Chinese Style Roast Hand of Pork

Only a couple of weeks into the Everything But The Oink challenge and I seem to have developed a new tradition.  For the last two weeks I have been leaving the house early on Saturday morning to visit Leeds Kirkgate Market.  My sole intention, to buy pig bits.  Last week I had a particular cut in mind, liver for that evening's meal.  I was also after trotters but the market was a trotter free zone that day.

This week I decided to let the market be my guide.  I have learnt, especially when buying fish, that if I plan a meal too carefully the key ingredient is often unobtainable.  This was certainly the case with last weeks trotters.  There were pig's heads a plenty last week but none at all this week.  What I did find and buy was a pork hand joint.  Not to be confused with trotters, the hand is from the lower part of the shoulder and still has the bone attached.

You cook hand the same way as shoulder*, but as I had been very traditional with my Roast Shoulder of Pork, I decided to have a bit of fun. I mentioned my porky find on twitter and a barrage of advice was quickly tweeted in my direction.  Pulled pork was mentioned more than once** but I wanted to play around with the flavours more.

I had a couple of options rattling around my internal cookbook.  The first option was Caribbean.  I thought a Jerk style rub would be splendid over the flesh prior to cooking.  In the end though, I decided on a Chinese inspired roast.  The deciding factor was a Guardian article I found about cheap cuts of meat.

Matthew Fort suggests that dousing cider vinegar over the joint prior to roasting helps to cut through the fatty nature of the meat.  My mind quickly made the leap from cider vinegar to rice wine vinegar and the decision was made.  I seasoned the hand with szechuan pepper,  5 spice and a little salt, poured over the vinegar, some soy sauce and water and banged it in the oven.

In total, although the joint only required and hour and a half, I cooked it for around two and a half hours and let it rest for an additional hour.  The only real tip is to keep an eye on the liquid level.  I topped up the pan a couple of times with more water and in the process the sauce for the meal made itself.  I warmed the carved pork in the pan juices*** and served it with rice and steamed pak choi with oyster sauce and the whole meal was delicious, a far cry from roast pork with apple sauce.  We have easily enough pork left over for another meal later in the week too, which isn't always the case with small joints of meat.

Not everyone will be able to find and buy hand easily as it is so often boned and rolled into shoulder joints.  If you do happen across it, or you can ask specifically, give it a try.  I hope you're not disappointed.

*in fact all roasting cuts of pork can bee cooked the same way, 30 minutes per 450g plus 30 minutes does the trick.
**it is the go to meat meal of the moment.
***hence the almost beefy colour of the pork.

Cider Braised Pork Loin Chop

Last Saturday I took the bus into town so that I could buy the liver and onions for that evening's meal.  I was so surprised at how cheap my bill came to in the butchers* that I panicked and also bought a couple of pork loin chops.  I was so flummoxed by the low price of my offal that I asked for chops without specifying pork or lamb.  I left feeling rather sheepish.

The pork loin chops went into the freezer as I didn't know when they would be cooked, but I needn't have been so hasty.  Meal planning on Sunday afternoon saw them being needed straight away.  I usually grill pork chops** but I wanted to try something a little different in the name of Everything But The Oink.

During the Olympic Food Challenge I braised a lot of food and it always made a delicious meal***.  I thought that braising the chops would be a nice way of cooking them and provide a delicious gravy to boot.  I'm going to try and avoid the cliché of apples and cider with as many pieces of pork as possible, but braising chops in cider with apples had to be done.

I based the braise on one of Nigel Slater's simple suppers, omitting the juniper, sage and whole apples.  As I expected, the chops were perfectly cooked and the gravy was superb.  The loin provides a lot of the pork that we eat, from chops to back bacon.  Along with cooking the other parts of the pig I'm going to try to add more variety in how I cook my pork.

*under £1 for two slices of pig liver and three rashers of smoked back bacon.
**we do eat a lot of pork chops.  This is probably why I want to eat more pig this year, to try to redress the balance. 
***give or take the pigs trotters braised in sauerkraut.

Liver, Bacon and Onions

Before I embarked on this challenge to eat everything that pigs have to offer I checked with Z that she would be happy to come along for the ride.  When we first met, Z was a vegetarian and I couldn't cook.  A lot of water has passed under an awful lot of bridges since them.  I am now at my happiest when cooking and Z is a card carrying member of the "I like my steak bloody" club.  She is not happy to eat all meat though.  Lamb is still firmly off the menu, as is offal.

I was braced for Every Thing But The Oink to be vetoed before it had even begun but, to my surprise, Z said yes.  I'm not however, prepared to eat pig parts for the sake of it.  I want to try and celebrate each cut and make meals that I'll return to time and time again.  Offal is cheap after all.  If I'm to convince Z that we should eat more of it I'll have my work cut out.

Tonight I've cooked the first of the "fifth quarter" cuts, liver, and Z has dodged a bullet by handily arranging to go around to a friend's house for the evening.  I have cooked with pigs liver recently, making pate for Christmas, but that was last year.  I wanted to enjoy the flavour and texture of the liver so I decided on the traditional meal of liver, bacon and onions.

