A Porky Dilemma

A preliminary note - be picky about your pig

These days, pork is much less fatty that it used to be. The public’s taste tends to be for lean meat, so animals are now bred lean. This is why many people complain that roast pork is ‘too dry’ – the modern meat contains less veins of fat, despite the fact that fat is what used to give proper roast pork its moisture and deep flavour. However, some specialist breeders and food outlets are fighting this trend, particularly by introducing more unusual breeds of pig whose meat has fallen off the map. I’d urge you to search out this superior pork – it’ll make all the difference to your meal.

What to do with pork fillet?

Pork fillet is one of those things I’m never sure what to do with. I found some lurking at the bottom of my freezer recently, and immediately panicked about how to use it up. Just like beef fillet, it’s a lean cut which benefits from quick cooking to keep it tender and moist. Because it’s actually fat that gives meat a lot of its flavour, pork fillet (again like its beefy counterpart) is not, perhaps, the most flavoursome cut. Its appeal rests in its tender texture. However, unlike beef fillet, it can’t be eaten raw: unless your meat is carefully sourced and checked, raw pork can carry tapeworm, hookworm and various other nasties. So all those carpaccios and rare steaks – all that’s best about well-sourced beef fillet – are out of the equation with pork.

How, then, to make the best of this cut of lovely meat? With quick but thorough cooking, I think, and with lots of flavour added to make up for its lack of fat. A stir-fry springs to mind. The one below uses Thai flavours but is not authentically Thai, because while I love the Asian ingredients I’ve used here, I’m not nearly experienced enough in their proper use to presume to tell you about it. I can only tell you what I like to do with them.

A bit about stir-frying

To me, the principle of stir-frying is to cook your ingredients fast in a shallow layer of hot oil, continually moving them around by stirring them or tossing them in the pan keep the cooking even. It’s similar to the technique to French call sauté. You need to use oil with a high smoke point (if you’re not sure what that means, it’s the temperature at which the oil starts to smoke in the pan. Any cooking oil should do, but ideally not olive oil, which burns too easily). Later, I’ve said to ‘deglaze’ the pan with a mixture of lime juice, soy sauce and Thai fish sauce. Again, this is both a French and an Asian technique, and how I do it is not particularly authentic. Still, I like it.

The list of ingredients is long for this one, as is the method. It’s a lot easier than it looks, although the amount of chopping may sound a bit excessive. Do you really want to spend half an hour or more chopping stuff up? I think you do, for two reasons: First, it’s therapeutic, especially if you stick on a bit of music or catch up with some TV. You might even enjoy it. Second, you’ll definitely enjoy the meal. And from personal experience, I can guarantee that the leftovers taste fantastic cold the next day.

Make it your own!

As usual, remember that you can always put your own stamp on your food. By all means use different vegetables to the ones I've specified: red pepper springs to mind for some reason. Also fresh bean sprouts. The tail end of a beef fillet would be a fantastic replacement for the pork - ask your butcher. It's a lot cheaper than the fat end! Try adding some good-quality Thai curry paste (with the veg) and extra coconut milk (at the end) to turn your stir-fry into an extra-quick curry. Or you could marinade the pork for a while, with a bit of chilli, lime, garlic, soy sauce, nam pla and so on...

As always, the culinary world’s your oyster. Or your pork fillet, in this case. 

Ingredients

1 large courgette

Piece of whole pork fillet – it should look like the about same amount as you have of courgette

1 lime, zest and juice

1 handful unsalted cashews

1 chunk fresh ginger (about the size of your thumb), peeled and grated

1 clove garlic, crushed

1 chilli, deseeded and finely chopped

3-6 spring onions

Splash of soy sauce

Splash of nam pla (Thai fish sauce)

About 1/3 of a tin of coconut milk

Vegetable or sesame oil (olive at a pinch, but ideally not)

Small bunch of coriander

Thin noodles (fresh or dried)

Method

First of all, get all your ingredients chopped and prepared. Zest and juice the lime; grate the ginger; peel and crush the garlic; de-seed and finely chop the chilli (include the seeds if you like a bit more heat). Pull most of the stems off the coriander and roughly chop it. Cut the white end of the spring onions into small, wafer-thin rounds, and the floppy green end into thin strips. Open your tin of coconut milk and stir the solids into the liquid underneath. Fish your cashews out from the bag. You want everything to hand once you start cooking.

