by Bruce Steele | Sep 13, 2015 | Recipes, What Chefs Say
Crispy pork trotters with Mission figs at Flour + Water, ca. July 2009.
Some of the most welcome offal to come out of the trend of head-to-tail cuisine are pork trotters, a.k.a. pigs’ feet, and we’re now seeing more of this humble pork product pop up on respectable menus in New York, L.A. and San Francisco. More often than not, the meat is braised, deboned, and formed into a crab cake-like portion, browned on both sides, and served with any number of sauces likely to win over even picky eaters — as they were last spring on the menu at the critically adored Frances, with a sauce gribiche. Semi-rustic preparations of trotters have made appearances in New York over the last few years at places like Craft and Baba, and last winter Northern Spy did a trotter cake with mustard greens — a play on collard greens and ham hocks — that caught the attention of the Times and became the lede for their review. (“Slice into it and the pork spills out, outrageously tender. There is nothing to tip off the squeamish that we’ve entered hoof territory.”)
But how did pigs’ feet — which many of us probably associate with the pale, puckered, and all-too-anatomically-intact versions we saw pickled in jars in the ethnic foods section of grocery stores as kids — become the stuff of haute cuisine?
San Francisco food writer Marcia Gagliardi (The Tablehopper) points back to the first wave of chefs embracing offal here in the last few years. “It started with the whole-animal guys — like Nate Appleman when he was at A16, Chris Cosentino at Incanto, and Mark Denham when he was at Laiola,” she says. “What you’re seeing now in S.F. is a second wave of restaurants doing rustic European dishes (Flour + Water, Frances, Contigo), and diners perhaps being a bit more adventurous.”
Below, a rough timeline of the trotters’ recent rise to prominence:
1999: Thomas Keller features Pig’s Feet with French Green Lentils in The French Laundry Cookbook.
2001: Tom Colicchio opens Craft in New York, later begins featuring pork trotters among his mix-and-match menu offerings.
2002: Chris Cosentino comes on board as executive chef at Incanto, bringing with him a passion for head-to-tail cooking, and using trotters in his pork ragu. Later launches the website OffalGood.com.
2004: The Bouchon Cookbook features pieds de cochon with a sauce gribiche.
2007: Fergus Henderson publishes Beyond Nose to Tail, which contains the recipe for Trotter Gear.
2007-2008: Trotters make their appearance on Nate Appleman’s menus at A16 and SPQR in San Francisco. He later wins the James Beard Award for Rising Star Chef, as well as a Food & Wine Best New Chef nod. They continue to make appearances on both menus under new chefs Liza Shaw and Matt Accarrino, in ragus, terrinas, and Shaw’s pork trotter zampone, which are deboned foreshanks stuffed with either sausage or a meatball mixture, then braised and finished off in a wood-fired oven.
Early 2008: Hakata Tonton opens in New York, with 33 of its 39 dishes containing pigs’ feet. The UK Telegraph declares them ‘the new superfood.’
June 2008: Animal opens in Los Angeles, and chefs Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook garner loads of attention for their bold use of offal, and they frequently work trotters into their menu.
June 2009: Bouchon opens in Beverly Hills, features trotters.
July 2009: Flour + Water opens to loads of press early in the year, and that summer begins featuring trotters breaded and fried and served with Mission figs and mustard greens.
December 2009: Josef Centeno’s Lazy Ox Canteen opens in L.A., and receives a bunch of attention for, among other things, pigs’ feet.
February 2010: The Times writes up Northern Spy and their trotter dish.
Spring 2010: Trotters appear on the menu at Frances, braised and seared in cakes, served with a sauce gribiche and pickled vegetables. Frances is nominated for a Beard Award for Best New Restaurant.
April 2010: Saveur spotlights the very rustic crispy pata (fried pigs’ feet) at Patio Filipino in San Bruno.
