Brined Pork Chops

When I was in high school I read the dining section of the New York Times every Wednesday and was always up to date on what was fashionable among the gourmet crowd. This was odd knowledge to have, because my cooking repertoire was limited to scrambled eggs and a pasta sauce made of parsley and garlic. Back then, the new craze was brining, and every week there was an article about the virtues of meat soaked in salt water. Eventually there was even a brining backlash, as people complained about the texture it gave the meat. I never persuaded my parents to brine anything, so I had to remain neutral in the great debate, until now. And so, my verdict: brining pork chops makes them tender and tasty. I got my basic brining technique from Bruce Aidell's Complete Book of Pork. He suggests many different brines, but the only essential thing is the proportion of salt and water and the temperature, which controls the rate the salt is absorbed. That's why he tells you to add ice cubes to the brine to bring it down to refrigerator temperature. This recipe is for two people and only takes fifteen minutes besides the brining.

• 1 3/4 cups water
• 2 tbs. kosher salt, or slightly less normal salt
• 2 tbs. brown sugar
• 1 tsp. cinnamon, or a cinnamon stick
• 5 cloves
• 1/2 cup ice cubes
• 2 pork chops
• pepper
• minced fresh rosemary or crumbled dried rosemary
• 1 tbs. olive oil or lard

Mix the water, salt, and sugar in some sort of container that will fit two pork chops. (I used a pie plate. Other options are a big bowl or a zip-loc bag.) Stir until the salt and sugar have dissolved and add the ice cubes, cloves, and cinnamon. Put the pork chops into the container. They should be submerged, or at least nearly so. Put this in the refrigerator for 2-6 hours, depending on the thickness of the chops. Bruce Aidell recommends that you brine 1/2 to 3/4 inch chops for 2 hours, 3/4 to 1 inch chops for 3 hours, and 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 inch chops for 4-6 hours. I would brine conservatively, since my pork chops are often teetering on the edge of oversaltiness.

Take the pork chops out of the brine and pat them dry. Rub them with pepper and rosemary (but no salt!). Heat the oil in a pan over medium-high heat until the oil has just started to smoke. Cook the chops for two or three minutes a side; they should be lightly browned at this point. If the chops are thin--3/4 of an inch or less--then they're probably done. If they're thicker, turn the heat down to medium and cover the pan. Even very thick chops will probably be done in another three or four minutes. They should be 140-145 degrees and should be pink in the middle. Serve with applesauce.

Beer-Braised Brussel Sprouts

No, I can't resist alliterating. I got the idea for this from carbonnade, the Belgian beef stew made with beer. I don't have Mastering the Art of French Cooking with me, but I remember Julia Child saying that the beer gave it character, and the brown sugar smoothed out the beer. Confirming my suspicion that ingredients starting the same letter are interchangable, I replaced the beef with brussels sprouts with delicious results. This takes 20-30 minutes to make, depending on how much work your sprouts take to prepare, and it serves two.

• 1/2 pound brussels sprouts
• 3 tbs. dark beer
• 1 tsp. brown sugar
• 1 tbs. olive oil
• salt, pepper

If the sprouts need it, trim off their outer leaves and cut off their stems. Cut them in half if they're big and you have the energy for it. Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large skillet that can be covered. Add the well-salted sprouts and stir occasionally (about every thirty seconds). Grind some pepper on them. Regulate the heat to make sure they brown nicely. When they're browned all over, add the beer and brown sugar. Give it a stir, lower the heat, and cover. Cook until the sprouts have lost their crunch but are still firm, which was about seven minutes for me, though my brussels sprouts were smaller than usual.

The stew that inspired this recipe has onions in it. Maybe they would be a good addition. I'm also interested in varying the fat. Butter is the obvious choice, but I bet it would be good with goose fat or lard too.

Trashy Coleslaw

This dish is a disturbing shade of pink. I call it trashy because it resembles some disturbing concoction of marshmellows and food-coloring. Despite its unusual vegetables, it's really just coleslaw. Cabbage and other traditional slaw vegetables would fit in as well, I think.

• 1 carrot
• 1 beet
• 1 green kohlrabi
• 1 celery root
• the juice of a half lemon
• salt, pepper, sugar, mayonnaise

Peel and grate all the vegetables. Put them in a bowl with all the other ingredients and refrigerate for an hour or two.

So, how much salt, sugar, and mayonnaise? You need a lot of salt, but I didn't measure. Maybe a half teaspoon? I used one or two tablespoons of sugar. I assume you'd want less if your beets are very sweet, which mine never are. And for the mayonnaise, just keep adding it till it looks like coleslaw, which takes a while.

Cuts of Pork in Hungarian

This won't be the most interesting post, but I hope that like this list of fishes in Hungarian and English, it will be useful.

• hosszú karaj
  blade-end loin (the part of the loin closest to the shoulder).
• rövid karaj
  rib-end loin (the back end of the loin).
• szűzpecsenye
  tenderloin
• tarja
  Boston butt (the top of the shoulder)
• lapocka
  picnic shoulder (the top of the front leg)
• oldalás
  ribs
• comb
  fresh ham (the back leg)
• csülök
  hocks (the bottom of the legs)
• tokaszalonna
  pork belly from the front of the pig
• dagadó
  pork belly from the rear of the pig
• farok
  tail

Lentils with Sausage

I was waiting on line at the butcher when the woman in front of me asked about the different kinds of sausage hanging in the back. She left with with a few kilos of garlic sausage. (It's rare that I see someone walk out of the butcher with fewer than two kilos of meat.) I decided to copy her and took home a link myself.

