Autumnal Sunday Dinner: Pork Shoulder Porchettata

I know it seems like whenever I propose a meat dish, it's something involving pork shoulder.  But I don't think I'm getting repetitive yet, so I'll keep going.  I'll take slow cooked pork cuts like belly and shoulder over a beef steak six days out of seven.  In so doing I pay $4.99 to $6.99 a pound or so instead of $15.99 to $19.99 a pound to feed myself and others, and enjoy the layers of flavor from slow cooking.  I actually worry now that "lesser cuts" like pork belly and shoulder and beef short ribs are becoming the in meats such that their prices will skyrocket as consumers demand more of them and leave loins and steaks on the shelves.  We'll see.

I've already gone into what porchetta means to me and along that train of thought this is a dish that feels right in the first chills of Autumn...aromatically roasted meat, vegetables cooked underneath so as to gather the drippings and obtain wonderfully browned edges.  "Porchettata" meaning in the way of porchetta, involving fennel and garlic.  I threw in some grapes to this recipe, befitting harvest time in wine countries everywhere, and cooked with the whole they added a welcome sweetness and acidity to the sauce derived from the bottom of the pan.  The sauce is the culmination of the roasted vegetables and what they catch from the meat as it oozes fat and juices that carry the seasonings with them.  

For the Meat:
1 4 lb. pork shoulder, butterflied by your butcher if possible, otherwise directions below
1 teaspoon fennel pollen or fennel seeds
1 teaspoon black pepper corns
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
2 medium cloves garlic
2 sprigs rosemary
1 tablespoon salt
1-2 tablespoons white wine
Baker's twine

For the Vegetables/Sauce:
2 onions, peeled and cut into eighths
2 lbs. carrots, peeled and cut into 2 inch segments
1 lb. celery, cut into 2 inch segments
2 lbs. potatoes - fingerling, red, yukons, whichever you prefer for roasting, partially peeled and cut into pieces equivalent to the other vegetables
1 lb. grapes, preferably seedless - can be wine grapes or table grapes
2 sprigs of rosemary
2 cups or so stock, plus another 2 or so for the sauce (recipe for veg stock below, or use a good meat stock, homemade if possible!)
1 cup or so white wine
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Salt and pepper to taste

To butterfly the meat yourself, get a very sharp knife, preferably one for filleting, and make an incision about an inch above the surface you're cutting on from one end of the piece of meat to the other, about an inch deep.  You want to basically unfurl this hunk of meat into a slab, so continue to slice across the piece of meat from that first cut while pulling the rest away from you as you'd unroll a rug.  What you should end up with is a rectangular slab of meat, roughly an inch thickness at every part.  It's ok if there are areas thicker or thinner, even some holes are fine.  You can pound the meat if you'd like to make it more uniform and/or tenderize, but it's not imperative.

Make the paste by grinding the rest of the meat ingredients except the wine in a spice grinder.  Then

mix in a bowl with the wine to form a
rough paste.  Take the paste and smear it all over the surface of the meat, covering as much as possible.

No need to massage or really work it in, although you could and let it marinate overnight.  Roll the meat up and tie off every couple inches with twine to secure it like a jelly roll.  Season the outside liberally with salt and pepper.

Preheat a convection oven to 275° F or a conventional oven to 300° F. 

Place the carrots, celery, onions, grapes and rosemary in the bottom of a deep and heavy roasting pan, season with salt and pepper, and toss with olive oil to coat.  Add enough stock and wine to cover the bottom of the pan and come maybe half way up the vegetables.  Place the meat on a rack suspended above the vegetables if possible.  Otherwise just rest it on top.

Roast in the oven 2-2 1/2 hours, then remove from the oven and add the potatoes, and a little stock if the pan is dry (it's ok if in the first couple hours the liquid evaporates and there's deep coloration, that'll be good for flavor and the sauce).  

Continue to cook another hour, then remove the meat from the pan (it should be nicely browned, fat cap crispy).  Tenting will take some crispiness away from the outside edges, but it's good if you're not serving the meat immediately.

Remove all the potatoes and some of the vegetables and grapes from the pan (enough to make a contorno for everyone).  Then place the roasting pan over a burner at medium high heat until the juices begin to sizzle.  Add some stock to deglaze, and using a spoon, loosen up all the browned bits stuck to the bottom and sides.

Transfer the contents to a blender and puree, adding stock to your preference to achieve the desired consistency.  Place back in a saucepan to heat through for serving. 

Slice the meat into half inch thick pieces and serve over a bed of puree, with the potatoes and vegetables on the side. 

