green fazzoletti with wild boar ragu

I did not bring my pasta maker with me from Florida. As much as I loved it, it was in a big box, and honestly required about seven hands to use it in any smooth fashion. So I gave it to my friend Lawrence, who I hope is making fresh pasta.

I did bring about a pound and a half of chunks of wild boar. That's a long story. Here it goes:

When I started this project, I planned to go all Omnivore's Dilemma and go kill a wild boar for this dish. I ran into a number of issue with that:

a) There are many places in Florida where you can just go kill wild boar. Don't need a license and there is no season when hunting on private land. So a lot of landowners set up businesses where they allow weekend warriors to come in and shoot boar. They will help you "track" them, and have dogs that will help in the process. They charge you to do this, and you pay them for the privilege of removing a nuisance animal from their property. Sounds like a scheme.

b) I haven't shot a gun since I was about 9. It was probably a really weak gun, possibly BB, and I remember thinking it broke my arm on recoil. I had two fears: First, that I wouldn't hit the animal. Second, that I would, but not in such a way that killed it, and it would get away injured, die in the woods in pain and haunt me forever.

c) I needed about a pound of meat. Seemed irresponsible to kill an animal for a pound of meat. I was pretty sure I would put the whole animal to good use. But for the immediate purpose, I needed a pound of meat.

So to address B, I asked my friend Ronnie, who shoots guns as part of his job sometimes, if he thought he could make a kill shot on a boar.

"Heckkkkkkkk yeah." There was much confidence.

Then another friend of mine told me that a lot of these ranches that let you come shoot boar are a little shady. Well, I don't know if shady is the right word. I was told a lot of them basically bait the field, take you to the spot, and tell you to shoot one. Like, it would be hard to miss hitting something. And that jibed with my Internet research on the ranches, which all but guarantee you'll be taking home a boar after a couple hours. That wasn't really how I wanted this to go down.

So I procrastinated.

Then one day, I got an e-mail from a co-worker asking if I could smoke a shoulder. Well, yeah, at the time, before I gave away all my grills, I could smoke a shoulder. It seems that a colleague of his had gone bow hunting over the weekend and taken a boar. He wanted some of it smoked, and offered to let me take a chunk of the smoked shoulder if I wanted.

"What I really want is about a pound of leftover chunks so I can make sausage," I told him.

That seemed to surprise him, but one day when I was at work, I was brought a boar shoulder and a bag of boar chunks.

Boar chunks

To some, it might be weird to have a cooler full of boar parts at their desk at work. But it surprised none of my colleagues that I did.

I smoked the shoulder and returned it, and the chunks ended up in my freezer, where I forgot about them for a couple of months. Then I found them when I was emptying the freezer. I briefly considered making this dish before I left, but I really needed to make that warm testa. Plus, by this time, I had given away the pasta machine.
 

  

Fast forward to recently, when I got the pasta rolling attachment for my Kitchen Aid. It was way more expensive than the little hand-cranky thing. But it's totally awesome, and best: can reasonably be used by people who only have two hands.

Seasoned ground boar chunks, aka sausage

The recipe calls for a ragu of boar sausage, so I turned my boar chunks into boar sausage with the addition of some sugar, salt, fennel, pepper and rosemary. After the browning stage, I already knew this recipe was going to work out well. 

I made the pasta, my first batch in about nine months. I triple-heart that attachment. Was soooooo much easier to use than the hand-crank. 






 

My pasta didn't turn out green. It was pasta-colored, with green spinach flecks. In the book, it is clearly green, like, the verdant flesh tone of a chick that Capt. Kirk might hook up with on Star Trek to prove some nebulous moral point to people in the '60s. Mine never made it there. Mine was of a flesh tone that never would have turned a head in any generation. But with green specks. Shrug. It was delicious.

Fazzoletti apparently translates to "face towels," which means that this pasta barely gets cut. it just goes in in big squares. I can do that. It might be my new favorite pasta shape.

Mario has the recipe posted on Facebook, if you're interested.

