Confit Pork Belly
With cauliflower and cockle dressing, cauliflower purée, boudin noir, and unhelpful shopkeepers.
Welcome to another issue of Le Cordon Bong, a newsletter about recreating Michelin star meals at home. You can get in touch with me via the comments or by email. All of the previous content is up on the website (which I personally find to be a a more enjoyable reading experience than the email format).
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Week 7, vol. 1
Setting the Table
I was digging around the internet this week, in search of cookbook reviews for The French Laundry and Rogan, the two books on my shortlist to cook next.
That’s when I came across French Laundry At Home by Carol Blymire, who I think might be crazier than me (she self-describes as “a special kind of nutjob”), and spent two years from 2007-2008 cooking through *every single dish* in The French Laundry Cookbook1. Which is utterly insane and very inspiring. If you enjoy my newsletter, you’ll definitely enjoy her blog (please keep reading my newsletter though).
If you’ve been here before, skip ahead! For the benefit of first-time readers, write-ups are structured thusly: (1) Amuse-Bouche - the history and provenance of the dish; (2) Starters - an intro to the fancy Michelin version of the dish I’ll be cooking; (3) Main courses - the actual cooking process; (4) Desserts - thoughts and conclusions on what worked, what didn’t, and most importantly, what tasted good; (5) Petit Fours - footnotes and references.
Amuse-Bouche
Pork belly has long been a quintessential dish in British cuisine - probably because it’s such a forgiving cut of meat that even the British weren’t capable of messing it up.
It’s also generally considered to be a cheap cut, which has always been confusing to me (Tom Kerridge agrees in his book), because it really has so many premium aspects - it’s full of flavour, there’s lots of marbling, there’s great textural contrast between the meat, fat, and skin, and you can turn the skin into the most amazing crackling.
My favourite expression of this is undoubtedly Cantonese crispy roast pork belly (siu yuk), which, trust me, you have to experience in Hong Kong - it’s just not the same anywhere else.
Starters
So, onto Kerridge’s version of pork belly. This dish involves quite a minimalist, straightforward preparation, which on paper sounds good - it’s just a slab of pork, some cauliflower purée, and a slice of boudin noir (a French blood sausage similar to black pudding).
In reality though, it means that the execution needs to be flawless, and the quality of the ingredients needs to be top notch - there is nowhere to hide in a simple dish. Every line needs to be clean and perfectly angled, the textures and doneness have to be on point, and the flavours must be balanced.
Thankfully, there is no recipe for homemade boudin noir, which means that store-bought will suffice. It’s somewhat surprising, given that Kerridge includes a recipe for British black pudding earlier in the book, requiring “500g pig’s blood (clot-free)”.
This would have been a problem, as I have absolutely no idea where to source fresh, clot-free pig’s blood. However, I did discover that Amazon does sell dried blood for sausage-making (because of course they do).
I also learned via the product Q&A section that there are artists out there who paint with pig’s blood, which subsequently led me down the inevitable internet rabbit hole of:
Pig’s blood art - to be precise, 600 litres of it;
Art about pig’s blood art - see image below;
Historical exterior decoration - pig's blood was added to whitewash to give the colour Suffolk pink, a colour still widely used on house exteriors in some areas of the UK; and
Modern interior decoration - Lizzie Purbrick, a former Olympics equestrian, used pig’s blood to paint a number of obscene phrases (that I won’t reprint here) on the walls of her paramour Lord David Prior’s London flat after she allegedly discovered him in the arms of another woman.
Main Courses
Cured pork belly
This isn’t the first time this has happened, and I guarantee it won’t be the last, but it turns out that reading the recipe is usually a good first step when cooking from a complicated Michelin star restaurant cookbook.
I dry-cured the pork belly on Monday night, started the 8-hour confit in duck fat on Tuesday morning, went out to gather the other ingredients, planned out all the cooking steps for Tuesday evening, and picked out a nice bottle of wine to pair with dinner.
Then, as I was re-reading the recipe (or more accurately, reading it for the very first time), I noticed the instruction “Carefully lift the pork out onto a tray, put some heavy weights on the tray to press the pork, and leave in the fridge overnight”. Whoops.
Also, if you were wondering how long cockles last in the fridge, it’s up to a week (I panic-googled after realising I bought the cockles one day too early). So, crisis averted.
Cauliflower purée
This book really loves the purées. I made a more complicated version of this in the monkfish and cauliflower dish last month, so I was quietly confident that I wouldn’t screw this up.
