Pulled Pork Sugo with Chestnut Polenta

Let me start first by saying, no, we haven’t set a date yet. Neal and I might be getting married this fall, or we might be getting married next spring. Or maybe we’ll get married fall 2010—though I think I might lose my mind if I’m in planning stages for another year-plus. We figured we’d pick a date once we found a venue we liked. But that’s just it, trying to find a venue has been like Amazing Race meets Survivor. I’ve gotten lost behind the Orange curtain, hit by a cyclist who ran a red light, seen a wedding venue come menagerie and driven all around Sonoma County with Slingblade barking at me from my father’s GPS, “Bear left, cow right.” All this running around is exhausting. And when I get home from a weekend’s worth of talking about tables and chairs and luxury Porta Potties, cranky for having missed my Sunday morning at the farmers’ market, the last thing I want to do is spend a lot of time cooking.

Which brings me to reason number 2,356 that I love my Le Creuset Dutch Oven: No-fuss cooking. Forget the crock pot. This can go in the oven, on the stovetop or even on the grill. It’s sturdy, conducts heat great and almost everything I’ve ever cooked in it tastes incredible. I’ve made carnitas, braciole and Hungarian Goulash. But right now my favorite dish is Pulled Pork Sugo with Winter Greens and Chestnut Polenta Cakes.

The word sugo is Italian for “juice” or “sauce” and it is up there in the country’s food lore with the best Bolognese—cooked slow, different for every family and nonna’s hallmark. Mine started with a recipe from Gourmet and is slowly morphing into something all my own. The dish is hearty and heart-warming, it takes very little effort to make come together—you literally stick it in the oven and walk away for hours—and the flavors have that layered balanced of savory and sweet, texture upon texture. While I love this sugo over chestnut polenta cakes for the nuttiness the chestnut flour adds, and the extra dimension of chew the polenta cakes get, and I like to add sautéed beet greens or Bloomsdale spinach from the South Central Farmer’s Cooperative, it’s also great with firm, dry pastas. The original Gourmet recipe paired it with orechiette, ear-shaped pastas that cup the sauce perfectly, holding onto it like a message from generations long gone. Bigoli, a rough-hewn spaghetti-shaped pasta is another favorite for the dish, and soft polenta goes well, too.

Winter’s running out, which means the opportunities to make this cool weather dish are trickling away with the lingering darkness. But for now I’ll make my sugo and eat the leftovers in the morning, topped with a gently fried egg, a pick through the last of the potential wedding venues on my list, knowing I had to do very little for this great meal.

Pulled Pork Sugo
adapted from Gourmet

2 lbs pork butt or shoulder
salt and pepper
1 large onion, chopped
2 celery ribs, chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 tsp dried oregano
11/2 tbsp tomato paste
1 cup dry white wine
2 cups chicken stock
½ cup cannellini beans, preferably dried and soaked
1 tbsp cider vinegar
1 bunch beet greens, Bloomsdale spinach or other hearty winter green
½ cup Parmigiano Reggiano or Pecorino Romano, grated

Place rack in the middle of your oven. Heat to 325 degrees.

Pat pork butt dry and sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. Roast in a small roasting pan or Dutch oven, tightly covered with foil and covered, about 3 hours, or until the meat begins to pull apart evenly. (This step varies greatly by your oven so the first time you make it, check after an hour.) When the pork is cool enough to touch, shred and set aside.

Pour off all but a few tablespoons of fat. Add the celery and onion and sprinkle with salt and pepper, cooking until softened, about 5 minutes. Stir in garlic and oregano into combined, then add tomato paste. Cook 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Add wine, broth, beans, vinegar and pork and let simmer, covered for at least 30 minutes. If the sauce gets to thick, add a little water. If you’re pairing it with pasta, use the pasta water.

Wash, trim and shred your beet greens. Heat a sauté pan over medium heat, add olive oil and heat until glistening. Add the beet greens and lower the heat to medium-low. Sprinkle with salt and sauté until wilted and sweet. Remove immediately from heat.

Serve with Chestnut Polenta cakes (below), soft polenta, or dried pasta. Finish with grated cheese.

Chestnut Polenta Cakes

4 cups water
pinch of salt
1 cup coarse ground polenta
¼ cup chestnut flour
butter
olive oil

Note: The trick to polenta is cooking it for a long time, the longer you cook it, the softer and creamier the corn gets. It also makes it much easier to digest. The trick I learned is to have a pot of hot water on the stove, and to slowly add water as the polenta thickens, to keep it the right texture.

To make the polenta, add water, salt and polenta to a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil and cook slowly, stirring with a wooden spoon, adding water as it thickens. Cook for 45 minutes. Add chestnut flour and stir in until it’s full integrated.

Pour polenta into a greased 9×12 dish and let set, then cut into 3-inch squares.

Heat a sauté pan and add a teaspoon each of butter and olive oil. Add the polenta cakes and cook, about a minute on each side until they’re warmed through and they have a crispy skin. Top with beat greens and pour sugo over polenta and finish with cheese. These polenta cakes are also great with fresh tomatoes and sautéed green and a fried egg for breakfast!

Braised Beef

We all have bad habits. I’m a piler and a procrastinator. I have trouble recognizing when I’m supposed to give the “short” answer to a question. And I tend to buy the ingredients for a recipe without actually reading the directions.

