The other white cheek.

Installment # 3 in the Charcuterie posts is Guanciale. First let's work on pronunciation. For those of you who, like me, do not speak Italian this is a puzzling word to pronounce but after many web searches and a conversation with former resident (but not native) of Italy, I have narrowed it down to 2 possible pronunciations. Gwan-see-ah-lay and gwan-chi-ah-lay. That out of the way, on the the meat of the matter.

The first step in any of these more esoteric recipes is to acquire the main ingredient, in this case UNCURED pork cheek, otherwise known as hog jowls. Uncured being the hard part... At the Nashville farmers market you can find salted and smoked hog jowls by the bushel basket, literally. This being a city of "southern food", hog jowls and ham hocks play a major part in a lot of southern cooking, soul food included. However, I wanted pig cheek au-natural. So I called up Danny at DW Farms and placed an order for 4 cheeks.

On the appointed day and at the appointed place, I picked up the jowls. 2 smallish 2 larger.

Let me just say this, I have never really been freaked out by a cut of meat until now... It's not the muscle tissue, or the location of origin from the animal, it was the bristles of the 2 smaller cheeks that could be felt on the skin side. 
All I can say is someone needs a Mach 3. <shiver> ewww.

I trimmed the nasty bits (glands and the like, some bristles, again ewww) and started the cure.

Kosher salt, sugar, garlic black pepper corns, and thyme. Quite a simple cure.

I doubled the amount of cure due to the amount of pork I decided to process. Just a little over double the weight.

I spread a layer of cure in the bottom of a big plastic container.

Then laid in the washed, trimmed and dried jowls. A layer of cure, a layer of meat, a layer of cure, a layer of meat then the rest of the cure.

Pop on the lid and chuck it in the fridge for 7 days, or until the jowls are uniformly firm. Turning and rotating every other day.

After 7 days it looks like this.

Not a lot to see in that one, so how about this. Ready to rinse and hang

After a little shower in the sink, I used a very sharp knife to poke a hole in the thinner end of each jowl and used butchers twine to hang them to dry.

As you can see the skin on the smaller two guanciali turned a little gray. This would be remedied by the drying process.

After 3 weeks of hanging the skin has turned all mahogany and pretty... The two large guanciali did not have skin.

Here are the first couple of slices.

This stuff is really fragrant. Slightly floral from the thyme and a little pungent from the garlic. There is a meaty aroma also that is really hard to pin down.

The flavor is also floral-ish but very porky and works very well as a traditional ingredient in alla carbonara.

If you can lay hands on uncured pork cheeks and a copy of Charcuterie, I recommend making this.

It may not be for everyone but I like it.

Cheers

Chris

Dontcha hate to get your cheeks pinched?

I would have never expected to enjoy this particular cut of beef, but cheeks are brilliant! The need some special treatment but the results, if handled even 3/4 correctly are outstanding.

Those of you who familiar with The French Laundry at Home will have more than likely already seen this dish fully blogged by Carol, and done with humor and style and great camera work...

Well for this blog you might get 1 of those 3... And even I don't know which one it will be... So without further rambling obfuscating I give you partial Tongue In Cheek from the French Laundry cook book.

I was inspired to try this part of the recipe by my experience with the Braised Veal Cheeks that I had at Roosters in Charlotte. Also I found beef cheeks for some ridiculous price like $1.25 a pound.

So with my newly acquired beef cheeks (Carol is dead on when she said that beef cheeks is fun and funny to say), I cracked open my, coffee table extravaganza, copy of, The French Laundry cookbook.

It starts by unpacking and trimming the cheeks. (Squeamish alert!)

The little pile of meat at the front of the picture is the part that I didn't keep, silver skin and membranes.

The second step is to make a batch of the Red Wine Marinade found on page 190.

1 bottle of good red wine (this will come back to bite you if you don't use a decent wine.) carrots, leeks, onions, garlic, flat leaf parsley, thyme and bay leaf.

Everything goes into a pot and is brought to a boil. The recipe states... "Tilt the pan away from the burner and carefully ignite the wine with a match." This is rather nerve racking in a kitchen with 8 foot ceilings and no commercial fire suppression system. It's also the best way to make sure that the alcohol is burned off so that it doesn't cook the meat while it is marinating. (Note to self: Make sure fire extinguisher is charged, as a precaution)

If you look closely you might be able to see the flames.

Once I couldn't get anymore vapors to ignite it was time to let the marinade cool.

I but the cheek in a one gallon zip-top vacuum bag and poured the room temp marinade in with it, sealed up the bag and stuck it in the fridge over night.

After a 8 to 12 hour soak, I removed the meat and strained the marinade into a pot and brought it to a boil. The vegetables are reserved for later.

While the marinade was getting it's boil on, I dredged the cheeks in all purpose flour and started to brown them in a  little peanut oil (my de facto cooking oil). It took about 3 minutes a side for the cheeks to get brown and crusty and ready for the next steps.

