It's stuff like this

A lot of cooks complain about things in the kitchen, but they find ways to reward themselves. Sometimes those rewards are blowing the week’s pay at the strip club, like our saucier did on Friday night. Or having familial relations with as many waitresses/cooks as possible, a favorite pastime among some of our cooks. Or chain smoking a series of cigarettes and downing countless cocktails, like all our cooks do.

For me, though, the reward to working at a fast-paced kitchen is that I get to see and learn all kinds of cool stuff I’d be hard-pressed to see or learn elsewhere. The latest incarnation of this is working with whole pigs.

Exhibit A: We now have a new dish on garde manger, a pork head-cheese roulade wrapped with sardines and garnished pickled onions, radicchio, chives fried prosciutto chips, and onion-preserved lemon relish. The dish isn’t one of my favorites—I’ve never been a big fan of sardines, for one; the roulade is ridiculously big, for another—but the prep work involved is interesting.

Once a week we have to brine pig heads. I’m talking whole pig heads that have been sawed perfectly in half. You see the tongue, the brain, the beady little eyes, the floppy ears. They have different expressions (of the four heads I brined last week, two seemed happy to have been killed, one looked bored, the other terrified). It's like a scene from a Nine Inch Nails music video.

The brine is a mix of about ten gallons of water, mixed with several pounds of sugar, salt, chili flakes, peppercorns, celery seeds, and cloves. A cup of curing salt is added to the mix to add color and prevent botulism. It’s brined for a week, and then braised.

After the meat is fall-off-the face tender, it is separated from the fat and skin, and then the “good” parts of the skin (i.e., the parts without hair) is added back to the meat, along with numerous spices. The braising liquid is reduced to gelatin, poured over the meat/skin, and formed into a terrine, which is then rolled with the sardines. Voila, a head cheese roulade.

The head cheese is tasty, and I’ve learned that apparently the eye socket is the most highly prized cut among chefs. Didn’t get to taste it myself (my garde manger compatriot got one, and the chef de cuisine the other from the initial pig head), but I hope to soon.

Exhibit B: This last Friday I got to see chef butchering a couple of suckling pigs. Seeing him take a knife and carve out the breastbone and ribcage of those beasts made me yearn to learn more about butchering. Not in a gay way, or a psychotic way, but rather in a “I want to be that impressive” way.

It’s stuff like this that pumps me up about going into work, keeps me sane while on the line, and stays with me as I hump my knives back home to Jersey on the PATH train.

Not so offal

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but what better way to jump back in then talking about one of the most fascinating types of food; something that sickens many and fascinates many more. Oh yeah, it’s offal time.

The varietal meats are a favorite of many other cultures, but not so much in the United States. Growing up my love of offal has come in leaps and bounds. As a tot I was a moderate fan of liver, having a bit of cheap chicken liver pate when visiting the grandparents for Thanksgiving. I then discovered foie gras, and became a pointy-toothed savage whenever it was around. I used to cringe at the thought of tongue and bone marrow, but now I realize just how flavorful that stuff is.

Offal can be easy to come by, too. Buy a packed duck and you get some liver. Buy a packaged rabbit and you get kidneys. Tongue is sold in pretty much every supermarket I’ve ever seen. They are usually well-used muscles or organs, so treat them like tougher cuts of meat (the shank or chuck, for example). Give ‘em the low and slow treatment, especially liver, which isn’t a muscle but which food science guru Harold McGee says is the most used of all land animal organs and has very little connective tissue.

My quest to consume every part of an animal’s body is now held up in the usual areas. I’m still not a huge fan of kidneys, I’m intrigued by the thought of eating brains (though never had the opportunity), and I’m not anytime soon going to be known as Mr. Lamb Fries.

A couple of weeks ago in class, we made sweetbreads—which are the thymus and pancreas glands—and it was my first time cooking or eating them. I wasn’t too enamored of them, to be honest, mostly because they tasted like nothing but the a la meuniere sauce served with them. But I’m dying to try the ‘breads at Jean-Georges or some other amazing restaurant to see what they do with them.

Jacques Pepin in his La Technique says that lamb and calf sweetbreads are the best, but that only calf sweetbreads are available in the United States (not sure if this is true, as I thought several U.S. restaurants have featured lamb sweetbreads).

If you’re looking for an easy entrée into cooking sweetbreads, here’s how we did it:
-- Take the sweetbreads and peel away the membrane, also taking care to cut away any bruised or bloody areas of the organ. Wash it off and dry it well. Ideally you want to press the sweetbreads down with weight overnight to remove liquid and to prevent rubbery end product.
-- Once pressed, run the sweetbreads through a breading mixture—flour, egg wash, bread crumbs—and sauté them briefly in butter. Reserve the sweetbreads and pour off any excess fat.
-- Put more whole butter in the pan, deglaze a bit with some lemon juice and throw in some capers to make a basic a la meuniere sauce. Once the butter is brownish, add some chopped parsley and pour a small amount over the sweetbreads.