Each region of Italy has its own pasta shapes and pasta recipes. Valeggio sul Mincio, a town near Lago di Garda and the city of Verona, is famous for its Tortellini di Valeggio, tortellini made of pasta as thin as … Continue reading Tortellini di Valeggio
I dedicate this post to Richard and his Baby Lady, as they did not only inspire me to create this dish, but also taught me the techniques as well as donated the chiles used. And I also think they’d enjoy … Continue reading Chile Ancho Relleno (Ancho Stuffed with Pork)
For Christmas I got a meat grinding attachment for my stand mixer, and so I can finally make my own salsiccia. Italian pork sausage (salsiccia) is an important ingredient for many Italian primi piatti, like risotto al barolo con salsiccia, malloreddus alla … Continue reading Homemade Italian Pork Sausage (Salsiccia Fatta in Casa)
I already did two posts on Carnitas sous-vide (this post, and this post), so why another one? Well, you can never have too much of a good thing, and those carnitas are so goooooood. So what is the reason for … Continue reading Carnitas Sous-Vide with Guacamole
I’m calling this recipe “swine” tenderloin as I made it with wild boar tenderloin, but it can also be made with regular pork tenderloin. For a change I’m not cooking it sous-vide, instead I finish cooking the meat in the … Continue reading Swine Tenderloin with Balsamic Reduction
Don’t these look great? I made and posted about vegetarian stuffed round zucchini a while ago. When I saw REMCooks’ post Stuffed 8 Ball Zucchini with the round zucchini stuffed with ground meat, I was inspired to create these round zucchini … Continue reading Round Zucchini Stuffed with Pork and Chipotle
Guanciale is cured pork jowl. It is the traditional ingredient for Spaghetti alla Carbonara, Amatriciana and Gricia, but difficult to find outside of Italy. Pancetta (cured pork belly instead of jowl) can be used as a substitute, but of course it … Continue reading Homemade Guanciale
After the success of carnitas sous-vide, I wanted to try a sous-vide version of REMCooks’ recipe for carnitas. Richard cooks the pork with orange juice, lime juice, fresh oregano, fresh thyme, ground cumin, and garlic instead of with achiote paste, … Continue reading Carnitas Cooked Sous-Vide with Orange Juice
Tougher cuts of meat can be cooked sous-vide for a long time (1 to 3 days) to render them tender and keep them juicy at the same time. I’ve been cooking sous-vide for over three years, and I’ve usually salted … Continue reading Sous-vide Salting Experiment
Have you ever heard of cutlets “Palermo style” (alla Palermitana)? I hadn’t. But thanks to the blog Culinaria Italia (the blog of a Brit who lives in Puglia) I have now tried them and loved them! The Cotoletta alla Palermitana … Continue reading Cotoletta alla Palermitana
Babi Panggang is Malaysian/Indonesian for “roasted pork”. So why did I spell it with only one ‘g’ in the title of this post? Because this is the Dutch version that is only known in the Netherlands (and perhaps Belgium) and … Continue reading Babi Pangang (Pork with Sweet & Sour Red Sauce)
After my trip to REMCooks I was inspired to try some more Mexican/Southwestern food. Carnitas is a dish made of braised or roasted and then fried or sauteed pork in Mexican cuisine. Richard had served us delicious sous-vide duck carnitas, and … Continue reading Carnitas Sous-Vide
After my post about Viennese potato salad, it won’t be a surprise that my next post that was inspired by my trip to Vienna is about Wiener Schnitzel. Although this is probably the most famous savory dish from Vienna (unfortunately … Continue reading Wiener Schnitzel
The success of many recipes depends on using a good stock. Most store-bought stock has too much salt in the best case, and in the worst case even lacks flavor. Not to mention bouillon cubes… Homemade stock is easy to … Continue reading Homemade Pork Stock
Pork tenderloin is amazing cooked sous-vide, it is the most tender and juicy pork tenderloin you have ever tasted. And it is so easy to do: simply season the pork tenderloin with salt and pepper, vacuum seal it, cook it … Continue reading Pork Tenderloin Sous-Vide with Sweet & Sour sauce
Saucijzenbroodjes (sausage rolls) are a very popular snack in the Netherlands. They consist of spicy sausage meat encased in puff pastry and are usually served warm. I don’t like regular saucijzenbroodjes very much. I think it is something about the … Continue reading My Sausage Rolls (Mijn Saucijzenbroodjes)
It was no surprise at all that the first recipe of 2014 on REMCooks.com was a chile recipe. This pork dish from New Mexico seemed fairly straightforward and delicious, and I thought it would be nice to tweak it just … Continue reading Carne Adovada Sous-Vide
Pancetta is Italian cured pork belly. I had looked into making it myself before, but the recipes I found required a curing chamber. A curing chamber is a cabinet with controlled temperature and humidity. Even for me it seems over the top to own one. But then I realised that pancetta was originally invented to preserve pork belly when refrigerators had not yet been invented (let alone curing chambers), so I figured that a cellar should do the trick as well. We don’t have a cellar, but in winter our garage comes pretty close with a temperature around 16ºC/60ºF. So I compared many recipes I found online on Italian blogs, on American blogs, and in the end based my first homemade pancetta upon a Dutch blog called missFromage (I bet Shanna likes that name!).
