Pork Chop Sandwich

My usual supplier for fresh bread is sick this week and I’m trying out a local French bakery. The baguettes are divine and deserve some special attention. Since I had some pork loin left over, I butchered it into chops and made this sandwich special.

The chops are marinaded in a peppery sauce, then pan seared. Topped with bacon (link to recipe and howto), sautéed onions, and a fresh garden salad from my back yard. The sauce is basically a Salt Lake City style “fry sauce” instead of the usual Thousand Island dressing (fry sauce is thicker than 1kI dressing).

Served with shoe string fries and a bottle of Lone Star beer.

10. Making Sauerkraut – still the top draw on the site with ~300 visitors a day. I had no idea people were so much into making that stuff when I wrote the post.

9. Primal Cut Tattoos – people looking for “chef tattoo” or “cook tattoo” eventually find that page. Problem, though, some people linked it as primal cut diagrams. People, the basis for those tats is a 16th century cut diagram, nothing you’d be able to use today.

8. The Bavarian Leberkaese recipe – recipes seem popular, even on this site which has once been called “the blog of some stupid idiot chef who hates home chefs and recipes”.

7. Yelpmailed – lots of hits, still, especially after the Boston Globe article and the launch of Yelp in Germany.

6. In Defense of Negative Reviews – got some coverage in the Wall Street Journal and therefore some hits. Also always a crowd magnet to challenge Michael Bauer.

5. Chew this, Vegan wasn’t the first I’d ever written on the topic. Much more hate was generated in response to Foie Alamo.

4. School food got some coverage here, here, and here.

3. Talking about Pie vs. Cake (and declaring a winner), Scallops, and Cheese Curds.

2. Controversial but still fun: my dislike for recipes, being called a sexist and racist for asking for more community kitchens, having a problem with bartenders calling themselves chefs, being approving of microwaves, and yelling at your employees in the kitchen.

1. And, finally, Top Ten Signs to Avoid a Restaurant and debunking the lies in “Thirteen things your waiter won’t tell you“.

That’s it for this short interlude, written this morning but for some reason not posted until I moved the status from draft to publish on my Android phone. Sorry about that.

Bacon: how CAN you resist? Yes, yes, I know I am reusing that picture. But, hey, first it's a great one and second it's a much bigger size :)

It is no secret that I am a lover of bacon. A representative and shining example of all three culinary baselines, fat, sugar, and salt, bacon is to food what Louis Armstrong’s “Wonderful World” is to a first date.

FIVE lbs in one sitting? If he divorces her over this, I want to marry her.

Going about adding more bacon to one’s diet offers a number of different venues. At the very bottom are bacon bits. They, along with Justin Bieber, Twilight, and drunken phone calls after 11pm from your ex, are part of Satan’s devious ploy to punish us for our wicked ways. And, like the others, better not talked about.

“Real” bacon comes in many forms and shapes. Mostly the flat-ish, artificially colored and flavor injected, kind. Supermarkets sell those by the pound and, in a pinch, that’s what works for most dishes. Just don’t get too offended if the “thick cut” slice of goodness shrivels under heat like a pro-Baseballer’s baby maker on the juice. All that injected salty brine needs to go somewhere, and right up into the air is as good as any place.

Real eaters prefer “artisan” bacon. Which is code for “the stuff I could have made myself but didn’t because I am lazy or overworked and have a suitcase of cash from my last bank heist or divorce settlement with ready funds for such decadent  indulgences.” Artisan bacon is expensive, usually well made and cured, often sold in places that come with a free foodie guilt trip for still eating Ready Mac from the box, and tastes delicious.

Those among us who prefer to spend less money and a little bit more time make their own. Which is nowhere as complicated as it sounds. Surprisingly enough, making bacon is fun. It also gives us, the end-user of said porcine gift, a choice of flavorings. And the satisfaction of knowing we got as close as possible to our ancestors’ dietary pursuits.

You waited for it: Let’s make some bacon

THIS abomination is a thing of the past from now on!

