June 20th, 2013 - Carnitas - Pressure-Cooked Pork**** (4)
Enjoying playing with my new Pressure Cooker from Kuhn Rikon, I can tell you that these carnitas were a big success with my wife and kids last night. I'll give you the low down on how I made it right here and I want you try it, and I want you to give me you variations as well as your response if you follow this recipe.
Carnitas are generally made by cooking pork slowly... oh so slowly. Well... we can quicken this process considerably by using a pressure cooker, and we don't lose a single bit of the magic. So the foundation of this recipe is the pressure cooked pork... 30 minutes... but the ingredients that go with it can obviously vary considerably. Below I have a recipe that is inspired by the Modernist Cuisine at Home book.
Ingredients
Pork Shoulder cut into small cubes - 3 lbs
Pork Stock - 2 cups (recipe is on the link)
Achiote Paste* (see note below) - 1 tablespoon
Chipotle chili powder - 1 teaspoon
*Achiote Paste can be store bought, or you can click on the link and find the recipe I used to make it myself.
Add the cubed meat and the stock to pressure cooker and heat till you get 1 red bar. Cook for 30 minutes, starting the timing when it reaches 1 bar. When it is done, open the pressure cooker (I put it in the sink and run room temperature water on it to depressurize it quickly) and strain the liquid into a separate pot. Add 1 tablespoon of the Achiote Paste and the Chiptotle powder, and cook on high for 25 minutes, stirring constantly.
The meat will come out perfectly cooked, tender beyond imagination.
NOTE: At this point, you have a rick stock which you can add any various seasonings too. This recipe uses the Achiote Paste and some chili powder, but there are hundreds of variations here that you can use.
Cooking the liquid on high for 25 minutes reduces the liquid to a thick syrup. At that point, add the meat back in and cook on high for 5-6 minutes.
They you are done! Season it as you see fit, with things like salt, lime, cilantro, chili powder, etc. We put the carnitas in warmed tortillas with a bit of salsa and sour cream and cheese.
RESULT: The meat was so tender, and it tasted so good by itself. It was really amazing. The whole thing with cheese in a tortilla was just as good. This recipe literally has the possibility of becoming a 5 star meal.
I do plan on trying the pressure cooker version with my Red Chili Rojo recipe which I have (but hasn't been blogged yet). Basically I would pressure cook the meat the same way (to make it tender) and the sauce would be more liquid with a straight Cumin / New Mexico Chili Paste. I think that might happen soon and I'll let you know how it turns out.
As always, your comments are welcome and desires, and so are variations!
June 20th, 2013 - Thursday - Achiote Paste
While making Carnitas I found a recipe that included Achiote Paste. I looked on Amazon and found some, but didn't want to wait for it to get here. So instead I went with my daughter to a few local Mexican Markets, and found some Achiote Seeds (Annatto Seeds) as well as a block of the paste. When I got home I decided to make my own paste. Here is the recipe, inspired by the Modernist Cuisine at Home book.
Achiote Paste
1/4 Cut of Annattoo Seeds
3 teaspoons of Ground Annatto (Achiote) Powder.
2 Dried New Mexico Peppers, stemmed and mostly seeded (I left a lot of seeds in)
1 Tablespoon of Black Peppercorns
1/2 Tablespoon of Cirander Seeds
1 Teaspoon of Cumin Seeds
1/2 Tablespoon of Dried Oregano
1/4 teaspoon of ground allspice
8 Whole Cloves
1/2 cup of orange juice
2/3 cup of white wine vinegar
1/4 cup of lemon juice
NOTE: The recipe I used also includes 3 tablespoons of chopped garlic and 1 teaspoon of tequila. Both of which I didn't use this time.
Put all the dried stuff in a coffee grinder and grind to a powder. Add to a blender, add the liquids, and blend. There you go! Makes a lot more than you need in the Carnitas recipe, so save it in the fridge. I have no idea if it freezes.
June 19th, 2013 - Wednesday - Brown Pork Stock - Pressured-Cooked
These mad Modernists are mad about pressure cooking. Remember those magical machines that made so much sound in the old days when we were children? Well we are bringing them back.
Today... my Kuhn Rikon Pressure Cooker arrived from Amazon:
The first thing we made with it was some rich brown pork stock.... Instead of boiling water for hours, we did it in an hour!
Ingredients
Pork Short Ribs - 1 lb
Neutral Oil - 2 tablespoons
Ground Pork - .5 lbs
Neutral Oil - 1/4 cup
Water - 4 Cups
White Whine - 1/2 Cup
Carrots Sliced Thinly - 1 Cup
Yellow Onion and Onion Skin - 1 Cup
Leek - White Parts Only - Sliced - 1 Leek Bulb
Italian Parsley - Handful of sprigs
Fresh Thyme - 2 big sprigs
Fresh bay leaf - 1 leaf
What to do good folks? Bake those ribs for 45 minutes (in a bit of oil) at 400 degrees in the oven. Brown them good. Then put the 1/4 cup of oil in the bottom of your pressure cooker, heat it it up, and brown that ground pork. Add the water, whine, carrots, onions, leeks, parsley, and herbs... and then the browned short ribs. I think I added a bit of extra water.
Seal the pressured cooker and heat at 1 bar for 1 hour. You can go longer for sure, the longer the better actually... but you'll get a nice good stock after 1 hour.
When you are done, depressurize the cooker with room temperature water and then strain the vegetables out... and you have wonderful stock....
