The Butcher Shoppe - Pork Chops

As you probably know, the dietary do-gooders have villified fat so much that today's pork is much leaner's than your grandpa's pork. I recently saw a 1940's era picture (the golden era when pork consumption in the U.S. exceeded beef consumption) of a typical farm pig alongside a photo of a modern day pig and it was like looking at old and current pictures of Oprah. The modern pig was svelte while the classic pig was corpulent and jowely, like we all remember from the storybooks. So today's slender pork is dry, tough and flavorless. Perhaps a more truthful slogan would be "the other bland white meat". To make things worse, most recipes gravely instruct us to cook pork to an internal temperature of 160 degrees for "safety" (they don't mention parasites but that's what they mean). Cooking to 160 ensures any subtle flavors and precious juices that might have been in the meat originally are long gone and the worrisome parasites that don't really exist in modern pork anymore are surely dead and safe to eat. To counteract act these problems we do have a few choices: 1) eat only pork shoulder, ham, bacon and sausage that have enough fat to make them worthwhile and forego pork chops and roasts 2) hunt down heirloom pork that is raised by a few pig farmers in NY and who knows where else and pay a fortune to have it shipped 3) brine lean pork in a salt water solution before cooking to retain some moisture and to add some flavor 4) buy factory farm pork (i.e. Hormel) that has been pumped with some funky sodium phosphate solution to simulate good pork, which just makes it taste weird I advocate options 1 and 3 and I'm looking closely into 2 but recommend against 4. In the context of this current state of pork I entered the local butcher shoppe a few days ago. The glass case was littered with papers promoting different cuts of meat for sale but inside were only chuck roasts and a few other random beef cuts. I wasn't sure if they were out of most things but I asked the butcher if they had any pork chops available. "Sure!" He almost jumped out of his apron. I said I didn't see any in the case and he explained they cut them to order, any thickness I wanted. Hearing this, I felt my knees buckle a little and I asked for two bone in chops, about an inch and a half thick. A minute later I watched as he toted around a long rack of pork to the band saw for cutting. Two thick-cut rib chops weighed in at nearly two pounds and at $4.99/pound I felt I was getting my money's worth. As I mentioned earlier, this was the first real meal I cooked in our new house with our new cooking equipment so I was excited to make anything. I brined the chops in saltwater (about 1/3 cup salt and four cups of water) for about an hour, dried them off, salted them generously then seared them in a hot pan with a little corn oil for about 3 minutes a side. They developed a beautiful golden crust but were obviously far from done so I placed them on a cookie sheet in the preheated oven (350 degrees-convection roast) while I finished the potatoes. I deglazed the chop pan with some cognac then added sour cream when the chops were coming out of the oven. The critical mistake I made was splashing in a little extra cognac at the very end to moisten up the quickly drying pan sauce. Adding an alcohol so late does not give it time to burn off most of the alcohol flavor and leaves it with a sharp, unpleasant taste. I tried to simmer it down but I knew I blew it. lightly coated the chops with the sauce, knowing it wasn't great. One key was pulling the chops out of the oven at the right time. I've been burned by putting too much trust in my instant read thermometer so now I use it to give me an indication but ultimately trust my instincts. I push on the chop (or whatever meat) to feel the resistance. The finger push method merits an entry of its own, which I will work on soon. These chops spent about 12 minutes in the 350 oven after the pan searing and rested for about five. They were cooked perfectly. Overall the chops were outstanding. I don't know where the butcher gets his pork and maybe the thick cut and brining had something to do with it but they were some of the best pork chops I've ever had (not the sauce - it was marginal) . They had that unctuous, bacon-like richness that good pork has. The flavor was milder than the shoulder or ham cuts and it was moist unlike supermarket chops. I suspect the internal temperature peaked out at about 140 degrees and was lower against the bone but I'm not worried about trichonosis. I'll be back at the butcher shoppe soon to pay my compliments and pay for another package of something delicious.

