CRACKLING

 

Having had the joy of the Pork Belly Bites at the Cricketers in Richmond, the obvious next step was to try making some in the privacy privacy of our own kitchen and in our own frying pan, with the help of my trusty assistant Caroline, who took most of these photographs. 

 

The local butcher supplied the belly:

It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, if in fact it sounds easy at all.  Cooking the pork was no problem in itself because you could lay it on its side, but the crackling didn’t get as crisp as we wanted because it was so hard to keep it upright in the pan.

Also we had it as a main course with asparagus and home-made apple sauce rather than as a starter so it was more a nodding homage than a recreation of the Cricketers ‘small plate.’

 

The apples in the apple sauce were from my pal Colin who has an allotment down Colchester way, and fans of pareidolia will note that one of the apples appeared to have a map of India on it (sort of):

Anyway the end result was good, but we concluded that perhaps those Richmond bites were pre-cooked then deep-fat-fried at the last moment to make the crackling really crisp.  And although I used to have a deep fat fryer, and often think about buying another one, I never quite get round to it.

 

A week later we tried simply to make roast pork, and of course tried to get the crackling right.  This is something that’s been haunting me my whole life, with mixed results, but I have to say this was one of my better efforts. A small triumph but one to be cherished.

 

My mum, who was not a very good cook and didn’t want to be, did have a way with crackling, and the more I think about it, the more I think it had something to do with the cooking fat she used which i was lard. We were ‘reduced’ to using duck fat.

 

 

THE GROOVE IS IN THE PORK

 What better way of celebrating Earth Day and the end of 

Ramadan than with a nice roast pork shoulder?

 

Cooking pork is isn’t all that – it’s the anxiety about crackling that can make a man lose his mind.  

Salt it or not salt it?  I’d say salt it?  

Oil it or don’t oil it?  I’d say oil it but I’m not 100% sure about that.  

Scald the skin with hot water?  Well, I can see some logic in that but all the authorities say how important it is for the skin to be really dry before you roast it so if you’re going to scald it, it has to be done at least a day in advance, and I can never think that far ahead.

 

Here’s some I did earlier, quite a long time earlier - I had a better oven in those days:

 

and here’s one cooked by some fine chefs in Vienna – I can’t even imagine what ovens they have:

In the current case, at the end of the roasting period, the pork looked good but the skin looked at best so-so.  Bits of it looked like acceptable crackling but a lot of it didn’t.

 

And having done a little bit of research earlier I happened to have found a source that said when in doubt detach the skin and stick it in the microwave.  I had never done this before and frankly it sounded like the devil’s work but I felt I had nothing much to lose so in it went and OMG it worked really very well indeed.  Perhaps not the VERY best crackling ever but not at all bad:

On the plate it looked like this - and yes I know those roast potatoes lack poise - another source of anxiety.

DRY JANUARY? YEAH RIGHT.

Some of us like to start the new year as we mean to go on - with a couple of martinis and some hand-crafted pork crackling.  Is all.

CRACKLING ON

If you’re in Sheffield and you buy a bag of pork scratchings from the Béres Pork Shop (established 1961), chances are it will come in the bag they use for their pork sandwiches, which bears the warning ‘contains crackle – only recommended for people with strong, healthy teeth.’  Health and safety gone porcine, innit?

Beres's

However, should you go into the newish indoor Sheffield Market on the Moor and buy a bag of pork scratchings from Waterall Bros Ltd (established 1964) you’ll find it comes in a bag with no such warning, even though - and I’ve done my research on the subject – the Waterall crackling seems a good deal harder on the teeth than the Béres variety, and frankly the latter is tastier.  Looks better too.

Waterall's

And in the interest of research I went to have a breakfast pork sandwich at Lynne’s Café on Surrey Street.

         This came with a fabulous piece of crackling (also stuffing and apple sauce) and was absolutely great – but it also managed to come with no warning whatsoever.  

Two establishments that allow people to take responsibility for their own lives and their own teeth.  How very grown up.

CRACKLING ON

My previous post about Schweinsstelze, and particularly about crackling, seemed to stir something in the collective bosom.

I was directed to an article in the Guardian by Felicity Cloake, from 2010, in which she cooks pork crackling by seven different methods, most of them \recommendations from “name” chefs.  Some involving doing very little, although one of them, which turns out to be her favorite, involves drying out the skin with a hairdryer before cooking.  I can see the logic of that.

You can find the article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/apr/15/how-to-make-perfect-crackling

In the end she makes it sound all too easy: she finds that most of the methods work – the only disaster being Prue Leith’s, which involved rubbing the skin with oil, which I think is an absolute no-no.

On a good day I can generally get my crackling there or there abouts but it’s always a bit hit and miss.  My method remains constant but results, as they say, may vary.  Yes, it’s important to have the skin dry, it’s good to have the oven extra hot at the beginning and at the very end of cooking, it’s important that when you score the meat you don’t cut too deep.  I’m personally against pre-salting but I seem to be a bit of a lone voice in that area.  I do my best, but of course there are still failures, and I sometimes don’t understand why.

With this in mind, at the weekend, back home in Los Angeles, I cooked a small “picnic shoulder” – American butchery and terminology is certainly different from British and I assume wildly different from the way the Austrians do things, but you have to work with what you’ve got.   It had a nice piece of skin on it, it had a biggish bone running through it, and the result was as they say “good in parts,” not so good in others. 

