A Return, Grill Repairs and Lazy, Lazy Grilling

Hey Everyone, and a Very Happy Summer to You!

Yes, I know it’s been a while.  In fact, it’s been about three months that I’ve spent away from blogosphere, both reading and writing, and thank all of you who have told me that I have been missed – especially Ping, Zoe and Juls!  I’ve missed you all as well (gods, do I have tons of blog reading to catch up on now – yay!!!), and trust me when I say that I have had a good reason – in fact, two good reasons! – to be gone.  I make no excuses, only that law school can suddenly drop buckets of workload on one’s head.  Or stacks of books, to be precise.  But, the essays for this half-term are turned in now, and the grade for the first one I got back is good, and I am also back from Barcelona (there will be pictures of food in upcoming blog posts along with restaurant reviews – the great, the good and the awful), and most significantly to my daily nom, I have repaired my kettle grill.

Oh, you didn’t know my grill was broken  - or that I had one at all?  I am not surprised.  You see, it was purchased broken – by design, not by defect – and after the spectacular inaugural failure of its first use, it sat on my balcony for a year, fading in the sunlight and snow, forgotten and unloved.  I rued the €20 or so that we had spent on it and wondered why the hell would anyone sell a grill so structurally bad as to be unusable.  To make it a bit clearer – inside the rounded bottom of it, it had a screw-in bowl thing which the coals were meant to be placed into – that did not have any vent holes in its bottom or sides.  None.  There were vent holes in the sides of the actual grill body around it, but according to the instructions, the bowl thing was to be screwed into the rounded bottom of the grill and the coals were to be placed into it.  I tried it, barely got any heat at all, and gave up on the grill as clearly too badly designed to use.

Then, upon having finished the aforementioned law essays, I felt uplifted and my brain uncramped – and also, it had gotten warm and sunny, and all the neighbors were grilling and … I had a genius idea.  What if I took out the stupid bowl thing and just put the coals into the rounded bottom bit of the grill which does have holes in it.  Would it work?

And – amazingly! – with the removal of the offending and useless thing, the grill was fixed!

To be quite honest, I still wonder why the thing was provided with the grill and why anyone bothered to make it and waste money on materials and such in order to render the grill inoperable.  On the other hand, the beyond-useless part is now resting in peace (or in the garbage to be precise), and we are grilling.  Well, not today – today it’s raining and thundering out, but we did grill yesterday and also a bit over a week ago before we went to Barcelona, and you know what?  That moment when the sizzling meat scents up the entire building and you are vindicated to all the neighbors who tormented you with their grill-scents for weeks – it’s glorious.

The food is, obviously, too.  I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like char-grilled food, be it meat, shellfish, vegetables or cheese.  Or even that thing I normally refuse to mention as food – tofu.  I do believe even tofu would be improved by grilling – but as I don’t eat it, you may have to ask a vegan about that.  Me, I go for meat.  I really ought to get one of those fish-grilling holders in order to do fish on the grill as well.  And seafood – but, it occurs to me that prawns would be great on skewers… but I digress (and drool).

Grilling really is one of the most rewarding ways of cooking – it has the ability to turn ordinary food into extraordinary just by the method of cooking, without any seasoning.  With seasoning added, it’s simply divine.  What follows is less of a recipe, and more of a description of how travel-fatigued and lazy, we managed to make and eat the above corn and pork-and-Padron pepper skewers.

Normally I am a stickler for making my own marinade, and letting the meat soak properly.  However, the skewers in the picture were a result of cheating – we were freshly returned from a week in Spain – exhausted, our fridge was mostly empty, and we wanted to grill but had no meat that was marinated, nor desire or strength to bother.  So, we bought a pork loin pre-seasoned in a vac-pack in the supermarket.  Typical supermarket marinade is pretty insipid but what it does do, is tenderize the meat and brine it.  So, while it does not really flavor the meat much, it does provide the shortcut of hours of marinating time, and when using small bites of meat, added seasoning soaks in/sticks on beautifully in just a few minutes.