To prepare the courgette, peel off thin strips with a vegetable peeler. Cut these in half widthways, then pile them up and slice them lengthways into quarters. You should end up with thin, ribbon-shaped pieces that are about half the length of the original courgette.

If your noodles are dried, you need to cook them: pop them into salted water which has reached a rolling boil. Once they’re floppy and a bit softened, drain them and put them straight into a bowl of cold water to cool. The best way of telling if they’re done is to taste them! It doesn’t matter if they’re a tiny bit underdone, as you’re going to heat them up once you’ve finished the stir-fry anyway.

Final bit of preparation is the pork. First, slice the fillet into thin rounds. They should be less than 0.5cm thick if you can manage it (the main thing is to have a sharp knife!). Then slice up the rounds into thin strips, about the width of your strips of courgette or thinner.

Now you’re there with your preparation, you’re only ten minutes or so away from dinner. Hang in there – this is the good bit.

Pour a little pool of oil into the most non-stick frying pan or wok you have. Put it over a high heat until the oil is really hot. It shouldn’t be smoking – that means it’s close to burning – but it should be just below that. Drop a piece of pork in to test; if it sizzles, you’re on the money.

Slip all the pork into the frying pan, taking care it doesn’t spit hot oil all over you. Cook it fast until each piece is golden brown all over, keeping it moving with a spoon or spatula and always making sure it doesn’t stick. Then take it out of the pan and set it aside of a moment.

Now for the veg. Keep the pan hot and don’t worry about changing the oil – all that flavour from the pork will get soaked up by your veg as it cooks. Add the chilli, ginger and lime zest first and cook for half a minute or so. Then add the garlic and give it another half minute before you put in the courgette and both cuts of spring onion. Once the courgette looks fully cooked everything else should be too, so add cashews and put the pork back in at this point.

Now you deglaze – add the lime juice, soy sauce and nam pla, and scrape all the flavoursome goodies off the bottom of the pan as it bubbles madly. Turn the heat down a notch and stir in the coconut milk, then scrape the whole lot out of the pan and put it somewhere warm.

Last but not least, put the noodles in the pan (again, don’t clean it first) and stir them around a bit over the heat for a minute or two. At this point, if you like, you can add the stir-fry mixture to the noodles. I like to keep them separate for some mysterious reason, but each to their own.

Serve up in bowls, with a slice of lime and a generous sprinkling of chopped coriander to bring the colours back to life. Was it worth all that chopping? Of course it was!

The Joys of Wild Garlic

All about wild garlic: your new favourite herb

Known officially as ‘Allium Ursinum’ and colloquially as bear’s garlic, wood garlic and ‘ramsons’, the wild garlic plant is a delicious free addition to the larder at this time of year. You can find them growing all over the country, especially in woodlands and by roadsides, and even in parts of London!

They have shiny, dark green leaves shaped like a pointed oval and, as the season progresses, beautiful, star-like white flowers. More importantly, however, they smell very strongly of onions – you’ll be able to locate them in the woods just by following their smell.

Unlike domestic or cultivated garlic, wild garlic leaves are much more widely used than its roots or bulbs, as these are much smaller than those of cultivated garlic. However, the whole plant is edible, so if you want to give the roots a go then do! The flowers are also edible and look wonderful sprinkled onto salad.

How to pick

When you’re picking, try to leave some buds so that the plant can reproduce, and there’ll be some around for you next year! If you’re after the leaves, pinch the leaf off at the stem, leaving the root in the ground if you can – the leaves will often grow back a second time if you leave them enough stem.