I didn’t screw it up. The texture of the purée was perfect. Then I thought to myself, “it’ll be even better if I blend it a bit more so it’s extra smooth”, stubbornly ignoring the other voice in my head saying “if you over-blend, you’re going to completely disintegrate the cauliflower cell structure and the purée is going to turn into a soup”.
And that’s how I made cauliflower soup.
Fortunately, I was able to salvage the mess by *very slowly* steaming off all the excess moisture on the lowest heat, while constantly stirring for half an hour. Seriously, it’s amazing that friends still ask me for cooking advice, because I am very bad at cooking.
Pickled cauliflower & cockle dressing
This was actually a breeze. Also, tiny pickled cauliflower florets look like popcorn.
I don’t have anything else to say, so uh, for the Game of Thrones fans, here’s a trap remix of Arya Stark selling oysters, clams, and cockles that I came across while researching cockles.
The finish
The only components that needed to be warm were the pork belly and boudin noir, so this was a calm finish, featuring the unconventional technique of whacking a massive saucepan on top of the pork belly slabs to ensure even, crispy skin.
Also, if you’re wondering why the main picture looks like regular black pudding instead of boudin noir, that’s because it is. The French grocery store I ordered from was experiencing delays. (When I pointed out that it would have been quite helpful if they informed me of said delays before I made the hour-long journey to pick it up, the shopkeeper nonchalantly shrugged and muttered something about going outside for a cigarette. So on the bright side, at least now I know they’re authentic, and the boudin noir will be excellent if it ever actually arrives).
Desserts
This was probably the least actual cooking I’ve ever done for a Hand & Flowers recipe. I barely even touched the pork belly - it was mostly just on a sightseeing journey from my fridge to the oven, back to the fridge, and into the frying pan. It does require some planning ahead (and maybe actually reading the recipe), but I will definitely be making this again.
My tasting notes:
The plating is so pretty! Plating is usually my biggest area of self-criticism, but I was actually happy with how this looked2 - even the little quenelle of cauliflower purée worked. It’s so pretty that it almost looks like a dessert (I’m thinking about recreating this exact plating with millefeuille, ice cream, a brownie, and a ring of little meringue dots and salted caramel sauce on the outside. That would make such an epic two course meal).
Pork belly is a superstar. This is really one of the best pork belly dishes I’ve ever had. It just tasted so clean, yet so full of rich porky goodness, and the crackling was *chef’s kiss* perfect. I wish I could put up the audio of the the crackling snapping in two.
The supporting act did an excellent job too, with the cauliflower bringing lightness and neutrality, while the dressing was a nice nod to the classic combination of pork and apples. The black pudding didn’t really do anything special for me, but I like black pudding, so whatever, and it provided great visual contrast to the cauliflower purée. I suspect it’s just there for the ‘gram.
Confit and compress needs to feature more often. I’m going to keep talking about the pork belly because it was so good. Slowly cooking the pork belly and pressing it overnight gave it this incredibly firm and meaty texture, not to mention a very elegant aesthetic. It just felt so premium. It’s also classic Tom Kerridge, using these little tricks to enhance both the flavours and the looks of the core ingredient - it’s exactly what we saw with the treacle-cured Chateaubriand and the braised beef shin enriched with bone marrow.
I think it’s safe to say this was a roaring success, and very fun to make despite the minor hiccups / my inability to read.
I have to say I was slightly surprised it wasn’t a sous vide cook (Kerridge loves the ‘vide), as many home ovens aren’t good at maintaining low temperatures for extended periods of time (sous vide would also have saved me a few quid on duck fat). Something to ponder for my adaptation, which as usual, will be out later this week. Until then, happy cooking!
Petit Fours (aka the footnotes)
I would love to cook every single recipe in the Hand & Flowers Cookbook (which was actually my original intention) but like, there’s the small issue of needing to purchase about £5,000 worth of kit. Also, I definitely don’t have the attention span to stick to one cookbook for two years.
Well… if I’m going to be totally honest… (1) I could have been a little less ham-handed on the sauce; (2) While the lines on the pork belly were clean, they weren’t *perfectly* perpendicular and it warped slightly when reheating; (3) If you look closely, there are a few errant drops of the cockle dressing on the right side of the plate that I forgot to wipe off; and (4) I definitely don’t have OCD and this definitely won’t keep me up all night.