Moving Part 2 - Local Food

No need to bore you with the rest of the move because there are important food items to discuss. The town we moved to, we'll call it Stars Hollow, has a population of around 17,000 with a downtown area dating back to the late 1800's. Presumably by intention, the downtown does not have any chain stores that homogenize so many towns across the country. Our first morning we went to the little diner/cafe for breakfast. $7 got me eggs over easy, hashbrowns, linguica sausage and wheat toast. Everything was cooked perfectly and my coffee cup never got below half empty. The wife had pancakes, eggs and slab bacon for just under $6. We'll most likely become regulars. The next day we visited the butcher shop downtown. They heavily promoted their sandwiches, especially a tri-tip one with an apricot bbq sauce. I had no choice but to order the tri-tip while the wife had the hamburger. Both were outstanding, largely due to the quality of the meat. The hamburger suffered somewhat from the cooking method - a virtual steaming process on a George Foreman grill - but the quality of the meat was so good that it still tasted great. Most interesting was the owner. While the kid made the sandwiches I asked the owner about the local cows that can be seen grazing on the nearby hillsides and if he ever gets his meat locally. Apparently I hit a nerve because he began his diatribe with "I don't know what line of work you're in, but in the meat business..." He went on to explain that it was a common myth to think that the local, grazing cows would produce the best meat when in fact they were mostly retired dairy cows and their grass diet made for lean, dry, flavorless meat (I declined to bring up my recent experience with the grass fed ribeye steak). He said that a strict grain diet was necessary to achieve proper marbling and the impending hamburger would prove it. After stealing a few bites of the wife's burger I can't argue with him. Since that first visit I have been back for several sandwiches and pork chops. The roast beef (made on the premises) was nothing short of outstanding. Since my initial visit, when I got the "stupid kid" treatment, I've established a good rapport with the owner and he has been both friendly and helpful. For more information on the pork chops, see the next entry.

Moving Part 1 - No Cooking/Eating Out

For the past several weeks the wife and I have been embroiled in the process of moving from Los Angeles to an undisclosed location in another part of California. One of the most trying aspects of the moving process was the kitchen shutdown. It began during the packing process and extended many days after we arrived at our new place. We eagerly unpacked the boxes labeled "kitchen"first in the hopes of becoming operational but candles, corn syrup and wedding present vases seemed to be all we could find. In fact, tonight was the first proper meal I've cooked in about two weeks (more on that later). When you can't cook your own food for days on end and you eat out virtually every meal, restaurant food quickly loses its appeal. You begin to realize how much they rely on salt and fat to impress you with a quick flavor hit. Don't get me wrong, I hold salt and fat in high regard but when used excessively, as most eateries do, they make eating out drudgery. I don't get how some people eat out most nights. Maybe they're the ones who die unexpectedly at age 40. I can't really remember the order of eating events the last couple weeks but I do remember a few meal snippets that exemplify how important timing is to good eating. During one arduous moving day I was brought an Apple Pan hamburger for lunch (which was delicious) and an In&Out hamburger for dinner. By the time I was eating my second hamburger of the day I realized there is a hamburger envelope and I had exceeded it. Our final meal in L.A. was at a little Italian joint owned by a little Italian guy in a little strip mall on a stretch of Venice Blvd. in the Palms/Culver City area. (It's funny how the word "Venice" in the Italian context conjures up charming canal images while in the Los Angeles context the canal loses the "c" and the image is much less charming. ) We ordered our favorite appetizer - thinly sliced eggplant rolled around a stuffing of ricotta cheese and pine nuts covered in a tomato sauce - and we split an entree-sized pizza. Normally this would have been a light, toothsome meal but after so many restaurant visits in a row the flavors were so flat and salty we couldn't even finish it. Getting three to four hours of sleep a night for several nights in a row is unhealthy for normal people but for someone like me who usually logs 8+ hours a night it was devastating. I ached from days of packing and hauling boxes around and felt bound up by the restaurant diet. This is the state in which I hit the road for our new home at midnight in an old Honda with bald tires in the driving rain with a complaining cat next to me. Before logging the first hour of driving the wife called from the other, nicer car and asked if I was drowsy because I had started driving much slower. Fessing up, I pulled off at a gas station in Camarillo for a cup of coffee and Krispy Kreme donut. I must admit, it pumped some life into me but instead of getting two large coffees as I should have, I only bought a medium. By the time we hit La Conchita the cup was dry and my eyelids were made of lead again. Normally the caffeine laden swill from a gas station keeps me awake for hours but my epic fatigue rose to the occasion. I toughed it out to Buelton where we finally found an open gas station and reloaded. It must of helped some but it didn't really feel like it. Nevertheless, thank God we made it safely, arriving at 3:30 A.M. Three hours of sleep on the floor later and the movers called to tell us they were a couple minutes away.

