Pork Shoulder Cooked in Green Chiles (TTH)

• 6 large poblano peppers (about 2 pounds)
• 2 pounds tomatillos, husked and washed
• 1 boneless pork shoulder (about 5 pounds), cut into 6 equal pieces
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 yellow onion, coarsely chopped
• 2 large carrots, coarsely chopped
• 2 stalk celery, chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, chopped
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 teaspoon coriander seeds
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
• 1/2 teaspoon whole cloves
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 cups store-bought low-sodium chicken broth
• Chopped fresh cilantro for garnish [Nope]
• 4 lime wedges for serving [See above]

Mise en place.  Spoiler alert: much of the sheer volume of the dish gets thrown out at the end.

Char the skin on the poblanos.  Do this well because this step is key in peeling the chiles later.  Kind of tedious.  Blais says you can do this in a oven, but does offer directions.

Peel (basically rubbing the skin off with your hands), seed, de-stem and I thought it was worth it to cut them up a bit before throwing in a food processor.

Trying to do an okay job charring the tomatillos.  They at least don't have to be peeled.  All of them were pretty softened.  A couple were even juicy like a tomato.

So Richard Blais doesn't even care if I core the tomatillos?

In a bowl, coarsely chopped.

Browning the hunks of pork.  I'm getting there when it comes to my expertise butchering a whole pork shoulder.

Oh yeah and you dredge them with flour and season them before you throw them in the pot.

Transfer pork to a plate and supposedly drain off extra fat.

Should I not have spent the time trimming the fat on the pork shoulder?

Add onions, celery and pepper along with a little salt and pepper.  Cook until softened.

Add spices and tomato paste and cook until the tomato paste begins to caramelize.

 

Tomatillos and poblanos get thrown back into the mix.

Pour in chicken stock and add the pork pieces, along with any accumulated juices.  Cook until liquid begins to simmer.  Cover throw it into a 325 degree oven until the meat easily shreds with a fork.  A couple hours, you know?

 

This is the part where you get rid of all the vegetables.

A dish too austere for me to even figure out a half decent side dish.  I wound up eating it with that white bread I got for the Swedish meatballs and eventually a nice round of sourdough but that was later.
However, one day it bothered me how long I had had the bread at room temperature and it yet to go bad at all.  This happened at work and a pile of meat doesn't really make for workday lunch.

Though enough with the bad even though I think this dish probably calls for homemade tamales as well (I'll try that sometime, but I've read that it's way more tolerable as a cooperative thing).  It's a beautiful dish if not really the right fit for my lifestyle.

Pork Stew with Green Beans and Oregano (FM)

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 8 ounces boneless pork shoulder, cut into large chunks
• Salt and black pepper
• 3 shallots or 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano, or 1 teaspoon dried [I used 2 tablespoons dried.  Oops, but it was fine.  Two tablespoons since I was doubling the recipe due to the fact that it's allmost impossible to buy 8 ounces of pork shoulder.]
• 2 cups white wine
• 2 pounds green beans, roughly chopped

Mise en place.

Browning the pork.

Cook onions and garlic until nicely browned.

If using fresh oregano, add 1/2 of it here.  Since I was using dried, I put all of it in to realize moments later that I had added 3 times as much oregano as I should.  This somehow didn't result in an overly oregano-forward dish.

Return the pork to the pot.  Add the wine and enough water to half cover the meat.  Which doesn't make a lot of sense if technically you're only supposed to be using 8 ounces of pork.

Bring to a boil, deglaze, and simmer, covered, until the pork is nearly falling apart and the liquid is saucy.

Add green beans, raise heat to medium-high, and cook until the green beans are crisp-tender.  I had to season aggressively to taste.

Oh this is also where you'd add the remaining 1/2 of fresh oregano.

The dish didn't really hit it out of the park, but neither am I miserable about the fact that I have 6-8 servings of this to get through.  The sauce was flavorful enough even while being quite simple.
I didn't really weigh out the pork shoulder after trimming off the fat and bone, but I'm sure it was at least over a pound if not more.  However, there really wasn't room left for any more green beans in the pot.

