Italian Meatballs

Serves 10 to 12

  • 3/4 cup fresh breadcrumbs
  • 6 tablespoons whole milk
  • 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
  • 2 medium onions, finely chopped
  • 6 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1 1/2 pounds ground beef, preferably chuck
  • 1 1/2 pounds ground pork
  • 3 large, whole eggs, lightly beaten
  • 3 large egg yolks, lightly beaten
  • 3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
  • 3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh oregano
  • 1 1/2 cups freshly grated Parmesan cheese
  • Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
  • Dried breadcrumbs, for work surface
  • Olive oil, for frying

Directions

  1. Place breadcrumbs in a small bowl. Drizzle the milk over and let stand until absorbed.
  2. Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion and garlic; cook until translucent, about 3 minutes. Set aside.
  3. Place the ground meats in a large bowl. Add breadcrumb mixture to meats along with the reserved onion and garlic, whole eggs, yolks, parsley, oregano, and cheese. Season with salt and pepper. Using your hands, mix until just combined.
  4. Sprinkle breadcrumbs over work surface. Roll 3/4 cup meatball mixture into a thin strip, about 12 inches long; repeat 3 more times. Line strips next to one another; sprinkle with breadcrumbs. Cut strips into 1-inch lengths. Repeat process with remaining meat mixture.
  5. Working in batches, transfer 1-inch pieces to a large sieve; sprinkle lightly with breadcrumbs to prevent sticking. Toss until pieces become round and form meatballs.
  6. Lightly coat the bottom of a large frying pan with olive oil; set over medium-high heat. Working in batches, cook meatballs until browned and cooked through, 1 to 2 minutes. Transfer to a paper towel-lined baking sheet to drain. Repeat with additional oil and remaining meatballs.

Use these in a pasta sauce, or lasagne.

recipe borrowed from Martha Stewart’s site.

Chinese Red Pork Stew

This is a strongly aromatic main course, and is really good with just some plain rice. Deird doesn’t like me cooking this because the house smells of star anise for a couple of days. You have to cook it for a long time (2-3 hours) to get the pork to be tender and fall-aparty. 

The weird thing about this recipe is that you marinade the pork in soy sauce, then when you fry off the pork before stewing, it turns a dark red. Some of the pork juices and marinade will probably stick to the pan- which is good, because that makes the stock look good later on. If the pork has a bit of fat in it, then this adds to the flavour. Don’t use too lean a meat.

Once it’s all cooked up, you need to sieve the sauce because it can be bitty from the bits of garlic, ginger and star anise floating round in it. The sauce should be thick, rich and sticky, and well condensed down.

Diced pork, about 1lb (1 fillet)
Dark Soy sauce (enough to marinade pork)
1 Onion, sliced into ½ rings
Ginger root- size of thumb
2 garlic cloves
2 star anise
Orange peel- potato peeled from ½ an orange (or mandarin, for authenticity.) Any spare peel- dry it for use later)
2-3 tablespoons of honey
Corn flour to thicken

In a frying pan, Fry pork and pour off juices
Add onion and soften
Add soy sauce from marinade and water to cover.
Add garlic (crushed) orange peel, star anise, peeled crushed ginger and honey
Stew for 60-90 mins
Remove pork, sieve sauce, and thicken with corn flour. Reintroduce pork and serve.

Pork Sausages

I’ve tried making these once, and it never really worked out. The pork I used was too lean, and the sausage were solid, and not overly nice. Use really fatty cuts like belly and shoulder.

Sausage casing, 2–3 metres
Free-range or organic pork shoulder, 500g, minced
Free-range or organic pork belly, 250g, minced
Fine dried breadcrumbs, 25g (optional)
Salt (start with 1 heaped teaspoon)
Sage leaves, 16
Black pepper
White pepper if you have some
Nutmeg or mace, a good grinding or 1/4 teaspoon
A little oil for frying

2 large bowls, wooden spoon, sharp knife, chopping board, teaspoon, frying pan, a wide-necked funnel (hardware shops sell cheap ones), something to act as a plunger to push the meat down the neck of the funnel (the handle of a rolling pin, perhaps), clean string, scissors, an assistant (sausage making is much easier and far more fun when there are two of you)

