Lamb Martini

Last weekend, I was back in Virginia visiting my parents. We went to the Yorktown Farmers Market on the river in Yorktown, Viriginia. I quickly saw what I wanted:

“Smoked Dandoodle” — what’s that? I’m familiar with the array of country dishes, from panhaus to cracklins, but I’d never heard of dandoodle. More suprising, neither had my country-raised mom. I was intrigued.

I went up the the vendor, and his eyes lit up as he responded “I’m glad you asked.” From one of his coolers, he pulled out this:

Yep, that’s a hog large intestine, also know as chitlin or, more formally, chitterling. It’s stuffed with pork sausage and then smoked in the same smokehouse that the Slades have been using for decades.

Doing some research on the internet, I could only find references to it in Smithfield county and the surrounding area in Virginia and North Carolina. Slade Farm is close by in Surry.

I found two variations, both being a stuffed and smoked large intestine. The first variation was what I found, the stuffing being pork. The other variation was with a stuffing consisting of a 1:4 mixture of pork fat and small intestine, seasoned with salt and red pepper.

As for the cooking method, I just sliced it in 1/4″ slices and pan fried it. It has a fine texture, like that of a cured salumi rather than a course ground fresh sausage. The smoking gives a very nice flavor, without being stale or overpowering. It was great on biscuits.

The most common usage I found was to cook it with greens and cornbread dumplings with greens. I think it would also work well as the meat for a simple kale and pasta dish.

It is no coincidence that in the Biblical story of Creation, it is a rib that God takes from Adam to create a most precious companion. Second only to the defining quality of vertebrates, there is no more precious part than the ribs. Not only do they protect the vital organs from injury, but, when cooked, they are the only cut of meat on which you are allowed to gnaw in polite company. There is something primal and familiar about tearing the succulent meat, fat, and melted connective tissue directly from the bone. Napkins? We don’t need no stinkin’ napkins. Our mouths rip the sauce off our fingers with abandon, quite careful not to break the skin.

To straighten a few things out first: I say Chinese-ish because I hate when American dishes get some prepended with some nationality just because of an ingredient. Little fried noodle things don’t make chicken salad any more Chinese than using chopsticks makes me so. (Do Chinese people even eat those things? I’ll have to ask my co-workers.)

And, I say barbecue-ish because it’s not proper barbecue. Depending on where you are, barbecue means many different things. To me (being from Virginia), “barbecue” is pulled pork in sauce, typically topped with coleslaw and served on a hamburger bun. To Aussies, barbecued is what Americans would call grilled, meaning a fast cooking method involving direct heat, typically outdoors with charcoal. In the Texas area, barbecue most often involves pork ribs cooked outdoors over indirect heat for several hours. This low-and-slow cooking is the common theme in American barbecue, regardless of the specifics.

So this is is more like Asian Flavor Inspired Oven Braised Pork Spare Ribs, but as Matt tells us, AFIOBPSR just doesn’t work.

So Chinese Barbecue Ribs it is.

The most recent (March/April 2007) Cook’s Illustrated has a recipe for Chinese Barbecue pork, with pork butt being the target. Even the black and white photo looked good enough to eat, with the beautiful glaze. So I decide to try the sauce with ribs instead of roast.

The recipe calls for sugar, soy sauce, dry sherry, hoisin sauce, white pepper, five-spice powder, toasted sesame oil, fresh ginger, garlic, ketchup, and honey. I used brown sugar for the sugar, mirin for the dry sherry, and freshly-toasted sesame seeds for the toasted sesame oil.

I marinated for 30 minutes (the sauce is really thick, so I don’t think this did much. I may brine for 24 hours next time instead), then put to slab on on a roasting rack in a pan, middle of the oven. You have to make sure to keep liquid in the bottom of the pan so the sauce doesn’t burn.

I cooked it for 3 hours at 300-325 (my oven is junk, so there’s no telling how high or low the temperature actually went). I flipped and basted every 30 minutes until it was melty tender. I took it out and let it sit covered for 10 minutes.

They were awesome. Probably not something I’d want to spend every Saturday doing, but well worth the effort. I great blend of flavors, none to strong, well-balance, tasty. Next time I might try to add a bit of orange zest.

I made a small baby spinach salad, with oranges and pine nuts, dressed with a splash of Blossom Vinegars ginger pear vinegar (from my local farmer’s market). I got out forks to use. It’s really hard to grip a metal fork when you hands are covered in barbecue sauce, so I ended up just eating the salad by hand. I highly recommend this method.

The beer was a homebrew I made last spring I call Saison d’Oregon. Basically a Saison-style beer brewed with Belgian ale yeast and Northwest hops (Cascade or Willamette, I believe). This was the last bottle and a bit past it’s prime, tasting more like a flavorful lager (if that’s not an oxymoron), which actually paired well with the strongly-flavored ribs.