Grass Fed Ribeye Steak

While the wife was enjoying libations and farewells from her co-workers (my former co-workers) at a Santa Monica watering hole (emphasis on hole) I pondered what to have for a solo dinner at home. I declined the invitation to fight Friday evening traffic into Santa Monica where I would overpay for a drink and try to avoid talking to former co-workers who lower my view of the human race. It's really not that bad, I like most of my former co-workers. They weren't the ones who decided to lay me off. It was a smelly Frenchman and his suspiciously hyper-masculine sidekick, who are both long gone too. Back to dinner. By 6:30 PM something was bothering my stomach. It could have been the sausage sandwich and beer lunch, the absurd "Chantico" drinking chocolate* from Starbucks or the double espresso I downed at 6:25PM. I figured I'd eat something simple and straightforward to spare my giblets any unnecessary strain. A calzone from a neighborhood pizza joint that only takes cash seemed like a good option but I balked with the phone in my hand. Too much meat, cheese and white flour. So I went to Trader Joe's to see if any fish looked good. Sure enough I found something - a ribeye steak. It was small, well-marbled and boasted its grass-fed heritage. At $15/pound it wasn't cheap but I was curious so I bought it along with $20 worth of other stuff I didn't need and headed back home. I remembered I still had a few brussel sprouts left to cook so I braised them in water and cream while I heated the cast iron pan to smoking. I generoulsy coated the steak with salt and coarsely ground pepper and pan-fried it for about 3 minutes per side. While it rested I poured some red wine in the steak pan to deglaze the crusty goodness. I then added about 1/4 cup of my poor-man's demi-glace that I had made a couple weeks prior. I won't bore you with the details but I got the recipe from an old issue of Cook's Illustrated. I really didn't expect anything from the pan sauce but I figured it was worth a shot. After it reduced by about half the steak was fully rested and the sprouts were ready too. The steak turned out to be really good. Cooking perfectly to a solid crimson throughout helped but I could tell the quality was there. It wasn't a 28 day dry-aged beauty from some mafia steakhouse but it was good. The real surprise was the sauce. Whoa! It rivaled any red wine pan sauce I've had from a restaurant...and it was an afterthought! The brussel sprouts tasted great (cream = good) and the glass of $7/ bottle of Columbia Crest Cabernet tasted at least as good as the $20 bottle of Wente I served with the short ribs a few nights ago. I expected little and was richly rewarded. In case you're wondering, the wife had a few chicken strips at the bar and a bowl of cereal when she got home but she had a nice time with co-workers. I'm glad I stayed in. * By the time you read this Starbuck's may have pulled the "Chantico" from their stores. It's basically melted chocolate ice cream. Cloying doesn't begin to describe it. I can't believe I drank the whole thing but at $2.75 I had to. It really is just another shameless Starbuck's gimmick. The name alone is ridiculous. I had to see where they claimed to have come up with it. Per Starbuck's website: "The name 'Chantico' comes from the Aztec goddess of hearth and fire. Chantico was said to provide homes with warm comfort and heat for cooking." I'm embarassed for them. I only tried it for business research reasons (I'm serious - I have a vested interest in what the latest cafe beverage trends are). Soon I'll tell the story of the espresso machine in my garage.

Salad for Dinner?

The wife demanded a light dinner due to all the rich ones we've been having recently. My first reaction was, naturally, horror. She specifically mentioned salad, which dovetailed nicely with our lack of any meat item in the fridge for other ingredients to orbit around on the dinner plate. I warmed to the idea of a dinner salad as I assembled red leaf lettuce, cherry tomatoes, hearts of palm (buried in the fridge sometime in 2004 but amazingly still viable), carrots, parmesan reggiano, pepper coated salami and homemade ranch dressing. While the pasta-cum-salad bowls chilled in the freezer for that restaurant-like feel I sliced the tomatoes in half to avoid the gushy mouth explosions, shredded the carrots because raw carrot slices are just annoying, julienned the salami and sliced the hearts of palm. It assembled quickly, was tasty and I felt great afterwards. The wife loved it too.

