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!

The perfect autumn dish and way to use all the varieties of apples you find at the farmers’ market. I used Newton Pippins for the risotto and a combination of Spitzenberg, Red Stripe and Muutsu for the salsa.

Apple Risotto with Grilled Pork Tenderloin and Apple Salsa

Pork Tenderloin
1 cup brown sugar
¾ cup coarse kosher salt
1 tbsp juniper berries
1 tbsp peppercorns
5 cardamom pods
1 tsp fennel seed

Combine ingredients in a large zip-top bag. Add whole pork tenderloin and add enough warm water to completely submerge the pork. Shake to dissolve sugar and salt. Refrigerate minimum 1 hour and up to 3 hours.

Heat grill. Brush tenderloin with olive oil and place on grill. Cook about 7 minutes on each side or until the internal temperature reaches 140 degrees for medium rare (the temperature will increase about 10 degrees after you take it off the grill). Let rest 15 minutes before slicing into ¾-inch pieces.

Apple Risotto
adapted from Silver Spoon
1/2 tsp lemon zest
2 Newton Pippin apples, diced
4 tbsp butter
6 cups vegetable stock
2 tbsp olive oil
2 cups Arborio rice
5 tbsp dry white wine
2 tbsp parmigiano reggiano, freshly grated
salt and pepper to taste

Melt 1 tbsp of butter in a sauté pan. Add apples and lemon zest. Sauté for 4-5 minutes, until apples are beginning to soften.

Bring the stock to a boil in a large saucepan. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a skillet. Add rice and stir until coated in oil. Sprinkle with wine and cook until evaporated. Add a ladleful of stock, stirring until it has been absorbed. Continue adding stock a ladleful at a time, stirring until absorbed before adding another. Add apples to the rice mixture about six minutes into cooking the risotto. When the rice is almost tender, stir in the cheese and remaining butter. Season to taste.

Apple Salsa
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp cider vinegar
2 tbsp lemon juice
½ tsp chile flakes
3 apples, cored ad chopped
1 tbsp tarragon

Stir sugar, vinegar, lemon juice and pepper flakes in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil. Add a half of the apples and cook until the apples are soft. Remove from heat. Mash the apples with a potato masher or an immersion blender. Stir in tarragon and the other half of the apples. Chill for 1 hour.

Serve the sliced pork over the risotto topped with the apple salsa.

Farmers’ Market Iron Chef: Battle in the Kitchen

With just 20 minutes remaining in Battle Apple I knew I was toast. I hadn’t made my apple vinaigrette, the batter for my apple fritters or heated my fry oil. Across fthe kitchen island stood my fellow food blogger and Foodbuzz Iron Chef challenger, Foodwoolf’s Brooke Burton, looking as relaxed as if she’d just come back from a beach vacation. And worst of all? The sweet-tangy smell of apples, caramelized sugar and cinnamon was making me hungry.

The competition seemed simple. Choose an ingredient at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market to plan a 3-course meal around. Each blogger-chef would have two hours to prepare their food, which would be judged on taste, plating and originality by a panel of food savvy professionals. But less than 24 hours before we were to take up our knives, we suddenly found ourselves without a battlefield, for the second time.

Chef’s Kitchens, a cool commercial kitchen co-op located in West Los Angeles was originally going to be our Kitchen Stadium. That is until we found out we needed food handlers’ licenses and liability insurance. Our second Kitchen Stadium was to be a friends’ home, that is until the über-pregnant hostess realized that we’d be taking over her kitchen for the better part of a day. Suddenly scrambling for a location the day before the event, Brooke and I called every connection we had in the food world to try and track down a kitchen large enough for two people to cook in. Bon Appetit’s test kitchen? No chance. Sur La Table’s cooking class kitchen? Not with a day’s notice. A restaurant that doesn’t do lunch service on Saturday? Are you kidding! If it weren’t for the graciousness of Pizzeria Mozza server Pilar Arias the whole thing would have fallen apart.

