"Pig Pickin"

What is a pig pickin? A pig pickin is a party with the pig being the most popular guest. A pig pickin is the roasting of a whole hog that is around one year old. This pig will be cooked on a fire until it is falling off the bone tender. During cooking the pig will be basted with a typical mop sauce. The pig is put over the fire meat side down and will typically be flipped one time during cooking. Usually the invited guests will help with cooking the pig and preparing the sides making the pig pickin a very socially interactive event. Once done the guests will pick the meat off the pig, hence the name pig pickin. The meat is usually served with coleslaw and baked beans. The pig pickin is very popular at church gatherings,family reunions, tailgate parties at college football games and of course is deeply rooted in politics. A pig pickin has been used to draw people to more than one campaign rally.

So the next time you are planning an event and want it to be a big hit why not go with the good old fashioned pig pickin. Your guest will be talking about your party for months.

Here is a mopping sauce recipe from Al Carson of Raliegh, North Carolina

Secret Sauce

1 gallon apple cider vinegar
1 (28-ounce) bottle ketchup
2 3/4 cups firmly-packed brown sugar
1/4 cup garlic powder
1/4 cup salt
1/4 cup crushed red pepper
1 tablespoon ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

In a large stainless-steel pot over medium-high heat, combine all the ingredients; bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for approximately 15 minutes or until crushed red pepper sinks. Remove from heat.

It should be bottled hot, not boiling. Just hot enough that the bottles are hard to hold for more than a few seconds. Fill bottles within 1/2 inch of the top. By bottling hot, it will seal itself. Does not need refrigeration until after opening and then only to protect flavor.

NOTE: The sauce does not seem to have a problem with spoilage. I have used unopened bottles a year later and they have been very good. The sauce does get hotter with age.

If you like the sauce even hotter, add 1/4 cup of Tabasco before cooking.

Assiette de Tete de Porc or ‘How to turn a hog’s head into a delicate trio of starters’

[Scroll down for recipes]

Carnivorous detachment is something many of us are guilty of.



By that I mean there is a deliberate and tangible epistemic distance between product and animal. It’s one that we gloss over. Choose to ignore, and prefer to exist in a state of happy ignorance about where meat comes from.

Of course, when it really comes down to it we know that something, some thing, died so that we can consume the animal protein on our plate but there is a vast chasm between the casual awareness of this and the genuine hands on reality.

A few weeks back I went to a slaughterhouse. It was clean and quiet and had been shut down for the day. But the pervading atmosphere was one of death.

It was discernable not only in the smell, but in the walls, the floors, the shape of the pens and the grim actuality of the chains, hooks and instruments required to turn a cow (or in this case a water buffalo) into something the consumer is happy to eat.

There was no slaughter that day. But it wasn’t necessary to see it in order to have beliefs affirmed: that, for me, eating meat comes with a responsibility to appreciate the reality of husbandry, slaughter and butchery.

I’m not here to proselytise. Merely explain the position I’ve chosen to take and hopefully use that as a springboard for what follows.



Naturally there was a culinary dimension to cooking a pig’s head. It’s a challenge. A gastronomic gauntlet. A badge of honour, almost. But it also represents the face-to-face dimension of being a carnivore. Literally.

Where one can cook a steak with little thought to animal from which it came, a head doesn’t offer this luxury. It is clearly an animal, and one that we are familiar with. Looking at the apparent smile that seems to spread across the face of a dead pig one can’t help but think it is in a state of blissful ignorance as to its fate: the dinner plate.

I’d set myself the task of cooking a rather ambitious menu and then serving it up to brave diners who had kindly volunteered to accompany me on this little culinary journey. As a perfectionist, though, this wasn’t going to happen without a practice run.

The brain dish wasn’t a winner and certainly not worth the effort of cleaving open the head – a task which took close to three quarters of an hour. But the rest had potential.