Up next: inadvertent surf and turf

"Pappardelle" Bolognese

Hmmmm, that photo hardly looks like pappardelle Bolognese. …

And I quote from the headnote in the recipe for pappardelle Bolognese in the Babbo cookbook:

"Purists first pooh-poohed the idea of dressing pappardelle with what is perhaps Italy's best-known and loved ragu, claiming that the cooks of Bologna would pair this sauce with nothing but tagliatelle. They were actually correct, but since it was my kitchen, and I love pappardelle, I prevailed."

I like lasagna. And I was in my kitchen. So I prevailed. 

I started out making the Bolognese, which is one of the recipes that I've been looking forward to because a friend who is a Bolognese fan and says she rarely has a good one really liked the one at Babbo. And I trust her opinion.

The recipe says it serves 6-8 people, and the headnote says sauce recipe will make enough for leftovers beyond that. So I did the logical thing, and doubled the recipe. I was making lasagna for about 12 people, and I still wanted leftovers.

(The recipe is here, via Epicurious and not precisely as it appears in the book. In the book, there is no butter, more olive oil and no beef. And this online recipe calls for, well, tagliatelle.)

So after making the sauce, I went to put together the lasagna in my lasagna pan, which is from Mario's collection, and it huge. And is made of cast iron, so it weighs a ton. I filled it to brimming with pasta and sauce and cheese, and when I was done, I weighed the pan.

It was 23 pounds. Granted, about half of that was the pan, but, let's just concede the 12 pounds of cast iron. I had a lasagna that was into double digits.

I have rarely been more proud.

My strategy of making more than enough sauce worked, and the leftover sauce made it into the freezer to be thawed and dispatched at a future date, when I need to dress some sort of pasta.

Possibly pappardelle. Or maybe tagliatelle. 

Up next: Green fazzoletti

warm testa with potatoes

Warning: This post comes with recognizable pig parts. If you knew the pig we're dealing with here, it might end up being somewhat upsetting.

Or, if you have an unnatural attraction to the movie Babe, this might not be the post for you.

There will be some photos in here that will make it exceedingly clear that it's a pig we're dealing with. Even moreso than when I wrote about the foot.

OK, did that clear everyone who's not interested?

You were warned.

There was a little bit of irony involved when I went to Nature Delivered in Brooksville, Fla., to buy a half a pig. One of the reasons I went to a farm was because I knew I was going to need a pig head to do this recipe. They hardly ever have those at Whole Foods.

But the process by which my pig was dispatched meant that I couldn't have the head of that pig. At the time, the farm did field kills for people buying pigs for personal use, or USDA plant kills for commercial. I was told the plant kills were more stressful on the animal because they don't want to travel. And if we did the plant kill, I couldn't witness, which was part of why I was doing it. I wanted to better understand my place in the food chain by watching the consequences of it.

But the field kill process they had there at the time leaves the head with a certain degree of, um, lead poisoning. Tends to leave it a bit inedible.

But Rebecca Krassnoski, who raised my pig, told me she would save the next noggin from a USDA processed pig for me.

That wasn't the last issue.

The recipe for Warm Testa with Potatoes in the Babbo cookbook technically calls for a half of a pig's head.

"You can't really have half of one," Rebecca said, struggling to figure out how to explain what was really pretty obvious. "It doesn't really work that way."

So I was going to get a whole pig's head. I would have to figure out how to deal with that.

I figured I had two options: I could double the recipe. Or, I could look in some of my other cookbooks and see if I could find another recipe that called for a half a pig's head.

You laugh. I have several.

When I read David Chang's recipe for pig's head torchon, I was struck by a couple of things. First, it called for a half a pig's head. That seemed like exactly as much as I needed to figure out what to do with. Second, aside from some minor spicing differences, the actual cooking of the head was almost exactly the same as Mario describes in his recipe. (In retrospect, that isn't really all that surprising. There are only so many ways to get the meat off a skull.)