Making your own pancetta is quite easy and not a lot of work, it just requires a bit of patience. The result was great! My first homemade pancetta has a more elegant and detailed flavor than store-bought pancetta available around here. As an added bonus it is cheaper as well. Thanks missFromage for making it look as easy as it actually is! I will definitely make this again. Continue reading “Homemade Pancetta”
Ham hocks (pork shanks) are an inexpensive cut of meat. They can be turned into something delicious by first hot smoking them and then cooking them sous-vide. This is a technique I’ve used before on ham of lamb and brisket, and I wanted to try it on a ham hock. It was absolutely delicious. A light smoky flavor, tender and juicy. Many recipes call for brining the ham hock first, but there does not seem to be a reason to do this for this preparation. The sous-vide cooking allows the smoky flavors to penetrate all the way to the core of the meat and will turn the meat completely tender without drying it out. Continue reading “Smoked Ham Hock Sous-Vide”
I’ve been to most of the regions of Italy, but not yet to the island of Sardinia (Sardegna in Italian). Owen, one of the long time readers of this blog, requested a recipe for malloreddus, the typical pasta shape of Sardinia. At first I thought I had never heard of them, but then I realized that they are also known as “gnocchetti sardi”, and that DeCecco produces a dry version of them. I did some research and talked online to someone from Sardinia and found out that malloreddus are made from semolina flour and water, and that on Sundays saffron is added to the water (as saffron is too expensive to use on a daily basis). Continue reading “Malloreddus Pasta with Fennel and Sausage”
For the main course of our Christmas dinner I wanted to prepare iberico pork, as I had liked it so much when I tried it for the first time. Because REMCooks’ pork with pomegranate sauce had looked so Christmas-like with the red and green colors when I first saw it, I thought it would be nice to do a pomegranate sauce for this pork as well. I prepared a very simple sauce: reduced pomegranate juice mixed with pork demi-glace, garnished with fresh pomegranate arils. It worked very well with the pork. Continue reading “Iberico Secreto Sous-Vide with Pomegranate and Chervil Root”
When I wanted to try and make chili con carne from scratch for the first time, the natural place to go for a reliable recipe was REMCooks.com. Richard’s recipe for what he calls Super Bowl Chili, Texas-Style has been the basis. According to Richard (and I consider him a reliable source), true Texas-style chili includes only meat, chile peppers, and spices. This means that the chile peppers used for it are very important, as they are the determining factor in how the chili will taste. This is why I made my own chile powder rather than using store-bought. By using different types of chiles you can achieve great depth of flavor. Continue reading “My First Chili con Carne”
The dinner we cooked when Teun came over consisted of tuna with runner beans as antipasto, gnocchi alla sorrentina as primo, iberico pork sous-vide as secondo, and finally chocolate stuffed ancho chile with amarena cherries as dolce. The pigs that are grown for the famous jamón ibérico from Spain do not just yield the hams, but also other fine cuts of meat. The finest is called the secreto (literally secret) and is a very nicely marbled piece of pork with lots of flavor. Teun and Albert introduced me to this cut, and I absolutely love it. Cooking it sous-vide is of course a great way to enjoy it to its fullest. I thought it would be nice to combine it with celeriac fondant, and the dish did turn out great. Continue reading “Iberico Secreto Sous-Vide with Celeriac Fondant Sous-Vide”
We are back home from our travels through Australia. Since this is a food blog rather than a travel blog, let me suffice by showing you a map of the route we have traveled (6000 km or almost 4000 miles altogether) in a camper van from coast to coast.
In the other posts I wrote about cooking in the Outback, I told you about how we would on most days kept the cooking to a bare minimum and simply put meat like beef, lamb or kangaroo on our small BBQ. But on one day during a long drive from the West MacDonnells to Kings Canyon I had plenty of time to think and decided to make something that would require more actual ‘cooking’ with the ingredients I had in the camper and of course taking into account the very limited equipment at my disposal. We did not have time to do any shopping, so I used only the ingredients I had bought without a clear idea of how I would use them.