Vegetable Stock:
1 onion, peeled and quartered
2 ribs celery, cut into a couple pieces each
2 carrots, peeled and cut into a couple pieces each
A few whole peppercorns
Salt to taste

Place the vegetables and peppercorns in a large pot and fill almost to the rim with water.  Bring just to a boil, then lower to a gentle simmer.  Let it cook an hour, more if you'd like, then season to taste with salt.  Can be stored several weeks in a refrigerator or several months in a freezer.

Stretching Leftovers Into Week Two (Maybe): Arancini

At the Zeoli household when risotto is made there are inevitable leftovers in significant quantity...even chipped away at for days afterward, a good portion remains.  Still perfectly serviceable, this aged food is often taken for granted, pushed further and further to the back of the fridge to may way for fresher things.  But there's a much better end to risotto's life cycle and it involves a pretty quick treatment, virtually reinventing and assuring it gets eaten quickly.

Arancini mean little oranges, so called because they are the shape, size and color of the fruit that drop from tress along sidewalks of many warm European cities...perhaps planted for the bonus effect of preventing scurvy among the gypsy population.  In Sicilian tradition they are filled with meat ragu and mozzarella.  In Rome they're called suppli, and more often than not shaped like croquettes, filled with prosciutto, mozz and peas.

I say maybe they'll last into week two in the title because breaded fried foods seem to trigger a human impulse to continue eating beyond normal satiation, so once made these may not last long at all.  So even though these are quite satisfying and not exactly light, I find that I can just keep eating them, knowing they don't get better than a minute or two out of the hot oil.

The batch of risotto which we used to make the balls pictured here was a simple one of grape tomatoes and mozzarella, basically a risotto "caprese".  Conveniently, the mozzarella was already there for us, and the tomatoes added a nice touch of sweet and tart to the end result.

Fried rice balls can really be made with any type of risotto I can think of, as long as, after sitting several hours or overnight, it becomes tight and easy to mold.  You can simply take the leftovers, form them and fry, or you can stuff them with new ingredients like melty cheese, meats, etc.  Even a seafood risotto would make for some good arancini, for instance.    

Not that there's a law I know of stating fried rice balls must be made from a batch of risotto previously consumed in original form...arancini can be the intended result from the beginning, just give the rice several hours in the fridge to firm up after initial cooking.  You can also do this with farrotto, or farro cooked in the method of risotto, for an earthier and healthier rendition.  

Ingredients:

A portion of risotto already made (at least 2 cups worth of leftovers I'd say)
Optional: favorite cheese to stuff the balls with, preferable one that melts well, as well as diced prosciutto, ham, bacon, etc. or leftover meat sauce
Bread Crumbs: for 2 cups of risotto, 1 cup bread crumbs and go from there
Eggs: for 2 cups of risotto, 2 eggs and go from there
1/2 to 1 liter oil for frying
Salt to taste

Take the risotto straight from the fridge and form into balls; the size of a clementine or small orange works well.  If you're stuffing them, take your finger and press into the ball, making an indentation in which to place stuffing, then close the ball up around it.  Dip the balls into the egg wash to coat, draining excess, then roll around in the bread crumbs.  Set aside on a sheet tray until all the risotto is used up.

Heat the oil in a heavy bottom pot to 375° F or until a small bit of the risotto sizzles and floats to the surface.  There should be enough oil to cover the balls by 2/3 at least.  Gently place the arancini in the oil, a few at a time so as not to overcrowd the pot, and fry, turning once or twice for even cooking, about 5 minutes overall.  Drain to a sheet pan with absorbent paper and season with salt.

Serve immediately and watch them disappear.

Time To Make The Pizzas

I've come to that point...I'm now dreaming in pizza.

The other night Nicole got up to drain her oft-filled bladder, and while she was in the bathroom I stood up and went over to the bureau, which instead of being a familiar piece of furniture I thought was the pizza oven in which I had a pie that needed tending to.  Cooking in about a minute and a half, you can never take your eyes off the oven for more than 30 seconds, so I was convinced I had to make a quick move to turn it before one side got overcooked.  Nicole asked me what I was doing and I momentarily regained some semblance of reality, but I couldn't put together coherent words to explain myself.  Still not completely out of my dream state and confused, I went back to bed and just passed out, the pizza of my dreams left in half baked limbo.  It's like when I worked at the Longshore Ice Rink in high school and would dream I was working the register and sit up at night in bed and think I owed someone change.  Nightmarish.