In a perfect world, I would have picked up the star ingredient the day I was going to make it. But I needed to pick it up the day it was available. (That it happened in a parking lot in Pasco County is something you'll have to write your own joke about. I've been very careful with my wording on the subject.) Anyway, I was unable to cook it immediately, so it went into the freezer for awhile. When it came out, this is what it looked like, and this is what I've been warning you about:

 

Rebecca, if you remember this pig's name, please do not tell anyone.

The head went into the largest pot that I had at the time, a 32-quart turkey frying pot. It was covered with water and joined by some aromatics. This picture makes it look like there is still a chance it could be saved:

 

Alas, it was in there for about three hours.

I started making this at about 10 p.m. that night. The chivalrous explanation for that is that I didn't want to subject Pam to the carnage. And it worked out that way, so that's the official story. But the truth is, this happened just a few days before I moved to D.C., and that was literally the only time I could do this. It was a busy couple of weeks. Well, it was a busy several months, but those couple of weeks were insane.

Some of the stuff I had in the freezer made the trip up with me. But here's the thing. This head weighed 25 pounds, and took up a lot of room in our auxiliary freezer in Florida. In D.C., we don't have an auxiliary freezer. We barely have the one. So I was up until 4 in the morning doing this dish because I had to, or it was never going to happen.

OK, so the pig visage sat in the cauldron for three hours. Done, right? Ha! At that point, after letting it cool, now somewhere on the order of 2 a.m., it was time to start pulling the meat off the face. It harkened back to Biology II in Mr. Mabie's class as I extracted muscle after muscle after muscle. Neither recipe specifically called for the brain, so I didn't have to cut the skull in half, which was good because by that point I had already given away all my saws. Well, I still had a Dremel, and you can do anything with one of those, but I didn't think of it at the time. I did yank the tongue out, though. From the neck end. It was late.

It wasn't pretty work. I'm sure if you've done it before, you're calling me names and exclaiming how it's no big deal. But for me, it was a lot of yanking and pulling at greasy, cartilage-y, collagen-y gunk. Chang goes into way more detail on how to do this than Mario does, which was helpful. He explained that you want to avoid the glands, and that there is "good fat" that you want to keep, implying that there is bad that you don't. When I write a horror movie screenplay, there will be a scene inspired by this experience.

When it was over, here was what I was left with:

A 25-pound pig head, reduced to 2 pounds of meat. Well, mostly meat.

Oh, there was also the skull, of course.

For the Babbo dish, the meat gets put in a small loaf pan with some of the cooking liquid, which is so full of gelatin by now that it could support the weight of a small island nation. Then it gets refrigerated until it sets up. At which point we have head cheese!

For the Momofuku dish, it's a little more complicated. First, you lay down some plastic wrap. (Frankly, I wish I had covered the whole kitchen in plastic wrap before I started.) On top of the plastic wrap, you lay out some fat and skin to form a thin layer. Then meat goes on top of that. That looks like this: 

Then it's rolled tight in the plastic wrap and refrigerated to let its gelatin do its thing.

Then I went to bed. It was after 4 at that point.

The next day, the log is cut into discs, breaded and fried.

Chang has a recipe for spicy mustard and pickled cherries to go with the torchon, which I'm sure is delicious and all, but I was trying to empty my kitchen, not add to it. I had some Dijon and some cherry preserves. I mixed them up to make a cherry-mustard sauce to go with the pork. It worked out. 

The Babbo head cheese gets served with a quick potato salad and pickled onions. 

I took both dishes over to my pal Laura's house. I had strong questions about how much I would like either dish, so of course, the first thing I did was take it to a food critic. Both dishes were fine. I didn't love either. It was a texture thing. A lot of meaty bits suspended in goo. It's a thing, I know, I just couldn't love it. I gave the bulk of the Babbo dish to my friend Alan. I felt confident if anyone I knew would be into it, it was him. He said he liked it. So I was glad that the effort was appreciated.

The ultimate measure of how much I like something is usually: Would I make it again. And the answer is, to almost a certainty, no. Mostly because I gave away that 32-quart turkey frying pot.