Before we start, let’s set some basic terms. Bacon comes from the pork’s belly. At least American bacon, that is. Other cultures have used shanks, butt, or even the compressed remains of heads and tails. For this exercise we’ll stick with pork belly.

Aside from the meat (we’ll get to the selection criteria in a second), you’ll need a smoker. Your local market should have at least one, often for less than thirty or forty bucks. Electrical smokers are a little less maintenance and easier to operate well, charcoal smokers on the other hand do have a certain pre-industrial charm. If you’re feeling completely hack-ish (or, just in case you want to wait that long, bought my forthcoming book “Blowtorch and Spatula, a 21st century chef’s pursuit of culinary clarity and degustatory delights” which has the plans in it) you could rig a smoker from a portable hotplate and some bricks, too.

Whatever your choice, make sure it has a hanger-bar. Build yourself (or purchase) some pronged bacon hangers ($8 at SausageMaker.com) and you’re all set.

Choose your belly from the back (that’s the part that borders on the loin) and don’t skimp on size. A well cured and smoked slab of bacon can be kept for quite a while and, while easy, the process takes a little bit of time and isn’t something you want to do every weekend.

Rub the belly with salt and sugar at a mixture of three to one. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and store in your fridge for at least twelve, better twenty-four hours. The combination of salt and sugar will act hygroscopic, pulling water from the outer layers of the belly through absorption (not adsorption).

In the mean time combine the same sugar/salt mixture (three parts salt to one part sugar) for your brine. Shoot for two cups of salt/sugar mix per quart of water. Everything else, now, is your decision. Personally, I love to add a little bit of chipotle, some maple syrup, and cloves, but the final taste is up to the cook, here. Bring your mixture to a boil (mine comes below) and stir to dissolve all the solids. Take off heat, add another quart of water, and let cool to room temperature. Finally, add a cup of vinegar. I use apple cider vinegar because I love the flavor it brings to the product, but whichever you prefer is cool. The vinegar helps raise the acidity of your brine and acts as a deterrent for many bugs that would otherwise spoil the party. If you feel very experimental, try cane vinegar and reduce the quantity by one third since it’s more acidic than other white vinegars.

Unwrap the bacon-to-be and submerge in your brine. Since the bugger has a tendency of floating up on me, I usually weigh it down with a plate on which I placed the “brick in a ziptop bag” I keep handy in my kitchen.

Until this is invented we'll have to stick to the old-fashioned way of curing and smoking!

Chefs need rest, and so does your bacon. Which, coming to think about it, makes perfect sense. Both chefs and bacon are essential to a perfect meal, which must mean we’re related. Oink! Give it four days, five on the upper end, in your fridge. But careful, fridge temperatures above 39 degrees and below 35 are detrimental to the full brine flavor development.

On the fifth day (or fourth, or third if you’re hungry and desperate) fire up your smoker. Again, the choice of flavor is yours. Applewood makes for great breakfast bacon, images of the Canadian forests, Maine fishermen on their way home, Seattle grunge bands. Pecan wood chips conjure dreams of southern hospitality, blues at the bar around the corner, chicken and waffles. Cherry wood is fruity, California on a warm day, goes great with seafood and game, and has notes of autumn winds in the Napa vineyards. Nothing says “John Deere and a twelve-gauge” like hickory smoked bacon, serve with pulled pork, hush puppies, and Shiner bock. Stay away from mesquite. It might sound great and taste great, too, but it’s one of those flavors that are hard to pair.

Take the bacon-apprentice from the brine and shake off extra brine. Dry in front of a household fan or hanging in the breeze for about thirty minutes. The bacon should be dry to the touch to allow a pellicle to  form while smoking. The pellicle is a layer of coagulated and tightened fat which will keep juices in (unlike the whole “sear to seal in juices” hoax, this one is real) and prevents the bacon from drying out. It also prevents juices from dropping onto the smoker rig which keeps smoke coming and carcinogenic smoke from developing. Hang onto hangers and smoke at 85 to 95 degrees F for nine to twelve hours. Longer smoking makes for a stronger flavor (but you knew that already).

