like substance shifted around my mouth. I sat there for what felt like days whilst it congealed and grew cold on my plate. Just eat half, said my primary school teacher. Half? Oh good god, please no.

I don’t remember the outcome, perhaps I blacked out or have packaged away the memory somewhere deep in my sub-conscious but that was my last experience with liver: as a timid six year old far, far away from the comforts of my mother’s cooking surrounded by giant teachers and snotty nosed compatriots who all seemed to be able to eat the disgusting bubbling brown mess on their plates without too much trouble. I went home that day and asked, nay demanded, that I take a packed lunch to school every day.

But the scars could not have been that deep because last week while at the butchers I spotted some fresh pig’s liver on the counter and was intrigued enough to buy it. Much like with rillettes, the constituent parts of pâté are cheap. For a little under three pounds I was able to buy a kilo of organically reared Gloucestershire Old Spot liver from a pig I was assured had led a happy life. This would be enough to make a large loaf of pâté, about a kilo and a half in total. Considering you pay about three quid for a tiny slice of the good stuff in a deli, this was too good a bargain to miss.

Having only ever made chicken liver pâté, I assumed, wrongly, that the process would be the same no matter which animal’s dark organ was lying on the counter. Slice, fry in butter, add booze, blitz in a food processor then leave in the fridge covered in a layer of melted butter.

It soon became apparent that this wasn’t the case. Instead the liver needed to be picked over (to remove any weird bits of I don’t know what), sliced and processed along with some breadcrumbs, milk, onion and a little pork shoulder to add a more meaty texture. This is fine when you are in possession of a full sized food processor. When you have one of these:

…it becomes a little trickier and a lot more time consuming.

I used the catch-all recipe from HFW’s River Cottage Meat Book and so was prepared to get a little mucky during the process. What I wasn’t prepared for is just how sticky raw liver is. It behaves like some weird 1950s B-movie monster gradually sliding across the plate, finding its own level and seemingly multiplying at will. By the time it had been picked over and sliced, it appeared to have doubled in volume and I was growing increasingly concerned as to whether it would fit into the loaf tin I had prepared.

The next step was to blitz up the various ingredients in my tiny food processor. Fine, I thought, no problems here. The resultant gloop (half an hour of whizzing, pouring, scraping and refilling) was, quite frankly, disturbing and if you’ve never tried to mince pork shoulder with a stick blender I don’t recommend trying. By the time everything had been thoroughly mixed and blitzed and processed I was slightly concerned that my sleep time would be plagued with horrific visions.

Regular readers will know that I don’t squeam easily. I’ve gutted things, I’ve cooked trotters and ears, I’ve sniffed and munched on durian, I’ve tried century eggs and even come very, very close to eating salted bugs (until a small Thai lady shook her head with a slightly concerned expression on her face) but a pork liver smoothie was almost too much. Almost. Thee are no pictures, for obvious reasons.

For the cooking, the mixture (‘pretend it’s a cake, pretend it’s a cake, pretend it’s a cake…oh jeez it’s pink and lumpy and smells like wet rust) was seasoned and poured (more like slopped) into a loaf tin and covered with a double layer of buttered foil before being placed into a roasting pan filled with water. After an hour or so in the oven, warm meaty smells were starting to fill the kitchen and it was removed from the bain marie ready to be pressed (cue enormous heavy wooden chopping board) and cooled.

By this time it was getting late and the prospect of homemade pâté that had only recently looked like a special effect was not too appealing, so I waited hoping that time and a sleep would ease my prejudice.

Which is exactly what happened. I had my first slice for lunch the following day and was completely, utterly, totally and unashamedly won over by the flavour and general texture. It wasn’t coarse like a pâté de campagne but nor was it too smooth. It had enough resistance to be meaty and a subtle taste that was nothing like the iron-y tang of liver. Definitely one to be recommended.

Home Charcuterie Part One – Making Rillettes

Charcuterie is an aspect of the culinary arts that has long interested me both theoretically and on a more practical level. I find it truly wonderful that something that began as a necessity grew into the art form that we know today.

On the broadest level it encompasses the vast gamut of skills from curing and smoking to drying and salting. In short it is about preservation. It was about making sure that precious parts of an animal that would spoil quickly were not wasted and could be eaten throughout the year, long after the prime cuts had been roasted and consumed. It was about thrift. It was about economy. It was about the reality of slaughter and respect for the animal that had just been killed, making sure that as little as possible was wasted.

In the days before refrigeration and deep freezing, our ancestors had to come up with myriad other ways in which to preserve the meat from the pig or cow or sheep that was far too large to eat within the few short weeks (days sometimes) before the meat started to spoil.

Thankfully, these were tasty and delicious enough for the practice to continue and flourish even after technology made it possible to preserve meat simply with the application of cold temperatures and even now we still enjoy the salamis, hams, pâtés, terrines and other items that they perfected over generations.

But charcuterie is not a practice that many home cooks embrace and it is becoming a lost art beyond the specialist. Which is a shame because many aspects of the practice are easy enough to replicate in any domestic kitchen – not to mention, incredibly cheap.

This surprises some people – pâtés, terrines and salamis are expensive when bought in delicatessens – but the components themselves are the cheaper cuts of meat, those which could not be simply roasted over hot coals: the tough bits, the offal, the bits that need a little more care and attention in order to become delicious.

In the spirit of adventure we set about attempting the charcutier’s art for ourselves this weekend. Keen to keep things relatively simple we shied away from chorizos, salamis or cured hams (plus we really don’t have the space to hang a full pig’s leg just yet) and chose instead to make a pâté and some rillettes, which are one of my single favourites in the charcutier’s entire armoury.

The first time I ever had rillettes was when I lived and worked in west London and invariably got my lunch from the best deli-café I’ve ever had the pleasure to dine in (sadly now a hair salon). They are rich, decadent and so tasty that even the mere mention can bring a smile to my face (see above for Tony Bourdain’s rather excellent summation of this glorious food).

Made with either duck, goose or pork cooked long and slow in fat they are not for those who view calorific items with scorn or trepidation but given the scarcity with which they are eaten, and the all-natural origin of the ingredients, I personally don’t think this is an issue – I’d much rather eat a few spoons of this sort of food once a week than gorge on a microwave chicken tikka masala or other such culinary monstrosity.

For our version of this classic French pâté type preparation we used pork belly and shoulder to be cooked down in some back fat. Once the belly had been skinned (which we use to make pork scratchings – nothing wasted here) it was cubed and placed in a large pot with the cubed shoulder cuts (often used to make high grade sausages) and the rendered fat. After the addition of a little water and a bouquet garni it was cooking time. And it takes a while. Three hours at a tremulous simmer so that the occasional bubble will make its way to the surface before bursting is necessary in order to cook the pork to the ideal texture.

Once cool, the pork was then shredded, seasoned with salt, pepper and a little allspice, before being left for a day or so to allow the flavours to develop, meld together and take on that distinctive Gallic character.

This is food alchemy at its finest. The gradual transformation of base ingredients into a finished product that is infinitely more than the sum of its parts and just to be sure, we made a lot. Certainly enough to keep us, and others, dwelling in happy porcine reverie until well into the New Year. Mmm, rillettes.