June 2010: Prospect opens in San Francisco, from the team behind the uber-successful Boulevard, featuring a dish that combines pork trotters with lobster. Critic Jonathan Kauffman later calls out the dish as a point where chef Ravi Kapur “hits a sweet spot” of edginess.
October 2010: Lowcountry opens in New York, offering “trotter tots” as a starter; Coi chef Daniel Patterson opens a casual offshoot in Oakland called Plum, featuring a pork trotter burger.
Original post: http://sanfrancisco.grubstreet.com
by Bruce Steele | Sep 11, 2015 | Uncategorized
Thanks for getting this far. A headline like “Consider lard” will cause many readers to click away in horror, feeling arteries fur, strokes striking, the tempting of fat and fate at the sight of this four letter word. Lard ranks among the most reviled foods in the western world. As Roy Hattersley came to know its very name is a playground metonym for fat. Once, it was the great cooking fat of Europe, from Shetland to Gibraltar and east beyond the Caucasus, in China, Mexico, in South America.
In Ukraine they have a festival devoted to it. Polish immigrants caused a UK shortage in 2004. If your ancestors came from these islands they likely opened their lard-ers and ate bread, lard and salt for countless breakfasts. And not many of them died of obesity. For thousands of years there has been lard wherever there were pigs, and there were pigs, broadly speaking, wherever there weren’t Muslims.
It’s a supremely versatile fat. Because it smokes so little when it’s hot it’s perfect for bringing a golden shatter to a chip or a fritter – only dripping, lard’s bovine equivalent, does a better job. (A specific kind of lard is also called dripping, but let’s not muddle things.) Its large crystals of fat make lard unsurpassable in baking: a pastry crust made with lard – or half-lard, half-butter, as Delia recommends – offers a stunning flaky shortness, that gently encompassing roundedness that wine buffs horribly call mouthfeel.
Before the second world war Britons ate lard without guilt or fear. Its disappearance from our kitchens parallels a surge in the national waistline and an upswing in the cosseted maladies of fat. It’s worth remembering that the very people who so trumpeted the benefits of factory margarine – which we now know caused considerably more harm than good – were the same who lambasted lard and denied its natural glories.
By any estimation, lard is a healthier fat than butter. Gram for gram, it contains 20% less saturated fat, and it’s higher in the monounsaturated fats which seem to lower LDL cholesterol (the “bad” kind) and raise HDL (the “good”). It’s one of nature’s best sources of vitamin D. Unlike shortening it contains no trans fats, probably the most dangerous fats of all. Of course it has more saturated fat than olive oil, but in her splendid book Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, Jennifer McLagan points out that even its saturated fat is believed to have a neutral effect on blood cholesterol. And would you want a pie crust made with extra virgin?
Leaf lard, the highest-quality, surrounds a pig’s loin and kidneys. (Roast pork loin, incidentally, gives the best crackling.) Next in value are the fat on the animal’s back, appropriately called fatback, and the the soft fat from around the internal organs, which has a more pronounced porky flavour. There are two main methods to make or “render” lard: wet and dry. In wet rendering you boil the fat in water. To dry render you simply melt it in a dry pan and skim off any crunchy bits of meat and skin. (Salted, these become the world’s best scratchings.) Wet-rendered lard has a clean, neutral flavour and a high smoke point, while dry-rendered is a nut-brown colour, smokes at a lower heat and tastes faintly of well-roasted pork. The industrial lard of the supermarkets may well have been bleached, deodorised, emulsified and otherwise fiddled with, but homemade or small-scale lard is likely to be be excellent. A kindly butcher might well give you a load of hard pig fat for free to take home and render (unto) yourself.
The best thing about lardy cake is its counterintuitive lightness – the fat brings the dough a refreshing, silky fluffiness. The cake originates in Wiltshire, which was always Britain’s best pig county. In central Europe they cut fatback into cubes and salt it for stews. The Italians cure lardo with rosemary and spices in the coffin-shaped basins of the Carrara marble mines. This lardo di Colonnata is a sublime antipasto, wrapped round prunes or figs, melted over grilled bread, or served with salt and honey. A melting smear of cured, flavoured lard is a wonder over a steak, and a lot of Mexican cuisine (don’t laugh) is unthinkable without lard.
