Welcome to the sixth guest post!  I’m letting anyone who wants to show off an offal dish submit a post with pictures.  Want to show the world that liver can deliver?  Are you ballistic over brains?  Let me know and we’ll post your hard work here!  This guest post comes from Jacqueline Venner Senske, and the post originally showed up on her website The Pasture Gate.

A while back, I bought some pig’s feet that came from La Quercia. They lived in my freezer for several months, and last week, I made up my mind to finally use them. Since pig’s feet are not a part of our regular diet, I am somewhat unfamiliar with their preparation. The project required some planning.

Research

A quick internet search showed that many pig’s feet recipes involve pickling. I talked to my grandmother, and it turns out that she prepared pig’s feet on the farm by pickling them as well. (Of course, she not only pickled pig’s feet but in fact butchered whole hogs and used every part in some way, but that is a project a beyond my current capabilities. I’ll start with just the feet and see how it goes.) Grandma mailed me a small cookbook called Schmeckt Gut: Traditional German Cookery, which is full of collected recipes from farm wives and traditional German families. Among the recipes is indeed one from Pickled Pig’s Feet.

Pickled Pig’s Feet
4 pigs feet
Salted water
2 cups vinegar
2 Tbsp. salt
1 Tbsp. whole cloves
1/2 tsp. black pepper
1 small stick cinnamon
1 cup chopped dill pickles

Scrape and clean pig’s feet well. Put in a kettle to boil with enough salt water to cover. Simmer for four hours or until meat will separate easily from the bones. Remove feet and add vinegar, salt, pepper and spices to stock in which meat was cooked. Boil for 30 minutes. Strain liquid and remove spices. Pick meat off the bones. Place pieces of meat and chopped pickles in a class loaf pan and pour stock over it. Chill until cold. Slice and serve. May be made ahead of time. Keeps well in refrigerator.

I carefully reviewed the recipe from the cookbook and also talked with my grandmother about her process, asking questions along the way. So how much salt should I add? Do I need to shave the feet first? How much pickling spice? How did you eat the pig’s feet?

Notes on Cooking Feet

I followed the recipe for the most part, with a few adjustments according to advice, capabilities, and taste. For example, I added sugar, at my grandma’s suggestion, but I left out pickles. Along the way, I took notes and photos. Here are a few excerpts of my adventures in pig cookery.

Day 1

8:30 am
I opened the packaging and cautiously poke at the feet. After a minute, the smell hit me from the feet, and it wasn’t altogether pleasant…

So the feet went into the pot with water to cover and I dumped in some kosher salt…around 1-2 tablespoons (and added another tablespoon or two later). Then onto the stove with the burner on medium-high to bring the water to a boil. Then I turned the water down to a simmer and let it cook with the timer set for 4 hours. The scent of the cooking feet grew stronger and stronger…to be expected when processing meat at home, but also motivation to consider cooking things like this outside or in a sort of summer kitchen.

11:45 am
Meat really starting to separate from the bones. The joints are relaxing and popping.

12:40 pm
Bones popping out and skin loose. Broth very fatty and rich looking. Smells porky and a little rank.

12:55 pm
The feet seem ready – meat is falling off the bone. Grandma said she threw out the water in which the feet cooked and used fresh water for the pickling brine, but the recipe says to use it. Plus, my gut says its good stuff, with all that fat and bits in there, so I’m using it.

1:33 pm
Feet are picked clean now, so I have a pile of bones and cartilage and another of soft, meaty tissue. I wasn’t sure about the skin, so I called Grandma. She said they not only ate the skin, but they put the whole foot – intact – into the brine, rather than picking off the tissue. Also, at her suggestion, I added sugar to the brine.

So in the end, I picked off the meat and tossed it in with the brine after I fished out the spices. Then I ladled the brine and meat into a bread pan lined with plastic wrap. There was a bit more than fit into my big loaf pan, so I also made a baby loaf.

2:00 pm
I placed both loaf pans full of the pickled meat on a small cookie sheet and placed them on the top shelf of my refrigerator.

Day 2

7:30 pm
I got home from work and was greeted by two nicely gelled-up loaves of pickled pig’s feet. I inverted the pans and jiggled and tugged the plastic until the meat slid out.

And then the moment of truth

…the taste.

Hmm…firm texture…highly spiced…holy brine! I recognized the flavor of German pickling. Not unpleasant, but pretty strong. And too much vinegar. The real pork flavor came in the third bite, when I got a more significant piece of flesh. A taste reminiscent of the scent of the cooking feet – rich, funky, porky. Closer to the true porky flavor I was hoping to achieve.

