12 hour cooked Pork Belly and Apple Terrine with a Thyme Sorbet, a Brunoise Salad of toasted pine nuts, celery, alf alfa and apple with a Jack Daniel's jus.
Thyme sorbets with pork seem to be a pairing I cant get away from. I absolutely loved it ever since I tried it at Lola Rojo a year ago in their wonderful tapas menu. Once you get past the traditionalists assumption that sorbets with hot courses are just some trendy fad you might begin to realise that the way the sorbet cleanses your pallet and the way the cold and hot foods can be eaten together whilst being separately enjoyed in the same mouthful like some crazy flavour tango, makes a great deal of cooking common sense. Hot and cold, like sweet and sour and crunchy and soft are all but ways of making food interesting and more enjoyable. Which is the point right ? Enjoyment. Fun maybe too if we permit ourselves to give in to such frivolities.
The crisp clean flavour of the sorbet dies with the heat of your mouth, and leaves you with the sweet apple terrine which is made simply by frying apple segments in butter and a little sugar until nicely caramelized then pouring in some juiced apple. The liquor is then separated and gelatin is added then poured over the apple segments once neatly placed in a terrine mould. If you want the recipe I based it roughly on a dessert element from this book which I highly recommend getting anyway.
With the sweet apple the combination of the soft pork belly and the crunchy salad are an ideal accompaniment. The pork was vacuum cooked at 82oC for 12 hours then pressed.
The salad is basically brunoised celery, apple and chopped roasted pine nuts mixed with some alf alfa, creme fraiche and a little lime zest. It's a nice little balanced salad in itself and the acidity from the lime serves as a nice compliment to the whole dish.
Then we come to the jus. Pork chops fried in a pan without moving them until fully colored on both sides. Some water added to deglaze and reduced, some mirepoix to deglaze and colour, some Jack Daniels to deglazed and reduced and then some chicken stock along with some star anise. The more meaty bits you get in at the start the more the jus works to hold the whole dish together. Its the Maillard reaction flavour compounds that you are using here from the initial frying to boost the meat flavours of the over all dish. The bourbon gives it that texan BBQ feel, and is really just a fun ingredient to use. The star anise then acts like a turbo boost to the meatiness of the dish.
And that's pretty much it. I still have to work on the cooking of the pork belly. I tried to crisp up the skin and render some fat by cooking it in a pan from cold then hard grilling it. It worked to an extent but I think I should return to cooking the skin separatly and just leaving the fat.