I cut the loin up into skewerable pieces, added a teaspoon of smoked paprika and a good thick sprinkling of garlic granules, chopped up a large fat sprig of fresh rosemary into it, drizzled on white wine vinegar and olive oil, and gave the meat a couple of turns in the bowl to coat it thoroughly and distribute seasonings.  If the meat hadn’t been pre-marinated, I’d have added some salt, covered the bowl with cling film and stuck it in the fridge for 2-3 hours, but as shop marinade is mostly salt, I skipped that.  I left the bowl of meat to sit on the countertop while I prepped the corn for grilling.

If you have never prepped corn on the cob for grilling, there is a truly lazy way to do it.  I know, I’m the queen of lazy – particularly on vacation!  Here’s how you do it – you peel back the husks while leaving them attached, thickly smear the corn in lightly salted spreadable butter (the sort which has a bit of vegetable oil added so it stays soft – Lurpak may be available in the States, and I know this variety is available in the UK), and sprinkle on some of the granulated garlic and crushed cayenne flakes generously (or less so if you don’t like eating fire).  Then you fold the husks back over the corn and seal the tips with a bit of kitchen foil before sticking them into a potful of cold water husk-end down to soak.  Then you go light the grill.  Or, if you are lazy and/or happen to be me, you shout for the guys to go light the grill.  Trust me, guys are very easily motivated by the idea of impending grilled meat.

While the coals are heating up, skewer up the meat with whatever you like in-between (or nothing if you are that sort of carnivore).  My favorites are normally either bell pepper pieces, mushrooms, or baby tomatoes.  But, while I was in Spain, I have discovered a new addiction (it’s ok arugula, I still love you!) – I am now officially in love with the delicately scented and oh-so-full-of-flavor pimientos de Padrón.  I had snagged a box of imported dark-green beauties immediately when I saw it at the supermarket upon my return.  In Spain, these are sauteed in a bit of olive oil with flaked sea salt (and they are amazing prepared so), but since they are eaten with seeds, all you have to do with them for skewering, is wash, dry and halve them, and then toss in a bit of olive oil – which is all I did.  You could probably buy any sort of a bell pepper and chop it and it’ll work just as well – but it would be sweeter and with less concentrated pepper flavor (not to be confused with heat – these aren’t very hot, if at all).

Turn the corn once while you skewer the meat – or ask the guys to – and put into a baking dish into a 75C oven to keep warm.  Grill the skewers turning a few times until the meat is cooked through (it’s pork, it’s not nice undercooked), and serve with the corn.  And your choice of fruity white wine, or a cocktail or whatever really.

Then, put up your feet and enjoy the summer.  Here in Sweden, we have to hurry up to do it – as beautiful and sunny and warm as it is, it simply does not tend to last.  In the spirit of that, I’ve got a fridge- and freezer-full of meat and I’m not afraid to use it.  And once this travel fatigue goes away, I’ll be back with actual recipes, not just “what I’ve managed to slap together for putting on newly-invented *cough*repaired*cough* fire“.

Pork Loin with Sage and Apricots, and Legal Advice

Dear readers and eaters!

I am sorry I haven’t been writing as much lately, but between the holidays and the need to write an essay for my Masters course, I have not had time to cook much of anything (subsisting on Caprese salad and snacks is not a bad life, but I was a bit too busy to grab a camera).  Now that the essay is done with, I am back (at least until the next one), and I return to you with some newly-gained insights into food and international law.

Pictured above - local Swedish pig. Bought inexpensively at a supermarket as a fast and easy dinner solution.

Among other fascinating things that I have learned in the course for which I was writing the essay was that both, EU laws and the WTO (World Trade Organization) agreements (to which both, the EU and USA are signatories, among many others) tend to try to lower food standards to lowest common denominator.  Why?  Because they’re mostly free trade laws (which isn’t bad in and of itself), and not food laws.  So they’re not really meant to protect the quality of food, but facilitate its trade.  Simplistically speaking.

