Cape Town - Some meats are contrary by nature. They’re the unpredictable element in the kitchen repertoire, the Mr Hyde which may suddenly show itself as a Dr Jekyll, when you least expect it, or the smiling, sweet vicar who turns out to harbour a dark secret of the kind the church hierarchy would rather ignore.
One such meat is pork, whether the cut is a leg, a slab of belly or a chop. Another is a T-bone steak. In both cases, they’re one piece of meat but two different things. T-bone is part sirloin and part fillet. Pork has that pale meat, and that strip of fat and skin. What they have in common is that both comprise two elements that require different approaches when cooking – and yet both are single pieces of produce.
When cooking a T-bone steak you have to be careful not to overdo the sirloin – that’s the larger portion, Daisy, while the piece on the other side of the T-bone is the much more tender fillet. It’s best to focus on getting the potentially tougher meat done to perfection, and let the smaller fillet just come along for the ride. It will be fine, even if pretty rare. Better that than to risk having the sirloin section tough.
A leg of pork is something that can be so right, but the cooking of it can go so wrong. The contrarian hunk of meat, on the bone, has to be cooked through but should not be dry. You want a succulent piece of meat, so ideally you want lots of lovely juices in there, and slow cooking time so that the meat, in the end, is reminiscent of the luscious tenderness of pork meat pulled in strips from a hog roast on the spit. That little piggy has been cooked for hours on the spit, turning all the while, while being basted all along. It is the most wonderful meat in all the world if done right.
Try to replicate that in the oven – and you can – and the point at which it will go awry is when you start paying as much attention to the crackling – the skin – as you are to the meat. But cook that crackling in the same way, and it’s likely to turn out limp and soggy, the opposite of what you want. So the answer, for a leg of pork, is to separate the two and cook the slab of meat slowly, with plenty of flavourings and liquid, with regular basting, and to cook the scored and salted skin in a hot oven to crisp up perfectly.
In programmes such as MasterChef Australia, I enjoy the way the better chefs see a piece of meat placed in front of them not as it appears, but as the potential for a dish that’s popped into their minds. I was eyeing a special Pick n Pay has last week of common-or-garden “pork braai chops”, the price of which was very friendly, especially considering that they were free range.
They were large, contained a smallish bone, and each had a strip of fat and skin. Such chops have sometimes defeated me in the kitchen, for the same reason as the T-bone steak bogey described above. So I tried to see them in a different light. Then I remembered how successful I’ve been lately with escalopes of chicken breast fillets, and decided to try doing them the same way.
Pork escalopes with crackling
Serves 4
Pork braai chops or cutlets, skin not trimmed
3 or 4 tbs flour
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground coriander seeds
Olive oil and/or butter
1 glass dry or semi-sweet white wine
2 Tbs Dijon mustard
I sliced off the fatty strip, and then removed the bone from each chop, carefully with a small, sharp knife. I trimmed most of the fat off each strip of skin and discarded it. The remaining strips of skin were layered in a lightly oiled oven dish, the skin sides were brushed with olive oil, and I salted them too. Then they were set aside to cook for about 40 minutes in the middle of a hot oven, with frequent checking to ensure they did not blacken. Adjust your cooking time as necessary – the point is for them to be lovely crunchy strips of crackling.
Back to the meat from those “braai chops”. Carefully cut them into as many pieces as make sense… be guided by the shapes of the muscles. Essentially, each slice of muscle needs to be a separate piece. Clean and pat them dry.
Lay out a strip of cling-film, place escalopes of pork on this, lay another piece of cling-film on top, and massage them down with the ball of your palm. This will stretch and flatten the escalopes.
In a clean shopping bag, shake up 3 or 4 tbs flour with salt, pepper and the spices. Add the escalopes to this, close the top and shake them around so that all sides of the meat are coated. Pour some sesame seeds on to a side plate and roll each escalope in the seeds. Fry these, a few at a time, in butter or a mix of butter and olive oil, until tender but not overdone. They should also not be pink, but they will cook quickly, as they are pretty thin. Add a glass of dry white wine to the pan, or a sweetish wine, and reduce it, stirring, on a moderately high heat. Add 2 Tbs of Dijon mustard and stir in well. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve with wok-fried shredded cabbage, seasoned with similar spices. For a bit of pizzazz, fry the cabbage in sesame oil. Garnish with the pork crackling which you have not forgotten is in the oven. One hopes. - Sunday Argus