Roasted and Fried Rolled Shoulder of Pork

This is another recipe involving crispy pig skin. The other two entires, puffy and crunchy, were the basis for this attempt. It uses a picnic roast, which is from the shoulder, but cheaper than the Boston butt.
Ingredients:
1 each pork picnic roast/pork arm picnic
salt
soy sauce
brown sugar
pepper
frying fat
Method:
Lay the shoulder skin side up and take off all of the meat resting above the two bones and joint. This will leave you with a slab of skin with a little fat and meat underneath it.

Rolled and baked shoulder

The bones and rest of the shoulder(a majority of it will be left behind) can be use for something else. Lay the slab you have removed flesh side up and season with salt, pepper, and sugar. Add a few dashes of the soy to the very center of the meat and roll the skin over so that the open ends of skin meet. Hold this roll tightly and secure with several knots tied with thin twine.

After frying, the skin puffs

Rub the outside with more salt and bake at 325F for 2 hours. Turn it over, turn down the oven to 250F and bake for an additional 3 hours. Remove from the oven and pan fry in very hot oil so that the skin puffs. Slice once it cools slightly.

The cross section

The skin is a hybrid of crunchy and puffy, the meat is tender and juicy.

Plate it up!

Roasted and Fried Rolled Shoulder of Pork on a duck fat and sour cream bun with sweet and sour mustard sauce

Regrettably,

Adam

Chicharrón - The Other Style

While I was doing research on fried pork skin, I noticed there are two basic categories, with any number of variations on each. The super puffy version, (I already covered here), and the less puffy more crunchy version. This time I'm going to deal with the less puffed, but crunchier, style. This will be more of an account of the different trials I did rather than a recipe.
The glorious piece of fat-back you can see pictured was my testing medium.
I cut out a few pieces, baked one, covered, at 250F for 7 hours, oil poached one at 207F for 7 hours and, water poached one at 207F for 7 hours.
After letting all of these cool, just like with the other style, you want to fry them in hot oil. I cut a slice off of each and threw them into 400F oil. The baked and water poached reacted about the same in the oil, they both created huge bursting pockets of steam, which if I didn't have a splatter guard, would have spewed oil all over anything within 3 feet. They did turn into crunchy fried pork, but the way to go is cooked in a fat (it pops less, but still use a guard).

So now that I have some oil poached fat-back I had to figure the best way to finish it. I trimmed off the meat because it was a totally separate layer in terms of texture and cooking time (it crisps before the fat). This left me with 1.5cm worth of fat sitting on top of skin. Being sure not to go through the skin, I made several cuts into the fat to allow oil to crisp in-between the cuts.

Frying the fat cut like this forces the skin and fat to curve and open, crisping the large section of fat. I enjoyed this result the most. I can't draw a conclusion on frying pork fat, skin and meat yet, but I know gently poaching pork fat and skin in fat, letting it cool, slicing it to increase the surface area, and then frying in hot oil makes a very tasty treat. Here is what it looked like.

 Plate it up!

Pork Fat-Back Chicharrón with Glazed Broccoli Rabe, Lacto-Fermented Beets, Rhubarb Compote and Lemon Zest

I am going to try this again with a section of pork belly, which has sections of fat and meat that are more intertwined than the stark contrast of layers from the back. This should prevent the muscle layers from being to dry and the fat layers from being to greasy, although I don't think fried fat-back, done this way, is too greasy.

Insurmountably,

Adam

Chicharrón

The first time I ate a "pork rind" I was about 16. So, I'll be the first to say I am not an expert on fried pork skin, at least in the authentic-traditional sense. However, I have started to make a lot of one version of Chicharrónes that I enjoy. This post is my most recent recipe, and so far has been producing the best results. The reason I want to clarify this is because there is some confusion around how fried pork skin should be named. There are a lot of different way ways to fry skin(with a lot of different steps in-between), and they all produce very different results. Sometimes it isn't even fried, it can be baked or roasted. I found a lot of confilcting information during my research for this adventure in fried pork skin. I've heard many different interpretations, but here is my version. Some people are religious about pork skin(especially when it is fried) and I do not want to offend anyone.
Lets' do this.

You can use skin from anywhere on the pig. I have not tested different parts side by side, but in this post there is skin from the hind leg and back. Both seem to perform identically, but if I can get a cross-sample of the whole animal together it will share the results. Maybe there is a prime area for the best fried skin?  Whatever part of the animal you choose, you are going to want to remove most of the fat and meat before cooking.
Again this may not be true in all preparations, but just bear with me here. The skin pictured here is from the back, and there is a decent (this was a small pig) section of "fat-back". There is also a small amount of muscle. These are both precious and have potential in other applications (lard, sausage, sauce), so trim and save. Start by laying the slab, skin side down. Place your knife just above the skin(you are going to cut into fat) and fillet the pork back like you would a fish. Check the pictures above for the general idea. Once you separate the skin from everything else(you can leave a little of the fat on) place it into a pot and cover with water. Boil for 2 hours, covering is a good idea, but not necessary. Take the skin out of the water and lay it out on a tray. Let it cool at room temperature and then set the gelatin by putting it into the fridge. Once chilled, take out the skin and scrape the fat away from the skin. Be meticulous. I use a knife after getting 98% off with a spoon. A bench scraper, or dough knife also work well. Once you have isolated the skin, lay it onto a non-stick tray and put it into your oven on the lowest setting possible, I think 140F should be the lower end, but you can try lower if you can go lower. A dehydrator would also work, but I just do it at 170F(thats as low as I can go) for at least 8 hours. You want the skin to look inedible, like this.