The Secret Ingredient
Some of the farmers were still setting up their stalls when Brooke and I arrived at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market on Saturday morning. The sparkling blue sky shimmered like the nearby ocean, making the colors of the produce pop. Butternut squashes looked more peachy, herbs more green. But nothing looked more beautiful, or more quintessentially fall-like, than the varied shades of green and red and yellow apples from Cirone Farms. Mike Cirone dry farms approximately 30 acres of orchards in See Canyon, near San Louis Obispo, growing popular varieties like Red Delicious, Gala and Fuji, and heirloom apples like Spitzenberg, Muutsu, Red Stripe, Bellweather and Newton Pippon. Tasting through the apples, which ranged from super-tart and firm to sweet and softer, we knew we’d found our ingredient, our secret ingredient. Battle Apple was on.

The Heat of Battle
Years ago, when I still thought I was going to make my living as a poet, I wanted to publish a literary journal called Celoso with my friend Chris. Celoso is the Spanish word for “jealous” and we wanted publish poetry that made us jealous we hadn’t written it, poetry that would make us work harder. The spirit of Celoso is what makes Iron Chef such a joy to watch. It showcases talented chefs taking on their culinary idols, sometimes even their mentors, not necessarily to prove they’re better chefs, but to push themselves creatively.

Celoso carries over to my food writing and, ultimately, to my friendship and writing partnership with fellow blogger Foodwoolf (aka Brooke Burton). So it seemed appropriate to lock knives in an Iron Chef-style competition, not to see who was a better cook, but as a way to push us to cook better, to be more creative and to craft a better story.

Dicing, slicing and sautéing, we threw ourselves into Battle Apple like professionals. Pilar’s kitchen island was buried under an orchard’s worth of apples, peeled skins strewn about like fallen leaves, bowls crashing like bolts of thunder.

My menu:

Fennel Apple Salad with Apple Vinaigrette
Apple Risotto with Grilled Pork Tenderloin and Apple Salsa
Apple Fritters with Homemade Ricotta and Almond Honey

Time management and only having two burners (we were sharing the stove) were going to be my biggest challenges. My strategy was to immediately get the pork tenderloin into a brine, then to start the ricotta, which takes about 20 minutes to make. But I spent most of my first hour peeling and cutting apples. Once I started the risotto time started to slip away from me. While it was cooking I couldn’t do much else. With all that stirring, stirring, stirring I felt like a witch over her cauldron.

All the while, I was watching Brooke cook. As she peeled and pureed I started to wonder if my dishes were complex enough. Were the apples going to stand out as well in my dishes as they would in hers. Could grilled pork tenderloin really complete with the oily richness of seared duck breast. Then our chairman announced I had 20 minutes remaining and all concern over Brooke’s cooking vanished. I felt doomed. I dumped all of the ingredients for my fritter batter into a bowl and started whisking while reading the directions for the first time. Oops. I was supposed to whip the egg whites and fold them into the batter, which should have been resting for an hour; that would explain why it looked like playdough.

I tried to save the batter and quickly race to make my dressing, heat the oil and plate all my dishes, but I had to call for backup. In the end, I went over my time (I believe Brooke did too). Luckily Alton Brown was nowhere in sight.

My best dish was, hands down, the pork and risotto (recipe tomorrow). Using Muutso, Red Stripe, Newton Pippin and Spitzenberg apples, the dish had wonderfully varied textures and balance, plus a kiss of spice from the apple salsa. The risotto was creamy and delicious and the pork was cooked perfectly on the grill. I do believe one of our judges gave it a perfect 10, for taste. But the fritters cost me. They weren’t crisp or particularly flavorful.

So “Whose Cuisine Reigned Supreme?” Foodwoolf won Battle Apple by three points: 68-65.

