Seared Pork Chops with Sauce Soubise

Traditionally, Sauce Soubise involved mixing classic bechamel sauce (milk based, thickened with roux) with sauteed onion puree. This makes for a fairly thick, creamy style sauce that has fallen out of favor in recent years. The use of vegetable purees to thicken and enrich sauces, however, has much potential for modern use.

This recipe makes use of the fond (brown meat pieces left in the pan) from seared pork chops to create a delicious pan sauce that is finished with creamy onion puree. This sauce makes for an intriguing eating experience since it is not commonly seen (at least not by me!) I found it to be quite delicious and to have a clean flavor--certainly complimentary to the chops--tasty, savory a bit sweet, and not too assertive. I've only made this at home thus far; in a restaurant setting adding a few attractive garnishes to the sauce would make for a better presentation. As it is written here the dish looks a little plain.

Stewed Onion Puree

1 T whole butter
1 lb yellow onions (3 medium), halved, cored, and sliced lengthwise
1 T heavy cream

1. Melt butter in small heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-low heat. Add onions and sweat gently, stirring very frequently to prevent browning. Cook until onions are very tender and all liquid has evaporated from the pan. Stir in heavy cream.

2. Puree in food processor or blender until smooth. You may have to let the mixture cool slightly before pureeing, but do not cool completely. Set puree aside.


Pork Chops with Modern Soubise

4 rib or loin pork chops
2 T olive oil
1 T butter
1/2 cup chicken broth
1 batch stewed onion puree (above)
to taste salt, pepper, red wine vinegar
2 T fresh parsley, finely chopped

1. Dry and season pork chops with a little salt and pepper. Heat a heavy-bottomed saute pan (preferably not nonstick) over medium heat. Add olive oil then butter. When foaming subsides
add chops to the pan. Cook until very well browned, then flip over and finish cooking on second side. Chops should be about 150 degrees internal temperature. Transfer to a plate and cover with foil.

2. Pour burnt fat from pan and deglaze with the chicken stock. Allow to reduce slightly (by about 1/4.)

3. Whisk in the onion puree and heat to a simmer. Adjust thickness to your preference by reducing sauce a little (to thicken) or thin with a little more chicken stock or heavy cream. Season to taste with salt, pepper, and red wine vinegar. Add accumulated chop juices from plate to sauce and combine.

4. To serve, arrange chops on serving platter or individual plates, top with a little sauce, and sprinkle with fresh parsley. Serve remaining sauce alongside to pass at the table. Enjoy!

Serve this dish with most any steamed vegetable and perhaps roasted red potatoes. The sauce here is probably not abundant or creamy enough to work for mashed potatoes.


This recipe can be found in the wonderful book Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making by James Peterson. I aquired my copy through The Good Cook cookbook club, and it is well worth the price. The text is written largely from a professional kitchen perspective, but any home cook with a little ambition and a desire to learn a wealth of information about sauces of all kinds should check this one out. The best feature of the book is that it is not simply recipes. Peterson goes into detail on the techniques and principles behind the sauces, then gives the reader recipes as examples of many of the sauces in practice. This gives the reader opportunity use what she learns in a number of applications, not just in a single recipe.

Jerk Chicken: The Best Marinade You've Never Tried

I personally have very little experience working with Caribbean flavors, but I stumbled upon something similar to this recipe in a little cookbook at work several months ago. (Cookbook info forthcoming.) This particular gem of a recipe caught my eye as I was looking for a jerk chicken methodology that did not involve the use of the bottled 'jerk spice' they stocked at work. This particular mass-marketed spice blend is quite tame and certainly doesn't inspire the epiphany that comes with the discovery of great food.

The jerk chicken recipe I found, however, was brilliant. It involves a wet marinade with many strong flavors, and offers as a result delicious, tangy chicken with a unique and complicated flavor profile. If you have never experimented with Caribbean cooking, I implore you to try your hand at this recipe and marvel at the results. I certainly did.


Jerk Chicken

Marinade:
1 cup scotch bonnet chilies, finely chopped, with seeds
1/2 cup allspice, ground
3/4 cup garlic, minced
3/4 cup ginger root, minced
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 cup yellow mustard, dried & ground
1/4 cup cinnamon, ground
1/4 cup Tabasco or other hot pepper sauce
18 scallions, white and green portions, sliced thinly
1 1/2 cup cider vinegar
3 cups olive oil
3/4 cup lime juice
generous handful kosher salt
1/8 cup black pepper, freshly ground

12 servings of fresh chicken, bone-in, skin-on (3 whole chickens quartered into breast & thigh/leg pieces, or 12 chicken breasts, or 12 thigh/leg pieces, or any combination thereof)

1. Mix all marinade ingredients together.

2. Submerge the chicken into the marinade in a large container, or in tightly sealed zip-lock bags. Refrigerate for at least one full day, two should give you even tastier results.