Remove from hangers, wrap tightly in plastic wrap and let cool down a bit before moving into the refrigerator for twelve to sixteen hours. Remove, chill for and hour to get some stiffness into the slab, then cut to desired thickness. Keeps in your fridge for a week or your freezer for up to three months. Not that it’ll ever last that long.

Parting Thoughts and Gift

Making bacon is easy. It’s not a labor intensive job, either. Along the way your choices of flavors are many, only limited by your imagination. During winter I like to make orange zest brines and apple cinnamon ones, in summer I gravitate towards fresher and spicier versions. Home cured and smoked bacon stays firm and tender under heat, unlike supermarket brands which are injected with saline solutions to sell at higher weights. They make great gifts, too, because nothing says “I love you” like a pound of home-made goodness.

And here’s the parting gift. My secret brine recipe :)

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup salt
• 2 quart water
• 1 quart apple cider vinegar
• 3 chipotle peppers, seeded and chopped
• 1 tbsp crushed black pepper
• 1 tbsp nutmeg
• 2 tbsp dried red currants
• cloves

Make the brine with everything except the cloves and pepper. Stud the cloves into the belly and rub the pepper over it before applying the salt/sugar rub. I smoke this one with applewood.

And don’t forget to comment and let me know how it was for you :)

Oracle, it must be said, who has never been slow in asserting their “patents” and intellectual properties, which – as a company – has never been a friend of Open Source to begin with (other than, well, purchasing it and using it as leverage to make money).

If, it stands to reason, WordPress.com ditches Cutline and Pressrow so as not to appear in agreement with Chris Pearson:

John, unfortunately the presence of Cutline and Pressrow (and Thesis used by one VIP) on WP.com has been pointed to as an endorsement of Thesis by Automattic, which is not something we want to portray.

(Matt)

Fair enough. But if, as Matt asserts, usage conveys endorsement, doesn’t that endorse Oracle, its vehemently anti-competitive actions, and its recent software patent bullcrap lawsuit against Google?

I, for one, wouldn’t mind a switch to Postfix.

A different presentation

The San Francisco post has to wait a few days. I am more or less still in (positive) culinary shock from a week of dining, meeting old friends, making new ones, and falling madly in love with Tingly Lamb, sorting all that out will take a day or two.

In the mean time, to issue a “be still my heart” and to combat the 106 degree weather in Dallas, I retreated into the kitchen to try something new. Wednesday I met Charley Stall, a self-described “experimental foodstuffs maker” (oh, the lengths we all go to, to avoid the dreaded m-word and not have to call ourselves molecular). He fed me his take on French Toast ice cream, which was both delicious and hell on my attempts to lose some weight. The only sweet thing I eat, aside from French Toast, are baked S’mores, so I figured it’d be time to make some S’mores ice cream and see how it stacks up.

When deciding on the method, I moved away from the custard techniques, having tried a few and found them to bee too thick and cloying to do the dish justice. Another great accident helped – heading to the Dallas Farmer’s Market to buy some organic eggs, I came across Wackym’s Kitchen and his delicious sea salt caramel cookies. Having done a similar, non-ice-cream dish for the “Don’t H8″ dinner in support of the overturn of Prop 8, I figured it’d be worth a try incorporating those caramel cookies instead of graham crackers. With that much salt, of course it’s imperative to use un-salted sweet butter, lest you’d be assaulted by saline overload.

I froze the marshmallows for a day in the freezer. Having just come back from San Francisco and finding myself without liquid nitrogen, this was a required step. Technically it could be skipped by spritzing them with a little bit of sugar water and tossing them into the blast chiller for an hour, but alas I am not as rich as some people and don’t have one.

Ingredients:

• 1 pint of heavy whipping cream
• 1 cup of dark chocolate chips plus a little bit extra, molten in a water bath
• 1 cup of marshmallow grind (see below)
• 1/2 cup of agave nectar
• 1 tsp liquid smoke

Toss the frozen marshmallows into a food processor and process until coarsely chopped. I tried doing it by hand, fearing for the life of my processor and the marshmallows (through overheating), but it dulled my knife after half a bag and takes forever. Nicely frozen marshmallows don’t really pose a danger to the machine.