I thought it would be nice not to use the BBQ for a change, and so I decided to simmer pork chops in tomato sauce and then serve the tomato sauce over pasta with additional mushrooms as a primo piatto, followed by the pork chops with the remaining tomato sauce as a secondo (click here if you’d like to know more about the Italian menu structure). I would have liked to use a better marbled shoulder chop for this, but I only had a loin chop so that is what I used. The result was quite nice and I will probably repeat this at home with a shoulder chop or perhaps even sous-vide. Here’s what I did. Continue reading “Pork Chop in Tomato Sauce (Primo + Secondo)”
Thanks to the wonders of scheduled posts, new recipes are posted on a regular basis while I am actually travelling through the Australian Outback in a camper van with very limited internet access and an even more limited kitchen. Even though it’s even more sparsely populated around here than in the South-Western USA that we were touring last year, the supermarkets here are well-stocked and so we’ve not been lacking in terms of nice food. Continue reading “Cooking in the Outback”
Whoa! The more experience I have with cooking, the more I dare to experiment and try new things without using recipes. In this case I made up a recipe from scratch, and I am truly amazed how delicious it turned out to be. From Paul’s That Other Cooking Blog I got the inspiration to deep fry pork belly in cubes rather than as a roulade. And from blogging about Dutch nasi with atjar I got to think about Indonesian cooking. Now this recipe is not Indonesian and not authentic, but it is certainly inspired by Indonesian cooking and uses Indonesian ingredients. Don’t worry though if you can’t get Indonesian ingredients, as I’m sure that it will be just as delicious with substitute ingredients that I will provide.
This dish is bursting with flavor. It starts with pork belly cubes cooked sous-vide for 36 hours at 60C/140F with 5-spice. (You can also prepare this without a sous-vide cooker, though.) (I have since then discovered that pork belly is even better when cooked sous-vide for 36-48 hours at 57C/135F instead.) The pork is then deep fried briefly to crisp it up. The juices from the pork belly are used to create a darkly flavored sweet & sour sauce that is bursting with flavor from sambal oelek, fresh ginger, and caramelized onions. This sauce pairs well with the juicy tender pork belly. As a contrast to the deep dark flavors of the sauce, I prepared atjar-inspired spicy sweet & sour cauliflower that is equally bursting with flavor, but in a different fresher way. Served with some rice, this was one great meal! I will definitely make this again, and I won’t change a thing. Continue reading “Spicy Sweet & Sour Pork Belly and Cauliflower”
After receiving Richard’s wonderful chile package, I browsed through his chile recipes (i.e. most of his recipes 😉 ) to get ideas of what to do with those chiles. His recipe for Chihuahua Cheese Stuffed Porcine Chipotle Burgers struck my fancy, so I decided to give it a try. I’ve never seen Chihuahua cheese around here, and I didn’t look forward to inquiring because everyone would think I was talking about a yappy little dog rather than cheese. So I decided to use sardinian pecorino because that is what I had.
I had never heard of chipotle chiles before, so I did not know that they are in fact smoked jalapeños. The flavor of the pork burger with the pickled chipotles mixed into the patties was simply amazing! We both loved it. The smoky flavor of the chipotles worked really well. I will definitely prepare these burgers again and then I will try grilling them on a charcoal fire because I expect that will take them over the top. Thanks Richard, not only for the great gift but also for this delicious recipe! Continue reading “Richard’s Awesome Chipotle Pork Burgers”
Pulled Pork is a BBQ recipe from the Carolinas, recently featured on Putney Farm. I thought it would be nice to do a sous-vide version. When you hot-smoke meat for a brief time and then finish cooking the meat sous-vide, … Continue reading Pulled Pork Sous-Vide with Spiced Apricot Chutney
Burgundy (Bourgogne) is a region in France that is famous for its wine and its food. Three years ago we went there for a few days to discover the wine region and purchased some nice wines. When tasting white wines, often a appetizer called jambon persillé was served with it and I remember it was a good pairing. And so it was not hard to decide what kind of appetizer from Burgundy I was going to make for the Burgundian evenings I organised. Continue reading “Jambon Persillé (Ham Hock Terrine)”
I hardly ever use beans and I thought it would be nice to make something with beans for a change. Beans make me think of Mexican food, so I decided upon a Mexican-Style Pork and Bean Stew. I am not a connoisseur of Mexican food, so I do not claim that this is a traditional recipe. Perhaps someone can tell me whether this is even remotely Mexican 😉 For color and variety I thought it would be nice to use five different kinds of beans. Since I didn’t know the cooking times of them, I decided to cook each type separately. This was a bit of extra work, especially since I do not have the space or pots to cook five types at the same time so I had to do this in two batches. It turned out that most of the beans had the same cooking time of one hour. Next time I will probably opt for cooking them all at the same time, even though that may make the flavors less clearly defined. I did not cook the beans and the pork at the same time, because the beans need to boil whereas the pork needs to simmer since otherwise it would dry out. I was pretty happy with the result. Next time I make this, I will use fattier pork with bones such as pork ribs for additional flavor and better tasting meat. Continue reading “Mexican-Style Pork and Bean Stew”
Stefan's Gourmet Blog 