Assaulted by food company propaganda and disillusioned by decades of conflicting advice, many people are returning to diets unsullied by fads and dogma. That lard is both “healthier” than butter and yet so despised shows the empty logic of the standard position. The fat amply qualifies as “real food”, that definition popularised by Michael Pollan as “the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognise as food”. Indeed, its history and heritage make it seem more valuable than ever when you consider what the lard hath given.
https://youtu.be/KddkyZ1UG5g
Read the original post: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/feb/15/consider-lard
by Bruce Steele | Sep 6, 2015 | History
The next time you slice into a juicy pork chop or chow down on some sausage, see whether you can pick up the taste of wild boar. Farmers may have domesticated pigs 9000 years ago, but genome studies now show that in those early centuries, trysts with wild animals were quite common, particularly in Europe. In fact, they were so common that genes from the founding stock have all but disappeared. The new work not only sheds light on where pigs come from, but it also speaks to how complex the process of domestication is compared with what we thought it was.
The results “challenge the assumptions of 100 years of research,” says Fiona Marshall, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri, who was not involved with the work.
In the 19th century, evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin pointed out that breeding led to striking differences between farm animals and plants and their wild counterparts, an observation that helped lay the foundation for his theory of evolution. Based on that thinking, researchers imagined that about 9000 years ago, humans corralled a few wild boars and—by separating them from their fellows and breeding them for favorable traits like tameness, size, and meatiness—they developed the domesticated oinkers that we see all over the world today.
But the story is not quite that simple. For one, archaeological evidence now indicates that pigs were domesticated at least twice, once in China’s Mekong valley and once in Anatolia, the region in modern-day Turkey between the Black, Mediterranean, and Aegean seas. For another, a 2007 study of genetic material from 323 modern and 221 ancient pigs from western Eurasia suggests that pigs first came to Europe from the Near East, but that Europeans subsequently domesticated local wild boar, which seemed to replace those original pigs.
Eager to get the record straight, Laurent Frantz, now a bioinformaticist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, carried out sophisticated computer analyses of 103 whole genomes sequenced from wild boars and domesticated pig breeds from all over Europe and Asia. His adviser at the time, animal genomicist Martien Groenen of Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands, had sequenced these genomes and had gathered additional, albeit less complete, genetic data from 600 other wild and domesticated pigs as part of another study.
Domesticated animals have a large number of wild ancestors, Frantz, Groenen, and their colleagues report online today in Nature Genetics. Their data support the idea that pigs originated in two places. But Europe’s modern pigs are mongrel mixes derived from multiple wild boar populations. Some of their genetic material does not match any wild boar DNA collected by the researchers, so they think that at least some ancestors came from either an extinct group or from another group in central Eurasia. This anomaly suggests that pigs were herded from place to place, where they mated with this “ghost” population. Moreover, at one point—most likely in the 1800s, when Europeans imported Chinese pigs to improve their commercial breeds—a little Asian pig blood entered the mix.
The effort is quite impressive, says Carles Vila, an evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Research Council’s Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain. “[It] uses this large amount of data to evaluate competing hypotheses and obtains very clear results.”
Those results are “part of the emerging story about long-term gene flow between domesticated and wild animals,” explains Greger Larson, a co-author and evolutionary biologist at Oxford. “We see this massive mosaic, with gene flow between east and west and between wild and domesticated.”
There have been hints before at this kind of interbreeding in dogs and in horses. But this work really drives home that, contrary to what researchers had long assumed, domesticated animals often mated with wild counterparts. And what happened in pigs—and possibly dogs and horses—may have happened in other animals, Vila says. Recent work in barley indicates that some crops have a similar history. “The separation between domestic and wild lineages is not always clear,” Vila notes.
