Prime Cuts

Medisterpølse, or Danish sausage, a staple of my immigrant grandparents. It’s hard to come by and most butchers won’t make it for you because there’s not enough demand for it. Many can order it from German sausage makers, it’s close but never right in my opinion. One of the few places to get it is in Solvang, CA. Solvang was to my grandparents what Chinatown is to many immigrants, an over commercialized version of a time better remembered than actually lived. In Solvang, Danish sausage is easy to come by but so many differ in taste.

Growing up my grandparents would take us to Solvang in an attempt to get in touch with our Danish heritage. We ate well, to say the least, my grandparents would go on and on explaining what Denmark was like and how they missed it. They would always buy at least 10 pounds to go back home with. We would have a traditional meal, or at least traditional to us, that would consist of Danish sausage, red cabbage, boiled red potatoes and brown gravy. All of it simple in it’s preparation and execution but like most great meals, sometimes simple is best. It was this meal that brought so many good times and tales of a land I have yet to visit. The stories were always mesmerizing keeping us at the table for what seemed like all night.

Sadly, my grandparents have long past and we continue to head to Solvang to find the good sausage. After this last Christmas my brother and I set out to make our own and to make it as close as possible to the way my grandparents were familiar with it. We scoured cookbooks, old and new, even a 1942 cookbook written Danish requiring us to translate word for word. We finally found a recipe that we felt comfortable with and began our journey.

If you’ve never stuffed sausage before it’s an experience you’ll never forget but it is well worth the struggle. After grinding the meat three times progressively grinding finer, we chilled, then added spices and chilled again. Then we stuffed, it came out perfect, I still need to master twisting sausage into equal lengths though. We let them rest for a short period, then boiled them setting some aside to eat and froze the rest.

We began the meal humbly and as usual, cutting potatoes, starting the cabbage hours before, constantly checking for the perfect balance of bitterness and sweetness. When time was right we heated and browned the sausages. We deglazed the pan and made our gravy. The meal was perfect, the sausage simple yet great.

It took me back to a time when my grandparents were still with us and would talk for hours. This time gathered around the table we reminisced the good times with our grandparents explaining to our spouses who our grandparents were why we loved them so much. I believe it is this singular meal that constantly reminds me of family and heritage of which I still have much to learn from. I know all of this might sound silly and most obviously exemplary of my passion for food but what is great food if not shared with the people we love?

Below is the recipe we used, enjoy!

Ingredients:

• 5lb. lean pork shoulder, ground 3 times and chilled
• 1 large onion, grated
• 1 Tbsp. salt
• 1 tsp. pepper
• 1/2 tsp. allspice
• 1/2 tsp. cloves
• 1 cup stock (chicken broth)

Preparation

Add seasonings to the meat, mix well. Add the stock. Press into casings (about 5ft. of hog casing) and tie at regular intervals to make links (I had trouble with this, you would think it’s super easy). Here’s where we made our change, instead of instantly frying or baking we boiled until cooked. Then we fried the sausage to give it nice markings and to crisp the casing. Finally, eat and enjoy!

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First Joe shared with you his love for steak on the bone and now he describes the first pork chop he ever fell in love with…

In my blog posting I have a few different styles I follow.  I write many recipes or informative/instructional pieces.  Sometimes I simply provide the steps to a photo series “how to”.  Sometimes it is a response to a question and sometimes I just flow randomly about a subject of random nature.   The latter is my favorite type of writing.  I often feel myself doing this in the preface of an informative piece as well… it is my natural style.

Justin and I are very proud of all the content posted on our blog but I do have a few favorites: the piece written about ice fishing is right up there, but my absolute favorite was the blog about steak on the bone.  It was just my passion on a subject flowing out freely.  When we started Prime Cuts I was nervous and unsure that I would have the motivation and the skill to write a significant amount of content.  But pieces like my two before mentioned favorites have rekindled a love of writing that I left back in high school.  I guess between high school and now I just didn’t have subject matter that was sufficiently interesting to me, but with food and all its tangent topics I can ramble on forever…which is a good thing for all Prime Cuts fans.

