Kurobuta Pork—The Other White Meat. NOT!

You may have seen Kurobuta pork on our menu at One Block West; we've been serving it for a couple of years, ever since we found a supplier. And you've probably wondered what it is.

Let's start with the basics. Kurobuta refers to a specific breed of pig called Berkshire, after Berkshire County, England, whose seat is Reading, just west of London on the M4. The Berk is a distinctive animal, mostly black, often with white feet and sometimes with white on the face and tip of the tail. Berks have really coarse hair and a medium length snout which is notably shorter than that of the common white pig. I kind of like the big hairy ears that point slightly forward.

Let's flash back about 375 years ago to Oliver Cromwell's nasty little scrap with the Kings Charles. Legend says that while Cromwell's army wintered at Reading, the soldiers discovered (liberated without compensation?) a wonderful black hog, tales of which these soldiers spread after the wars. The Berkshire hog as it came to be known was renowned for its size and outstanding flavor.

Scientific studies have shown that Berkshires are genetically predisposed to produce short muscle fibers and lots of intramuscular marbling, important for both tenderness and flavor.

I won't forget the first time that we served grilled Kurobuta rack chops, for more than one customer asked me if I hadn't mistakenly put a veal chop on the grill. Yes, the meat is that noticeably different from modern factory pork.

A word about factory pork. Historically, pork had been America's mainstay protein source, grown on small farms and in back yards everywhere. After World War II, the tide turned and pork consumption decreased to the point where chicken replaced it as America's primary protein source.

Faced with this crisis to their industry, the National Pork Board responded with a marketing campaign to put pork on a par with chicken. At the same time during the 1980s, Americans became diet crazy and looked to eliminate fat from their diets. Breeders responded by producing hogs that were up to 30% leaner than the hog of a generation ago. And they also produced a pig that gets to market weight very quickly, not giving it sufficient time to gain flavor.

Now when you produce a pig with that little fat, you certainly reduce the caloric content, but you lose all the marbling in the muscle tissue. This intramuscular fat gives both flavor and juiciness, that succulence that makes eating good pork such an ambrosial experience. The net result of factory pork competing with low fat factory chicken: tasteless and dry pork.

On the other hand, factory farming has brought us a wealth of very cheap, very low fat product. I'm not going delve into the environmental consequences and the animal welfare aspects of confinement farming. These are natural side effects of the market demand for cheap protein. Without factory farming, a lot of people would be denied access to high quality protein in their diets.

Remember "The Other White Meat" campaign from the National Pork Board touting their low fat, healthy product? It must certainly go down as one of the most effective marketing campaigns ever. When the National Pork Board uses the term white, what they really mean is bland and lacking flavor and interest. That they have convinced the Wonder® bread- and flaccid chicken breast-loving Americans that pork should be in their refrigerators should, I guess, not come as any surprise, especially since we are at least a generation removed from people who have tasted small farm, slowly raised pork.

But if you let these same people taste the two products side by side, it is clear in study after study that people prefer the flavor and succulence of Berkshire hog to any of the commercial hogs. And we chefs, people who love flavor, are leading the way for Berkshire and other small farm pork by putting it on our menus.

So, how do we get from Berkshire to the term Kurobuta that we use on our menus?

In the 19th century, the British government sent some Berkshire hogs to Japan as a gift. In Japan, the hogs were named Kurobuta (黒豚) or black pig. The exquisite pork was and is much appreciated in Japan and Japanese growers have perfected the art of producing fine marbled pork in the same way that they have perfected Wagyu (cow of Japan) beef, known here by the regional appellation Kobe. I'm not clear on why Berkshire pork is marketed here in the US as Kurobuta, but it is probably an intentional association with Wagyu/Kobe beef, the world's most luxurious beef.

There are a couple of other factors involved in making Kurobuta what it is, besides genetics. Pigs deposit the fat in their diet directly into the muscle tissue, making their diet extremely important for flavor. This is one of the reasons peanut-fed Virginia pork tastes so good, and why the acorn-fed pata negra pigs of Spain are so amazing. Kurobuta pork is fed a very careful diet, one calculated to enhance the flavor of the meat.

The second factor in good tasting pork is the lack of stress on the animal. Undue stress causes the meat to be dry and tough. Berkshire hogs are raised in low-stress environments and typically allowed to range where they will, with adequate shade to keep them cool.