Researchers have assumed that so much interbreeding should have caused boars and pigs to look more alike than they do. But apparently by always selecting animals that looked like pigs and not boars, these early farmers were able to enhance and maintain piglike behavior and traits. This selection likely created “islands of domestication,” sets of genes that were passed on in the pigs despite interbreeding, the researchers suggest. There are even a few islands—those that contain genes involved in behavior and size, key traits for domesticated animals—that are in the genomes of both European and Asian pigs, Larson reports. The idea of “islands” provides a “basal genetic model for understanding domestication that could be tested in other species,” says Ludovic Antoine Alexandre Orlando, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved with the work.
Similar islands are thought to enable new species to form. “We need to be looking at these special islands and how they are established and maintained,” says Alan Cooper, a molecular evolutionist at the University of Adelaide in Australia who was not part of the study. And Larson and his colleagues are doing just that by sequencing genomes of ancient pigs and boars to better pick out the islands and figure out when they first appeared.
Marshall looks forward to these and other efforts. “We have to completely rethink domestication processes,” she points out. “Genomics provides very exciting tools with which to do this.”
Read the original post: news.sciencemag.org
by Bruce Steele | Sep 1, 2015 | Recipes
Chicherones is Mexico’s take on pork crackling. Serve with guacamole for a classic Mexican snack
- 7oz/200g pork skin, as much fat cut from it as possible
- Coarse salt
- 1 or 2 large green chillies (Serrano if possible), chopped
- ¼ of a red onion, very finely sliced
- 1 big bunch of coriander, washed and dried, leaves picked from stems
- 5 small sweet cherry tomatoes cut in half
- 2 large very ripe avocado
- Juice of 2 limes
METHOD
Preheat the oven to 230F/110C/Gas ¼. Cut the skin into thin strips about 10cm (4in) long, and then put them in the oven for an hour and a half to render the fat and soften the skin.
Remove the pork from the oven and transfer it to a clean roasting tray. Then turn the oven up to its hottest setting (about 550F/300C/Gas 10). While the oven is heating up, make the guacamole.
In a large pestle and mortar, crush one of the chillies with the onion and coriander leaves, and then the tomatoes, which you should bash up a little bit. Scoop the flesh out of the avocados and add this to the mixture, crush the mixture with the pestle, but keep it a little coarse.
Season with salt and squeeze over the lime; taste and adjust acidity with more lime and check the salt. Add more chilli if it needs it: the guacamole should taste punchy and full. Return the pork skin to the oven at 550F/300C/Gas 10 for 5 to 10 minutes to allow it to puff up and become really crispy.
by Bruce Steele | Aug 20, 2015 | Uncategorized
Paul Wellman (file)
PAIRING PINOT WITH BBQ: As both a chef and winemaker, the Hitching Post II’s Frank Ostini enters this Saturday’s grilling-meets-wine demo during the Sta. Rita Hills 10th Annual Wine & Fire Weekend with a distinct advantage — even if he isn’t cooking mammoth meat like cohort Peter Cargasacchi.
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Like much of the greater wine world, Santa Barbara County is hitting a saturation point with events in which the wine itself can no longer be the only star of the show. Folks in the Sta. Rita Hills realized this back in 2006 when they started the annual Wine and Fire celebration, which pairs their world-class pinot noir and chardonnay with food cooked over open flames.
This year’s 10th annual affair — which kicks off with a party at the Sanford & Benedict barn on Friday night, peaks at the La Purisima Mission tasting on Saturday, and includes open houses all weekend — emphasizes the fire more than ever before, thanks to the BBQ Blast. Taking the place of the usual Saturday-morning seminar, this grilling demo features five teams of vintners, chefs, and their supporters showing off their chops and tips and assorted bits. They’ll pair finished dishes with their wines and explain which morsels go best with which sip and why.
To get a taste, I asked a few participants what to expect.
Which meat goes best with pinot?