Some of the crackling was good and crisp, some of it was too soft and chewy.  I think it could have used more time in the oven, but the pork itself was already getting overcooked.  Maybe a blow torch to crisp up the skin would have been the answer – a method mentioned not quite seriously in Felicity Cloake’s article.  I’m inclined to think the piece of pork was just too small, and the layer of subcutaneous fat was too thin, but I have no absolute answer.

Those folks at Marks and Spencer have found a partial solution.  When I was in England I made a staggering discovery of their “Snacking Crackling” – that's it above - crunchy skin with no meat whatsoever, sold as an eat-anywhere-any-time snack. There is something wonderful but maybe slightly sinister about that.  How do they get them to stay so crisp? My crackling, even the best of it, is soggy the day after it’s cooked.  Ah the wonder of M and S.

And again, back in the southern California saddle, I just bought myself a bag of Baken-ets Chicharrones – that’s the Mexican term for fried pork skins: Chicharrones, not Baken-ets, obviously.  These were “hot n spicy” (which I don’t absolutely need in a pork skin) and it said on the front of the pack in very small letters “colored with paprika.”  Also, according to the list of ingredients on the back, colored with “Artificial Color (Red 40 Lake, Yellow 6 Lake, Blue 1 Lake” – I guess that’s all right, but I really don’t know.  Also containing monosodium glutamate (which I personally find unobjectionable), and Torula Yeast, which I’d never heard of, but having looked it up online I suspect it’s worth a blog in itself – “a type of yeast that is grown for the food industry by feeding on wood alcohols. It is also a byproduct of the paper industry. The end result after drying is a fine tan powder with a meaty flavor” – that’s according to fooducate.com.  
With a beer – actually an Australian Fosters, the hot n spicy chicharrones tasted just fine; without one they’d have been very hard work.  Hands across the sea, right?

 

HEAVEN AND EARTH AND PLASTER

Well, inevitably, things got better after Woking, and although I wasn’t in England for a culinary tour, I did put on quite a few miles, and found myself eating all over the place: enjoying a very English curry in Sheffield, a game pie from the Chatsworth House farm shop, a pork and stuffing sandwich in the George Hotel in Castleton, Derbyshire, then a meat pie in Hardwick Hall, much improved by the addition of Henderson’s relish.

 There was a roast pork Sunday lunch in the Leather Bottle in Pleshey in Essex – no stuffing but with a piece of crackling.  The crackling could have been cracklier but you at least they tried.  It also came with two kinds of spuds and 4 other vegetables, which might be trying too hard,

But of course when you really want to get fancy, it’s London that calls.  My fancy dining companion Joanna and I went to lunch at Hix Soho, named after Mark Hix who seems to be considered a kind of god in Britain.  He is also apparently “controversial.”  

 In 2009 celebrity chef Keith Floyd ate lunch at the Hix Oyster and Fish House in Lyme Regis, then a few hours later died of a heart attack.  Hix put an item on the menu named “Keith Floyd's Last Lunch.”  (Certain sources have it as Last Supper, but that surely can’t be right).  Some claimed to find this offensive, but I can’t for the life of me see why.  I assume Keith Floyd, or anyone with a sense of humour about eating, would have been royally amused.  For future reference, any restaurant that wants to put my last meal on their menu will have my blessing to do so, and I hope it isn’t just hospital gruel.

Anyway Keith Floyd's Last Lunch wasn’t on the menu at Hix Soho, but there was something called  Heaven and Earth, which turned out to be a globe of black pudding (wrapped in caul to keep its shape, I think) sitting on a bed of mashed potatoes and apple.  Pretty much impossible to resist: and tasting every bit as good as you’d want it to be.

And for main course we had cuttlefish in its own ink.  I was pretty sure I’d had cuttlefish before, but I really couldn’t remember when, and since this came with sea aster, which I had never even heard of, I followed my “eat what you’ve never had before” rule and ordered the beast.  Of course I felt a little bit Husymans-ish, ordering a mostly black meal, but I could live with that.  It looked like this: (actually much better, the light was poor, and the photographer didn’t want to look like a hayseed).

I’ve since discovered that sea aster is sweeping the nation as part of the ongoing foraging kick.  I remember when the same happened with samphire, and sea aster grows in similar places: salt marshes and estuaries.  I heard somebody on the radio describing it as a hip and happening ingredient though since Waitrose now sell it, it may have lost some of its hipness.  Uncooked it looks like this:

Once cooked it was texturally like a strip of cabbage or celery, but since it was drenched in squid ink it was hard to know what it really tasted like.  And actually that squid ink sauce was the killer element of the meal.  It was good with the cuttlefish, but it was absolutely GREAT with chips.

Any disappointments?  Only that some of the best-looking food wasn’t available for eating.   In a gazebo at Hardwick Hall, there was a fine array of vegetables grown in the garden, good looking spuds and leeks, and the longest parsnips I had ever seen, even if I’m not absolutely sure that a thin, two and a half foot parsnip is really what we’re looking for, but I'd have been keen to sample.  In any case they were only for display.

And in the Turret House of Manor Lodge in Sheffield there was a display of a medieval feast featuring a boar’s head and a mouthwatering venison pie, but they were made of plaster: nobody’s idea of a great last meal.