What can you do to combat the disadvantage that puts you as a consumer?  My advice is pretty simplistic (this is what I do myself) – it is that you should shop responsibly – towards yourself if nothing else.  Buy meat and poultry locally whenever you can, and if you can’t, buy it from reputable producers (say, New Zealand lamb if your country does not produce it).  If you can afford it, don’t buy the cheapest discounted meats (especially if they are from a questionable source far away).  I compensate for the bigger single-instance expense by eating less meat, but better quality.  I’m not telling you to never buy things on sale – just that, when you do, check their source.  It’s going in your mouth, so it makes sense to consider where it came from.  The source really does make a big difference (and in flavor, too), believe me!

Being worn out from the holidays and the stress of an essay, what I really want is easy food.  And yes, this here is easy food, no matter how fancy it looks.  In fact it’s on my list of all-time easiest-to-impress-with recipes.  It also pulls together in literally no time.

It is not nearly as fiddly as it looks, and the tangy-sharp and very aromatic combination of apricots and fresh sage cut through the juicy porkiness amazingly well, and it really needs very little on the side – although if you want to make a more substantial meal, boil a few baby potatoes and toss them with parsley and butter, or simply add a bit of good bread.  But me, I am happy to shovel this away with nothing but a pile of greens and a slathering of some béarnaise sauce.  Especially seeing how I am trying to be good and lower my carbohydrate intake following all the sweets and indulgences of the holiday season.  And this, while incredibly luxurious, fits the bill very well indeed.

Yes, I do know dried apricots have carbohydrates in them.  But consider the amount I use for the entire meal, and it isn’t that much – and furthermore, they also have fiber which is never a bad addition.  Not to mention the out-of-this-world flavor!

What you need (it’s a really very short list):

• Meat mallet and some butcher’s string.  If you don’t have a mallet, a rolling pin will also work.
• Roasting tin and rack
• Meat thermometer (optional but very helpful here).

• A pork loin (size depends on how many people you are feeding – mine was 0.6kg and fed 2 to stuffedness)
• A generous pinch chili flakes
• A generous handful fresh sage (I just bought one of those fresh-herbs pots and chopped all of it up)
• 50-75g dried apricots (increase as needed if your pork loin is larger)
• Sea or fine salt (not coarse!) to taste
• A little bit of olive oil to brush the meat (if you are so inclined).

Here’s what you do:

• Preheat oven to about 225°C.  Foil your roasting tin for easy cleanup later.
• Finely chop your dried apricots and sage, mix together.  Set aside.
• Take your pork loin, rinse, pat dry, and lay out on a cutting board.  Remove all connective tissue.
• If it’s flat, butterfly it – cut into it from a side like you’d into a cake to make more layers, but not all the way, then open it up like a book, and if it’s thick, cut it open in a spiral, like a log gets cut into making veneer.  You should end up with a roughly rectangular piece of meat about 1-1.5cm thick.
• Cover it with some baking parchment or clingfilm (plastic wrap) and hit it with a mallet some to flatten it out further.  I use a combo of the large and small toothed sides of the mallet, and the flat end to finish, but be careful with the large teeth – the meat is pretty tender and you don’t want it falling into shreds.
• Remove plastic wrap, and scatter the chili flakes over the meat.  Salt lightly, and spread the apricot and sage mixture over most of the area, leaving a couple of centimeters (about an inch) on the longer side of the meat clear.
• Roll the meat up starting from the side opposite the one with a clear margin into a log.  The clear margin is there to avoid stuffing falling out too much.
• Tie with buther’s string at about 2-3cm (1 inch) intervals.  It helps to have someone else hold the knots while you tie if you aren’t so handy with those – I’m not!
• Brush with olive oil, and set on the rack seam-side up.
• Roast for about 30 minutes for a small (0.5-0.6kg loin), or until internal temperature is between 72-75°C (160-170F).  Former number for medium-well, latter for well-done.  Since this is pork, I prefer to rely on the thermometer to be sure when to take the meat out of the oven.  Underdone pork is not just dangerous but also not at all appetising to me, and overdone dried-out meat is never any fun.  So, invest 5€ in a simple metal one, it’s worth it!
• Take out of the oven and let rest tented with foil for about 10 minutes.
• Place on cutting board, remove string and slice into neat pretty apricot-jewelled slices.