Jerked Pork (WBR)

• 10 scallions
• 2 tablespoons minced garlic
• 1 or 2 habenero (Scotch bonnet) chiles, stemmed, seeded, and minced
• 1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves or 1 teaspoon dried
• Salt and black pepper to taste
• 1/2 cup fresh lime juice, more or less
• 1 boneless pork shoulder (picnic or Boston butt), about 6 pounds

Combine the first six ingredients and enough lime juice to make a paste.  Poke a bunch of holes into the shoulder and rub and poke that stuff in.  Couldn't find habaneros sadly when I was shopping which is kind of heretical, but I did the best I could with some jalapenos.  Marinate preferable overnight.

I realized afterward that I probably shouldn't have been so particular about trimming off the fat (considerable) from the shoulder.  Well, duh; part of this was still edible after 4 hours at 300, "basted" occasionally with merely lime juice.

The result served over coconut rice (Basically rice cooked with coconut milk.  It involves slightly different technique than the normal way and it's kind of foolproof I think).

Of course most of the meat was barely edible, but we made do with some Bulls' Eye Sauce for moisture.  I'm curious enough to do an ATK version of this.  Maybe even the charcoal grilled with that smokes wood and allspice berries to mimic the traditional way of smoking it over pimento wood (aka wood from the allspice tree).

Mortadella (Lucky Peach 4)

Bologna a la Bologna, Marco Canora

 Mortadella (Italian pronunciation: [mor-ta-ˈdɛl-la]) is a large Italian sausage^[1] or cold cut (salume /sa-'lu-me/) made of finely hashed or ground, heat-cured pork sausage, which incorporates at least 15% small cubes of pork fat (principally the hard fat from the neck of the pig). Mortadella is a staple product of Bologna, Italy. It is flavored with spices, including whole or ground black pepper, myrtle berries, nutmeg and pistachios, jalapeños and/or olives, though those with flavours other than ground pepper and myrtle are not made with the original recipe from Bologna.

Okay, sure, I agree now that mortadella could be made with olives.

• 1 3/4 lbs fatback (1 lb cut into 1 1/2" cubes, and the rest cut into a 1/4" dice)
• 2 egg whites, briefly beaten
• 1 C pistachio nuts
• 5 pounds pork shoulder, cut into 1 1/2" cubes
• 18 g pink salt (aka curing salt)
• 65 g kosher salt
• 2 T paprika
• 1 nut nutmeg
• 1 t almond extract
• 1/2 C dried milk powder
• 2 C frozen whole-fat milk
• 4 T black peppercorns
• Amaretti liqueur [I couldn't even bring this up on Google and wound up just using Disaronno instead.  Hey, it worked.]
• 100-mm-wide collagen casings, or plastic wrap

An untrimmed, bone-in pork shoulder.

The trimmings and the major bone.

Mise en place.  After a lot of hunting, I eventually found fatback at Savenor's in Beacono Hill.  Of course they have fatback and caul fat and all sorts of things I might employ someday in my cooking.

Blanch the diced fat back for 3 minutes.  This somehow firms up the fat a big.  I did the same thing to the pork rind before I scraped the fat off for chicharones.

Fatback is preferable in the dish in the first place because it is so firm and definitely not adjacent to any muscle unlike belly or fat from any other part of the pig.

Blanched fatback and pistachios tossed in egg white so they stay in place when the mortadella is sliced.

The larger pieces of fatback and the shoulder tossed with the dry ingredients.  The single teaspoon of almond extract was supposed to get in here, but I failed to remember while measuring the rest in a single pint container.

A measly teaspoon wasn't going to ruin my product, surely.  Even when all along I thought it was a tablespoon.  Ha.

Grinding meat: pretty much a nightmare.  I managed.

Season with liqueur and process as finely as possible with frozen milk.

Looking a hell of a lot more like lunchmeat.

Fold in the pistachio mixture and peppercorns and cure for 4 days in the fridge.  Where it wound up getting even more brighter pink.
And all these years of wondering whether Oscar Meyer dyes their bologna.  They probably do?

One portion was obviously way bigger than the other.  I barely managed to squeeze the two babies in my stockpot.

Casings totally burst from my sausages.  Hey, it was my first time out.  The meat is simmered until the internal temperature reaches 155 degrees.

Plunge the mortadella in ice baths and cool completely.  I was tired and they were still giving off heat after I had put them in the fridge.  Oh well.

