Cooking With Pig: Act II

Say hello to a Berkshire pig, one of many heritage breeds people are seeking out for that old-fashioned fattiness and flavor that is typically missing from the average supermarket pork. In case you've been asleep for the last 35 years, pork has become a commodity product, raised literally cheek-by-jowl on huge, stinking factory farms and bred to be lean, lean, lean because of our misplaced abhorrence of fat (we should be more worried about the calories we consume in that chicken-pasta salad, people). I've mentioned Niman Ranch pork, sold at Whole Foods, at least a zillion times already. In the Washington, D.C. area, also check out Eco-Friendly Foods at http://www.ecofriendlyfoods.com/, or your local farmer's market. More and more local farmers are offering naturally-raised pork, beef, lamb, etc. (Suggested reading: The Ominivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan.)

If you do decide on Niman Ranch pork, you can throw your meat clerk for a loop by asking for the name and contact information of the farmer who raised it. This was suggested to me by the founder of the Niman Ranch pork cooperative and although I had to work my request up the chain of command at my local Whole Foods, and although it took the meat manager a few hours to track down the information, I indeed got an e-mail address for a farmer in Nebraska and I did send off a note. The return e-mail I received from the farmer and his family (complete with family photo) was so gracious and thankful, it almost brought a few of us to tears. So do try it.

And that brings us to today's mission: Step II of our three-day Provencale pork stew or daube, courtesy of Paula Wolfert in the February 2007 edition of Food & Wine.

If you've been following along, now would be the time to remove the bowl or pot of pork that has been marinating in the refrigerator since sometime yesterday. Today we're going to be browning the meat and putting the stew in the oven for the first of two cookings.

What I do at this point is place a large baking sheet on the kitchen counter and cover it with paper towels. Uncover the marinated pork. Most of the bright pink color will have changed to a dull tan. Use a pair of tongs to lift the pieces of pork out of the liquid. (Save the bouquet garni and the marinating liquid, but discard the spice bundle). Shake the liquid off the pork pieces and place them on the paper towels. Use more paper towels to blot the meat dry. You want them good and dry before you brown them. Now, season them aggressively with kosher salt and ground pepper. To proceed, you will need:

1 1/2 ounces dried porcini mushrooms, soaked in a bowl of hot water until soft

1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

2 1/2 tablespoons brandy

1 large onion, thinly sliced

1 large carrot, cut into 1/2-inch dice

4 ounces fresh pork skin with a thin layer of fat, cut into 2-by-1/2-inch strips (optional)

1 head of garlic, separated into cloves but not peeled

10 crushed juniper berries

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

parchment paper

In a large, heavy pot or Dutch oven over high heat, heat 2 tablespoons of the oil until it starts to smoke. Reduce heat to medium-high. In batches, brown the pork pieces all over, then set on paper towels to drain. (This would be the point where my wife has a meltdown, pleading, "Do you have to cook like this? Can't you see you're getting grease all over everything?") Look extremely contrite and promise to clean up. Then return all of the pork to the pot and over moderate heat sprinkle meat with flour. Stir until flour is completely dissolved. Pour brandy over meat and use a long match or lighter to ignite the brandy. Shake the pot occasionally until the flames die out.

Remove the pork to a plate. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil to the pot and, over moderate heat, add the onion and carrot. Season with salt and cook, stirring occasionally to incorporate the brown bits stuck to the bottom of the pot, until onion is soft and lightly browned, about 10 minutes.

Lift porcini mushrooms from the soaking liquid and chop roughly, reserving the liquid. Add mushrooms to pot and cook another 3 minutes, stirring.

Pre-heat oven to 250 degrees.

Remove pot from heat. Use a slotted spoon to remove onion, carrot and mushrooms. Reserve. If using pork skin, cover the bottom of the pot, fat-side down. Spoon 1/3 of the pork, 1/3 of the vegetable mixture, 1/3 of the garlic clove over the pork skin. Season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle a few juniper berries. Repeat this layering process 2 more times, until all of the ingredients are used up. If not using pork skin, forget the layers: just mix the pork and other ingredients in the pot.

Pour the reserved marinating liquid and the reserved mushroom soaking liquid into the daube. Tuck the reserved bouquet garni into the meat. If necessary, add enough water to just barely cover the meat. Place a round of parchment paper over the meat. Over moderately high heat, bring the daube to a boil. Cover the pot and place it in the oven. Bake for 2 1/2 hours. Remove pot from oven and allow to cool. Discard parchment paper and bouquet garni. Refrigerate daube in its pot overnight.