Impress people.  Or just munch yourself happily.

About Bad Cookbooks and Amazing Pulled Pork

Feast of Sæhrímnir

Sometimes, I cheat.

No, not on my other half, naturally!  Pfft!  I cheat with spice mixes.  I have done so since one fateful day, many years ago, when someone with the best of intentions gifted me with a 7kg hardcover book of world cuisines – glossy, beautifully published and in full color.  It proudly lives in my storage as I reckon it’s the 2nd worst cookbook I’ve ever owned.  Or perhaps it ties for first place with “Spicy” by Marie Claire magazine  (which is the worst cookbook I ever spent wasted any money on, and I heartily recommend you to not waste money on, by the way – I regret the £1 I’ve shelled out on it in a charity shop to this day).

Anyway, about that first awful cookbook – I received it as a gift for a birthday sometime in my early 20s, and I tried, a couple of times, to cook something from it.  Except – and this is what scarred me – there is no way I could have done that properly without actual electronic chemistry-lab sensitive scale and a spice grinder.  How else would I get 17g of coarsely ground spice X and mix it with 24g of Y, and… you get the idea.  And the result was that to cook Indian, I tossed the book onto a bottom shelf, visited an Indian store, bought a few varieties of their curry powders, and that was that.  These days, I don’t touch cookbooks which prescribe ingredients in such a manner, and I buy good-quality spice mixes whenever I can.  And use most of the spices to eye/taste anyway.  So you see, this story is not so much about cookbooks I hate, but about spice mixes:  I love them.

But wait, you say, didn’t you write about how you hate the spice packets and never-ever buy them if you can help it?  Yep, I did.  But, the two are really, really not the same thing!  The pre-prepared spice packets pumped full of sugar, salt and additives and starch are the subject of much loathing.  The nice carefully blended and pre-mixed and packaged spices in pretty tins or jars, sometimes with a bit of salt but usually without sugar, and without any added unwanted stuff – those are the stuff of dreams.  Lazy, lazy dreams.  But wait, there is more to the indulgence – on a fairly recent visit to Essencefabriken, I’ve bought a baggy of their propritary Cajun spice mix – and visiting a proper spice shop, sniffing all the spices and mixes they have, and then telling them how much of each you want, and getting it all weighed out for me on an antique balance-scale in polished brass – this is the posh life of a spoiled home cook.

But I could talk about spices and spice shops for hours, and I’d promised a recipe for pulled pork.  A fair warning to you – this will be long.  You I can’t really describe the process and all the details shorter.  You may be able to, but not me.  I like my instructions to be on the exhaustive side, so please bear with me here, ok?

So, here we are finally getting to the pork in question – pulled pork is easy to make.  The hardest bits are mixing the spices (or not, see above!), and resisting the temptation to cook it at a higher temperature than the recommended 130C, and for a shorter than the recommended 6-12 hours (and that time varies wildly).  I freely admit to being lazy, but there is an ingrained, in all of us who cook, tendency to want to check on food and keep seeing if it’s ready yet, which is very, very counterproductive when trying to make pulled pork.

After approximately 6.5 hours in veeery low oven.

And yes, the slow lazy cooking process which takes many hours and during which the oven and meat appear to be barely doing anything, it is very counterintuitive to the modern in-a-hurry cook, with our tight schedules and deadlines and tendency to think that any meat which is cooked longer than an hour must end up overcooked.  But fear not, as not all meat is meant to be eaten bleu (barely warmed up by searing), and while it may not look like there’s a lot going on during that time, trust me, while you wait (and you’re better off reading, working, bathing, sleeping or walking outside in meantime), magic happens in that oven.