WAIT A MINUTE!!!!
What about that pound of short ribs????
Exactly! I took those ribs and slathered them with sauce and slapped them on my outdoor grill for 10 minutes and... you guessed it... AMAZING RIBS. HOLY CRAP!
The sauce is used is worth mentioning for a second. It was Stonewall Kitchen - Maple Chipotle Grille Sauce. And... it was okay. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm not saying it's good. It was okay on the ribs.
So you will soon see a 'rib' recipe coming from me... and it's going to be 1 hour in the pressure cooking followed by 10 minutes on the grill and it might just be incredible, because these were so good.... so tender... perfectly cooked ribs. Now I need the best BBQ sauce I can get and we'll see where we end up! Looking forward to that, and I hope you are too!
As always... your comments are welcome!
June 8th - Cook's Illustrated Cookbook - Tuscan-Style Garlic-Rosemary Roast Pork Loin - One of the definite joys I get in this world is putting together a good meal. Good meals are a combination of a lot of things, not the least of which is the foundation of intention that goes into them. We appearing humans have a lot of energies running through us, and being an artist in any realm means sensing, balancing, and transmitting those energies out into the world in a form or expression.
Cooking is one such expression. Not many people would tell you to learn to breath and to use energies of intention and purpose in your cooking... but I will! Through meditations of various sorts, I gather energies in my body and transform them into useful forms so I can express my art (in this case, good cooking) with ease.
Enough about all that, let's talk about Tuscan Style Pork! So I had this boneless Pork Loin in my freezer from Costco, and I decided to finally use it! And I looked around at a bunch of recipes and came up with some ideas. I'm listing the Cook's Illustrated Cookbook (from the Cooks Illustrated folks) in the title because they gave me the inspiration for the garlic and rosemary.
Now let me tell you about this meal. It turned out absolutely fabulous, a real treat. We ate it with the family last night out on the porch and it touched us all emotionally. That's what the best meals do, right? There are some things I think could be improved. For instance, I think the roast loin could be cooked Sous Vide and we would have had more tender pork cooked perfectly all the way through. That's what I'm going to try next time.
So here we go...
We started with about a 4 pound pork loin. Cook's Illustrated folks tell you to use one with bones, but I didn't have one with bones, so there wasn't much I could do about that.
Brining the Pork
There is a method in the book where you submerge the pork in a brine liquid in the fridge for 2 hours... I didn't do this. Instead I used my handy syringe and injected salt water brine into the pork in many places. I've never really figured out if this works very well. The Modernist Cuisine folks do it all the time. I've got to eventually learn about brining, because I really know next to nothing. Never the less, I injected salt water into the pork.
Paste - Garlic - Rosemary
So next I made a paste of 2 tablespoons of minced garlic (I got mine from a jar, but you could use fresh), three or four sprigs worth of fresh rosemary leaves chopped up, a couple tablespoons of olive oil, and some pepper and salt.
Brown the Loin
I patted the Pork Loin dry and heated some Olive Oil. I then browned the Loin fat side down in the oil for a 5-10 minutes. I took the loin out and set it on the cutting board. I cut holes in the loin with my knife and stuffed it and slathered it with the Paste.
In the Pan
In the pan with the olive oil and the juices from the pork, I heated it up, added 2-3 more sprigs worth of rosemary leaves, then an onion (I used a red onion of all things) and cooked them down a bit. Then I added white wine. I used Pinot Grigio, which I don't think is a 'dry' white wine. Well, maybe it is, I found a Blog about it: Wine Folly. Yes indeed Pinot Grigio is a dry white wine. What do you know? Though they suggested I use a Chardonnay for Pork. Oh well.
I cooked this mixture together till the wine reduced and tasted amazing.
Dutch Oven
In a dutch oven I layered in some carrots. Then put the pork loin on top of the carrots. I then added the white wine mixture of onions. I think added a few more splashes of wine. Then I put the whole thing in the oven at 275. I wanted to cook it slow.
It would be at this point where next time I'll put the whole thing in a bag and Sous Vide cook it slowly to the perfect temperature of 140 degrees
In the oven I had a hard time getting to 140, I had to eventually increase the heat to 325, and then it over shot the 140 mark to 155 which is overcooked. Damn it. (It still tasted wonderfully, but we can do better and I'm convinced Sous Vide is the way to do it!)
You take the roast out and let it sit for 15 minutes, best covered in tented foil.
Sauce
So I heated some olive oil while the roast was sitting, and added 2-3 more sprigs of rosemary to the oil and four small shallots chopped up! Then I slowly added Chicken Broth, probably 1-2 cups, maybe more, then boiled it. I added the accumulated juices from the pork as well as lots of the juice from the wine mixture the pork just cooked in. I cooked this mixture for 5 minutes or so and it was the most wonderful gravy.
Carrots and Onions
So the carrots and onions that the Pork Baked in were a side dish and the carrots just tasted AMAZING.
Mashed Potatoes
My daughter made Mashed Potatoes which went with the meal perfectly!
We ate outside with the family and it was just wonderful. One of the better meals. Just so perfect. I will say again however that next time I'm Sous Vide cooking it so the meat is just perfect.
[I'll let you know one day when I do that and come back and add a link to this post pointing to the new recipe]
Again, this was a fantastic meal. Thanks to the folks at Cook's Illustrated for some of the ideas that inspired this!