The sausage was dry but much softer than the typical cured sausage. I ate some on bread. It was dully bland; its fat took over my mouth, but without any strong flavor but a bit of smokiness. Giovanna commented that it wasn't her favorite sausage, and I wondered if it would be better cooked. We put this experiment into action. The cooked sausage made a crunchy, intense morsel. The sausage was so much better, and the difference in flavor so reminiscent of the difference between raw and cooked meat, that now I'm not sure if that sausage was intended to be eaten raw.

I adapted this from a Mark Bittman recipe by replacing its bacon with this sausage and decreasing the proportion of lentils. (Sorry to be so Mark-dependent. When I come back home, I promise to broaden my horizons a bit.) I'm not sure what to replace the sausage with if you're outside of Hungary. It should be the softest, fattiest cured sausage you can find. This makes enough for about three people, or two people with lots of leftovers. It takes 45 minutes to an hour, not counting lentil soaking time.

• 1 cup lentils
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 12 dkg fokhagymás páraszti kolbász or other sausage
• 1 large onion, or 2 smaller ones
• 1 carrot
• 1 parsnip
• 2 cloves garlic
• less than 1 tbs. olive oil
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/2 tsp. vinegar
• salt and pepper

Put the lentils, stock, the bay leaf, and some salt in a small pot and bring to a boil. Simmer for two minutes and turn it off. Let the lentils soak, and refrigerate if necessary. Or skip this step.

Chop the onion, carrot, and parsnip. Cut the sausage into 1/2 inch chunks; they should be really small since the sausage is so powerful. In a medium pot, put the oil over medium heat and fry the sausage pieces, shaking them around only after they've crisped on one side. Put the sausage aside, turn the heat down slightly, and fry the vegetables in the fat that remains in the pan. Add some salt to them. After five minutes, add the lentils and stock, cover, bring to a boil, and turn the heat down to maintain a simmer. The lentils should be done in about thirty minutes, though I'm not very good at estimating lentil-cooking times. Add some more stock or water if necessary. When the lentils are soft, add the lemon juice or the vinegar. Mark Bittman suggested red wine vinegar. I didn't have any, so I used white wine vinegar and unthinkingly added about a tablespoon of it, which wasn't good but didn't ruin the dish. I figure lemon juice would be good too.

Refreshing Chicken Stew

This stew is simple enough that it doesn't really need a recipe, but there's nothing wrong with that, is there? It's bright and refreshing stew, the opposite of the delicious but sour cream laden stew I enjoyed the other day at Kulacs, which is Gyöngyös's answer to Kádár. (I have no idea what benefit they get out of their website.) This recipe is for two servings and takes about an hour and a half, most of which is just the chicken cooking.

• 4 chicken drumsticks
• a foot-long piece of leek
• 1-2 carrots
• 1-2 parsnips
• 2 tbs olive oil
• 1/2 cup white wine
• salt and pepper

Heat up half the oil in a pot over medium-high heat. Season the chicken with salt and pepper. When the oil is hot, add the chicken and brown it, and then put it aside.

Cut the leek in half the long way, and then cut these halves into 1/2 inch slices. Add the rest of the oil to the pot, set the heat to medium-low, and add the leeks, plus some salt. While they cook, stir them occasionally and chop the carrots and parsnips into 1/2 inch cubes, adding them to the pot as you cut them. Put the chicken back in the pot. Add the wine, turn the heat up, and cover. When it comes to a boil, turn the heat down and put the cover partially off and maintain a simmer. (In his article about heat, Harold McGee says never to cover your pots completely when you stew meat!) Cook till the the chicken is done, adding more wine if you need to. An instant-read thermometer should say 165 when the chicken is ready. Season with pepper, and more salt if necessary.

I served this with barley, and maybe I'll say more about that eventually. I used drumsticks because they looked the nicest at the butcher. I'm sure thighs would be fine.

Chicken with Corn and Lemon

My new place of residence is Gyöngyös, Hungary, about an hour away from Budapest. I'm the only native speaker out of eight English teachers at Berze Nagy János Gimnázium. I teach 24 classes a week, including one group of ninth graders who I see everyday. They have two students who don't know any English, plus a few who have already taken it for five years. The teaching has been okay so far--more details to come in later posts.

Gyöngyös completely lives up to my hopes for its culinary resources. Four days a week, farmers come in and sell their fruit, vegetables, eggs, milk, and mushrooms at prices that are cheap even for Hungary. Butchershops are plentiful, and a lot of them sell what my dictionary claims is mutton. This is unusual in Hungary, where sheep are usually used here for cheese and wool and not eaten. There are also several butchers who only sell poultry (chicken, turkey, duck, and goose). Parmesan cheese is tough to come by, and the selection of olive oil is limited, but at least I can have goose fat again.

Chicken with Corn and Lemon

• A chicken breast (i.e., two fillets)
• Kernels from one leftover ear of corn
• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1/2 tbs. or so of butter
• olive oil, salt, pepper

Heat olive oil on medium-high in a large skillet. Dry the chicken breasts and put salt and pepper on them. When the oil is hot, add the chicken to the pan and cook it till it's just done (10 minutes or so), turning the heat down if necessary. When the chicken is done, move it aside. Turn the heat down to medium-low and let the pan cool. Add the butter, corn, and a bit of salt and cook, stirring, until the corn darkens. Pour a tiny bit of water--one or two tablespoons--into the pan, turn the heat up, and stir to deglaze the pan. When most of this water has evaporated, turn off the heat, add the lemon juice and some more pepper. You can also add the chicken back into the pan if it's cooled off too much. Serve the chicken with the corn sauce.

This was really good. More butter would probably improve it. I also think it would work fine with raw corn kernels.