Tomorrow, we remove the fat from our daube, add sauteed mushrooms and cook one more time...Are you hungry yet?

Cooking With Pig: Act I

No, this is not a picture of an earthenware bong, but rather a daubieres, which is French for a strange, pot-bellied cooking vessel with a narrow top primarily used for cooking certain stews known in the Provencal lingo as daubes. That would make this one of several items that I did not possess for this particular pork stew recipe. Nonetheless, I had been saving this recipe from the February 2007 issue of Food & Wine because it was written by Paula Wolfert and because it celebrates one of our favorite animals. In fact, this recipe, which came to Wolfert via food writer Barbara Wilde, who lives in Provence, sat next to my computer keyboard for the longest time, occasionally migrating down to the kitchen table and back with the stack of other paperwork that needs sorting through from time to time, just waiting for that moment when I had nothing better to do for a couple of days and the weather called for a nice, comfy stew.

Yes, you heard right: a couple of days. Or maybe even three or four. If you know anything about Paula Wolfort, you know that she is all about authenticity. There are no shortcuts in Paula Wolfort's vocabulary. So if it is possible to consume the better part of three or four days making a stew, you can bet Paula Wolfort is all over it. That is why we reserve an honored place on our bookshelves here at The Slow Cook for titles such as The Cooking of Southwest France and The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen. These are books that transport you to kitchens where people truly care about methods and ingredients and flavors. To hell with the time involved. Paula Wolfert's idea of a weight loss plan is the 30 million steps it takes to get from the butcher's to the finished stew. So be prepared to stumble over ingredients, cooking utensils, methods with which you are completely unfamiliar. Be prepared to adjust, make substitutions, use your own judgment. For instance, do not spend half a day driving to every gourmet shop in town looking for lavender flowers in February.

Lavender flowers would be just one of the ingredients that put my inadequacies as a gardener/cook on full display. Just down the street from our house is a huge lavender bush--it must be five feet around--that we pass every day on our walk to school. If memory serves, it was in bloom around November, and we were constantly running our hands through the blossoms as we passed by to pick up some of the aroma. We smelled like we'd been mugged by a bar of lavender soap. If I had been thinking at all, I would have gathered a peck of those blossoms, dried them out and stored them in the freezer. They were free for the taking. But of course I didn't, and now for the second time in as many week's I've run across a recipe calling for lavender flowers.

Another trouble item would be winter savory. I'll be damned if there is any winter savory in any of the spice racks I've searched, or among the fresh herbs for sale at Whole Foods. I tried growing summer savory in my garden this past year without much success. If I were anywhere near the gardener I claim to be, I now realize I would have some winter savory growing somewhere, or I would have grown it and stashed it away for just such an occasion. Again, out of luck. My solution to the lavender blossom/winter savory dilemma was to tie some herbes de provence in the spice bundle that Wolfert calls for.

A daubiere: Again, I plead guilty. I do not own a daubiere. I wonder if Wolfert does. She owns just about every other piece of exotic cookware, but she did not linger long on the daubiere. Fortunately, you are allowed to substitute a large, heavy pot or Dutch oven, of which I have plenty.

Wild boar: The orginal recipe that Wolfert describes calls for wild boar. And according to the piece in Food & Wine, she did try boar from a couple of sources. If your local grocery doesn't carry boar, and you can't wait for FedEx to bring you some, by all means use the best pork shoulder you can find, such as the Niman Ranch pork from Whole Foods.

Pork skin: The original recipe calls for sheets of pork skin, with not too much fat on it, cut into strips. These are used to layer the ingredients inside the stew pot. Sorry, I did not have any pork skin handy.

And that brings me to a few nits I'd like to pick with this recipe, which falls in the "Master Cook" column. I don't know if the fault lies with Wolfert, or if her editor's eyes simply glazed over around Step 359, but I did find these irritating, especially considering the many hours I've spent answering silly questions from editors and recipe testers over the years.

For instance, whatever is supposed to happen to all that pork skin? The instructions clearly call for strips of skin to be placed inside the stew pot to create layers of ingredients. But the subject of skins never comes up again. Do we eat them? Pull them out and admire them? Turn them into a lamp shade?

Why reduce? You are supposed to mix a leftover marinade liquid and the liquid leftover from soaking some dried mushrooms in a pot on the stove and reduce it "to about 2 cups." Then you drain this into the stew pot, and add water to cover the meat. Why bother reducing the original liquid only to add water?

Why "garnish"? After the stew has cooked the first time, you are instructed to sautee a large quantity of mushrooms, garlic and parsley as a "garnish." But then the cooked mushrooms are stirred into the pot, and the pot returned to the oven. So how does this constitute a "garnish?"