Once coarsely processed, I removed them and returned them to the freezer for another 60 minutes. You don’t have to do that if they remain reasonably stiff.

Process the chocolate chips with the nectar and cream until foamy and evenly processed. Return the grind, pulse once or twice.

Add the mixture to your ice cream maker.

When the cream is two thirds done, process half of your box of salty caramel (or, if you’re not as lucky as I am and near someone who makes them, graham crackers) into a coarse dust. Add liquid smoke. Add crushed cookies to cream and finish.

Crush the second half in a bag, melt some sweet, un-salted, butter, and make the bottoms. I like to use a medium size ring mold. Push about 1/4 inch high of the bottom. Brush with the molten chocolate, let stand for thirty seconds, the fill the ring mold with the ice cream. On top I sprinkled some choco shaves and added a mint leaf.

Serve.

Alternatively, cut a marshmallow into 1/2 inch strips, place on top, and brulee briefly. Adults might like some amaretto liqueur flambé on top, too :)

And we’re back in the saddle, wielding the mighty lance of truth and scientific endeavor against the black knight of stupid dietary fads and quickly greenwashed wool pulled firmly over the eyes of its followers.

Not everything is better with Bacon

I’ve never been a fan of dietary restrictions. With them comes, generally as a prerequisite, often an annoying need to proselytize, ignore facts while playing talking points into the stratosphere. From PETA buffoons comparing themselves and animals to the victims of the Holocaust, to salivating dweebs storming a butcher and demanding to have their anti-meat diets served. Not to mention the death threats and images of family members with superimposed cross-hairs sent to chefs and butchers, and more.

Head into your favorite store and you’ll find quite a few “gluten free” products. Many which had been that way for decades (there’s no gluten in SunnyD, only extremely unhealthy sugary goop), but now sport the logo. In a brilliant marketing move, a small industry catering to the less than one tenth of one percent of all Americans suffering from coeliac disease, managed to convince a much broader audience of the evils of an inherently non-evil foodstuff, boosting their sales of often overpriced “dietary solutions”.

And, not unlike any old bad religion, the psychology of dogma stands – the more it is dispelled, the tighter its followers will hang onto it.

Try arguing with a vegan. Ever tried arguing immaculate conception with a nun? Don’t.

Ever eaten a tomato in November? Your friendly neighborhood nagging vegan did. That tomato, together with tens of thousands of its watery friends, came from Mexico. Raised “organically” on a swath of land wrest from the arms of mother nature through aggressive deforesting. Huge container trucks load the hydroponic abominations into their bellies, hurrying north to serve those who love their tomato and lettuce main course. Huge veins of asphalt and gravel connect the fields to the main interstates, built on top of natural habitats, killing more than one species for good. Extinction, apparently, as well as anti-environmental building and maintenance of farms isn’t part of the things that make stuff non-organic. But, hey, we didn’t use any fertilizer.

On its way north, truckers tell, it’s not uncommon to be stopped by waylaying thugs, crooked cops, and cartel employees. There’s good money making with those tomatoes.

Bite into it, go ahead. No animal was slaughtered for your dinner. Sure, you’re supporting the cartels that deal in human trafficking, the extinction of a few species, and the workers at that farm aren’t what you’d call in a good employment situation, but – hey – Stanley the Steer wasn’t harmed.

Ethics, it’s what’s for dinner. Just a question of what gets your ire up. Me, I prefer not to extinct species, support human traffickers, or support the work standards of those farms, but … hey, if it’s Stanley you’re more concerned about I’ll respect that.

The Baconkini... No, really, how can ANYONE resist that?

Apply enough pressure, and carbon turns into diamonds. Some people don’t want to wait those six million years, so pressure is applied now. Mainly, and chiefly, on us – the consumer. Watch your carbon footprint, people. And food, it turns out, has a huge carbon footprint. At least, so the vegan who spat in my face during a lamb cooking demo, meat does. Apparently vegetables are transported on unicorn laughter and carried across rainbows by leprechauns.

