winter in four parts...

... celery root soup, crisp pancetta, fried sage ...

  

... little gem salad, beets, tangerines, mint, toasted pepitas ...

... crisp duck confit, du puy lentils, braised savoy cabbage, black pepper gastrique ...

... olive oil/almond/citrus cake, crème fraîche, candied mandarinquats ...

contrast

I really do love cooking in the cold weather months...braising, roasting, caramelizing, slow long cooking...


But as individual dishes need contrast, so too does the meal...


This salad was the perfect way to refresh the taste buds between a bowl of creamy, warm celery root soup and a plate of crispy duck confit with lentils and cabbage.  Most often I would write a menu that progresses from salad to soup to main course, but I didn't want to go back-to-back with two fairly rich dishes. 

The crunchy, salty roasted pepitas made for a nice contrast both in texture and flavor within the dish itself.


Every ingredient in this salad was excellent, but the show stopper was without a doubt these tangerines!  Firm and sweet, but with great acid.

... the gems ...

I removed the larger leaves from the outside and relegated them to sandwich duty.  I like the inner light green/yellow leaves for this salad. 

... the toasted pepitas ...

A key ingredient in the Mexican dish mole, these are great on their own.  I always buy nuts and seeds raw and toast them myself.  Put them in a dry sauté pan and roast them in a 400 degree oven until they are slightly crunchy and take on a little color.  As with all nuts/seeds, a little color means flavor, a little too much color means bitter.  Hit them with a bit of good olive oil and kosher salt when they come out of the oven...delicious.  Make sure you toast some extra because they are great snacking on their own.

... the beets ...

These great beets were simply roasted in a hot oven with olive oil, a little water, salt and pepper (covered)...then peeled, cut into wedges and tossed with their own vinaigrette.

... the mint ...

feel free to use a lot in this salad...and whole leaves are great!

... the tangerines ...

Oh...my...the...tangerines!  You can cut them into segments or "supremes", but I like to first cut off pieces of the fruit almost like you would cutting around the core of an apple.  From there, I just cut slices against the direction of the membrane that separates each section...you can see what I mean if you look at the slices of tangerine in the salad above.  I like the way it looks and the way it eats.  For larger citrus like grapefruits I tend to cut out the individual segments.

... the vinaigrettes ...

I hadn't planned on using two different vinaigrettes for one salad, but I happened to have some blood oranges on hand.  I made a meyer lemon vinaigrette for the salad, and dressed the beets separately in a blood orange vinaigrette.

my first PORCHETTA...

So I usually don't like to type anything in all caps {it's like yelling}, but in this case I felt it was warranted...PORCHETTA!!!    (so there you are...bold, underlined, italicized and all caps...can you tell I'm happy with the way this turned out?)

It is something I have always wanted to make, but most of the time I am cooking for groups of about 8-10 people.  Since a traditional porchetta is made using a whole pig it would have been a bit much.

I have also seen versions that wrap a pork belly around a couple of boneless pork loins which I think is a nice idea...but still quite a large roast.

Recently I found a blog while I was researching various ways of cooking prime rib and stumbled on this post for an all-belly porchetta...now we're talkin'.  There's a lot of great detail there, so I won't repeat, but just give some of my observations now that I have made it for myself (and some friends)... 

Here is mine all tied up and ready to go.  I seasoned and tied it 2 days prior to cooking.  He said to tie the roast starting on the outside, working in.  I would have been inclined to do the opposite, but he was right...just look at how uniform it turned out!  I did change the seasonings from his version.  For years I have used a mixture of spices based on a braised pork belly recipe from the  Café Boulud Cookbook.  My mix is as follows: fennel, coriander, cumin, peppercorns, bay leaf, cinnamon, allspice, star anise, cloves, dried chiles & garlic.  Oh, and salt, plenty of salt.  While that seems like a lot of flavors going on, they really do mellow out over the long slow cooking (and it's fun listening to people trying to guess what the spices are).

On day 2 I followed his advice of rubbing the skin with a mixture of salt and baking soda.  As he explains this changes the PH of the meat/skin which allows it to get very VERY crispy.

Another step from his method is to blast it at 500 degrees at the end to crispy it up.  The roast already seemed very crisp so I decided to skip that step.  It turned out that while the skin was crispy it wasn't the right kind of crispy and was frankly difficult to eat.  Because I had cut the roast in 2 (it was otherwise too long) I decided to give the second half that blast to finish it off.  That was the ticket...the right kind of crispy...it literally shatters when you bite it!

This is the first half and, although it was delicious, everyone unanimously pushed the skin to the side of their plates.  When the second half of the roast was finished everyone was breaking off pieces of the crispy skin with ooohs and aaahs!

{there is no picture of the second half as it was devoured so quickly!}

While this dish does take some time and patience, I highly recommend giving it a try.  Pork belly really is a cheap cut of meat and is loaded with flavor.