And a bonus story: That morning, I had gone to Le Pigeon, Gabriel Rucker’s fantastic kitchen-aurant. Kitchen-aurant is the new term I’m coining for small restaurants where the kitchen is right out in the seating area. Le Pigeon is small and comfortable, like my beloved Lili Patisserie. You want to order the entire menu and just gorge yourself all day. I had half a whole grain walnut waffle, two eggs sunny-side up, and a piece of maple-braised pork belly. The eggs were very high quality, the only better ones I’ve had were from my own hens. But the pork belly– seriously one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. Porky, mapley, Mailliary, tender. Cooked for four hours– four hours. Beautiful. Definitely a nice starter for the ribs that evening, but but I wouldn’t recommend having these two meal and Voodoo Doughnuts in the evening.

As a kid, one of the more obscure foods I was exposed to was panhaus. My paternal grandfather was a farmer, so there was always fresh meat that he had either raised himself or had been given by neighbors. Panhaus was one the treats the we go occasionally. As long as you don’t mind the fact that you’re not really sure which parts of the pig it’s made out of, it’s incredibly tasty.

In short, panhaus (also, panhas or ponhaus) is cornmeal, pork broth, light spices, and maybe meat and buckwheat flour. Basically, polenta made with pork stock instead of chicken stock, water, or milk. This is the amazing thing to me: all of these seemingly different cultures, whether it be Italian, Mexican, German, or Appalachian, all have this same basic dish. Cool.

Panhaus, and it’s sister scrapple, is a traditional country German dish, originating in Westphalia and the Rhineland. The Dutch (in the Netherlands) have a similar dish named Balkenbrij. There’s an interesting German Wikipedia page on panhas (translated) which I’m going to work on translating. German panhaus is described as a traditional dish of part of the Schlachtfest (Slaughter Festival) which “combined a traditional harvest festival with an opportunity to dine on the meat that wasn’t suitable for long-term processing and storage” (link).

As with all traditional dishes, there’s tremendous variation among recipes. I’ve seen many different recipes for panhaus and scrapple, and there’s a lot of overlap and no clear distinction. The panhaus I remember is was a small, gray loaf with a smooth texture. This page states that the basic difference is that panhaus doesn’t contain actual meat, while scrapple does. There’s also a lot of variation on the parts of the pig that go in; some use head only, some head minus fatty jowls, snout, and ears, some use all of the random scraps. None call for pork offal, which my dad remembers being used instead for “puddin’”.

if it tastes like fish, can you eat it on friday?

Foxfire 1 gives Mrs. Mann Norton’s recipe for scrapple as (1) take a hog head sans eyes and ears, (2) boil until the connective tissue dissolves, (3) pick the meat and strain the liquid to remove any bones, (4) mix with cornmeal, sage, and pepper, (5) gel into a loaf, and (6) slice and pan fry. Yummy, seriously. This recipe is what I decided to start with.

the other white meat

Since most people don’t like to cook things that still have their face, it’s pretty hard to find a whole hog’s head. And I don’t have a pot large enough. And I want to stay married. So, I settled for boring pork sausage (pork, pork fat, salt, pepper, sage, thyme) from Otto’s Sausage Kitchen in Portland. While the panhaus I know (and love) shouldn’t have any meat in it, I decided to put it in, since there’s not much you can do with it anyway after making the stock (or what my ancestors would call the “likker”).

bubble, bubble, toil and trouble

I boiled a pound of sausage in about a quart of water for about 20 minutes. This cooked the meat (obviously) and produced a good likker. I used a potato masher to breakup the meat. I then added two large leaves of sage and some pepper. I started adding the cornmeal, whisking it in to prevent clumping. I then added 2 packets of Knox unflavored gelatin, prepared as per the directions in a bit of cold water, to make it set better, since there would be no delectable dissolved connective tissue from the bones.

these are a few of my favorite things

I added the yellow cornmeal until it was pretty thick. I let the cornmeal cook for a few minutes, then put the mixture in a loaf pan and let it sit to cool.

meat (corn) loaf

When it was cool and had gelled nicely, I sliced a couple of pieces off and pan fried them in butter for a few minutes.

fry it up, baby

Seriously delicious.

I found out later that white cornmeal is more traditional in my family. A brief summary of dry corn products now. Take the dry corn kernels, coarsely grind them, and the smaller pieces are corn grits and the larger pieces are yellow cornmeal. Take the dry kernels, soak them in a mild lye solution to remove the yellow husk, and you have hominy. Take this, dry it, and grind it, and you get the smaller pieces as hominy grits (or “true” grits) and the larger pieces as white cornmeal. Next time, white cornmeal, and only meat liquor. I’ll have to try to find pork bones or scraps somewhere.

in process of being eaten

The Monday after I made my loaf, I pan-fried a few more slices and a sort of polenta-like thing with a tomato sauce, truffle oil, parm-regg cheese, on a bed a baby spinach. Wait, what was that sound? Oh, right, every ancestor I’ve ever had rolling over at the mention of panhaus and truffle oil.

so much goodness on one dish

Commercial Producers:

• Butcher’s Best Ponhaus - with a blurry but large photo of it
• Habbersett Scrapple
• Rapa Scrapple
• Arnold’s Sausage scrapple
• Stoltzfus Meats scrapple

And of course, the Fall events schedule wouldn’t be complete without odd festivals combining two completely different foods: The Apple-Scrapple Festival with their Scrapple Chunkin’ Contest.