Frank Ostini of the Hitching Post, teamed with Steve Fennell of Sanford Winery: Beef is king because that’s what they eat in Burgundy [with pinot noir], and what the Hitching Post II has successfully served with pinot for almost 30 years. But Saturday, the best match will be with smoked duck — the smoky, earthy, gamy duck will pair perfectly with Sanford & Benedict pinot noir.
Peter Cargasacchi, teamed with Loring Wine Company: Woolly mammoth, because it is the only true paleo meat that is being served. We will be serving woolly mammoth sliders with purple lichen slaw. We have been working with geologists in the Arctic Circle to create a menu that is fresh from the permafrost. Siberian baby woolly mammoth. When they chiseled the young wooly mammoth out of the block of ice, it still had fresh clover and buttercups on its lips. [Editor’s Note: It looks like pulled pork to us.]
Which meat with chardonnay?
Ostini: I’m pining for a Winfield Farm Mangalitsa pork chop, grown by Santa Ynez Valley rancher Bruce Steele, who is my neighbor. It is for sure the greatest “other white meat.” The white part of this is the fat that is so flavorful, rich, and glorious when grilled and cuts through the acidity of the Sta. Rita Hills chardonnay, making it a perfect match. I sort of wish we were grilling this.
Cargasacchi: I would probably have to say penguin, because it combines two culinary traditions, poultry and seafood. Penguin is the true Chicken of the Sea.
Why does cooking with fire go so well with Sta. Rita Hills fruit?
Kimberly LaMontagne, whose husband, Theron Smith, is teamed with Kessler-Haak: The complex flavors wood projects with its many layers completes my pinot noir, which I create to marry with BBQ. Thank you, wood, for helping my wine be “multilayer sex in a bottle!”
Ostini: You’re asking a guy who was born with a BBQ pit in his backyard. Cooking with fire is the original cooking. It is a big reason why we are Homo sapiens. It is a part of our DNA. So it goes with fruit from any valley in Santa Barbara County. With SRH fruit in particular, it is the acidity and the smoky, earthy, gamy characters that work so well with grilled food.
Cargassachi: Not all fire is created equal. A lot of our competitors will be using “strike anywhere” fire. Their fire has no soul. Our fire will be authentic paleo fire. We are bringing it from a lightning-strike-initiated forest fire. Everyone else’s fire has no sense of place — soul-less junk fire — it could be from anywhere.
Is a BBQ battle treading on the toes of your friends up in the Santa Maria Valley, where tri-tip was supposedly invented?
Ostini: Born in Santa Maria, and now living in the Santa Ynez Valley, I figure I’m rather bi-valley — as a chef and as a winemaker. And my family has been grilling in Casmalia outside of Santa Maria for 60-plus years. I have tons of respect for that, and my brother respects what we have done in Buellton.
Cargassachi: Tri-tip and oak grilling is a ranchero tradition. It’s authentic to all of Santa Barbara County. And as a matter of fact, the last woolly mammoths that existed were here on the Channel Islands. What could be more fitting than eating woolly mammoth in the last area that it freely roamed?
Will you be doing grilling, smoking, or BBQ?
Ostini: Yes, yes, and yes. Our duck is cold smoked first, and we will grill it over an oak wood fire, using our indigenous style that we here have always called BBQ. For me, the distinctions are blurred. The common element is the smoke flavor derived from the wood fire. What’s good about this “contest” is the chance for attendees to taste four distinctly different BBQ styles with great wines.
Cargassachi: We will be using a La Caja China roasting box, using indirect heat, to create succulent, juicy meat rather than the charred carbon that our competitors will be serving. After 15,000 years in the deep freeze, mammoth is fairly delicate and requires long, slow cooking over moderate heat to be at its most tender and flavorful.
Should wine grapes be included in BBQ recipes?
Ostini: Sta. Rita Hills fruit makes such good wine; it is a waste to use it in food. Maybe Central Valley grapes?
4•1•1
Wine & Fire runs Friday-Sunday, August 14-16. See staritahills.com for details and tickets.
Read the original post here: Santa Barbara Independent