So says the vegan: “but as the end-user, rather than feeding it to an intermediary, I save a round-trip”. And right they are. No denying that. Which is, let’s face it, the main reason we need to re-think our diets.

Meat has become the staple of our plates. Cutting down on its consumption, introducing fresh, local, seasonal, vegetables as the stars into our dishes, makes sense. Talk to your butcher. Find someone who raises, slaughters, and sells locally. Offset the higher cost by eating less, but better. Six ounces of grass fed, local, beef beat the 20oz Mega Mart abomination every day. Talk to your farmers at the market. Most often they not only know what’s in season, they also have great ideas on how to cook it. Don’t expect to find every food source within driving distance, but take the time on a Sunday to find one new source that’s local. Use it. Reward the farmers and ranchers.

I’m no Alice Waters. I know how to cook, I am better looking, and I don’t have millions at my disposition. I also won’t tell you to blow your financial wad on hipster-approved “locavore organic” food. There’s more to this than chain burger or $8 organic egg. There’s a balance. One that supports our environment, promotes health, supports local businesses, and does more for the people, livestock, and landscape needed to produce food than any vegan diet…

Cut out T.G.I McShitBurger and move away from chain food sellers. The fundamental flaw in a vegan’s mind is simple: we can not change our food production by ignoring it. Greenwashing the atrocious means even vegan food is produced might help one’s own sense of guilt, but our planet doesn’t suffer less. Instead of looking away, work with those who are the mortal enemies of factory farming and CAFO – the local grower. Support their defense against the bullies at Monsanto and ConAgra, help keep a small farm or ranch alive by buying there instead. For every rancher still working out there, CAFO gets a big punch into it’s endlessly money lactating teat. And that’s good.

In one aspect, I guess we agree, the vegans and I: think before you chew. If that steer you’re gobbling down hailed, errm.. mooed, from the lush manure pastures of California CAFO Co., you better skip it. If that tomato, red and all watery, comes from Mexico, drop it like it’s hot. Buy local, support your farmers and ranchers, spend that extra minute talking to your butcher and the guy who sells radishes at the Farmers Market. You won’t regret it, it’s leagues tastier, and the environment will be much better for it.

And that’s where it all comes down to earth. Sloganeering, willful ignorance, and reliance on tainted “scientific” studies doesn’t serve omnivores or vegans well. Someone once asked, “is veganism a mental disease?” I disagree. But it’s as sad a mindset as that of the guy buying BurgerMc every day or getting their meat from Walmart. Willfully ignorant. And nothing pisses me off more than smug bastards ignoring the facts while declaring themselves superior to me based on flawed reasoning. That and, oh, those letters with cross-hairs over their children’s faces “asking” chefs to stop serving meat.

Next time someone wants to greenwash their guilt ridden diet, do me a favor. Ask them to think. Get informed. Learn about nutrition and the source of our foods. For one of those things we need to survive, food has become, sadly, quite a never-thought-much-of commodity.

I am SO out of my league here, but figured I’d try it anyways. This morning, getting up at five and all, I made Weisswurst. Despite its looks, this is not what’s known to Canadians, Cajun, and other Frenchmen as “boudin blanc“, instead it’s a veal and bacon based mixture (boudin is pork, not surprising considering it’s French cuisine).

The mixture was roughly 70 per cent lean veal, ground finely, then mixed with twenty per cent pork belly and ten per cent shaved ice, which had been processed into a foamy mass. Salt, parsley, mace, onions, ginger, and cadamom were added. The mixture was then filled into natural pork casings and cooked at 158 degrees F (70 degrees Celsius).

Traditional law (unwritten but almost, if sometimes not more, as powerful as written state law) in Bavaria says, that Weisswurst may never “hear” the noon church bells. Since it is not smoked or otherwise made less perishable, this made sense in older times, sadly today’s butchers and restaurants (mostly north of Bavaria) sell Weisswurst all day.

I finished at eleven, one hour to spare, and served immediately alongside mild Bavarian mustard, a pretzel, and some potato salad.