To sum this up in short – you brine your cut of pork overnight submerged in brine entirely, and then you place it in a Dutch oven or a baking dish, stick a meat thermometer in it, place it all into that oven and forget about it for the duration.  Which goes against the “oh my god it’s going to burn if I don’t check it yet again!” instinct (which is right in about 19/20 dishes you I cook).

How-to is first here, because the how is more important than the “what spice mix” in this case:

Note:  If you do not own a meat thermometer, buy one.  Trying to cook this without one is near-doomed to failure.  I’m serious, and I am the one who routinely cooks meat by eye – slow-cooking meat in the oven requires one and there is no way around it.  If you cook tens of them every week and they are in a uniform weight from same pig farmer, or if you are good with a smoker on a barbecue, maybe, but not in the oven.

Note 2:  This process must be started 2 days in advance.  So plan ahead accordingly.  No, you cannot make it less, and no, there are no shortcuts around that I know of which’d not make the end result worse.  On the other hand, these 2 days are really not spent making efforts – it is just the time which is needed.

• Add your brine ingredients (recipe follows) to a pot large enough to hold your meat submerged, and bring to a boil.  Stir, remove from heat and cool to lukewarm or completely.  I stuck the pot out on the balcony  for an hour or two – October night in Stockholm works fine as a refrigerator.  Don’t be tempted to put the hot pot of brine in your fridge.  Bad for fridge, bad for your food and thus just a Bad Idea™!
• Rinse the pork shoulder (karre, Boston Butt – I used boneless, but bone-in works fine for this too), and pat it dry.
• Once brine is cooled, submerge the meat in the brine, cover and place in the refrigerator for a min of 12 hours, up to 24 if your cut is larger than 2kg (~4lbs).
• After brining time is done, preheat your oven to 130°C (270F).
• Take the meat out of brine (use your hands, they’ll get wet and messy later anyway!), rinse it lightly under running water to remove excess salt, and discard the brine (do not reuse, ew!).  Pat the meat dry, and rub it all over with a sufficient amount of spice mix (see recipe and suggestions below) to coat all sides.
• Lightly grease a baking/roasting dish.  For very large cuts (over 2kg), I recommend a roasting dish with a rack, but for a smaller piece like mine (just over 1kg), no rack is really needed.  Place the meat into the dish, and insert a meat thermometer into the thickest part of the pig.  Note that about halfway through cooking, the thermometer may need to be pushed deeper in, as the meat will change shape somewhat.
• Place the dish in the oven, and set timer for 3 hours if it is a small cut, or 6-8 hours if it is large.  This is not necessary but if you are at home, it’s not a bad idea to check at that point, possibly to push the thermometer deeper in.
• Roast meat until it reaches internal temperature of 90°C (195F).  Yes, it’s way beyond what is considered “done” for pork, but that is the temperature you want to roast to (and yes, I am the one saying it, the woman who likes her beef barely-warmed and her lamb red-to-pink).  Note that the temperature advance will plateau at 75-85°C (170-185F) and will crawl up very slowly from there.  It’s normal, due to fat rendering and collagen turning into gelatin – see details below.
• Remove from oven, cover in foil, and allow to rest for 1-2 hours before arming yourself with 2 forks and shredding the quivering (and it’ll quiver by that point!) piece of meat into pulled pork strands.
• Serve with your choice of bread (I baked a part-wholemeal long-ferment sourdough which I should possibly blog about at some point, but any good crusty bread will do – or just, any fresh bread really!).  The dripping off the meat can be either made into a sauce of your liking and choice, or used as-is (don’t forget a food warmer candle underneath to prevent it congealing into unappetizing slab of lard at the table).