Today’s subject is a just the tip of the iceberg but I want to talk about a very special food, PORK!  There are a few sayings in the culinary world that sum it up nicely: “bacon makes everything better”, “when in doubt just add pork”, and recently on a random Facebook quiz I was told that my last words will be “pass the pork chops please”.  Honestly, that’s ok with me.

Clearly my allegiance lies with beef, it is what I base our restaurant menu on and I feel it is what I am the best at fabricating/preparing.  Pork however is just, well… special.  Think about it, the different cuts of pork are all so truly unique in flavor and texture, especially.  Bacon, center-cut pork chops, tenderloin, slowly braised pork shoulder, fatback, ham, prosciutto, and even lard. They are all so different and all have their respective places in cuisine.

As a center of the plate item, side dish, cold cut, flavor enhancing ingredient , or even to add structure and strength to a dough, pork is important.  Personally, I could eat some type of pork every day and never get sick of it.  Many people would think that this would get quickly redundant, because it’s all so fatty.  While it is true that a lot of pork can be fatty (which is why they are so highly praised) there are quite a few lean cuts as well.  I ate a center-cut, white meat pork chop for dinner the other day that I slowly stewed in tomato sauce.  This is a dish that my mother used to make, and fatty was the last thing I thought about it.  Also a dish I used to prepare at a previous restaurant was Hunters Style Pork – a small pork tenderloin that was seared then braised slowly until tender and served with caramelized onion and green apples.  The natural richness of the pork, balanced with the sweetness of the onions and the tartness of the green apples is a perfect combination.  Baby pork tenderloin is just what it sounds like when prepared properly…tender.  You don’t need a knife to cut it and simply put…you can eat a lot of it.  You want to eat a lot of it, trust me.

I feel that every culture has its pork recipe or even a simple cooking method that produces one of the signature dishes of its people.  Spanish roasted pork shoulder seasoned liberally with sofrito is one of my favorite meals ever, hands down. German wiener schnitzel with a tender pounded pork loin is like butter.  Hawaian style whole pig roasts, where a giant hog is wrapped in banana leaves and roasted slowly in covered with red hot coals and hot stones…this is simply amazing.  It is the true essence of pork – the only few ingredients are a pig, some form of heat, time, and love.  That’s really all that is needed. All these dishes are favorites of mine, and are world classics for a reason.  They have taken all the flavors of a region and combined them with the most diverse culinary animal, to produce true food of love.  (This doesn’t even touch on the vast amounts of different sausages that would not be possible to prepare without pork, but that’s another post entirely).

To conclude I just want to talk about the first pork chop I ever fell in love with.  It is something that has generated much interest within our restaurant staff lately because to many it seems like an unorthodox way of cooking pork.  Pork chops stewed in tomato sauce…  mmm!  The way my mom makes our Real tomato sauce is a daylong/multiple day process.  Its one of those things that the longer it cooks the better it gets, and I even think of it like a stock where the tomatoes are the equivalent of the water in a stock and all the meats that you put into the sauce are what flavors the water/ tomatoes.

To start you get a huge pot of tomatoes going on the heat, then throw in a pack of pork chops, a pack of veal chops and you then simmer this combination all day.  When the meat is falling off the bone tender and almost flakes apart you are ready to remove them from the sauce.  Yes, that’s right, take em out.  What you are left with is a sauce that is intensely flavored with these meats (the sauce is then finished by adding meatballs and Italian sausage and simmering for another half day).  But it is the dinner before the sauce that I speak of, tomato sauce braised chops, fork tender, served simply with white rice and a bit of sauce to coat the rice.  It is heaven.  For the record, that’s the first pork chop I ever fell in love with.

Hungry yet?

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Photo by: kelving525