In the meantime, please enjoy this picture of a knackwurst:

Knackwurst

I use Thesis on this site. Other than that, I have no stakes in it. I don’t like Chris, I am more than dissatisfied with this aloofness and elusiveness on the Thesis forums, and I am firmly of the belief that in this day and age of Twitter, Facebook, and social craze SEO is a dead horse which he beats too much. I don’t make money selling Thesis as an affiliate, and I don’t intent to use it for the rest of my days. One day something better will come along, and that’s when I’ll switch.

I like Matt. I really do. I remember getting him drunk on his 21st, rocking a gondola with him during a Napa Valley trip we organized, and terrorizing his first apartment in San Francisco. He convinced me to move from Drupal to WordPress sometime in 2006, and I think I still owe him five hundred bucks. Matt?

So, for all it’s worth, I should have a horse in this race tagging alongside Matt’s.

Here’s my issue, and it’s two-fold. First, I don’t like the GPL. Now, let me explain… I am all for liberal licensing. Heck, while working at Socialtext I pushed (and ultimately failed) for a license which would, in essence, declare web applications to be “shared” when served on a web server and require the code to be made public. Such efforts were included in the ill-fated Affero GPL and Mozilla’s MPL, but never took hold.

To Matt, the GPL is a magic bullet. One that saves the industry in and by itself. Pearson, on the other hand, is a pompous prick. No two ways about it. To Chris, he himself is the magic bullet. The one that saves and saved the industry on a daily basis, leaping tall SEO hurdles in a single bound. Both are wrong. Though, to be fair, being a pompous prick doesn’t harm one’s code and doesn’t diminish one’s actual achievements. While I might disagree with Chris being one of the top three names in WordPress, without Thesis I might have reverted to Drupal in 2009.

The GPL is outdated. It used to be fine when NetHack made its round around the globe. Today, no one compiles games anymore. The desktop is the web, the web is the desktop. Welcome to HTML 5, the Cloud, and the elusive “social” animal. Code is written for the web, downloaded from the web, deployed onto the web, and used on the web. The GPL might as well not exist anymore, since I am able to share the fruits of my labor right here, online, letting you play with it, use it, without ever sharing a line of the code I plunged into the GPL base provided by Matt.

Sure, if I wanted to package it and distribute it, I’d have to. But who does that, these days? Instead of shipping CDs with code, port 80 does the trick. Instead of open raw data, APIs work for the common good. And that’s great, celebrate while the GPL revolution eats its children.

For me, however, if there is such a thing, there is a clear winner in this debate – Matt. I might disagree with the fundamental goodness of the GPL, but I appreciate a calm, level headed argument over egotistical chest thumping. I can “see” Matt’s point, I can’t see Chris’. Matt is a business man. Chris? He reminds me of all the other SEO types, the “don’t take no for an answer” attitude, the car-salesman manual, the stringent repetitiveness of small, ultimately fallacious, arguments until they become, at least in one’s own mind, true.

So, why am I still using Thesis, then?

In one sentence – because it, the code, the environment, sucks less. Ideology, friendships, and inherent good aside, none of Matt’s GPL’d framework options comes close.

I was all ready to leave, purchased Genesis from StudioPress. Turns out there’s a clause somewhere that I can’t get a refund if I don’t like it. Because, as StudioPress says, it’s downloaded code and therefore can’t be refunded. That very statement, right here, sadly invalidates Matt’s argument. Thesis, while restrictive and without the openness Matt seeks, at least gives me the liberty to drive before I buy (or ask for my money back). A liberty much, much, more fundamental than the implied contagiousness of the GPL which, as I said above, becomes a non-issue for the vast majority of theme code users.

I’m out sixty bucks, Genesis made some cash on me, and the code, free or not, now rots in my inbox. Until a commercial theme providing the same new-user friendliness (not by Chris, mind you, but the many users in the forums – once you strip the web business weirdness), a chance to test-drive the framework and the features of Thesis 1.8 comes along I simply can’t afford switching.

And that, sadly, is the issue all along – ideology should never override good business sense or serve as a substitute for good salesmanship.