When I picked my lot a few days ago, the buds were sprouting but hadn’t yet flowered (they look a bit like pointy seed pods). These ‘pods’ are absolutely delicious pan-fried in butter and olive oil and sprinkled with a little salt – crispy and soft, and tasting mildly of roast garlic. I thoroughly recommend you pick some if you’re out and about.

You need to take a little care when picking wild garlic as there are a few plants that look similar but aren’t edible, notably Lily of the Valley. There’s freely available advice on the internet about telling them apart, but the main clue is the smell – you’ll notice an oniony scent anywhere where wild garlic grows, and it’s really pungent when you crush a leaf between your fingers. Don’t worry: it doesn’t taste nearly as strong as it smells! In addition, the flowers of Lily of the Valley are bell-shaped, rather like snowdrops, and its leaves grow from one central stem, whereas wild garlic leaves each grow individually on one stem.

Eating it

The younger leaves of wild garlic are best for salads, as they’re a little more tender. When picking, you’ll sometimes find them towards the edge of a cluster, or underneath the larger, older leaves. They’re also wonderful chopped into ribbons and added towards the end of a stir-fry, especially with some julienne of ginger. You can add the younger roots to stir-fries as well – treat them a bit like spring onion. Don’t leave out the older leaves – they’re great for soup, since you’ll be pureeing it anyway, and you can also blanche them in some boiling salted water until they wilt and eat them a bit like spinach.

So that’s old leaves, young leaves, roots, flowers, buds; soup, salad, stir-fries, blanched leaves, pan-fried buds. You can even make wild garlic pesto (no joke – the recipe’s below). This could well be the most useful plant in the universe. Now cook with it!

Wild Garlic Soup

Ingredients

Knob of butter

1 large onion

1 large potato

Medium-sized mixing bowl full of wild garlic leaves

50ml white wine

1 litre chicken stock – preferably homemade, but stock cubes are fine

2 tbs crème fraiche or cream

Salt and pepper

Method

Roughly chop the onion and potato and wash the garlic leaves well. Sweat the onion in the butter until it’s translucent and soft, then add the potato and sweat for another minute or so.

Deglaze the pan with the white wine (just pour it in and scrape the yummy bits off the bottom), and let it reduce to a light syrup, then add the chicken stock and let it simmer for 20 minutes or until the potato is well cooked through.

Once the potato is cooked through, add the garlic leaves and cook for another two minutes once they’ve wilted. Purée the soup until it is a consistent colour and texture, then add the crème fraiche or cream if you’re using it, and stir it in well. Taste it, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Then pour into a lovely big bowl and enjoy!

As a garnish, you have a few lovely options. You can set aside a few leaves of garlic, and slice these into really thin strips to top each bowl, with a spoonful of cream. Or you can make up a little bowl of pesto from the recipe below and serve the soup with a blob swirled in. Again, this looks fantastic with a bit of cream swirled in too!

Wild Garlic Pesto

Ingredients

A couple of large handfuls of wild garlic

1 small shallot

50-60g hard, salty cheese such as parmesan

50-60g pine nuts or shelled, peeled walnuts

80 ml olive oil, plus enough to cover the pesto in the jam jar

½ tsp salt and ½ tsp pepper

1 tsp sugar

Method

Wash and thoroughly dry the garlic leaves, grate the cheese, and very roughly chop the shallot and nuts. If you need to peel the walnuts, blanche them for a few minutes in rapidly boiling water and try to peel them while they're hot: it's a fiddly job at the best of times, but this makes it a little easier.

Pulse the nuts and shallot in the food processor until broken up somewhat, then add the garlic leaves and oil and continue to pulse until the garlic is chopped up very small and a consistent texture is achieved.

Fold the cheese into the mixture, then season to taste with salt, pepper and sugar. Pour it into clean jam jars, then top up with oil until the pesto is totally covered (this is important to keep it fresh and green).

Keep your pesto in the fridge; it’s at its best up to a week after making it. It’s great with meat, particularly chicken and sausages; with soft, mild cheeses or salads; and with the soup recipe above. It’s also yummy on pasta!