The restaurant is open 7 days per week now, lunch and dinner straight through from noon to close.  I don't work all those shifts, and most of us are down to 5 day work weeks at this point, but the day to day repetition and aggregate time spent there mean life revolves around the pies.  It's seemingly impossible to get more than a day or two ahead of demand in prepping our ingredients, so we're always working against the clock to fill our station with all the accouterments in time for service.

As in DMX's breakthrough album "It's Cold And Hell Is Hot", every day is a battle, but in the case of the pizza man, it's the oven that tries to control me.  After 5 weeks or so I've learned some of the nuances of the 850 degree monster, and to force it to do my bidding rather than the other way around, well, sometimes. Building and maintaining a proper fire is something, from what Mario (Mario LaPosta, the Chef de Cuisine and senior pizza man, not Batali) says, that pizzaiolos in Italy go on at length about, distinguishing it as a craft unto its own aside from the making of  the pizza. 

This week I began the next frontier in pizza making, though probably not the final one, of stretching pies as they call it.  Not just putting them in the oven and cooking them, but first taking the disks of dough from the tray and stretching/working them into edible canvases.  Time is of the essence on this learning course so as to make me look legitimate in full view of our patrons who can see all the action at the open pizza bar (I'm not quite there yet, but my examples are usually roughly circular).  And to also free up Mario and Ruben, both veteran pizzaioli, who have been working with almost no time off since July because they're the only ones who to this point know how to make pizza from start to finish.

The skill of it is something that undoubtedly takes a good amount of time to learn, but to execute the stretching is a process of only about 30 seconds (unless you're the guy in the Visa commercial who rolls it around his back and along his arms), and given our volume of business, I'm getting a lot of practice.  I don't think I'll be tossing it in the air any time soon and bedazzling diners, but I basically have to become proficient at it within a few days since we don't have rolling pins, nor do we have anywhere to hide our mistakes.      

World Pizza Championship here I come 2013 or so (Mario placed 8th overall in 2010).

Quick Dins: Sea Scallops Over Tomato Relish

Quick meal, nutritious, summery...just what's needed sometimes.  Sweet, tender scallops atop a fine dice of roasted plum tomatoes seasoned with the "aroma" of garlic but mainly left to their natural sweetness derived from dry heat.  This would probably work as well as an app or tapa as it does an entree, since it lacks a little bit of carb component, but you can get creative on that.  The tomatoes can be made a day in advance or so and probably improve for it.  Once you have them relished like this, you'll see they're good underneath or on top of a lot of things.    

Ingredients For 2

1 lb. sea scallops (little membranes on the sides removed if not done by fishmonger)
3 lbs. plum tomatoes
Extra virgin olive oil
3-4 cloves of garlic, smashed
2 tablespoons white wine
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste
Couple sprigs fresh thyme
Optional: aged balsamic for garnish
Basil to garnish

Preheat an oven to 350.  Slice the tomatoes in half, then remove the seeds and inner flesh.  Place all the scooped out halves in a mixing bowl, and toss with the thyme sprigs, wine, vinegar and enough olive oil to coat nicely. Season to taste with salt and pepper.  Drizzle some olive oil on a couple large baking sheets, then place the tomatoes on, cut sides down.  Arrange the smashed garlic on the pans and bake for an hour.  Let them cool to room temperature once out of the oven, then remove the tomato skins, which should come off easily.

Dice the tomatoes finely and try to keep them uniform in size.

Season the scallops with salt and pepper.  Heat a frying pan over medium high to high heat and add just a little oil to coat the pan.  When it smokes, add the scallops in one even layer, not over crowding the pan.  Cook in a couple batches if necessary.  Cook about two minutes per side, until there is a nice brown crust on each, and they turn from translucent to opaque.

Serve the scallops over the relish with some basil leaves and a conservative drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and aged balsamic if you like.

A Tale of One City, Two Areperas

After a long week of work, I had yesterday off from TL and decided to go out and taste some different food.  I've been to Valencia Luncheria before, but strangely never had their arepas or empanadas, two things foodwise Venezuela is best known for.  Valencia for a while was of the highest rated eating establishments in the Norwalk/Westport/Fairfield area with a 27 for food, so someone must have really liked it.  The tiny place is always crowded, especially around lunchtime.  A 15 minute wait for simple fried takeout  isn't surprising.  I opted for carne mechada in my arepa (typical Venezuelan slow cooked and shredded beef) and an empanada with black beans and cheese, no crazy flavor combo but bound to be good.  $7 plus change for both, and a satisfying and energy boosting lunch was mine.