So, here it is. A first draft anyway. Complete with recipes


Trio of Pig’s Head

[NB – The only element of this I had help with was asking the butcher to remove the eyes. I have a funny thing with eyes. I was 21 before I could consider the possibility of getting contact lenses.]

For this you will need one pig’s head. Remove the eyes and discard. Remove the ears close to the head and wash well. Use a boning knife to remove as much of the cheek meat as possible, cut into inch long pieces and set aside.

Cut off about an inch and a half to two inches of the snout and discard (a large saw is probably the best piece of equipment for this).

Place the head and ears into a large stockpot with a crude mirepoix of carrots, onion, celery, leeks and garlic. Cover the whole lot with water and bring it to a gentle boil. Let it simmer for half an hour, skimming off any scum that rises to the surface. After thirty minutes reduce the heat and let it bubble away very gently for three hours.

To confit the cheeks, finely chop some rosemary and bay leaf. Salt the cheeks and sprinkle over the herbs. Put the whole lot into a roasting tray and add enough duck or goose fat to come halfway up the cheek pieces. Cook in a cool oven – about 125 degrees C – for three hours. Turn the pieces every half hour or so. Once cooked leave to cool.

Remove the ears and head from the stock pot and let them cool. Strain the stock through a sieve and then a muslin cloth, bring it back to the boil and reduce it by about half. Remove about 250ml from the pot and add it to another saucepan. Reduce that by half. This will make the setting jelly for the brawn pâté. The rest of the stock can be used to make soup.

Once the head is cool enough to handle strip it of its meat, of which there should be plenty – about 300-400g. Set to one side and discard the bones.

Take a deep breath. You’re almost there.

Confit of pig’s cheek



Remove the meat from the duck or goose fat and slice off the skin (which can be used to make pork scratchings – bake ina moderate oven for about 20 minutes). Use two forks to shred it roughly, a little like making rillettes. Heat the leftover fat and strain through a sieve.

Season the meat with salt and black pepper then stuff it tightly into a sterilised jar. Pour over the liquid fat, screw on the lid and let it cool. This should keep for weeks and is great served with cornichons and fresh, crusty bread.


Brawn pâté



Brawn is a rough and ready item of charcuterie usually made with the entire head with chunks of meat set into jelly. This is a more delicate, refined version, much more similar to a pâté or rough sausage. The jelly is almost indiscernible and is used predominantly as a binding agent.

Finely chop the meat. Season it with salt and pepper then add some chopped sage, about six or seven leaves. In a mixing bowl add about 50ml of the reduced stock to the meat until it starts to come together then turn out onto a square of cling film or tin foil.

Roll the meat into a tight sausage and leave in the fridge overnight. Once set, slice the meat into circles, fry in a little olive oil for thirty seconds each side and serve with salad leaves.

Crispy fried pig’s ears



These are delicious. Not just passable or ‘OK. For an ear’, but really tasty. A little like calamari but slightly tougher.

Thinly slice the ear and coat in seasoned flour. Make up a batter (I used the ginger beer batter again – it works really well) and deep fry the battered ears for about two minutes. Drain on kitchen paper and serve with sea salt, a little lemon juice and some mayonnaise or sweet chilli sauce.

In Over My Head?

As the old adage goes, you learn something new everyday.

Yesterday I learnt three things. Did you know, for instance, that the greyhound accelerates to 45 miles per hour in a single second from a standing start? Zero to forty five in a second? Amazing. It is the second fastest land mammal on earth.

The other two factoids I gleaned through empirical, hands-on research and part of me wishes I was still in a happy cloud of blissful ignorance. Here we go: the brain of a pig is surprisingly small. Tiny, in fact. About the size of a duck’s egg.


['Two squeaks, or not two squeaks? That is the question']

The second? There is a wonderful nugget of meat that sits just below the eye socket behind the cheek bone, only accessible with an adventurous finger after the head of a pig has been simmered long and slow. It falls away in a rather satisfactory fashion, a neat little piece of tasty pork.