Smoke-Roasted Sage-Crusted Pork Loin with Mostarda di Frutta

I must have been about five the first time my family went camping. It was in New Jersey. But it was nothing like the New Jersey of suburbs and highways and brick and concrete. There were acres of trees in every direction surrounding our campsite and a shallow, clear creek that ran alongside it. Across the road there was a lake and a waterfall.

It’s easy to love camping for the proximity it puts us in to striking natural beauty. It takes us out of our constructed lives, so that we eat and sleep and play by the sun. And regardless if you’re the kind of camper who prefers to reach your outdoor destination by foot or by car, every camper knows the smell of wood smoke. It wraps its fingers around each person sitting around the fire, weaving its way into the fibers of your clothes, working into the follicles of your hair. It infuses your food, from pancakes to burgers to potatoes, with a sweet, earthy smell that is unmistakably simple and natural, like the family hearth from another time.

Unfortunately, we can’t all always be camping. But it’s easier than you think to recreate that wood fire smell without setting your house on fire or spending big bucks. Alton Brown created a smoker on Good Eats using two terracotta planters, a hot plate, a pie tin and some wood chips. An ingenious device to be sure, but I live in a small apartment in Los Angeles with a balcony that barely fits my small gas grill. So I opted for a small, perforated stainless steel smoking box and a bag of untreated hickory chips (though any hardwood: apple, chestnut, walnut or mesquite, for example, would do).

Deciding what to cook was much harder than deciding how to cook it. Poultry, lamb, beef, pork and game all lend themselves to smoking. The trick with this style of grill smoking is to keep it simple. On my little gas ‘cue you can’t escape the flames or vary the temperature much—the low setting is hot and the high setting is hotter—so I knew whatever I was going to make shouldn’t call for cooking over super-low heat for hours and hours.

I finally settled for a variation of the Smoke-Roasted Sage-Crusted Pork Loin with Quick Mostarda di Frutta from June’s grill-devoted issue of Gourmet. It was surprisingly easy and utterly delicious. The leftovers were great on their own, as sandwiches and could have easily been doctored with some eggs for breakfast. And better yet? If you made the mostarda and rubbed your pork with the seasoning paste ahead of time, you could pack it all into your cooler and have an amazing treat for your next car-camping trip (not recommended for backpackers). Cook on a grate near the fire, but not directly over it for that slow-cooked, smoky flavor.

Smoke-Roasted Sage-Crusted Pork Loin with Mostarda di Frutta
adapted from Gourmet Magazine

Note: If you are cooking on a charcoal grill, you can use natural hardwood charcoal for fuel. Cook when the flames go out, though cooking over lower heat will take longer but the results will be delicious.

For the Pork
¼ c olive oil
¼ c coarsely chopped sage
2 tbsp minced garlic
1 2/12 lb pork loin
Kosher salt

For Mostarda di Frutta
1 ¼ cups water
4 tbsp dry brown mustard
½ c distilled white vinegar
¼ c packed brown sugar
1 2/3 mixed dried fruit (I used plums, pears and apricots)
Kosher salt

Equipment
Grill, smoking tin, soaked hardwood chips

Soak a ½ cup of hickory wood chips in water for 30 minutes. Drain and put into your smoking tin. Place on hot grill grates. As the chips heat up they’ll begin to send smoke through the vents.

While the grill is heating mash together oil, sage, fennel and garlic with a mortar and pestle. If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, use a wooden spoon and a bowl. You are trying to make a loose paste.

Rinse your pork loin and pat dry. Season with Kosher salt and pepper then rub all over with seasoning paste.

Turn your grill down to its lowest setting and place your meat on the grates. Put lid on and cook until done, 145 degrees for medium rare, 150 for medium and so on. Remove finish roast and let rest for 20 minutes, covered with foil.

While the pork is roasting, whisk together water and mustard until smooth.

Bring vinegar and brown sugar to a boil in a small saucepan, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Simmer over very low heat, stirring frequently until thickened, about 10 minutes.

Add mustard mixture and stir in thoroughly, then add dried fruit. Simmer again until slightly thickened, about 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with pork.