3. Remove chicken from marinade and gently shake any excess off--any that sticks to the chicken is meant to stay there! Prepare a grill, stove top pan, or oven as to your preference. The grill will net you the best flavor. For a charcoal grill, a two level fire is ideal, one side very hot to begin cooking, skin side down. This will result in a seared, crispy skin, and an excellent charred flavor. After skin is well seared, perhaps 5 or 6 minutes, flip chicken skin side up and cook another 5 minutes or so on the hot side of the grill. At this time, move chicken to the other side of the grill which should be at medium heat and allow to finish cooking (to approx. 165 degrees F), turning the pieces back skin side down if bottoms begin to get too dark. If a gas grill is used for cooking and does not allow for separate heating zones, than cook from start to finish at medium high, turning down near the end of cooking if chicken is getting too dark.

4. Allow chicken pieces to rest 5 or 10 minutes, then serve! This dish would be delicious with simple white rice and fried plantains. Red beans and rice or something like it would also work well.

[Notes:

1. This recipe as written is for quite a large batch of chicken. Certainly smaller amounts could be made by scaling the numbers back to a much smaller amount. The ratios for a small batch would be identical to this one.

2. As with nearly all applications using whole chicken breasts I would advocate for the use of bone-in, skin-on chicken here. The moistness and flavor imparted from the bone and the heavenly crisp skin make for great eating. If you are particularly health food oriented by all means leave off the skin, and if you are opposed to bone-in food, leave out the bone. For those paying attention this leaves you with the ever popular boneless skinless chicken breast, and yes, this dish will still be great if you go that route.

3. In a pinch you could do lots of substitutions here, Serrano or other very hot peppers for the scotch bonnets, alternate vinegars for the cider, lemon juice for the lime, etc., but I think the flavor profile as written will be hard to improve upon.

4. Though this recipe calls for chicken, certainly pork should work here just fine, a whole chicken could be marinated and roasted, or a dozen other alterations could be enacted to vary the final product. Happy experimenting!]

On Culinary School, Career, Growth, and Blogging

I graduated from the New England Culinary Institute in the spring of 2004.

Culinary school is a relentless learning experience that demands daily growth. Curriculum pushes students to learn about food and cooking in many different ways simultaneously: by reading, listening to lectures, writing, tasting, and most importantly, doing--ideally by cooking in real world situations. For two years a milieu of learning envelopes students and opens their eyes to new ideas and techniques while it hones a skill set that will serve them for years to come. Like all learning experiences, however, culinary school is not intended to be a one time injection of information. Certainly it teaches many particular skills, but the real point of school is not to impart any sort of static knowledge, but rather to illuminate for the student the process needed to learn every day of her life.

For a few culinary graduates this learning process continues simply by the nature of their jobs out of school. A sous chef or executive chef must continually expand their food knowledge to keep sharp in running a restaurant and maintaining a popular and economically sound menu. A chef must vigilantly study his profession by reading industry publications, attending conferences, developing better management skills, and learning new ingredients and techniques. These traits are the hallmark of a career in the culinary arts. For many graduates their work after graduation does not push them in this manner and it is far too easy to treat their professional lives after school as an ordinary job. From a distance a job and a career may look identical, but if your work is a career you push yourself to learn every day and grow professionally, while if your work is a job you simply show up to do what is required of you, then go home and wait for your paycheck. Most people settle for jobs when they could have careers because there is nothing about their work that forces them to be more engaged and as a result they waste daily opportunities for growth. Culinary school makes its pupils learn; once on their own, students need to pressure themselves to learn.

Which brings me to spring 2008, nearly four years since I parted ways with NECI.

Unfortunately the last several years of my professional life have seen me relax a little too much and not push myself to learn. At times I've even acknowledged to myself that I needed to do something about this very fact, but I've never quite known how to accomplish it. A couple of weeks ago it occurred to me that what I need is a food journal. This one small item would allow me to record ideas as they occurred to me, make notes on any food articles or books that I'm reading, remember successful meals and recipes I've tried at home, take down ideas as I research items I'm interested in testing for use at work, and generally be a focal point for all my thoughts and ambitions related to food.

The Black Peppercorn blog is a combination of this new physical food journal I've begun to keep and my long standing interest in writing and blogging I recently began to explore in my first blog, Splitting Eights in Canton, NY, a blog exploring gaming and life in general. One problem I've had with that first blog is that although I love board games, I really don't play or think about them enough to be able to write on the topic several times each week. Perhaps I will someday, but right now it's just not happening. Food, however, is a different story. I work with and think about food every day of my life. I cook at work, I cook at home, I read food books and food blogs, and I write in my food journal. With any luck (and a little work!) all this will translate into lots of interesting posts on this blog, and lots of professional and personal growth for yours truly. Happy reading, and please give me lots of feedback (especially the constructive criticism kind, that's the stuff that will really help me grow...or quit, if I'm really not cut out for this!)