In the end, this recipe – or at least my virgin execution of it – resulted in a concoction too strongly spiced to draw out the full, meaty flavor of the feet, as I imagine it is supposed to. Placing the intact feet in the brine, according to my grandmother’s method, rather than picking them clean, would probably yield a greater amount of porkier pork, rather than a mass of congealed brine that also contained meat. That’s how I will do it next time.

Or maybe I’ll look for other things to do with pig’s feet.

A Lesson in Learning

At any rate, this project also got me thinking about traditions and passing them on. Specifically, about learning skills. I really think this project – and the product – would have been better had I learned about it in a different way. I think the process required apprenticeship, someone to teach me in person from their experience – or at least pictures of what I was really trying to accomplish.

I sort of worked toward creating something like the traditional processed meats we saw in the markets of Paris (At top, processed meat in Paris’ Rue Cler market; below, my pickled pig’s feet), but I think I was really going for something a little different (though I did follow the recipe).

Hmm.

More research – and practice – and apprenticeship – required.

Thank you Jacqueline!

Welcome to the fifth guest post!  I’m letting anyone who wants to show off an offal dish submit a post with pictures.  Want to show the world that chicken feet can’t be beat?  Are you terrific with tongue?  Let me know and we’ll post your hard work here!  This guest post comes from Katrina Kollegaeva, and the post originally showed up on her website Around the world in 80 markets, and more.

Aren’t they fun?! A test to an omnivore kinda dish, I say. Yes, not only did I buy these pink creatures quite on purpose (the all organic tootsies of a – hopefully! – happy piggy), but I cleaned them, boiled them until no more, dismantle them and put them all together into a glorious Soviet grandmotherly dish of kholodets, pork in aspic, or – more familiar to you perhaps – a ham and chicken terrine.

The origin

The name Kholodets stems from a Russian word meaning cold, frozen or chilled. The dish basically consists of shredded boiled meat (which can be anything from chicken to beef or even rabbit), jellified by the means of pork stock that is made out of glorious pig trotters (the bones and other tissue in the feet make the liquid go jelly-like when chilled. In fact – read closely, my vegetarian friends – all jelly like treats are made with at least some use of a pig essence).

I believe the recipe had its roots in the Fresh obsession with everything jellied in the 18-19 centuries (and Russians were bonkers about all things Frenchy). The wobbly and transparent texture of the dish signified something bizarrely sophisticated and – yes – fun to the masses. Later on, after the Soviet revolution, kholodets could be found in any canteen and kitchen throughout the Communist kingdom; particularly popular during long, celebratory banquets; such as the most important New Year’s eve.

My kholodets childhood

I’d been dreaming of re-creating this dish of my childhood for years, battling the seeming impossibility of sourcing the named tootsies from my local butchers (I found them eventually through the Real Meat Company). I always remember the long evenings at home, in our kitchen, with my mum slowly going through buckets of just-boiled meat, carefully separating the edible tasty bits from not so. She was using all the possible plates, cups, bowls and saucers in our house to make the little individual portions of kholodets – a bit of meat on the bottom of a plate, some crushed garlic, and stock on top – that gets jellified in the fridge for the next 12-24 hours.

My mum almost always used chicken meat and put lots of garlic, so the result was incredibly tender, delicate and flavoursome. We ate out little kholodets (ki?) out of the same bowls where it’d been chilling, with some nose-bitingly Russian mustard or grated horseradish and, of course, slices of black Russian rye bread.

And now..

Well, I repeated the experiment the other night, freakily enjoying the sweet and meaty smell of chicken and trotters boiling my kitchen away for good four hours (take the trotters and some bony joints of a chicken, add cold water, a few spoons of vinegar, onion, carrots, lots of salt and crushed pepper). And this is the initial result:

I felt like a villain – a wonderful, life-affirming feeling!

You then pick the meat off the bones; and start layering pieces of pork and chicken meat into your little bowls, specks of garlic, some garlic out of the same stock and top up with the stock. Let it cool and keep in the fridge for at least overnight until your kholodets firms up and you see a thin white layer of fat on the top.

Voila!

Have your pig trotter concoction with some pickled cucumbers, some lovely fresh salad, some sourdough bread (home-made in my case, but this may be optional) and – an absolute requirement which was refused to me in my years of pioneer youth – a shot of very, very cold vodka.