Now, the recipe, such as it is, and some answers:

You need a fatty, tough cut of pork, which may be counterintuitive when you are going for a final result of such melting tenderness.  But yes, do not touch that pork loin and put down the tenderloin.  Get the cheap, fatty shoulder – you need that fat and collagen which the loins do not have to create this.  The cut usually recommended for this is shoulder – bone in or out – top “butt” or arm; karre in Swedish.  I don’t honestly know if the ham (back leg) would be as good in this, but different cuts of meat are used for this in the USA, and I imagine any similar cut of pig would do.  My boneless shoulder cut was small but it worked just fine – a very large cut of this sort can be cooked very well (even better imho) but it will take a long, long time.

1.2kg cut of pork fed 3 very hungry people to stuffing.  Would have worked for 4 too, really.

The amount of brine depends on the size of your cut.  Make enough brine.  You can measure the meat by putting it in the pot before making brine, to see how much brine you’d need to cover it.  Remember that meat will initially displace it, at least in the 1kg:1L ratio.

Brine recipe:   Per 1 gallon (4L) of water, use:

• 1 cup (2.4dl) coarse salt without iodine (sea salt is great)
• 1/2 cup (1.2dl) molasses sugar (farinsocker)
• 4 heaping tablespoons of whatever spices you want to use.  I used Essencefabriken’s Cajun mix.  Just make sure your spice mix is a mix of spices, and does not containg significant % of salt.
• 2 teaspoons of red chili flakes (optional, for those of us who love the heat)

Scale the recipe as needed, put in the pot, boil, cool, ready to submerge meat.  Roasting fowl really benefits from this treatment too – just remember that if you use a whole bird rather than a cut of meat, it needs to be taken out of the brine 2-4 hours before cooking to allow the meat to absorb the brine from skin’s inside.

I used about 3 heaping tablespoons of Cajun spice mix on my 1.2kg piece of pork after brining.  This will depend on how large the cut is and how thickly you coat.

The meat will stabilize at certain temperatures, most notably the 75-85°C range mentioned above.  It is because once a certain internal temperature is reached, first fat, and then collagen, will begin to liquefy.  You want this to happen in order to make the meat tender and shreddably soft – collagen is what makes the meat tough so you want that gone, and the melting fat is what keeps the meat from drying.  Both good things.

If you attempt to speed the process up by cooking at higher temperature, the meat will probably be pretty good, but it won’t be as moist or as soft.  Minor changes to temperature advised are no risk – it’s a very flexible cooking process, but if you up the oven temperature to 170°C or above, it’s a whole different kettle of fish.  Or a different pan of pork, as it happens.

Different cuts from different pigs will take different amount of time to cook.  It is because they have different ages, different amount of collagen content, different fat marbling, etc.  This is not a dish you should expect to be done by hour X unless you have a pretty good idea and have done this many times.  A small cut like mine could take 5 hours to cook – or it could take 8 or 9.  It is not unheard of for the cooking process to take 20 hours for the larger cuts (over 3kg).  So, if you want to serve this to your guests, cook it overnight and let it rest, then shred and if needs be, cover in foil and reheat gently before they arrive.

Long cooking will make the meat shrink.  Depends on what else you feed your guests or how much of a meat-eater they are, you may want to allow +1 or 2 people in your calculations.  Besides, leftovers from this are fantastic in soup, pasta, sandwiches, tacos, Tex-Mex in general, and a thousand other things.

So, with all of this in mind, the time and wait and the reading of this post which got hugely long, the results are amazing and they are worth it.

Rustic Sourdough Loaf

We devoured ours with about half a loaf of bread between the three of us, and no other sauce than the drippings from the pork itself, and a fruity light white wine to wash it all down.  And it was amazing.  And I will make it again and again, and you should too.  Unless you are Jewish or Muslim.  But then, I heard that this method works really well on fatty lamb shoulders and legs too.  Just so you know!

And I know that you know you want it.