Plain tomato sauce and, "You've Gotta Have Heart"

Late season fruits are the sweetest... I turned the last tomatoes of the summer into a plain, sweet sauce that I can use through the winter. And, organ meats!

I've been asked by people who want to eat more healthfully, for advice on selecting produce. The good news is that we can all do it. If there's one thing human beings have been doing forever, it's picking out what's best to eat. A school of thought in personal nutrition that has always fascinated me are the Instinctos, or Anopsologists, who always eat their foods singly---there is no Instincto "cuisine"---as well as fresh and raw. They choose their nutrition, one food at a time, and eat it until they no longer want it. This is the way I'd advise you to select your fresh foods, at least as a starting point. Be a human animal, first: if it helps, pretend you're a gorilla, or a chimpanzee. Look for what catches your eyes. Pick it up and weigh it in your hand. Prod it gently with a finger. Give the bunch of celery or melon or whatever it is a sniff. Do you want to eat it? Put it in your basket.

Beef heart stew

I was late to the fields this tomato season, so I only got one unlimited harvest. By then, most of the fruit was on the ground. The one kind of tomato that was most plentiful was a small, orange variety that was similar enough to last year's golden tomatoes, which made a wonderful sauce, that I was willing to take some risks to get some home. The other shareholders were avoiding these tomatoes, for being on the ground, but I got down and started gathering. If it felt firm like a grape, I picked it up for further inspection. If it was especially dirty, I'd wipe off the dirt so I could check it for bug holes. I was looking for an unbroken skin, no bruises, and especially no round marks, indicating that a bug had made its way in and might still be inside---it or its offspring. If the tomato met all those requirements, I put it in my bag.

At home, I dumped them all into a sink full of water and started washing and sorting. Some tomatoes got squished on the way home, so they went into the compost bucket. I gently rubbed each fruit's firm skin with my palms and fingertips to get the dirt off, and removed the stems, then set the clean tomato in a colander to drip.

From top: Red dal (see link for recipe), spinach sauteed with garlic,
well cooked broccoli, and roasted sweet potato with butter

In batches, I ran the tomatoes through the food processor, then into a big pot on the stove to simmer. I added a generous glug of red wine and one of olive oil, and a little salt, and let it cook for several hours. The resulting sauce was thick like jelly. And when I say it was sweet, I mean that I didn't even use onion, and the sauce was still nearly as sweet as store bought. That's vine ripened sweetness for you.

I let the tomato sauce cool, then bagged it in cups and quarts for freezing. Some of it I used right away in place of fresh or canned tomatoes: in the red dal in the photo above, and in a stew of beef heart, turnip, and kohlrabi that we're eating right now. Like the beef tongue I posted about last time, heart makes good stewing meat, and is very cheap. This heart was given to us by the farmer when we picked up our order---some people don't like the organs and just won't take them. Honestly, I'm not crazy about kidneys or livers, and I've never tried brain, but heart and tongue are muscle: a good starting place if you're just trying organ meats for the first time. They cook up like beef and are lean, but become tender with stewing. Heart has a touch of that organ-y taste that liver and kidney have, but not much. I'm surprised beef hearts haven't caught on more, especially with the Paleo crowd.

Braised pork foreleg and belly

We are eating the last bits of the half a pig we bought late last year. This week, I braised two forelegs and the last two pieces of pork belly that were in the freezer.

There are two challenges to working with this pig, both challenges that I relish. One is to use as much of the pig as possible, while minimizing the overwhelming porkiness. I put whole pig’s feet from this farmer into a pot of split peas, once, and ruined them, because these are not my father’s pig’s feet. I wrote a micro essay for Meatpaper in which I described the way my father would eat the pig’s feet that my mother would braise in tomato sauce. Even as a child, trying to eat one of those fatty trotters was a disappointment. There’s no meat on them, just bone and connective tissue, which are great for making silky, rich sauces, but on a pastured pig, there is also nothing porkier. The scent and flavor are strongly musky, almost human. And there lies the second challenge in working with this pig: being pasture raised, it ate a rich diet that makes it taste more like a pig than grain-fed pork raised in commercial operations, like what you buy in the supermarket and what my mother bought to put in her sauce.

My farmer tells me there are several factors that make a pig porkier tasting, including breed, diet, and exercise. This pig foraged in woods, ate bugs and roots, and had room to run around. The color of the animal’s skin is supposed to speak to the depth of flavor, too, with red pigs having redder, stronger-tasting flesh. Our pig has white skin, which I removed this time before cooking. I’ve braised some belly before with the skin on, and decided I could do with a milder flavor. Besides, I was also going to braise the forelegs, which I was sure would be stinky.


Previous experiments with this pig have proven that the best approach to the tough and flavorful bony cuts, like the ribs, has been to marinate the meat in a mojo criollo type of mixture (OJ, oil, and garlic is the barest-bones version of this), then rub it with dry spices, sear the ribs, then braise, finishing it with a barbecue sauce in the last hour or so of cooking. I’ve also had excellent results braising pork belly with strong spices and aromatics. The cooking is the same for the ribs as for the belly: sear, then braise. I decided to bring my simpler belly process to the forelegs, and braise everything together until the forelegs fell apart.

 

I worked from a recipe for Chinese Braised Pork Belly, made a couple substitutions (brown sugar for rock candy, jarred minced ginger for fresh), left out the eggs, and added water as necessary to braise. I have a giant, extremely heavy cast iron roasting pan that deserves some of the credit for the excellent results I get using it to roast vegetables and meat. The steady heat that it holds, and how hot the surfaces get, all do an amazing job. One of the disadvantages of cooking in a typical home kitchen like mine, compared to the kitchens in restaurants and on cooking shows, is that their stovetops and ovens can get much hotter than mine. Iron helps even the score.


To take the skin off, you want a very sharp knife. I sharpened my knife twice during this process, because taking off skin requires sharpness, and cutting through tendon and hitting bone will dull the blade considerably. After taking the skin and foot off one foreleg, I needed to sharpen up again for the next.

Taking the skins off the squares of belly is not unlike skinning a fish fillet or taking a chicken breast off the bone. I hacked the shit out of these bellies, like I did the first few times I filleted salmon. Not that anyone cared after it was cooked.

I cut a long incision in the skin, worked the knife under it, and kept the tension on the skin as I worked, in order to remove as little fat as possible, and no meat. 

To take the feet off, I cut through the skin around the foot at the "wrist," just above the thumb-looking toes. There are strong connective tissues on the front, rear, and sides of the joint, and running through the middle of the bones. After cutting through the outer connections with a knife and clearing the way between the bones, I used a pair of kitchen shears to cut the ligament in the middle.

After searing the meat in the roasting pan, I added the other ingredients from the recipe, including water, and began to braise at 250 for several hours, turning the pieces over every hour or so, to allow for browning above the liquid.

Each of these forelegs was good for more than one generous serving of meat. We ate the braised foreleg and belly together, which was a good combination because the fat content averaged out nicely between the fairly lean forelegs, which are a lot like turkey legs in the amount of connective tissue and the leanness of the meat, and the extremely fatty belly.

In the picture above, the sliced belly is between three and five o'clock, most of one foreleg is from five to nine, and along the top is the remnants of another foreleg after we'd already savaged it.


We ate from these for a few meals, eating bits of the foreleg and belly over lentils and rice. This morning we finished it off for breakfast with pancakes. It was so good that Kevin started singing “Pork and Pancakes” to the tune of the Hallelujah chorus in Handel’s Messiah.