Na zdaravye, tovarishi.

Thank you Katrina!

Welcome to the fourth guest post!  I’m letting anyone who wants to show off an offal dish submit a post with pictures.  Want the world to know that livers set you a-quiver?  Are you terrific with tendon?  Let me know and we’ll post your hard work here!  This guest post comes from reader Karla Ng, who was kind enough to share this recipe with us.

Ingredients:
1 ox tongue, two and a half to three pounds
1/2 cup soy sauce
3 bay leafs
juice of 1/2 lemon

5 cloves garlic
1 large onion, diced
3 medium tomatoes, diced
1 220g can of tomato sauce
1 220g can of tomato paste
1 pound of chicken livers (boiled for 10 minutes in salt, pepper and ginger then
mashed; You can substitute 1 can of liver spread to cut the cooking time but
the sauce’s consistency is better with chicken liver.)
1-2  medium russet potatoes
1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese
1 cup boiling liquid
Salt and pepper

Procedure:

Place the tongue in a medium size pot and add water until it’s fully immersed.  Add 1/2 cup of soy sauce, 3 bay leaves and 2 tablespoons lemon juice to the water and place your pot on the stove. Get the liquid in the pot boiling, and then reduce the heat and simmer for about 2-2.5 hours or
until the meat is tender. I usually let the tongue simmer for about three hours so the meat is super tender and it almost melts in the mouth. You can keep a few slivers for a sandwich!  Once the meat is tender, peel the skin from the muscle while the tongue is still warm.

While the tongue is simmering, peel and slice the potatoes.  Pan fry them until they’re golden brown and set them aside.

In a saucepan, saute the garlic and diced onion until softened. Add the diced tomatoes and raise the heat to cook them. Once the tomatoes have released all of their moisture, add the tomato sauce, tomato paste and one cup of the liquid you cooked the tongue in.  Mash the boiled chicken livers and four slices of the fried potatoes and add this to thicken the red sauce. Bring to a boil then add grated cheddar cheese and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Slice the preboiled ox tongue and serve with the potatoes. You can go easy on the sauce and serve it on the side, or be very generous with it and top
the casserole with potatoes.

Thank you Karla!

 Welcome to the third guest post!  I’m letting anyone who wants to show off an offal dish submit a post with pictures.  Want to show the world you’ve got a real talent with ox-tails?  Are you crazy about cracklins?  Let me know and we’ll post your hard work here!  The guest post comes from Camille Malmquist owner of  Croque-Camille, and a pastry chef by trade.

No fridge should be without its jar of Trotter Gear.

Such is the introduction for this very useful bit of mise en place outlined in Fergus Henderson’s Beyond Nose to Tail. When I found out that Ryan was opening his blog up for guest posts on offal and the like,  I knew immediately that I wanted to participate. And that I wanted to make Trotter Gear.

I’ve recently become enamored of pig’s feet, which fortunately, are readily available at French and Chinese butchers here in Paris. Trotter Gear seemed like it would be right up my alley. The recipe suggests boiling the trotters for 5 minutes to rid them of the initial scum, which is plentiful.

1. First boil, 2. Boiling off the scum

Next comes the braise. I took the drained and rinsed trotter pieces and put them back in the pot. Onion, carrots, celery, leeks, garlic, thyme, peppercorns and white wine went in with them. It was supposed to be Madeira, but I walked all over my neighborhood only to discover that every single place that sells Madeira was out. What? Welcome to my world.

I then covered the feet and aromatics with chicken stock, a step that my husband, Nick, found to be over the top, and brought it to a simmer. Once simmering, I slapped a lid onto the pot and placed it in the oven for a few hours. When the trotters were completely tender, I took the pot out and let it cool until I could handle the jiggly bits. I pulled the fat and skin from the bones (which I discarded) and put them in an old, spotlessly clean Nutella jar. This part was made easier, I think, by the fact that I had had the butcher cut up the feet for me beforehand.

One can sense its potential even now.

The question is, now that I have the Trotter Gear (and it should be noted that it feels very good to have that jar in the fridge), what do I do with it? Flipping a few pages forward in the book reveals several recipes which utilize the Trotter Gear. As tempted as I was to try the deep-fried rabbit, I couldn’t not try to replicate the Chicken and Bacon Pie I loved so much when I dined at St. John Bread and Wine last spring.