A final note: I've just looked out of my kitchen window into the crummy, bin-filled yard that counts as my garden, and guess what's growing in all the corners? You got it: wild garlic. It's probably closer than you think!

A Breakfast Treat for Easter Morning

Easter is on the way, and I’ve been searching high and low for the ideal egg dish to kick off my Sunday morning. Lately I’ve grown rather tired of the high street obsession with the chocolate egg. This tradition originates in the pagan fertility festivals which were present before Christianity’s Easter celebrations replaced them. Even the name ‘Easter’ is supposed to stem from ‘Eostre’, the Old English name for a fertility goddess. While an egg may look hard and dead, new life always lurks within, making them representative of fertility and resurrection and a convenient symbol both for the Christian resurrection myth and pagan springtime celebrations. Nothing says ‘springtime’ quite like a fresh egg, and for me, a chocolate one just doesn’t quite say it loudly enough.

Like many of us, I used to start Easter Sunday with an enormous pile of chocolate eggs. Then I graduated to fresh ones, hard-boiled with onion skins to dye them mottled brown, and finally to the very peak of eggy perfection – the four-and-a-half-minute soft boil, with just a sprinkling of salt in the yolk. But was it true perfection? This year I wanted to find out. Not for me the soft-boiled egg of former years; I’m out for something new. And I think I might have found it.

Known in French as ‘oeufs en cocotte’, or ‘eggs in a pot’ this simple dish is an absolute winner for a luxury breakfast or lunch dish. In its basic form, an oeuf en cocotte is made simply by cracking an egg into a buttered ramekin or similar small dish, popping a knob of butter on top, and cooking it in a bain marie for around 15 minutes in a hot oven. Remove the bain marie from the equation and you’ve got a baked egg – a British version of the French classic.

As usual at PDKTC, I’m fascinated with the number of possible variations on this basic theme. You can replace the butter with milk or cream or even (I’m told) tomato ketchup! You can line the ramekin with anything from slices of ham, bacon or salmon to tomato ragu, pan-fried asparagus or cooked aubergine. The flavour variations are pretty much infinite – any combination of herbs or spices can be blended with the butter, milk or cream to seep their way into the egg as it cooks.

The recipe I’ve given below is an utterly luxurious smoked salmon and cream version which will go down a storm on Easter morning. Like all baked egg recipes, though, at its heart it’s ludicrously simple as well as infallibly impressive. Whether you’re showing off to your parents or getting in some brownie points with your other half, I thoroughly recommend an oeuf en cocotte this Eastertide! As usual, have fun and experiment. Who knows, maybe the chocolate eggs will have to wait until lunchtime this year...

Oeufs en cocotte with smoked salmon and cream

Ingredients

Per ramekin:

Butter

2 slices smoked salmon

1 egg

1 tablespoon double cream

A good sprinkling of parmesan

Salt and pepper

Method

Pre-heat your oven to 180°C.

Butter the ramekin and line it with a layer of smoked salmon all over. Try to get it round about in line with the edges, but don’t worry too much if it overlaps slightly – the salmon shrinks a bit as it cooks.

Slightly season the salmon, then carefully crack in the egg. Try not to break the yolk, but don’t worry too much if you do!

Spoon over the cream until the egg is pretty much covered – it takes around a tablespoon for my ramekins, but it depends on the size you use. Sprinkle over a good amount of finely grated parmesan, and some more salt and pepper. Go a bit easy on the salt, because there’s a lot in the parmesan already.

Boil a kettle while you set out your ramekins in a high-sided baking tray or large saucepan. Pop it in the oven, and pour in the water until it reaches around halfway up the ramekin. Don’t overfill it, or bizarrely the egg will take a lot longer to cook!

Close up the oven and leave it to cook for 15-18 minutes, depending on how well-done you like your egg. The egg will look a bit wobbly even when it’s fully cooked because of the liquid cream. The cheese on top should be golden-brown and bubbly.

Serve with a slice of hot, buttery toast for breakfast, or some salad and crusty bread for a delicious light lunch.

Enjoy, and have a very, very Happy Easter!