Gary does Gordon

Now this is an example of a dish I would never have normally attemped in a million years and is precisely the reason why I started this project in the first place. Pork cheeks! I mean come on, who in their right mind would go out and specifically buy the cheeks of something and then cook them? It certainly is something I would never normally do and in fact I haven’t seen ‘cheeks’ of any sort at any of my local butchers.. ever! I asked the question at one butcher, and his response was

Butcher dude: “Lordy lordy… we ‘avent sold them things since ’bout 10 years ago now.”

Me: “So what do you do with them then?”

Butcher dude: “We throws ‘em away. Sometimes we sell ‘em to companies who make dog food, but that don’t ‘appen too often”

I was shocked. They throw these things away. So I asked the butcher if he could keep some back for me to which he replied they don’t receive the heads of pigs or cattle etc anymore so he can’t. Hmm, I was stuck then. Where was I going to find this stuff?

A few months passed and it was by pure coincidence that I went into a branch of Waitrose one day which happened to have pork cheeks on sale as part of their “Forgotten cuts” range. I bought as many of them as I could (Happened to get about 8 of them) all for the grand cost of £2 or there abouts. That was it, they were all sold out and I haven’t seen them again since. This was a sign and I quickly got everything together for this dish and made a start on making it that very night.

The ingredients

I first started with the pork cheeks. These needed to be cooked confit style, in duck or goose fat for a couple of hours and it was as simple as getting the fat to a simmer stage, adding the cheeks with some herbs and garlic, adding a parchment lid and then leaving it to cook slowly.

The pork cheeks

The cheeks slowly cooking

Next involved prepping the pork fillet. This was relatively simple as well and involved trimming it so it was uniform in size and then seasoning it well and then wrapping it up with parma ham. Once done I then left it in the fridge to chill for later.

The fillet wrapped in parma ham

Next up was preparing the madeira sauce. I have done this before so I won’t go into detail on how I did it in this post as you can see it all here<LINK NEEDED>. Once done I kept to one side to heat through later.

Next up was prepping the other elements to go with the dish, namely the black pudding, the morel mushrooms, spinach and the turnips. It was at this stage that I realised I had forgotten to buy baby turnips… ahh… but I did have a swede lying around so figured that this would be better than nothing and I used this instead. The book suggests serving baby turnips whole, as well as preparing a puree as well, however given I didn’t have any baby turnips and I couldn’t be bothered to prepare a swede puree I opted to prepare and cook cubes of swede instead.

So I chopped the swede into little cubes and blanched them quickly in salted water to soften a bit. I sliced up the black pudding into discs and kept them to one side for the final rush later on. The morel mushrooms I had were the dehydrated variety (Could not find any fresh ones anywhere) so I soaked these in hot water to rehydrate before cooking.

By this stage, the cheeks had cooked and I had left them in the fat to cool down completely. They had shrivelled up to about half their size which was quite incredible really. I can only imagine how much fat they must have contained in the first place. I patted these dry with some kitchen towel and then prepared the potato ’spaghetti’. Oh dear, this was actually quite a difficult process. I had to cut potato into fine strips to wrap around the cheeks and then pan fry them till golden. The problem was actually getting the strips fine enough in the first place. The good news was that I had my brand spanking new mandoline to use which should make the process easier. Check it out…

My mandoline

I put it on its thinnest setting and set about cutting some potato slithers lengthways. Once cut, I then julienned these with a knife, trying to cut them as thin as I possibly could. Once done, I laid out some clingfilm, put some potato strips on this and then a pork cheek. I then wrapped the potato around the pork cheek as best as I could, but something told me at this stage that the strands simply weren’t long enough to stay in place when cooking. I really needed one of those funky japanese slicing machines which can produce a looooong spaghetti strand from almost any vegetable, which I could then wrap around the cheek like string… I suspect this is what Gordon uses in his restaurant, but alas I do not have the £600 needed to buy such a machine for myself. Such is life.

The potato strings... oh dear

It was time to get everything together and it became clear very quickly that this is one of those dishes which requires multiple chefs in order to get everything done on time. There are quite a few components to cook at the same time and I was struggling to say the least. The pressure began to mount. I started by browning the fillet in a frying pan and then transferred this to a hot oven to bake for about 8 min or so. Whilst this was in the oven, I started to gently fry the morels and black pudding in some butter. Whilst this was going on, I wilted some spinach, warmed up the swede,warmed up the sauce and began frying the pork cheeks wrapped in potato. Oh dear, they didn’t stay wrapped for long. As suspected earlier the strands were not long enough and they parted pretty quickly. Arggg, all that preparation only to have it disintegrate on me at the last minute. Sigh… Anyway, I persevered and once everything had cooked I kept them to one side to keep warm. I took the fillet out of the oven and let it rest whilst I plated everything else.

The black pudding

I love plating dishes such as these. It makes all the effort appear worth while. Using a ring, I plated some spinach which I then topped with the morels and the black pudding. I then added a pork cheek on top of this together with a couple of slices of pork fillet. Lastly, I added some cubes of swede around the plate. The madeira sauce was kept separate and added to the dish as we ate.

The final plating

It looks yummy no!? Let me tell you, it tasted wonderful too. I am a big fan of pork in all its guises, and pork fillet wrapped in crispy parma ham, together with the salty black pudding was a delight to say the least. I was very surprised by the flavour that the pork cheek gave as it was almost beefy in flavour; very intense. Unfortunately the potato spaghetti looked like the cheek was having a bad hair day and certainly was not as ‘permed’ as I would have liked but it tasted good and gave some much needed texture to the dish. The morels were nice and earthy and the spinach and swede also worked well in balancing out the rather intense flavours of all the other components. The madeira sauce worked exceptionally well with this dish too… I am such a fan of this sauce. It works with nearly everything as far as I am concerned.

In future I would probably do without the potato spaghetti as this was a pain in the ass to do without a dedicated piece of equipment to get strands long enough for the purpose. I would probably also do without the swede and replace this with potato croutons perhaps; oh and I would replace the morels with a much cheaper mushroom such as shitake, but other than that this dish would remain the same. It was a delight to eat, but a bit of a pain to cook.

Pork cheeks, with pork fillet wrapped in Parma ham, black pudding, baby turnips and sauteed morels … Done!

Next up: Chicken stock

Previous post: Raspberry compote with tarragon cream