First up I tasted the empanada...the dough, more sweet than savory, was thin and not too oily, just a bit of crunch and then into the hot interior of molten queso blanco and black beans with that signature Latin flavor of cumin, garlic and stock they're cooked in.  The beans weren't mushy, but starchy and firm enough to stand up to the heat, the cheese more there for texture than salinity.

The arepa was not quite as hot, with just a thin outer crust of the corn pocket providing the crunch, the rest of it mild without much salt and just simple corn flavor. It was not overstuffed with carne, just enough without it unfolding into a complete mess. The beef was very nicely cooked, very moist, tender and well shredded.  The flavors were simple and homey, like a good pot roast done with Venezuelan spices.  To dip was a bold chipotle sauce, spicy and smoky, and a pleasantly sour tomatillo salsa with always refreshing cilantro.  I probably could have eaten all of both, but my stomach was actually telling me when I was half done with each that I was satisfied.  My appetite has shrunk considerably in the 2+ weeks working in the restaurant.  Not that it should be taken as anything's wrong with the food...we're not stretching the meat sauce by adding ground thyroid glands or engaging in any unsanitary practices.  Just that smelling food all day decreases cravings and appetite, for me at least.        

Next stop, Westport Avenue and Masas Arepera for the same thing.  The stretch of Route 1 it's on is tough for new businesses...I've been going north and south through it as long as I remember, mentally cataloguing a fraction of the businesses located from the drive thru cleaners to Los Cabos, forgetting most of what's in between, until that one day every ten years I need to get a carpet cleaned.  I feel like people don't pull in on a whim to many of the tiny parking lots as they cruise by to take time checking out some of the small mom and pop type places.  Not a pedestrian-friendly area at all.  But that's America.  Some shops have surprisingly lasted years, but most of those who've opened in the last five are soon gone.  Remember Eno's Cheese Shop?  Yeah, that's what I thought.

Not that I wish anything but success for the people who decide to open up shop in the numerous and mostly tiny strip malls or whatever you'd call them.  Nicole and I always ponder though if the would-be entrepreneurs come from around here and know what the area is like...do they do their research?  If they do, do they think they're going to change the game and open a gem?  We all know the odds often thrown around on food establishments and their rates of success.  And lots of us have seen Kitchen Nightmares and other shows where you see what happens when people over-leverage.

I made the mile or so drive through that always congested crossroads of Norwalk and walking into Masas after Valencia was like night and day...despite it being twice the size, Masas was completely empty except for the couple of staff.  It's pretty new looking, with a blown up version of their menu on the wall, floor to the high ceiling to the left as you walk in, with pictures of a perro caliente and hamburguesa, among others, for visual aid.  Some items were curiously whited out with tape.  On the other side are huge photos showcasing the varied landscapes of Venezuela.

After ordering, as I waited I looked around to the other businesses in the area and noticed where there used to be a middle eastern joint was now a brand new Indian one.  Like I was saying...good luck, honestly.  I feel compelled to try it now.

Masas is slightly more expensive, but their arepa was definitely bigger than Valencia's.  Biting in to it, the meat was dryer and not as well shredded as Valencia's, and most importantly was significantly lacking in flavor.  Under-salted and devoid of that depth you should get from a good long cook with aromatics and spices.  The corn shell of the arepa was the right texture, for what it's worth.

The empanada was greasier than Valencia's, and the beans were mushier, again lacking their own distinct flavor.  Essentially just mushy brown/black stuff intermingled with melted white cheese.  Not terrible, but not memorable either.  I wanted to like it, wanted it to be good so I could say they really have something there.  But the feeling I got from the food was the feeling I got walking in; kind of indifferent, completely lacking the character and convivial vibe and commotion of Valencia.  They served one sauce with both my pockets, which seemed to be mayo based with some cilantro and a lot of garlic in it, nothing about it fresh or making for a particularly good condiment for either dish.

The same sentiment applied to Masas' location could be said of Valencia's, but in the case of the latter, they have become established as a gem within the strip mall landscape.  In this day and age of foodies and finding the next best thing wherever it may be, location and atmosphere aren't all that important.  In fact, sometimes less is more.  It's about good, distinct food.  If you ask a Venezuelan guy you know what he thinks of a place and he approves, it should be enough to keep it in business, considering how word travels (not that I asked anyone about Masas, but if I had a Venezuelan friend, I would have consulted them).  I didn't order up a huge sample from either place on my lunch journey, so to be fair maybe Masas' does have some redeeming dishes, but considering they call themselves an arepera, I don't think I can be blamed for not delving deeper.