December 10, 2013

Maialino da latte profumato al fiore di finocchio selvatico

“Sottovuoto” or “Sous Vide” is the process of cooking food at low temperatures under vacuum. It has been slowly taking over the restaurant world since the 1990s. Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck in England is one of the early proponents. Because of his success and his restaurant being name one of the best restaurants in the world, sous vide cooking continues to grow as more recipes are developed for different ingredients. Personally I’ve never been excited about a piece of meat that looked almost raw, tasted almost raw, and cost more than it should just because it was cooked for 12 hours. If I had my choice…I would take my steak rare and save the restaurant the effort. Until this week.

This was the first time I’ve ever cooked this way and the process is straightforward. Basically you cook food at the final temperature you want it to be finished at. To do this correctly you need to envelope the food with a constant temperature, in this case water or steam. Because it is at a low temperature you need to make sure there is no air around the food as the temperature is low enough to allow bacteria to grow, so you put it in a plastic bag and seal it with a vacuum machine. For our piglet we sectioned it, added some good extra virgin olive oil and a small amount of rosemary to two bags and vacuum sealed them. The recipe called for fennel flowers, but those were not in season. We then double bagged them to make sure they didn’t open when cooking. They then went into the steam oven for 7 hours at 70 degrees centigrade. The next morning…perfectly cooked pork. To finish the dish we pulled the sections out and slowly fried them skin side down to crisp up and caramelize the skin into cracklings. It was out of this world.

The result of probably 60 minutes of effort was 15 portions of meat done perfectly that had almost no waste. The meat retained most of it’s moisture so you could serve all of it. I will definitely try this at home, once I figure out how to do this in a water bath or in a bain marie.

Always try to work in Italian