Man Cooking: Rilettes
I thought for the next iteration of man cooking I would choose something much less challenging, as brawn nearly broke me. Hence, rilettes.
The recipe which Brendan and I followed was an adaptation of Anthony Bourdain’s recipe (I know I know, I have difficulty following recipes), and goes something like this:
Remove skin from a large bit of pork belly.
Chop pork belly into inch cubes
Put the pork belly and a rabbit into a low oven, with a bit of liquid in the bottom of the dishes. My butcher was kind enough to joint my rabbit for me, which makes the subsequent stripping of meat easier.
The display on my oven has worn off so my temperatures are approximate, but mine was on about 80 degrees with the fan on.
Roast for at least five hours. I did it for six, because that is how I roll.
Go for a walk around the neighbourhood, but pop home to flip the meat intermittently.
Remove meat from oven.
Reserve liquid from dishes, and separate (AND KEEP!) the fat from the cooking liquid.
Allow meat to cool until you can handle it and shred a little. Be aware that the meat fibres will soften when stored, so err on the side of shredding roughly. Using two forks works quite well. Make sure the mixture is moist enough, adding a tiny amount of cooking liquid as required. We added a bit much, and ended up squeezing liquid out.
Pack into sterile storage containers, leaving a centimetre of headroom in the top of the containers, and refrigerate.
Once meat is cold (after half of an hour or so), heat up fat, and top up containers with warmed fat to cover. The reason you chill the meat before adding the fat is so that the fat remains on top of the meat to form a seal, and doesn’t permeate through the meat.
Allow the flavours to meld for at least three days before eating. This is the hardest part of the recipe.
If the meat is sealed properly it will keep in the fridge for a couple of months.
To serve, just scoop out and serve with toast. I like toasted brown bread, as that provides a nice contrast in texture. You could add sliced gherkin / capers / chutney if you wanted to get fancy, but to be honest why bother.
Overall impressions: 8/10, very favourable. It tastes really good, it is really easy to make, and it is easy to clean up afterward.
There is no way my rilettes is lasting two months in the fridge. We made more than we could fit into a dozen sealed containers, so I had a few unsealed containers as well. I scoffed these over the New Year period (with other people, what do you take me for?), and they were delicious. I shouldn’t eat any of the sealed containers just yet, because after the pig head incident I want to show Marie that man cooking can taste good.
What I might do differently next time:
Rather than roast for six hours, simmer for the same time period. There are recipes out there for both cooking techniques, and the roasting didn’t seem to add much.
Rather than adding rabbit to the pork belly, add a different meat for the following reasons: a) the rabbit was more expensive (£11) than the pork belly (£8), and b) the rabbit meat was quite fiddly to strip from the bones. Pheasant might be one option – the meat has a good flavour to it, the meat comes off the bone easily and they can be quite cheap – ie £2.50 per bird in high season in London, less in Scotland. If I were to add pheasant I wouldn’t cook for the full six hours with the pork belly, I would probably take this out after a couple of hours. Other game birds are more pricey once you look at how much meat they yield.
Next time I will definitely buy additional fat (we didn’t), rather than relying on the renderings from the pork belly. Most of the recipes suggest 200gm of pork fat to seal, and our belly gave out nowhere near that. I had to adulterate the renderings with some chicken fat and duck fat I had to hand. Not that this fat from multiple animals really matters, all you want is a sealing agent (you don’t need to eat this), and pork fat is infinitely cheaper than duck fat.
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