Which wine? In the introduction to the recipe, Wolfert states very clearly that she marinates the pork in white wine. Two days later, and after you've followed all 3,000 steps, you arrive at this startling paragraph, the very last paragraph in the article:

"Although this Provencal stew is made with white wine, it's so hearty that a red will make a better match. Conveniently, the rustic and substantial wines of Provence, where Barbara Wilde lives, have a rich fruit bolstered by a firm tannic structure, making them an ideal choice."

Serves me right for not listening to my wife, who never tires of reminding me that I should always--always!--read recipes through to the end (and maybe back again) before I start cooking. But really, don't you think this kind of information should go near the top, when you're making your shopping list?

I am calling this Pig in Three Acts because the recipe conveniently breaks down into three stages, performed over three days. The first, or Act I, consists of marinating your beast.

3 pounds boneless pork shoulder, cut into 2 1/2-inch pieces

1 bottle red or white Provencal wine

1 medium onion, thinly sliced

1 medium carrot, cut into thick slices

Bouquet garni: 6 sprigs each of parsley, thyme and winter savory, plus 2 bay leaves and 1 leafy celery top, tied together with twine.

Spice bundle: 1/2 teaspoon lavender flowers, 12 crushed peppercons and 10 crushed juniper berries, tied in cheesecloth (this is where I placed 1 teaspoon herbes de Provence to substitute for my lack of winter savory and lavender flowers).

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Put the pork into a large, non-reactive bowl or pot. Add wine, onion carrot, bouquet garni, spice bundle and olive oil. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Continued tomorrow...

The Accidental Coq au Vin

I did not begin the week intending to make a coq au vin. But as so often happens, things kept pointing me in that direction. First, it was our turn to receive the chicken from the farm subscription we share with my sister and her husband. So there sat the bird the last several days, chilling in a bowl in our refrigerator, demanding some kind of attention. Then I noticed my wife, for no particular reason, had purchased some cipollini onions at the grocery store. ("I just thought they looked good," she shrugged). Then there was the half-used slab of bacon, not particularly well wrapped, just laying there in the fridge on top of some jars of Thai curry and such. Before you can say "Le Creuset" I was pulling one of my favorite books off the shelf in search of an "authentic" coq au vin recipe.

Why do I use quotes around the word authentic? The word seems to have come under a cloud. Or is it that we just question the true origins of everything these days, as if good food can't merely be good on its own terms, it must also have a certifiable pedigree? The fights are endless. For instance, how can a tomato pizza really be authentically Italian, when the Italians didn't even have tomatoes until they were brought from the Americas in the 16th Century? So I suppose you could question whether a French coq au vin is truly "authentic" if you consider the possibility that the original chicken came from, say, Armenia, and was first cooked in wine there. So, to be more precise, I guess I should say I was looking for a method of cooking coq au vin as we know it, namely, from somewhere where the cooking of coq au vin is not merely sport, not something people do occasionally to get their picture on the cover of a food magazine, but serious business going back a long, long time. That's why I reached for my copy of Mourjou.

If you love cooking in the fashion of people who really care about what they eat, who obsess over the freshness of the products they cook with, who cook in a manner that has been passed down for generations--if you care, in other words, about preparing food to be enjoyed for its fullness of flavor and in its own good time, then this is a book you should own. The complete title is, Mourjou: The Life and Food of an Auvergne Village, and it was written by a Brit expatriot named Peter Graham, who, besides writing books, also directs small films and writes about travel and art and psychoanalysis and a number of other things that make his life seem perfectly pleasant and sane. At some point more than 20 years ago he picked up and moved to this tiny village, Mourjou, in the province of Auvergne in south-central France, a sometimes mysterious place where lush valleys co-exist with dormant volcanoes, where a verdant landscape dotted with small herds of lazy cattle is cross-hatched with deep canyons and snaggle-toothed mountain peaks. There are also small villages such as Mourjou where ancient customs are still kept, where neigbhors nose around each other's kitchen gardens and where family recipes are guarded like state secrets. In particular, I treasure books like Graham's because books like Mourjou just aren't being written much anymore. Remember? We're all too busy to read well-written prose about food. We're just here for the recipes, or so they say...

Anyway, I thought Mourjou might be a good place to look for a coq au vin recipe and--Bingo!--I was right. In fact, Mr. Graham writes a nice little takeout on the means and methods of coq au vin, including an amusing explanation for why, throughout the text, he chooses to use the French word--coq--rather than the literal English translation. "I use the word coq because it is a way of avoiding the problem, in English, of the word 'cock', "Graham explains paranthetically. So I will follow Mr. Graham's lead.

