Pork

I got a 7-lb Boston butt from the Virginia farm that raises forest-fed pigs ("Babes in the Woods"). I'd been wanting to try pulled pork in the Big Green Egg since I got it, but the 10+ hours of cooking it was a daunting prospect. So Labor Day became the big day to try it.

As always, I used my barbecue bible, the Jamisons' book, using their rub of paprika, pepper and other ingredients and their mop of vinegar, leftover rub and more pepper. I applied the rub the night before and another coating in the morning when I took the butt out of the fridge. I lit the fire at 7 and got the pork in at 8 at about 220 degrees. I mopped it every 45 to 60 minutes and in the afternoon inserted my newly acquired digital thermometer probe into the meat. It was at about 120 degrees and needed to go to 180 according to Jamisons. Other recipes had put the internal temperature at 160 to 180, so I was willing to accept the lower end of the range. The new probe, for what it's worth, registered the "oven" temperature about 20 degrees lower than the Egg's own thermometer. I pulled it out at 6:30 at 160 degrees and wrapped it in foil for half an hour.

The pork was delicious and was a big hit with the family members who came over for the holiday, but it was different than I anticipated. I thought I would have a tender, fibrous, gray pork that would shred at a touch to turn into those piles of pulled pork we had on our road trip last summer. I had prepared the vinegar sauce to go on this pulled pork. What became evident as I sliced through the crust to the pink meat underneath was, as Henry said, "I don't think this is the shredding kind of pork." It was in fact, as Henry also observed, much more like ham, though with more of a smokey, porky flavor than you usually get with ham. It was very tender and pretty moist, but firm and I carved thin slices for the platter. The vinegar sauce was still delicious on it.

Clearly there's some things I don't understand about barbecuing. Was this more of a picnic cut, so that I got smoked pork shoulder, rather than a real butt with the marbling that would yield the shreddy texture I anticipated? Are these forest-fed pigs, which have great flavor, simply too muscular to get that kind of marbling? (There was plenty of fat, but as a slab along one side of the cut.) Is the Egg simply not going to yield the kind of result that a real smoker would?

Don't get me wrong -- it was a great meal and a very successful recipe. But I would like to have a better idea of what I'm doing. Everybody brought great sides and Andrea did her delicious corn sticks. I also grilled some wings (about three dozen) and sopped them in a "Basque" sauce from Thrill of the Grill (this was very good and will prompt me to try more recipes from there) and in Frank's Louisiana sauce, said to be the sauce of the original Buffalo wings.

Petit salé aux lentilles

This class bistro dish was one of my favorites when I lived in France and great winter comfort food. I've been wanting to do more recipes from my Anne Willan books and this seemed very apt in the cold weather between the years.

It's very simple. You put a 2 lb pork shoulder (mine was a little bigger), tied in a cylinder, in a brine made of 2 qu. water, 2 sprigs thyme, 1 bay leaf, 2 sliced garlic cloves, 2 tsp. juniper berries, 1 tsp. peppercorns (oops, forgot these), 2 whole cloves, 1-3/4 c. coarse salt, 3 Tbl. sugar and an optional 2 Tbl. curing salt gently heated and stirred until salt and sugar dissolve then completely cooled. Cover and refrigerate, the recipe says, anywhere from 12 hrs. to a week (I saw too late that the headnote recommends at least two days and cooked mine after 24 hrs.)

To cook, you rinse off the brine and cover pork with water in a pot. Bring to a simmer and cook for 5 min. then pour off water and refill. (If the pork has been in the brine longer than 3 days, soak for 1 hr. in cold water prior to this step.) Bring to a boil and simmer for 1-1/2 hrs. Then stir in 10 oz. French lentils (closer to 12 oz. in my dish), a whole peeled onion with two cloves stuck in it, a crushed clove of garlic and a bouquet garni (parsley, thyme, bay leaf tied together) and cook for another 1/2 hr. Remove pork and cover, drain excess liquid from lentils, take out onion, remove cloves, chop and return to lentils, and remove bouquet garni. Slice pork and serve on bed of lentils. The pork is juicy and tender from the brine, and salty without tasting too salty. Lentils are always great.