I know this because of Project Napoleon.

Project Napoleon, named after the Stalin-esque character in Animal Farm, began quite by accident.

I’d had a request to cook (and eat) brain for the Nose to Tail Tuesday feature (thanks for that). With calves’ and lambs’ brain still illegal, it was up to the reliable old porker to provide the means by which this terrifying prospect could be realised.

I put in a reluctant request with my butcher and received a phone call on Wednesday: ‘I’ve got a pig’s head here for you? Do you want the whole thing or just the brain?’



The question was a no-brainer (ha ha ha – sorry). The head is a culinary challenge I’ve been keen to take on for quite some time: a real test that separates those who merely profess a predilection for the holistic approach and those with genuine gastronomic fortitude.

Why does the head divide the cooking fraternity so? It’s about emoting. As humans we have evolved to read faces, to try and glean as much information as possible from them. The slightest movement can give away a secret, a feeling or an emotion.

Presented with the head of an animal, there is a near certainty that we will lean towards anthropomorphosis. And pigs, even deceased and decapitated ones, look like they are smiling. They look content. Happy even. So turning it into food is difficult.



Once this hurdle has been leapt over, the rest is easy.

One option for turning this insanely cheap meat (this one cost just under three pounds) into a viable foodstuff is to make a tête de fromage, not a uniquely male medical condition but a rustic pâté also known as brawn.

Here the entire head is simmered gently for three hours in water and stock vegetables. Once cooled, the meat, fat and skin is stripped from the skull, the stock strained, reduced and turned into a jelly into which the meat is set.

Yum.

Or not.

I wanted something more refined. I’ve always believed that true culinary skill lies in turning the ridiculous into the sublime. The drab into the delicious. Here was a challenge.

Driving home from the butcher’s I started putting a menu together, one that would showcase this unusual ingredient to its full potential.


Head Over Heels

So, here is the plan – to be served to adventurous dinner guests, just as soon as we find some. Any takers?

Pre dinner drinks with pork scratchings and ears Ste Menehould

Deep fried brain on toast with champagne

Sour Apple amuse

Pea & Bacon Soup made with ‘head stock’ with homemade bread

Refined brawn pâté with sage

Confit cheek with apple jelly, candied bacon and summer leaves

Dessert

Cheese and port

Let’s see just what this head can do…

Nose to Tail Tuesday (N3T) - Pigs' Tails

From last week’s ‘cheeky’ success, we are heading right over to the other end of the animal for today’s N3T.

These, as you can no doubt see, are pig’s tails:



According to Fergus Henderson, tails have a ‘lip-sticking quality’ thanks to the merging of fat and flesh, similar to snout (which is yet to grace the table) and belly (which has. On many, many occasions). Surely this was going to be a success?

Hmmmm.

‘What the hell are they? Oh my god, what are they? Oh my god, they look disgusting. I don’t think I can eat those. I really don't.’

This is the (paraphrased) reaction of my girlfriend after I’d pulled a tray full of tails from the oven. And it was vaguely understandable.

You see, even when cooked, a tail looks completely, totally, resolutely and unapologetically like, well, a tail. Only slightly scarier. If Ridley Scott is looking to make a recession friendly addition to the Alien franchise then he could do a lot worse than cook up some tails.

I suppose this is part of what I was talking about yesterday – about detachment and the intrinsic distance that now lies between animal and consumer. If it looks recognisable then it is unappetising. What we have become used to is eating something that doesn’t have to remind us that what is on the plate was once on a farm.

A tail changes that.



A tail is something we are used to seeing in cartoons and in children’s books. It’s curly, it’s faintly ‘cute’ and almost completely representative of the animal that it is from.

It’s also visible. You cannot see a steak when a cow is walking round a field. Many don’t even know where the fillet is, for example. A tail is on show. It is always there, being curly, being piggy.