I'll admit that this is a meal that I have never cooked before.  I found this recipe by the Hairy Bikers and, with a glass of wine in hand, set about cooking up a feast.  Frying floured meat and onions is hardly a tricky task but I'm glad I followed their recipe.  The resulting gravy was possibly the best I have ever made and I'm not too proud to admit that the addition of tomato ketchup is a good idea.  I can't imagine that this will be a dish that Z will ever warm to, but I'm a huge fan and will be having liver again.

Roast Shoulder of Pork

I'm going to start this post with an admission.  I have done startlingly little research into the world of eating pig.  That's to say, I've eaten my fair share of pork in the 36 years I've been on this planet, but I have not really looked into the bits that don't regularly end up on your dinner plate.  Everything But The Oink kind of snuck up on me last week and since then I have spent some quality time with Fergus Henderson and Anthony Bourdain*.  I have unearthed some fantastic recipes, some of which haven't turned Z's stomach, but I'm no closer to compiling a full list of the composite edible parts for the challenge.

With that in mind and not wanting to lose any time while I rummage around the internet, I decided to crack on with a trusted favourite cut of pork.  Shoulder has been my go to roasting joint for as long as I remember.  It was always my Mum's choice and I think her influence has rubbed off on me.  Mum probably chose it due to cost, but I love the extra fat that you don't get with leg or loin joints.

Before we go any further, it has dawned on me that there will be a lot of talk of fat on Everything But The Oink.  You may well be prepared to read about offal but there are people out there, to whom even the mention of lard would render** them queezy and requiring smelling salts.  I am not going to hide away from the fat. The layers of fat in a shoulder joint shoulder mean that the meat won't dry out during cooking.  You should still pay attention to the cooking time and rest the meat after cooking, to make sure you get a really juicy bit of meat.

Of course it will always help if you have a good lump of pig.  Today was Leeds Farmers Market on Briggate, so I hot footed it into town in the hope of securing a nice bit of pig.  I was really happy when the first stall I hit was Tancred Field Farm's.  Tancred raise rare breed pigs and cattle on their farm to the north of Wetherby.  I know I won't be eating pork of this calibre for every meal in the challenge so it was great to start off with such lovely meat.

Typically you should roast shoulder for 30 minutes per 450g plus 30 minutes at 180˚c.  To make sure I had decent crackling*** I started the roasting at 225˚c and reduced it after half an hour.  As ours was only a small joint it was out of the oven and resting in an hour and a half.  I let the meat rest for the time it took to cook some vegetables.  I also made some apple sauce, it would have been rude not to.

I plan on adding pages for suppliers and a full list of the cuts of meat so that you can cross reference my endeavours better, now if you'll excuse me there are leftovers with my name on them.

*Their books that is.  I have not had the pleasure of meeting either of these culinary muses.
**Oh I fully plan on rendering back fat...I may even salt some!
***You can't have roast pork without crackling, it's like roast beef without Yorkshire Puddings or chicken without stuffing.  You can have the best piece of pork in the world and your roast will be ruined if the crackling isn't up to scratch.

The whole hog!

With every new year comes a new set of challenges and goals.  Some people even set themselves New Years Resolutions*.  I was in the market for a challenge but I couldn't think what to do.  In November 2010 I started writing a food blog, Tonight's Menu, an almost daily diary of the food I cook at home.  The challenge wasn't to keep a food diary or to widen my culinary horizons but to see if I could improve my written English.  Over the course of almost three hundred posts, I think I have managed to do just that.

Half way through writing Tonight's Menu another challenge appeared in the shape of the Olympic Food Challenge.  The Olympics were everywhere you turned last summer.  I thought it would be interesting to see if you could eat a national dish from all of the participating nations.  With the help of eleven intrepid food bloggers** we just about made it to the finishing line.

Then, this afternoon, out of the blue, a tweet caught my eye.

"I want to do an eating challenge this year"

Without stopping to check my tweet for typing errors I suggested that they should eat an entire pig over the course of the year.  It then dawned on me that they were after more of a Man vs Food type challenge but by then I had started thinking.  For a long time I have held the belief that if you are willing to eat meat you should be willing to eat every part of the animal that laid down its life for you. 

Nose to tail eating, including the squidgy bits, is something I aspire to but not something that I'm evangelical about.  Until the Olympic Food Challenge I hadn't eaten pigs trotters.  Liver tends to be kept for pate.  Black pudding is a must for a full English but after that, I have a lot of ground to make up and a lot of bits to eat.  I'm planning, over the course of 2013 to eat everything that a pig has to offer, from the snout to the tail and everything in between.  I do not intend to eat an entire pig, however, as I already consume a fair amount of chops, bacon and sausages I may well do that anyway.

So cute I could eat them!

I can see some stumbling blocks ahead.  I know that I do not own a pan large enough to cook a pig's head in, I'm not sure if I'm ready to try trotters again and I have absolutely no idea where to buy testicles in Leeds.  If you have the answers to any of these problems, please let me know.  If you just want to know how I'm getting on, come back soon.

*In 2000 I resolved never to make any more New Year Resolutions, to date this is the only resolution I have ever kept.
** Two hundred and four Nations took part in London 2012, there was no way that I could have achieved that on my own.