The first issue to be surmounted, as usual, is which version of coq au vin to adopt. This is no less a problem for Mr. Graham. "Coq au vin is a dish, like potee, which is found in slightly differing versions all over France," he writes. (There we go again, the authenticity thing.) "There is even a slender tome called Coq au Vin, which contains sixty-one slightly differing recipes for the dish." Several regions of France lay claim to the "original" coq au vin. And even in the province of Auverge, there are disputes over which ingredients should go into a proper coq au vin and how it should be cooked. "Should it include the fowl's blood as well as wine? Should the lardons be smoked or unsmoked? Should the sauce be thickened with beurre manie and/or the mashed-up liver?" There are even questions about whether the bird should first be marinated in wine and--perhaps the most troubling question of all--must the fowl in question be an actual coq (meaning an older male), or can we use--perish the thought--a plain old ordinary chicken?

Graham doesn't say, exactly, how he resolves these dilemmas. He really ducks the question entirely (no pun intended). Perhaps he is guarding someone else's family's recipe secret. He does acknowledge some trouble finding an actual coq, even in his adopted village. He sometimes succedes by visiting a local farm. The wine, he says, should be "a dark earthy wine made on the hills overlooking Clermon-Ferrand." Then, after describing how the farmer's wife, Nicole, must be persuaded to charge for her time plucking and preparing the bird, Graham simply launches into a recipe. I just have to assume that Graham has resolved all the aforementioned issues to his personal satisfaction. So his is the recipe I've followed, more or less. Note: This dish needs to marinate 24 hours before cooking, and is even better if you give it another day to rest in the refrigerator after it has been cooked. You do the math.

Serves 6 persons

Graham calls for a coq "at least two years old." But if you can't find one of those, he will allow "a very large free-range chicken of the highest quality," about 4 1/2 pounds.

2 ounces lard, or, in my case, the grease from several slices of fried bacon (I didn't want to buy a whole tub of lard).

15 pickling onions (I used about a dozen cipollini onions of various sizes)

3 1/2 ounces salt pork, diced large

6 ounces button mushroom (I substituted cremini mushrooms)

For the marinade:

1 bottle dark, full-bodied red wine (I used a French Syrah from the Camargue area near Nimes)

bouquet garni: two sprigs thyme, 2 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, 2 sprigs winter savory (I omitted the savory--couldn't find any), 1 bay leaf

2 carrots, quartered

2 large cloves garlic

large pinch salt

freshly ground pepper to taste

As in most braises of this type, the meat is first marinated, then dried and browned in oil before all of the ingredients are assembled in the pot and placed in the oven.

Cut the coq (or chicken) into pieces: legs, thighs, breasts. Cut the breasts in half. Remove as much fat as possible and remove the skin from the breasts and thighs. Place the pieces of bird in a non-reactive bowl or pot, pour the marinade over it. Cover and refrigerate 24 hours.

The next day: Preheat oven to 250 degrees

Drain the poultry well, blotting any leftover moisture with paper towels. Save the marinade with its solids. Meanwhile, in a heavy pot, heat the lard (or bacon grease) over moderately high heat. Brown the poultry pieces well on all sides, in batches if necessary. Remove and set aside. Place the salt pork and onions in the hot grease, turning occasionally until the onions are golden. (If using cipollinis, they must be blanched in boiling water first, the skins removed.)

Remove the pot from the stove. Pack the poultry pieces, onions, salt pork and mushrooms into the pot. Pour the marinade with its solids into the pot. Place pot in oven and cook 2 1/2 hours, or until chicken is very tender but not falling off the bone. (Note: Graham calls for 2 hours cooking in a 350 oven, but I think 250 degrees is amore appropriate braising temperature to avoid overcooking.)

Allow the pot to cool. Remove all the poultry, onions and mushrooms and place on a baking sheet, separating and discarding the carrots, herbs and other solids from the marinade. Strain the cooking liquid into a separate container (you could use a grease separator at this point to remove most of the grease). Cover the cooked coq au vin and refrigerate it and the cooking liquid overnight.

The following day, skim fat off the surface of the cooking liquid. To serve: Reheat coq au vin in 250-degree oven. While this is reheating, chop the fowl's liver finely, removing any gristle. Just before serving, drain the cooking liquid through a strainer into a blender and blend it with the liver until smooth. Place the liquid in a small pot over medium-high heat on the stove and cook until somewhat thickened. Pour the hot liquid over the coq au vin as it is going to the table.