Harold's Mortadella with Wilted Dandelion Greens

Top Chef: The Quickfire Cookbook

Dieterle's Quickfire win from Season 1, Episode 7

• 2 slices sourdough bread
• 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 ounce oyster or stemmed shitake mushrooms
• Salt and pepper
• 1 handful dandelion or other bitter green [I found some bagged blened of baby kale, spinach, and chard and figured I was close enough.]
• 1 1/2 tablespoons mayonnaise
• 1 1/2 tablespoons tapenade
• 1/4 cup sliced red grapes
• 3 ounces of mortadella
• 1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley [As usual, I didn't have any]

Mise en place.  Look at that beautiful meat.  Most of the supporting players hailed from Trader Joe's: grapes, tapenade, sourdough, greens.

Sautee the mushrooms.

Wilt the greens.

Mix mayonnaise and tapenade together.  Layer mushrooms on one side.

Followed by the greens and grapes.

And then the star: my HOMEMADE mortadella.

The sandwich itself is a pretty fantastic utilization of the meat and I never really thought I'd ever make the sandwich (I read the cookbook close to when I started cooking many years back) until 2013. 

I wish I could've sliced the mortadella thinner, but I am not master.  Also not an owner of a $600+ food slicer (though sure, I wish I was).  The combination of the two condiments were really stellar, the mushrooms added lovely texture, and the grapes were this fantastic, juicy, fresh counterpoints.  The greens were also essential and I'm sure the sandwich would've been ever more lovely if I had dandelion.

And what of the mortadella itself?  It is pretty awesome and the whole process of producing lunch meat is pretty zany.  I've been plotting for a while the fact that I would attempt to make sausages this year (I have this charcuterie book all lined up on my Kindle.  Cured meats, here I come.).  Lo and behold, Lucky Peach publishes an article on mortadella.  Mortadella was something I'd heard of occasionally (probably initially from this sandwich on TV) .
I knew it had something to do with bologna.  And bologna is...  Something I have just never understood.  I love roast beef (boursin, caramelized onions, tomatoes, horseradish...) and can endure the rest of the array, but I've always objected to baloney.  It had always seemed essentially flavorless and textureless; a whole lot less "real" seeming than even process turkey, chicken, and ham.  "Salami" was just bologna with some pepppercorns stuck in it.  And why was it so pink?

After laboring for hours and hunting and ordering the ingredients for weeks (I hardly used a tablespoon of the pound of curing salt I bought and am not sure when I'll use my 100-mm collagen casings again), this mortadella was certainly not a sheer waste of time.  Even though the casings burst and I forgot the almond extract, the mortadella was still very extraordinary.  I was extremely proud of myself before I even tasted it (the day I finally cooked it).

Pork Vindaloo (Cook's Illustrated)

Soups and Stews 2010

• 1 (3 1/2-pound) boneless Boston butt roast, trimmed and cut into 1-inch cubes
• Table salt and ground black pepper
• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 3 medium onions, chopped coarse (about 5 cups)
• 9 medium garlic cloves, minced or pressed through garlic press (about 3 tablespoons)
• 3 tablespoons unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon sweet paprika
• 3/4 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1 1/2 cups low-sodium chicken broth
• 1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes
• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon mustard seeds
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1/4 cup minced fresh cilantro leaves

If you can't find a Boston butt roast, you'll have to trim down a 5-pound picnic roast.

After wrestling with the roast for about 1 hour.  Thank god I had a boning knife.  My chef's knife was clearly not up to the job.

Bone, skin, and excess fat.  I guess I could've rendered down the fat, but I didn't want to bother.

Mise en place.

Browning the pork.

Cook the onions until softened.

Add garlic and cook until fragrant.  Add flour and spices and stir until onions are evenly coated.  Gradually add in the broth.

Add all the rest back in (except for the cilantro and I didn't haven't any on hand) and throw in the oven for 2 hours.

I realize that I don't really know what I'm looking for in a vindaloo.  It's practically the only dish I order when I go to an Indian restaurant, but it's widely variable.  I've never see it with pork, and I didn't necessarily find the choice of meat appealing.  Oh well, maybe someday I'll find the elusive ultimate version.