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!