At this stage you can store the skin a room temperature for a few weeks, months if you are brave/stupid(I do). To turn into delicious puffed skin, after all that, all you have to do is fry it. Break the skin into the size you want, they puff a lot so just be ready; huge ones are fun to eat too.I've tried frying at 350F and they come out great. I've also put them in at 250F in a small pot of oil and then cranked the heat to high. These rising temperature chicharrones have a more uneven inflation and are also good. I cannot decide which I prefer, but the 350F ones are much easier and more consistent to make; try those first. Once fried, at least season with salt, you are going to need a fine salt, any coarse salt just doesn't stick evenly, even if you add it immediately out the the oil(it turns out alright, but finer salt can make a perfectly even seasoned rind). The addition of some powdered acid is a great idea, and some dried chili. You could make your own, but Tajin is ready to go and tastes great. I bet is was designed for applications like this.

Plate it up!

Again!

Maybe seeking out pork skin specifically to make Chicharrónes is a little much(probably not though), but I hope I have at least communicated that if you ever are in possession of a piece of pork, never throw away the skin!
I am interested in making fried skin/meat/fat versions. The incredible puff of this version is due to the purity of the skin, however, in some instances sacrificing the puff for a more crunchy/crisp texture sounds great to me.

Finally, I have decided that blogger just isn't convenient enough to post all of the pictures I take during production, with all of the formatting details that I want. So, I will be linking to my Picasa page for some posts.  I will create entry specific albums if the topic warrants it.
This one warrants it, check it out here.

This one is for you,

Adam

Cotechino Sausage

I love pork skin, fat, meat, blood, bones, pretty much everything the pig has to offer.  So when I had a discussion with my roommate about a sausage that combined most of those, I was excited to try it out. I do think the addition of some blood to this sausage would be a good thing, but I believe that traditionally Cotechino sausage is simply pork meat, skin, fat, salt and spices.  I went with the traditional to start with, but maybe some boudin noir will be in my near future.
Recipe:
327g pork butt
94g pork skin boiled for 2 hours
94g pork fat
6 g salt                                                                                                        
1tsp pink peppercorn/fennel seed/black pepper
1tsp dextrose
1/16 tsp TCM(tinted curing mix)
4 tbsp water (2 of the tbsp in the form of ice cubes)

A quick aside, I mix measurements because that is how I think they are best interpreted. Some people may say that all of the measures in a recipe should agree (e.g. all grams, all metric, all U.S.), but I don't trust my scale in less than 1g intervals and a volume measure in that case works fine, also, in this particular recipe the water is in tablespoons not because I cannot accurately measure the water in grams but because that is how it is added, by the spoonful, while I am mixing the sausage. Anyway, probably not that important, but I wanted to get that off my chest.

IMPORTANT: When using TCM it is critical that you do not add too much. The stuff can kill you, a lot of things can kill you, but even a small amount of this stuff can be deadly. If you just take care and don't fool around with it, don't use it if you have no idea what it is, there is no reason why it cannot be a safe and useful ingredient in your culinary arsenal. For reference here is the demi-tasse spoon I used to add the, less than a gram, of TCM to my mix.

Method:

Cut all of the ingredients into small pieces that will easily fit into a meat grinder.  I diced the skin into very small cubes, smaller than the meat and fat, because I didn't trust the KitchenAid grinder I was using to handle it.  Mix all of the ingredients together, except for the water, so they look something like this.







I let this sit overnight, but I don't think that is necessary, however it does have to be very cold when you grind it, so just thoroughly chill it. Then grind that stuff, I did two passes, again because the kitchen aid grinder wasn't too powerful. After passing everything through the grinder, put in two ice cubes to get out the remainder of the mix and chill the mix in the bowl. Then mix the sausage with your hand vigorously, really trying to smash and smear it into a uniform mass.  While you are doing this add the last two tbsp of water in two additions. The mix should be sticky and dense, not oily or broken. Like this!








The next few photos show how to tightly and uniformly wrap a sausage mixture in plastic wrap. I am basically making "bulk" sausage here, cooking and serving it without a natural or synthetic casing.
To narrate these photos:
Spread the mixture, more or less, in a uniform log onto the plastic wrap 1 inch from the edge nearest to you.
Take the 1 inch of extra wrap and roll it away from you until it touches the other side of the sausage mix. Then, being careful to get a tight roll, roll the entire log up, until all of the wrap is used.
This is the hardest and most important part: grab the sides of the wrap and pinch the sausage in towards the middle, then grab as close as you can to the sausage you have just moved in and roll the whole log away from you, keeping it in contact with the table the whole time. If the log moves away from you and does not roll then you need to increase the friction between the surface of the table and the wrap. A very light smearing of water, applied by running your hand under water, shaking it off and then rubbing your hand over the table surface works well for me, and it is fast and always available. Even better, if you are going to be doing a lot of these, mix sugar and water in a 1 to 3 ratio and smear a little of that on your counter-top. Alternatively, you could also twist the two sides in alternating directions in mid-air, but this method never makes as uniform, or tight a roll.
Once you get the sides rolled tight, without any air pockets in the sausage, use the extra wrap to tie a square knot.
Poach this for 1 hour at 60°C. I did this in a pot, with a Pampered Chef digital thermometer. Place directly into an ice bath after the hour is up and let the sausage fully cool before using.

You can used this sausage for any number of applications, I will say that next time I am going to try doubling the amount of skin and fat in the sausage.  This version has a nice texture, but it is a little too brittle for my liking.

This is what it looks like fully cooked. Fairly lean. Look at the bits of skin!

I diced it and made ravioli filling. It was pretty good.

Now plate it up!

Sausage is fun and good to make at home.

All the best,
Adam