This final habit has caught me more than I’d like to admit staring at a recipe an hour before dinner that tells me I should have started it the night before. Or worse, I’ve gotten half way through preparing something only to discover that I am then supposed to let it sit for three hours to set or that I should refrigerate it overnight. Mishaps like these leave me scrambling and, while they can inspire creative solutions (like packing custards on ice to set them faster), the results are usually less tasty, texturally challenged or complete failures. Those are the nights we eat frozen Trader Joe’s spinach pizza.

I am trying to get better, though. I even decided to sit town with David Tanis’s A Platter of Figs last Tuesday night to look over the winter menu—Slow Beef—I’d planned to make on Wednesday for the Top Chef Finale. Fortunately I had realized that the menu was for 8-10 people when I was looking at the ingredients (7-8 lbs of flanken was a dead giveaway that we would have more leftovers than we’d know what to do with). Wouldn’t you know, not only was I supposed to salt the flank steak for the braised beef overnight, but then he suggested, right there in the intro, that you let the meat sit in the sauce over another night! Determined to do the best that I could (you don’t fall down on Finale night, do you?) I peeled myself from the couch, salted the meat, and made a date with my Le Creuset Dutch Oven for 8 a.m.

Earl Wednesday morning, with sleep still crusting my eyes, I chopped my onions and measured out all the ingredients I would need for the sauce. I browned the meet so that it had a nice crust on it, added the sauce, stuck it in the oven and went to work, which, fortunately, is just down the hall. I popped up from my desk for five minutes here and five minutes there throughout the day, straining and degreasing the sauce, then finally putting it in the fridge for about 6 hours to soak up the flavor. The results were layered, complex and melt-in-your-mouth tender, with the faint sweet heat of the paprika and earthy spice of the cloves coming through. Lesson learned. The extra time salting, slow cooking and letting the meat rest in the refrigerator had really brought the dish together. Reading the recipe had made the difference.

Beet, Egg and Watercress Salad

To accompany the beef, I made a version of the celery root mashed potatoes Tanis suggested, cutting back on the fat in recipe in addition to halving it. But the real star of the evening, though, was the roasted beet, egg and watercress salad we enjoyed to start. Sweet and tangy with a little watercress spice and creamy hard-cooked eggs with the slightly molten centers, the salad was the picture of restraint and balance. My dinner guest that night, my friend Suzy, bravely battled her fear of desserts and whipped up delicious lemon and rhubarb tarts for dessert that were light and refreshing, with wintery citrus flavor and a hint at spring, just around the corner.

I am convinced of the benefits of fully reading a recipe days in advance, but I know I’ll probably falter again. Bad habits are hard to break. And you probably didn’t need the “long” version of the story to figure that out.

Watercress, Beet, and Egg Salad
from A Platter of Figs by David Tanis
serves 8-10

3 bunches watercress
2 large shallots, finely diced
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 tbsp sherry vinegar
salt and pepper
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp grated orange zest
6 medium beets, roasted, peeled and diced small
6 soft-center hard-cooked eggs

Wash the watercress and drain. Wrap in a kitchen towel and refrigerate.

To make the vinaigrette, macerate the diced shallots in a bowl with the vinegars and a good pinch of salt for 10 minutes. Stir in the mustard until dissolved. Whisk in the olive oil, add the orange zest, and grind in some pepper. Taste and adjust for acid and salt. The dressing should be somewhat tart so add more red wine vinegar if necessary.

Put the prepared beets in a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Whisk the vinaigrette and pour it over the beets. Toss the beets in the dressing and leave at room temperature.

To assemble the salad , trim short watercress sprigs from the bunch and make a fluffy pile on a large platter. Scatter the beets over the watercress leaves, distributing the vinaigrette here and there. Carefully cut the eggs into quarters and garnish the salad with them. Just before serving, sprinkle the eggs with salt and pepper.

Braised Beef
adapted from A Platter of Figs by David Tanis
Note: This is half the original recipe. It served Suzy and I dinner on Wednesday night Neal and I four or five times each after that. It’s still plenty of food. Try making has with fried egg and potato cakes out of the leftovers, it’s delicious.

3 lbs flanken
salt and pepper
olive oil and vegetable oil or lard
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp paprika
¼ cup tomato puree
½ cup dry red wine
4 cups chicken stock (preferably homemade)
1 large onion, halved
1 bay leaf
a couple of cloves
½ a large thyme spring
Celery root mashed potatoes (BUY THE BOOK!)

Season the beef generously with salt and pepper. Refrigerate for several hours, or overnight.

Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Let the meat come to room temperature and dry it well.

In a heavy-bottomed pot, like a cast iron Dutch Oven or enameled iron pot, brown the beef in your choice of oil. You can add vegetable oil to the olive to lower the smoke point. I didn’t. I browned in straight olive oil. When the meat is well colored on each side, remove from pot and set aside.

Pour off any remained fat and return the pot to the heat. Add butter and flour, stirring well with a wooden spoon to incorporate the flour. Stir in the paprika, tomato and red wine. Slowly add the chicken stock and bring to a boil.

Add the onion halves, bay, cloves and thyme. Return the beef to the pot, cover and move to the oven. Cook for about 2 ½ hours or until the meat is quite tender.

Remove the braise from the oven and transfer the meat to a platter. Strain the sauce. Chill it, then degrease it by spooning the fat layer off the top. Taste the sauce and season if necessary. Put the beef back in the pot, pour the sauce over it. If time allows, refrigerate it overnight. To serve, reheat the meat in its sauce. Carve meat into thick slices and serve with potatoes. If necessary, reduce sauce over a brisk flame to thicken it slightly.