To Alan, I think.

Up next: "papparadelle" bolognese

duck braciole with favas and pecorino

I nearly missed the window on this dish.

I thought I had done all the fava-related dishes last spring, but as I was flipping through, I saw this and realized I had missed one. So I planned to make this dish when I started seeing favas in the farmers markets a few months ago.

Then I forgot.

Then there was a recipe I was supposed to test for work that called for fresh favas, so I figured if i could find them, I'd knock this dish out with that one. I had already picked up the duck legs from a farmers market, and had them sitting in the freezer.

So, what we have here is a lesson in shopping out of season.

After looking around long enough, I found favas at an Asian market in Virginia. I bought four pounds, which, after shelling and peeling, netted me 2 cups (the process and travails of which can be read here). Most of the beans were bigger than I would want them to be, and a lot of the pods seemed a bit woody. The dish calls for the favas to basically be raw, cooked only long enough to get the individual beans peeled. So I was a little nervous.

The duck, on the other hand, was beautiful. Got it from Pecan Meadows Farms at the 14th & U farmers market. The dish calls for the leg quarters to be deboned. I once deboned a pig's foot, and that took about an hour. The first duck leg took about 10 minutes, but that was with stopping to wash my hands and take photos about three times during the process, chronicled here:

The whole leg.

The meat pulled back from the thigh bone.

The meat pulled most of the way off the drumstick.

The boneless meat beside the meatless bone. Ta-da.

For the other three legs, I took no photos, and had them all done in about 10 minutes altogether. So there's a lesson about taking pictures while you're deboning fatty animal parts. (Also, there's way more meat in a duck leg than a pig foot, but that's another story.

The flimsy duck leg gets stuffed with bread crumbs spiked with citrus zest, herbs and olive oil. Then tied to maintain their shape, and roasted.

Tied to maintain their shape.

Tied to maintain their shape.

I couldn't find my twine. Why I couldn't find my twine, I have no idea. My kitchen is tiny. There is nowhere to hide. I know I have twine. But I couldn't find it. (Update: I have since found it. It was right where I left it.)

"Eh, I'll just roll them up and put the seam side down. It'll be fine," I thought to myself.

As the legs were roasting, I could see they were not maintaining their shape (maybe they needed to be tied?), the meat and skin contracting so that what once looked like a duck leg now sort of looked like a baseball with a little nubbin on the end.

Oh well.

The other thing I noticed was that the legs had given off so much fat in the roasting process that they were nearly submerged in a jacuzzi of their own bubbling oil. They weren't roasting, so much as they were frying in duck fat.

Let me restate that last sentence to properly convey my reaction to the events:

They weren't roasting, so much as they were frying! In duck fat!

So in the end, my dish looked almost nothing like the photo in the book. And I don't care, because it was delicious. The duck skin was as crispy as I've ever made duck skin. And the stuffing, which was now sort of a crust after the leg basically turned itself inside out in the cooking process, possibly because it hadn't been tied to maintain its shape, was crunchy and citrusy.

The favas, as I suspected, were not very good, through no fault of the recipe. But that was a minor point next to the success of the duck.

Up next: Cover your eyes, it might be time for the warm testa.

catching up

Sometimes, there is no drama. Sometimes, I just go to the store, and everything i need is just there. Sometimes, there is no process that I've never dealt with before. 

These are a few of those stories. Very, very short stories. (And there will be more.): 

rigatoni with five lilies

 

This one was easy. Pretty much everything I need for this dish is available at any supermarket.

The five lilies refer to all the onions in the dish. There are Vidalia, red, leek, scallion, garlic and chives. Wait … that's six.

Pretty sure they are all alliums, so I'm not sure which one isn't getting credit in the title.

Either way, totally up my alley, caramelize the Vidalias, then sauté everything else and toss it with some big pasta. 


chocolate and valpolicella crema

Easy one: This is basically a thick, rich … really thick, really rich … chocolate pudding, flavored with red wine. Bulletproof.