Braised Short Ribs

Last night we hosted a little dinner party for two friends - an engaged couple who I will refer to as Helmut and Gertrude (to protect their identities). The featured dish was braised short ribs. Short ribs are one of those dishes I make that are fairly simple to prepare but taste so good that I almost feel guilty they didn't involve more work. When I get compliments about them it feels as if I got an 'A' on a term paper that I purchased, if that makes sense. Typically I trim the excess external fat from the ribs, brown them in my pressure cooker (in batches so I don't crowd the pan), saute coarsely chopped onions and carrots in the empty pan, deglaze the pan with some liquid (wine or broth) then add the full compliment of liquids to create the braising liquid. Usually the liquid is a cocktail of red wine, chicken and/or beef stock and tomato sauce or crushed tomatoes. I recently started adding one shot of espresso to the mix with very good results. For this batch I switched from red wine to white wine and used only chicken stock because I didn't have any homemade beef stock on hand. I completed it with tomato sauce and espresso along with a couple bay leaves and whole pepper corns. When it reached a simmer I returned the browned short ribs along with the liquid that had pooled around them into the cooker and capped it. I brought it up to the first pressure line, stabilized it and let it go for two hours. I usually cook it at the second, higher pressure setting for one hour but I wondered if a gentler, longer cook time would produce more tender meat. Two hours later the ribs were fall apart tender, with the bones slipping right off the meat, so I sequestered them to their own bowl. I poured the liquid and vegetables through a standard mesh strainer into a separate bowl, discarded the vegetables and put the sauce and the meat into the fridge overnight. As mentioned previously, I completed most of the short rib preparation the night before so I could remove the 'fat frisbee' from the top of the braising liquid after a congealing night in the refrigerator. Also, with most of the cooking done, Helmut and I had time to soak in the hot tub before dinner (Gertrude and the wife preferred watching 'Lost', the modern incarnation of Gilligan's Island). After removing the fat from the sauce, I heated it back to liquid consistency and poured it through a fine mesh strainer in order to give it a smooth texture. I returned it to a simmer on the stove without a lid to reduce and thicken it while the short ribs slowly heated in a 250 degree oven in a casserole dish. The sauce didn't thicken much so I added cornstarch (mixed with a small amount of cold milk prior to adding to the sauce). After thickening I added the sauce to the short ribs and returned the casserole dish to the oven to complete its heating. To round out the meal I boiled russet potatoes, pressed them through a ricer and stirred in sour cream, butter and buttermilk. Not rocket science - just fluffy mashed potatoes ready to soak up any juices from the short ribs. I boiled green beans in a pot of salted water for four minutes, drained them, tossed in a little butter and squeezed a wedge of lemon over them. The short ribs were fantastic. They seemed especially tender which may have come from the kinder, gentler pressure cooking or from their high quality (purchased at Whole Foods) or both. The sauce was excellent and curiously very similar to the red wine-based sauces. So similar that I have no strong preference between the two. With the fat removed from the sauce the dish wasn't nearly as heavy as short rib dinners often are. Washing it down with a bottle of Wente Reserve Cabernet completed the dinner nicely. Helmut and Gertrude said they enjoyed it. Notes: Pressure Cookers: I highly recommend pressure cookers. If you don't have one this dish can be made conventionally by putting the pot in the oven at 350 degrees for about 3.5 hours instead of cooking under pressure on the stovetop. However, some of the sauce will evaporate unless the pan has makes a tight seal. Short ribs - in case you're not familiar with these, they are short, thick rib sections from the chuck/prime rib area. They are very well marbled with fat and sell for about $4/pound in my area. They are not the long ribs that are frequently barbecued/smoked.

Simple Alfredo and Brussel Sprouts

Tonight I spent most of my kitchen time making braised short ribs for a dinner tomorrow night so I needed to whip something up quickly that would satisfy me and the wife while we watched Gillmore Girls and Scrubs. Oh yeah, and the cupboard was pretty much bare except for a few staples. Following the time honored axiom, 'when all else fails throw butter and cream at the problem and it will taste good', I thought a pasta Alfredo would work. I melted some butter in a small sauce pan, added some heavy cream then, when it was bubbling, added grated parmesan (reggiano) . The whole process took less time than it took the pasta to cook. To balance this gluttony out somewhat I made brussel sprouts as a side dish. They were braised for about 10 minutes in a little chicken stock and then fortified at the end with a splash of cream. I added some pressed garlic to mine (the wife and garlic are enemies) and a dusting of ground pepper. Tonight's meal turned out well and the short ribs are 80% complete and fall apart tender. I'll elaborate on the short ribs next time. Oh yeah, and I figured out the problem with group #2 on my commercial espresso machine and it's relatively inexpensive and simple to fix (more on the espresso machine, rags to riches story later).

Morel and Crimini Mushroom Impregnanted Chicken Breasts

This toothsome little dish came from a French recipe cookbook that is actually quite hard to find. The recipes are good and each one features several full color pictures of the preparation and finished dish. For this one I seared a full, double, bone-in Rocky chicken breast in an All-Clad saute pan until the skin was golden and crispy, then set it aside to cool while I prepared the stuffing mixture in the same pan. The stuffing is a mixture of rehydrated morel mushrooms (I rehydrated in my homemade chicken stock) that are sauteed with sliced crimini mushrooms and shallots. Brandy (or Cognac) is added and reduced along with cream. The mixture is then stuffed into each breast (I cut pockets into each one) and held in place with toothpicks. Rather than finish cooking in the pan with more cream and the mushroom soaking liquid, as the recipe directs, I finished it in a 350 degree oven, partly due to its cumbersome size and partly to retain juiciness. I heated/reduced the cream and mushroom liquid which I fortified with chicken juices from the breasts after it had finished baking. The sauce was drizzled over the breasts and served with steamed aspiration (or is it broccolini?). I got my starch through the White Hawk India Pale Ale that I drank while cooking. The wife loved it, as she should have, and so did I.