One of the things I love best about the Nose to Tail books is the way they encourage you to COOK, as opposed to mindlessly following a recipe. That’s why I’m sure the authors would have no problem with me taking some creative liberties with the pie. I thought I should try some game, since, well, ‘tis the season, and I found a little pintade (aka guinea hen) at the store one day after work. I wanted that pie badly enough to make it on a weeknight, if that tells you anything.

1. Pintade/Guinea Hen, 2. Browned, 3. Trotter Gear, 4. Pintade Pie Filling, 5. Placing the Crust, 6. Pintade Pie

So upon arriving home from work, I commenced butchering the pintade. I browned the pieces in a Dutch oven and saved the carcass to make stock at a later date. Next into the pot went some sliced shallots, to pick up the delicious fond, and a healthy amount of red wine. The pintade pieces (sans skin) went back into the simmering wine along with about half the jar of Trotter Gear, and a bay leaf for good measure. I let it cook until the meat was falling off the bone, at which point I pulled out the bones and poured the stew into my new pie dish, purchased just for the occasion. (Wait, you say. After working a full day, you went food shopping and then hit up the BHV kitchenware sale to get the ruffly Emile Henry pie dish you’ve had your eye on forever? And then you went home to butcher, braise, and then bake a game bird? Yep. This is why we eat at 10 pm.)

While waiting for the pintade braise, I made a quick pâte brisée, using half lard and half butter. Once the stew was ready and in the pie dish, I rolled out the pastry, cut a hole in the center, and carefully placed it over the dish. I crimped the edges, cut a few more vents, and into the oven it went. The resulting pie was everything I had hoped for. Braised meat is always good, but the Trotter Gear added a mysterious additional level of deliciousness. I actually have a tendency to be squeamish about texture-y things, but I gobbled up my portion with no hesitation and no problems. So I am a firm convert. Trotter Gear is a thing of beauty.

Thank you Camille!

Welcome to the second guest post!  I’m letting anyone who wants to show off an offal dish submit a post with pictures.  Feel like divulging your secret beef heart tartar recipe?  Are you keen on spleen?  Let me know and we’ll post your hard work here!

Having got to the two St John’s cookbooks and being a regular at St John’s Bread and Wine it was time to get into some of the more unusual recipes. I have made the chutney, the poached chicken with aioli and the loin of pork with roast garlic and anchovy sauce. With a great butcher on the way to work who seem to be able to secure most things a pig’s head seemed like a logical next step. It’s not often you can say that.

So I scored the head for a fiver and got a couple of trotters for 50p each.

Half the head was for brawn the other half for a straight up roast. Both recipes are in the St John’s cookbooks though I changed a few bits due to what ingredients I had.

I put him in the sink and gave him a bit of a shave. There was some white stuff incrusted in his ears which I drew out.

I couldn’t believe how small the brain cavity was, I know pigs can’t exactly walk, talk and play cards but it was pretty minute.

Half the head went into a big pot with the trotters, onion, celery, pepper corns, coriander seeds, thyme and water. I cooked this on a lowish heat for about two and a half hours.

When ready I took the head out and stripped the meat off the skull. It was mainly in the cheek area and around the neck.

I chopped some of the fatty flesh from the snout and put that in the mix too, with some finely chopped parsley. The stock I strained and reduced over a strong heat for a good half-hour until it looked thick and gelatinous. I put the chopped meat mixture in an oven dish with salt, pepper and a little slug of red wine vinegar, poured enough of the stock over it and smoothed it all down. It went into the fridge for tomorrow.

Here’s a picture of Oliver’s beautiful brawn. – Ryan

For the other half I first browned some shallots and garlic in some butter in the oven. The head then went in with a couple of glasses of red wine and some water. The recipe asked for stock but I didn’t have any so I put a teaspoon of veg bouillon power in too, with some fresh parsley. This cooked for about two and half hours also.

When roasted I took the meat out, added some Dijon mustard to the liquid in the cooking tray, by now glossy with fat, and some watercress as directed. I then served it – boiled potatoes with the sauce drizzled over it with the head chopped up at table and lots of effort put into extracting the meat.

So was it worth it? As entertainment yes, as food no. The roast head was so fatty it was overwhelming and there was not much meat to be had. The meat I did get was nice though, rich like pork belly. Really, though, it was a fun bit of theatre in the kitchen and there is nothing wrong with a bit of that to brighten up your Wednesday evening.

Thank you very much, Oliver! – Ryan