Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Pork Fillet Stuffed with Speck and Cheese
Have you noticed that I haven't bitched about traffic for a while? It has only just occurred to me, but somehow I must have got used to the smog, the rain, the mud, the crazy drivers and the congestion. I still get into the odd conflict with people on the road - pedestrians who step out onto the road even when they see you coming still manage to arouse my passions - but I have learned to leave all that behind when I reach the door to our apartment. Nowadays I just sit down and start thinking about dinner, watch Great British Menus on the BBC and then cook.In between, I do spend a bit of time complaining
- At my poker performance. For some strange reason my luck has gone down the drains a few weeks ago and stayed there ever since. Maybe I'm paying too much attention to food these days and care too little about winning. But as long as I'm happy at the end of the day, everything is fine. And I am, so I really shouldn't complain. Especially not today. We had another beautiful day (in fact, at the moment it seems that spring will never end) and with the sun shining through the office window work seemingly did itself.I got home as relaxed and happy as I sound now with as little to talk about as I have now, so I got straight on with dinner. That'll at least give me something to bother you with. I still had the pork fillet in the fridge that I had bought at the market and immediately attacked it with a knife and a load of stuff I found around the kitchen: Basil, speck, cheese, mustard... The outcome was a fairly pleasant mustard-crusted pork fillet stuffed with speck and mountain cheese. I served it with grilled tomatoes and creamy mushroom sauce, both of which serve to underline the northern Italian feel of the dish.
For the pork:Just in case you had noticed the *asterisk in the recipe above, let me share a bit of useless information with you. The other day I watched a very interesting program on the Discovery Channel called "Kitchen Chemistry". It's hosted by Heston Blumenthal, owner of Britain's much-acclaimed Fat Duck restaurant. This is not you ordinary cooking show where you can get recipes and ideas. Instead, Mr. Blumenthal looks at the chemical processes that go on while we are preparing food and tries to show to viewers how the science behind the cooking affects such thing as texture and flavour. I've never tasted his cooking, but he seems to know a fair bit about chemistry. Just looking at the menu of his restaurant you can tell that he likes to experiment - a bit too much for my taste, but that is not really the issue here. Nor is the fact that I learned a lot about ice cream and mashed potatoes that day and can recommend the show to anyone who wants to know why certain things tend to go wrong so easily.
300 g pork fillet
a few thin slices of speck (alternatively Parma or Serrano ham or some other type of dry-cured smoked ham)
a few slices strongly flavoured mountain cheese
2 to 3 basil leaves, cut into thin stripes
1 to 2 tbsp mild whole grain mustard
5 tbsp olive oil
cocktail sticks or string to hold the pork together
2 tomatoes, halved horizontally
For the sauce:
1½ tbsp butter
1 shallot or ½ onion, finely chopped
1 small garlic clove, finely chopped
2 handfuls of mixed wild mushrooms, sliced (or a mix of button mushrooms and dried wild mushrooms)
a pinch of ground caraway
50 ml medium dry sherry
100 to 125 ml chicken stock (if you are a vegetarian, you can use vegetable stock here)
1 to 2 tbsp thick cream (if you do not have thick cream, use double or whipping cream instead, but adjust for the difference in the fat/liquid ratio by using more cream and less stock; in this case, you might want to add an extra pinch of stock granules to the water though)
salt and pepper to taste
To serve:
mashed potatoes
butter stewed spring vegetables
sautéed morel mushrooms
a few drops of truffle oil
Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Place the tomato halves in a roasting tin large enough to hold them and the pork with enough room to let the steam escape. Drizzle with 3 to 4 tablespoons of the olive oil and place in the oven as soon as it's hot.
In the meantime start on the sauce (see recipe below) and prepare the meat. Place the pork on a board. Using a sharp knife, cut a pocket along the middle of the fillet. Stuff the cheese into the pocket, top with the basil and speck and seal tightly with cocktail sticks or tie into a parcel with a piece of string.
Heat the remaining oil in a large, shallow frying pan. Fry the pork for about a minute on each side to lightly brown*. Transfer the meat to the baking dish with the tomatoes and spread enough mustard over the top to form a thin cover. Return to the oven until cooked through, about 12 minutes. Remove from the oven and let it rest for a few minutes.
For the sauce, heat the butter in the frying pan used to brown the pork (or a medium sized saucepan if you are using the sauce for some other purpose) over medium low heat. Add the onions and fry uncovered until translucent, about 3 minutes. Add the garlic, reduce the heat to low, cover and continue sweating until golden and soft, about 10 minutes. If you do not have a lid for the large pan, transfer the onions to a medium saucepan before adding the garlic. When the onions are soft, increase the heat to medium and add the mushrooms. Fry uncovered until the mushrooms have released their liquid and are going brown. Now add the caraway seeds and briefly continue frying. If you are still using the frying pan at this point, transfer the mixture to a medium saucepan, then add the sherry. Bring to the boil and gently pour in the stock. Bring to the boil again, reduce the temperature and allow to simmer until slightly thickened, about 10 minutes. Stir in the cream and allow to heat through. However, make sure not to boil the sauce from now on. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
To serve, slice the pork into 2 cm thick slices. Place a big spoonful of mash on a plate, drizzle with a good amount of mushroom sauce and top with the pork. Arrange the tomatoes and vegetables around it. Scatter with sautéed morel mushrooms and drizzle with truffle oil.
What the asterisk was meant to indicate is that, on program's website, Mr. Blumenthal has a thing or two to say about frying meat before you roast it. Many cookbooks tell you that the reason for this is to "seal in the juices", but Mr. Blumenthal calls this an "amazing piece of kitchen nonsense". In the section on kitchen myths he tells us:
"It never fails to amaze me when chefs talk about "sealing" meat. You only have to look at the pan to see the juices pouring out of the meat as it is heated above about 60°C. The muscle fibres contract and literally squeeze the water out of the meat. What actually happens when you put a piece of meat in a hot pan is that chemical reactions (known as the Maillard reactions) start. Proteins and sugars react together once the temperature is above about 140C to produce a wealth of new molecules which provide the typical "meaty" aromas. In short we cook meat at high temperatures to generate flavour - not to seal juices in."This seems to make sense, don't you think? That brown crust that forms when meat reacts with fat and heat is one of the yummiest parts of a roast. Why else would we deglaze roasting tins once the meat has been removed? So I will leave you with a quick remark about tonight's dinner. I have not deglazed the pan. Instead, I kept it in the fridge to make a sauce for the leftovers tomorrow.
Christine at 10:44 pm