But there is a way round this. A simple and easy way to overcome this seemingly insurmountable hurdle.

Slice, cover in breadcrumbs and fry in oil. Instantly you have something that resembles a McNugget or goujon (depending on your personal predilection for fast food or otherwise).

First off the tails were nestled into a deep roasting tray with a couple of onions, some squashed garlic cloves, three or four bay leaves and some rosemary. The whole lot was then sluiced with light chicken stock and a splash of white wine before being covered with foil and going into a low oven (about 150 degrees C) for three hours.



What emerged was what caused the (justifiably) negative reaction from my girlfriend (hence no photo).

Once cool, they were plucked from the remaining stock – which had turned to jelly – and slow roasted in the oven to render out some of the fat (in a similar manner to pork scratchings).

Step three was to slice into bite size chunks then bread them. Instead of breadcrumbs I used crushed corn flakes, partly for colour, partly for texture and partly for taste.

Flour-egg-flour-egg-cornflakes is a good way of getting a nice crust.



They took no more than a minute or two on each side to fry in oil (sunflower or canola oil is fine). By then they were a wonderful colour and perched neatly on top of a mound of mustard mashed potato and some broccoli puree.



And the verdict?

They were good. No more, no less.

Just good.

The texture could be hard for some to overcome. The roasting part had crisped up the tails and given them a slightly chewy bite. You also have to be a little careful not to bite down to eagerly due to the high number of small bones.

But the meat is tasty, noticeably porcine with a smattering of fat (although not as much as the St. John recipe due to the slow roasting phase, which Henderson leaves out) and a generous amount of lean.

They would benefit from something acidic, like a salsa, in which to be dipped because they are seriously rich but the mustard mash provided a nice flavour and textural contrast to the crunchy bites.

Would I make them again? I doubt it, but I will be keeping a bag of these in the freezer to throw into the stockpot every now and again – they’d add a smattering of body and richness to chicken, or beef stock.

So, verdict? N3T 2 – partial success

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Homemade Pork Scratchings - Part Two

It seems to have taken ages to get round to this, but thank you for your patience. You’ve been very kind. Ready to roll? Good.



Hopefully you managed to get hold of some pork skin and went through the laborious procedure of putting it on a tray, grinding some salt over it and popping it all in the fridge. It should take all of two minutes.



If not, here is a quick recap (homemade pork scratchings part one).

Unlike most methods, this one needs no deep fat fryer - just an oven.

Turn it on to about 180 degrees C. Remove the tray from the fridge and dry the pork skin. The salt will have helped some of the water leach out – this will give you supremely crackly pork snacks.

Grind a little more salt over both sides of the skin and put it all in the oven. Then wait.

This is cooking so easy that it should come with a pair of slippers, a velvet robe and large armchair for relaxing in.

After ten minutes or so turn the oven down to about 140. You are doing two things here: One, rendering out the fat and two, drying out the pork skin nice and slowly to get that beautiful flavour and texture.

Roughly every twenty minutes, you’ll need to drain off the fat (of which there will be much. Keep it. Seriously. Pig fat has a multitude of uses, all of them tasty. You could make rillettes?). Take this opportunity to turn them as well.

They should take about ninety minutes in total. This is quite an instinctive recipe – you just know when they are ready. The colour will be deep and rich, they will have curled up into neat little shapes and the skin will be starting to bubble.



Leave them to cool. Season with black pepper (and more salt, if you wish) and then eat them with many bottles of cold beer. Depending on their size, two or three should be enough for each person.

Seriously.

This is one of those snacks that you take one bite of and say ‘I could eat those until they come out of my finger nails’ but by the third mouthful you are ready to throw in the towel and have a nap.

The perfect pork scratching has a reverse side so crispy that you fear for your teeth and an inside with a little fat and meat left on so you get a textural contrast of such deliciousness that you are almost guaranteed to make that noise. Go on, be shameless. You know you want to.

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