I've been loyal to Anne Willan since I attended a cooking course at her Ecole de La Varenne in Paris (before it de-camped for the countryside) and have several of her cookbooks. This recipe was in The Country Cooking of France. Her books tend to be big, heavy coffee table books with lots of text and photos. I don't have the impression that the recipes are quite as meticulously tested for the home cook as you would expect from someone who operated a cooking school. Nothing that can't be overcome if you do a little thinking yourself, which I tend to do after the fact. So I probably should have used a smaller pot, since there was a lot of excess liquid which may have kept the flavor from concentrating. I should have read the headnote about keeping it in the brine for two days, but why should the recipe say something different? The result was nonetheless delicious, but I will put on my thinking cap the next time I use one of her recipes.

Clay pot cooking

I've been fascinated by clay pot cooking since I got my first Roemertopf in Germany many years ago. I still have a Roemertopf (my second), though I haven't used it much in recent years. A year ago or so, La Tienda lured me into buying a 12-inch Spanish cazuela, a round, relatively shallow earthenware casserole. A few months ago, I got a Pirmal beanpot at La Cuisine in Alexandria.

So I was happy to see Paula Wolfert's new book, "Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking." I think she is a great cookbook writer; several of her books are already on my shelf. Happily, she said most recipes in the new book could be done in four types of clay pots -- a Roemertopf (!), a cazuela (!), a beanpot (!), and a tagine -- the only one I don't have (yet).

She also has some recipes that call for being baked in a clay environment and suggests lining your stove with fire bricks to achieve this. It occurs to me, though, that my Big Green Egg provides a ceramic environment, so I will experiment with using it for those recipes.

The trick of cooking with clay pots is to avoid sudden shifts in temperature. They must warm up gradually and should not be set while hot onto a cold surface, even just granite at room temperature. Recipes with baking always call for a start in a cold oven, so the pot heats up as the oven does. A Roemertopf must be soaked in water before each use. The cazuela and beanpot both required "curing" before use by soaking in water.

I used Wolfert's new cookbook for the first time over the weekend, cooking a "tiella" of pork, wild mushrooms and potatoes. A tiella is an Italian version of a cazuela, which Wolfert says is quite serviceable for this recipe, which comes from Calabria in southern Italy.

I increased the amount of pork in the recipe because 1 lb. seemed too skimpy for four people, but I left other quantities as written. You start by sauteeing 3 crushed garlic cloves and 3 oz. of thinly sliced, shredded pancetta in 2 Tbl. of olive oil for a few minutes. Then you add the boneless pork shoulder cut into 1-1/2 inch cubes (I used just shy of 2 lbs.) and brown them on all sides. Then you add 1 lb. of red potatoes, peeled and thickly sliced; 1 lb. of brown mushrooms, quartered; 3/4 oz. of dried porcini, soaked and coarsely chopped; the strained soaking liquid from the porcini; 1 tsp. salt; 1/2 tsp. pepper; 1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper, and a sprig of rosemary. You cover (my cazuela doesn't have a cover, so I borrowed the cover from a 12-in. braising pan) and simmer 45 min. It can be done ahead of time to this point.

Before putting into the oven to finish, you scrape off any congealed fat from the top, and pick out the potato slices and put them to one side. You mush the meat and mushrooms into a single layer and then arrange a layer of potatoes on top. You "press gently" to compact the casserole, then top the potatoes with 4 oz. of shredded cheese. First choice is a Calabrian cheese called caciocavallo, which Vace didn't have, so I used the second choice, aged provolone. You drizzle 1 Tbl. of olive oil over this, set in a cold oven, and turn it on, set at 400 F. After half an hour, you turn off the oven and let the casserole continue to cook in the receding heat for 45 minutes. Sprinkle 1 Tbl. chopped parsley on top and serve. I served it with a simple green salad and ciabatta.

I was very happy with the result. It was, obviously, very rich. It's hard to say just what the earthenware pot contributes, but Wolfert says these recipes are better cooked in earthenware than in conventional pots, and I'm willing to take her word for it.