I had a little bit of trouble finding valpolicella. Well, until I asked at Mazzaro's. Then I had to pick from one of the 4-5 kinds they had. I should really ask about stuff more often.

One thing: The recipe says it serves 8-12. I made 9 servings, and no one … no one … was able to even eat half. And not because it wasn't delicious. It was probably the best pudding I've ever had. Just. Soooooo. Rich.

tomato bruschetta

Easy one: You just have to have good tomatoes. If you do, this will be awesome. If you don't, it can only be as good as the tomatoes.

I got good tomatoes from a roadside stand. They were great. And I got bread at Mazzaro's. So that worked out, too.

The cheese is cacio di roma, a semi-firm sheep's milk cheese. I haven't seen it around here, but I found it at Whole Foods while I was in Miami. I suspect if I looked hard enough around here, I could have found it, but it jumped out at me in Miami. Let this be a lesson to you: Always travel with a cooler.

* Note: These were all made -- and written -- before I left Florida. So that explains some of the references.

Up next: duck braciole

fennel-dusted sweetbreads

Well, doesn't that look attractive.

No, no, that's not brains, though it sort of looks like it might be, right? It is veal sweetbreads, which, as the punch line goes, is neither sweet nor bread.

(And there are still brains left to be cooked. We'll get there.)

This was an opportunity buy. I was at Wagshal's Market because I heard it was a cool meat shop, and I wanted to see if they had anything that was on my hard-to-find list. They had rattlesnake, but that isn't in the book. All of the traditional meats behind the counter looked good, but all i really wanted was to get something -- anything -- that got me a little out of my comfort zone.

The directions for the sweetbreads include blanching them for 10 minutes, then peeling off its membrane. Mmmm. Membrane. That's outside the comfort zone.

On the door of the freezer case at Wagshal's, it listed some of the items inside. Other than the rattlesnake, the only thing that jumped out at me was the sweetbreads. I thought it was possible that I could get sweetbreads from a meat vendor at a farmers market, but I was willing to consider buying it here if they were local. So I asked where the sweetbreads came from.

"I'm not totally sure," he told me, "but I think from right around here." He was gesturing toward the side of his neck.

In a completely literal sense, he was right. Sweetbreads are a gland in the neck of a cow. I was glad he knew that, but it wasn't what I meant.

"I meant, where was the cow from?"

"Oh. They come from a farm between here and Baltimore."

Perfect.

So I blanched them. And I peeled the membrane. And I learned that blanched sweetbreads smell like farts. Yes, it was definitely the sweetbreads. The next step was to soak them in cold water until ready to cook, and that seemed like an excellent idea at that point. 

The rest of the dish goes together fast. There is bacon. There is a dressing made of quince paste. There are vinegar-y onions. There are fennel fronds.

The sweetbreads are then broken up into lobes -- mmmmmm, lobes -- and dredged in flour that's spiked with ground fennel seed. I actually didn't have any fennel seeds, but rather than run over to the supermarket, I grabbed what I did have, which was fennel pollen. For those not familiar with fennel hierarchy, that's what they call "an upgrade."

The dusted sweetbreads get a quick sauté and stacked with all the other stuff mentioned earlier. 

Suddenly, it looks way better, right? 

It's an organ meat, so it has that organ-meat texture. But it's also basically fried. So it also has that texture. And it has bacon. And the quince vinaigrette. Where we're going is, even for someone generally not crazy about the texture of organ meat, there is so much good going on here, that it's a really good dish.

I've had sweetbreads a few times, and the first several times I kind of had to turn my brain off to what it was before I could eat it, but I've always thought they were good. I did that again with this dish, multiplied by the fact that I was handling them raw for the first time, but I would totally make this again.

And it turns out, sweetbreads are everywhere here. After I made this dish, I saw them at Whole Foods. Who knew?

Up next: catching up/quick hits

bigne with honey mousse and red currants

This dish was so epic, only a guest appearance on the Washington Post All We Can Eat blog could handle it. Click here to read it!

Up next: fennel-dusted sweetbreads.