Currently, our Kurobuta pork comes from small farms in the Midwest who take great care with their pigs, but we are eagerly awaiting the fall when our local Berkshire piglets will be market size.

I should also mention that besides Berkshires there are other wonderful breeds such as Tamworth and Old Spot, that are well worth finding and eating.

My apologies for this opus. I intended for it to be a short "Kurobuta is great pork; eat it" piece. My inner storyteller got carried away.

Caul Fat—The Chef's Friend

I have a fondness for making and eating charcuterie: pâtés, terrines, ballotines, galantines, sausages, hams, and such. One thing you learn early on when making charcuterie is the kinds and uses of various kinds of fat: fatback, kidney fat, bacon, pork belly, and especially caul fat. It constantly surprises me the number of people in this industry that I meet who have never worked with caul fat.

Caul fat, as you can see, is a very thin lacy membrane that surrounds the viscera of animals. I generally use beef or pork. Lamb is also available. I highly prefer pork caul fat, unless I am working with beef.

Caul fat is indispensable when you want to contain and restrain a loose or rolled product. During cooking, the fat largely melts away, leaving you the finished product that you would otherwise have had to tie with string or bind in some other fashion.

Caul fat is excellent for making individual servings of a forcemeat. You can wrap the forcemeat in caul fat and the fat will help it hold its shape until it cooks and the proteins set up to hold it in shape.

Caul fat is even more excellent for restraining rolled meats, such as these boned saddles of rabbit stuffed with a Kurobuta pork forcemeat. Easy to roll and no fooling around with string. No unsighltly string marks messing with the presentation and no messing around removing the string from a hot product.

Caul fat can be very difficult to find if you are not in the trade. Hopefully you can find a good butcher.

June Bounty

I love June! I've been waiting all winter for this! Just look at the toys I have to work with!

From left to right, English peas; white, yellow, and gold beets; purple, yellow, and green snow peas; and a bounty of tiny squashes.

Now's a great time to be eating in the One Block West dining room.

Wow!

I have a fairly jaded palate. I'm around top quality restaurant food every day; I read a lot of food rags; we talk a lot of food; and, naturally, I eat out when I get the chance to see what others are doing. So, it is a rare day when something makes me go, "Wow!"

But this morning, I couldn't say "Wow!" enough to a dish that I have been mulling over in my head for a while, but have just got around to testing in the kitchen.

I made some sausage of Kurobuta (heirloom Berkshire) pork, the last of our local storage apples, sage, and various other seasonings. Then I boned out a saddle of rabbit (that is, I pulled the two loins off the backbone, leaving them joined together) and stuffed the rabbit with the sausage, rolled it, wrapped it in caul fat to keep the very lean rabbit moist, browned it all over, and roasted it.

Twelve minutes in the oven, five minutes resting, and "Wow!" It was so good that there was nothing left within seconds—I'm a greedy little pig. Happy Ed. Very Happy Ed. Wow!

Now appearing Thursday through Saturday, Kurobuta Pork-Stuffed Saddle of Rabbit, until I run out of rabbits. Come and get yours!

It's 93 Degrees. What to Eat?

After a cool and rainy spring, things turned suddenly melt-your-eyeballs hot with breath stifling humidity Friday and Saturday. The meat thermometer in my pocket was reading 120+ in the kitchen during Friday night dinner service, a nearly nauseating experience. This happens every year, but just for a short period in late July to mid August, not the first of June, for goodness sake (with apologies to the Bard for omitting the apostrophe after goodness).

The first thing I did Saturday morning was make four gallons of gazpacho, figuring that when it's hot as blazes, a cold bowl of gazpacho is just the ticket. But I also did something entirely crazy: I made big pot of Venison Stroganoff.

Why? Because I had a bunch of venison in the cooler that I needed to cook. My game broker knows I am a sucker for off cuts of meat and he sent me a box of vension on the cheap, just to gauge my reaction to it, to see if he should bring it on and sell to other chefs.

To be fair, when I bought the venison, it was cool and rainy and I had no idea the weather would turn so dramatically horrible. Anyway, the deed was done Saturday morning and I ended with a vast pot of silky braised venison and fresh porcini mushrooms just waiting to be finished at service with sour cream and pappardelle.

Before dinner service at our staff meeting, I was joking with the servers about the Stroganoff. We were all joking that if it were a snowy day in January, the dish would sell like hotcakes. And we all agreed that I was crazy to put it on the menu because there was no way in hell that it would sell, no matter how good it might be (and it was excellent).