The marinade, once boiled and reduced a bit was strained again, this time through a coffee filter. Not part of the original recipe but I wanted to remove any little icky bits that the skimming didn't catch.

Per the recipe I had about a cup marinade.

The vegetables left from the marinade got a quick saute in the pan used to brown the meat.

Let me just say that throughout the process nothing had really tasted all that great, and the colors were almost disturbing... purple leeks and carrots, freaky. I did figure out the issue with the off flavor and this is were the quality of the wine comes into play... Cheap wine is not the best idea. I don't mean Thunderbird cheap but not anything I will buy again.  Lesson learned... I get it now even though I am not much of a wine person. Good wine = good food.

So now that I had all the parts ready, I was hoping that my bad choice of wine wouldn't ruin the final dish, but I had to put it together to find out.

Cheeks, marinade, vegetables, veal stock and water to cover went into a loaf pan of all things. I used a loaf pan because of the overall volume it held was just over what was needed to hold the ingredients without diluting the marinade/stock too much with water.

I covered the meat with a parchment lid... Neat idea. Cut parchment to the size and shape of the cooking vessel with a vent hole in the center so that the meat is protected from caramelizing and allows a little evaporation. Mr. Keller says "It's like having a lid and not having a lid at the same time." How Zen...

I cooked the cheeks for 4 hours at 300°, then let them rest for 30 minutes before even removing the parchment. That's a long 30 minutes, but worth the wait.

For the final plating I did a quick sauté of fingerling Yukon Gold potatoes and sliced the cheek into half inch slices. I also reduced some of the braising liquid until it was satiny smooth and coated the back of a spoon.

Oh Damn! it was good. My worries about the wine flavor were put to rest with the first bite. This had has good a flavor as the veal cheeks I had at Roosters. The texture was very nice but not as good as the veal. I really enjoyed the dish, and I learned lessons while making it. Two hallmarks of a good recipe to me.

I will make this again when the temperature is a bit lower. It's a perfect late fall or winter dish.

Anyone else out there tried variations on French Laundry recipes? Did they work? Did they fail? Tell me about what you experienced.

Cheers

Chris

If life hands you lemons, make lemon cookies.

Many of you will know exactly what the phrase "cookie dough sale" means. For those of you who don't, let me splain...

The ubiquitous candy/trinket/candle fundraiser sales of our school days have been augmented by the sales of 3 lbs tubs of cookie dough with nearly the mythical self life of Twinkies. (Actual shelf life of the dough frozen, is 12 months). The dough cost between 10 and 13 dollars depending on the flavor.

Now this is not an item I would buy if little Timmy knocked on the door hawking his wares to fund raise for his school field trip to the science center, but when my nephew called at the beginning of his school year, (in perfect compliance with the Do Not Call Registry, since I brought and consumed cookies the previous year) I played the part of dutiful uncle and agreed to purchase a tub-o-cookies.

I chose the German Chocolate cookies, seeing as that is probably my favorite cake, I thought they would be tolerable.

After a few months and the inevitable memory lapse about the purchase, I received a call one Saturday morning with a cryptic message informing me that my sister-in-law would be at certain small/square hamburger joint, at a certain time and would have my "stuff"... I arrived at the aforementioned time and place feeling like I was ready for a shady drug deal and took delivery of my rapidly thawing tub of joy... Once home I tucked the tub away in the garage freezer until such time as I needed on demand cookies.

This morning, that time arrived... I had actually planned for the event by removing the dough from the freezer last night and leaving it out to thaw.

I imagine that you, dear reader, might be asking yourself "what the hell do lemons have to do with German Chocolate cookies...?" or maybe "What the hell is he yammering on about today...?" I will do more 'splaining'.

Over the weekend I purchased a bag of lemons from the local chain grocery store, I found a little mold on one, then a second, then third and fourth lemon this morning, and knew that if I didn't harvest the lemon juice quickly, I would have moldy additions to my compost pile, and a couple of wasted bucks.

So I wind up in the kitchen with 2 dozen German Chocolate cookies and a half a cup of lemon juice... Now what does anyone worthy of the description "curious" do with 2 dozen cookies and a half a cup of lemon juice? Sprinkle a little juice on a cookie of course...

You could have knocked me over with a feather... Turns out the combination is actually really really good, and I'm not even fond of sweet lemon preparations.

So, lessons learned today... Chocolate and lemon CAN go together, and the scary tub-o-cookies can be turned into a decent desert.

I recommend finding a nice chocolate cookie recipe and drizzling fresh lemon juice on them while they are still warm... I also recommend you find way to get rid of the remaining cookies other than standing over the cooling rack eating cookies and growling at your family members when they venture too close to you... 

Surprises happen all the time... Be open to them.

Cheers

Chris