1. Put one of the large bowls in the sink and fill it with cold water. Drop the length of casing into it. Find one of the ends and hold it close under the cold tap. Turn the tap on a little. You’ll see the water run in and the skin will gradually swell as the water travels down, so it looks like a long, curly snake – an amazing sight! Keep running the water through the casing for a minute or two and then leave the casing to soak in the bowl of water while you make the sausage meat.
2. Put all the minced pork in the other large bowl. Add the breadcrumbs if you are using them (a small amount is good for the texture of the sausage), then add the salt and stir well with the wooden spoon.
3. Chop the sage leaves and add them to the mixture with some pepper and nutmeg or mace.
4. Before you start going into sausage production, make a little ‘cake’ of a couple of teaspoons of the sausage meat and fry it for a couple of minutes on each side until cooked through. Taste it for seasoning – do you need more herbs, more salt, more pepper?
5. Now to fill the sausages. Take the casing out of the water and slide your fingers down it to push out any water trapped inside. Find one end of the casing and draw it over the spout of the funnel. Gather up all the casing over the spout (rather like putting a legwarmer on over your foot), leaving a little bit of the casing overlapping the tip of the funnel.
6. Take a spoonful of the sausage meat and push it down through the neck of the funnel. When the meat appears in the tip of the casing, tie a piece of string around the bottom to pinch it closed (if you tie the casing closed before you put the meat in, you’ll get a big bubble of trapped air).
7. Take it in turns with your assistant to keep pushing the sausage meat through the funnel and into the casing, which will slide off the spout of the funnel as it fills up with meat. Try not to make the sausages too thick and fat or they’ll burst when you twist them into lengths. It’s difficult to make them really even at first and you’ll probably find that the end of your string of sausages is a bit more professional looking than the start.
8. When you’ve used up all the sausage meat, you’ll need to twist the filled casing into individual sausages – unless you’re going to cook the sausage in one big coil like a Cumberland sausage. Starting at the tied-up end, gently pinch the casing and twirl the sausage clockwise every so often, so that you get a classic ‘string of sausages’, like something out of a cartoon. Then find the middle of the string (roughly) and start twisting ‘opposite’ sausages into pairs (see the picture). There is a clever butcher’s way of twisting them into bunches of 3, but it’s too hard to explain!
9. When you get to the end, tie it up with string and snip off any remaining casing. Hang up the sausages somewhere cool and airy for a few hours and then either cook them straight away or, better still but you’ll need unbelievable patience, put them on the bottom shelf of the fridge overnight to let the flavour settle.
10. When you want to cook your sausages, heat a little oil in a frying pan over a low heat. Fry the sausages fairly gently, turning them every few minutes so that they brown all over without burning. They should cook gently for at least 15 minutes, depending on their thickness; cut one open to make sure they are cooked all the way through.

Faggots

• 250g fresh pig’s liver
• 250g fatty pork scraps
• 1 fresh pig’s heart, split in half and rinsed
• 100g ham or bacon scraps
• 100g fresh breadcrumbs
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• Salt
• Freshly ground white pepper
• ½ tsp Mace
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 tsp all spice
• a handful of chopped fresh parsley
• a few sage leaves, finely chopped
• small sprig of rosemary, finely chopped
• small chopped red chilli (or dried chilli)

• Caul fat or streaky bacon for wrapping (optional)

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4.
2. Roughly chop then coarsely mince all the meats and combine in a bowl.
3. Add the breadcrumbs, onion, herbs, spices and some salt and pepper and mix together thoroughly
4. Shape mixture into six balls.
5. Wrap each in a square of caul fat. Cut it large enough to overlap – it will bind on itself to hold the faggots together.
6. If you’re using streaky bacon, stretch each rasher with the back of a heavy knife, making them as long and as wide as possible (approximately two per faggot).
7. Flatten the balls slightly and place on a baking sheet or in an ovenproof dish into which they fit snugly and roast for 50 to 60 minutes, basting once or twice.

Traditional Cured Ham


1 whole or half leg of fresh, free-range pork, on or off the bone

Ingredients:

• 4 litres water
• 1.2kg salt
• 2 teaspoon dried red chilli
• 1 tablespoons cloves
• 2 tablespoons white peppercorns
• 6 juniper berries

Combine ingredients, mixing well to dissolve the salt.

Boil all the brine ingredients together in a large pan and leave to cool. Transfer to a non-metallic brine tub and chill to 3–4°C. Place your piece of pork – also chilled, ideally to almost freezing – in the tub and submerge completely, using a non-metallic weight. Leave the pork in the brine, in the coolest place you can find, for 3 days (minimum) to 4 days (maximum) for every kilo. The maximum time is for a ham you intend to keep a long while; the minimum will suffice if you plan to cook and eat it soon after it is finished.

After its allotted time, remove the ham from the cure, wipe it dry with a cotton cloth and hang it to dry in a muslin bag in a cool, well-ventilated place for 24 hours.

You can then smoke it if you like: hang it high above a hardwood fire or place it in your smoker and either smoke it continuously for 24 hours or intermittently (6–12 hours a day) for 5–7 days. Ideally the air temperature where the ham is smoking should not exceed 40°C (27°C is perfect but a little variation will not hurt).

Smoked or unsmoked, this ham keeps well if you go for the maximum cure time: hang it in a well-ventilated outbuilding, or covered porch where a draught can get to it but the rain can’t, and it should keep right through the winter months. In warmer weather, hams are at risk from flies and other bugs: best get them cooked before too long. A minimum-cure time, unsmoked ham should be kept in the fridge, wrapped in a cloth or muslin, but not plastic, and cooked within a month of curing. Don’t worry if a few specks of mould appear; just wipe them off with a cloth dipped in vinegar.

Hams should be soaked in plenty of fresh water, changed every 12 hours, for 24–48 hours (depending on the length of the cure) before boiling. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for 2–5 hours, depending on size. If the water tastes very salty after the first hour of cooking, pour at least half of it away and top up with fresh boiling water from the kettle.