Dinner started early and I noticed each ticket had a venison on it, and then dinner became a full on rush for ninety minutes and the venison orders starting stacking up, far outselling every other dish.

So, question for you. It's 93 degrees and 95% humidity. What are you going to eat for dinner?

Go figure.

Garlic Scapes

A friend who lives right next to the restaurant raises garlic on a little plot here in town. And every year when his garlic starts sending up bloom shoots called scapes (photo, at right), he cuts them off brings them to me.

If you leave the scape on the garlic plant, it will put its energy into the scape, which will straighten out over time and produce tiny seed-like bulbs. If you cut the scape, the plant puts its energy into growing the bulb, the part that most of us like to eat.

But to eat only the mature bulb is to miss two other very edible stages of the plant: green garlic and scapes. I should mention that there are two kinds of garlic in the world, softnecks which do not produce scapes and hardnecks (including rocamboles) which do produce scapes.

The curly scapes are tender with a mild garlic flavor. I dice them and make risotto from them, slice them and stir fry them, cut the blooms out and use them as another vegetable in mixed vegetable sautés, add them to the myriad green sauces that I make, and so forth and so on.

If you're lucky enough to grow your own hardneck garlic or know someone who does, by all means, avail yourself of this spring bounty.

Preserved Lemons

Here at One Block West Restaurant, we use a lot of preserved lemons, mostly in tagines of lamb or chicken. Whenever I've mentioned them in my recipes and in the monthly newsletter, customers have always been curious what preserved lemons are and where they can buy them.

As for what they are, preserved lemons are basically pickled lemons, lemons that have been brined, in the same way that you would make dill pickles, without the dill, naturally. This photo shows from left to right a fresh lemon, a lemon that has been curing for about two weeks, and a lemon from a batch I made about a year ago. Notice that the lemon that is still curing is starting to go soft, but it is not quite soft enough to eat. And that the lemon I've had in the cooler for months has lost its color, which is expected.

As for where to buy them, I don't know of any place. Sure, they're available to the trade in 10 kilo buckets, but even I don't need that many preserved lemons at the restaurant and you surely don't. Fortunately, preserved lemons are trivial to make and you should try it. I don't see how you can screw it up.

You'll need lemons to preserve and extra to squeeze for lemon juice to top off the container, a non-corrosive (plastic or ceramic, for example) container, something to weight the lemons down and keep them under the surface of the brine (such as a couple of plates), and salt (we use kosher salt).

To begin, dip the lemons to be preserved in boiling water for a few seconds, mainly to dissolve any wax coating on them. Wipe them to get all the wax off and cut off the stem. Then, as in this photo, slice in half vertically, leaving the two halves attached at the stem end. (How you slice the lemon is immaterial. The entire point of the exercise is to let you pack the lemon with salt. This is how I slice the lemon. Do what feels right to you.)

Then, I rotate the lemon ninety degrees around its vertical axis and slice it again, this time from bloom end to stem end, leaving the halves attached at the bloom end and slicing through the stem end. I do this simply because having the lemon quarters attached at both ends seems to keep the lemons whole longer, not that this is in any way important.

In the past, when I have quartered lemons, leaving them intact only at the stem end, I have noticed that they tend to fall apart more frequently as they age in the brine. Again, it doesn't matter, mainly because you will most likely dice the rind before cooking with it. A pickled lemon is a pickled lemon no matter what shape it's in or how you slice it.

This final photo shows a lemon ready to be packed with salt. Put a layer, say a centimeter or less, of salt in the bottom of your non-corrosive container. Pack each lemon full of salt and place in the container. Add any herbs or spices you want. (I always throw in a cinnamon stick and some fresh thyme. Why? I dunno.) Then top off the container with lemon juice (I save the brine from one batch to use with the next batch, boiling it between uses) and place a couple of plates on top of the lemons to keep them fully submerged beneath the brine.

At this point, I put the lemons on the counter and check them once a week. They take four to six weeks for the rinds to soften to where I like them. At this point, I transfer the container to the fridge and start to use the lemons.

You can use the whole lemon, but I generally just dice the rind for my tagines, couscous and other dishes. The reason for this is that my lemons are generally full of seeds and it is a nightmare to remove them and still have any flesh left intact to dice. So I peel the rind off the flesh and pitch the flesh.