Editor’s note: Linda Avery reviews the recently released cookbook by super chef Ferran Adrià, a collection of “family meals” prepared for his staff at the now closed El Bulli restaurant in Spain.

The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adrià
by Ferran Adrià
photos by Francese Guillamet

Facts: Phaidon Press Inc. 384 pages, $29.95 (or Amazon at $17.15)
Photos: Grab a calculator and do the math (see 4th paragraph below: Open the Book)
Recipes: 93 plus basic recipes
Give to: Gourmet home cooks, professional chefs, cookbook collectors

The name Ferran Adrià immediately summons thoughts of molecular gastronomy: his famous spherical olives which appear as jellied green blobs jiggling on a spoon but burst to fill the mouth with the flavor of intense olive juice. Or the frozen Gorgonzola balloon, a hollow white sphere, about eight inches across and the color of fresh ricotta, topped with a grate of nutmeg meant to be broken (with your fist?) and eaten in shards.

photo © by Francese Guillamet

Ferran Adrià is the father and inspiration of a creative culinary era of deconstructing the dish and reassembling in a way you’ve never seen. His three Michelin star restaurant El Bulli closed last July after 24 years. He will reopen as the El Bulli Foundation in two years, most likely transforming the space as he transforms food.

When I first saw The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adrià, I wondered if I need buy a chemistry set or cylinder of liquid nitrogen.

No, this truly is home cooking, the maestro demonstrating in detail how a dish should be done. You see, “family meals” are the repasts of his restaurant family; the menus of dinners prepared and eaten daily by his staff of 75.

He insisted on good food, easy-to-find ingredients that are mostly fresh and the aggregate couldn’t be expensive. (I think I read that the cost could not exceed €6/person but I can’t confirm).

Open the Book. There are 31 meals within. Each meal has a starter, a main, and a dessert. Recipe ingredients are listed for 2, 6, 20 or 75 and carefully calculated (not mathematically but via testing at each level) for each group. So using a bit of math, we know that 31 meals x 3 recipes equals 93 recipes.

photo © by Francese Guillamet

Each recipe has photos showing every step — about 15 photos per recipe. That’s almost 1,400 photos not counting the photo stack of appetizer, main and dessert preceding the meal, photos of utensils, types of fish and more.

It’s a blog but on paper: each step of every recipe is a photo with instructions superimposed. One almost doesn’t need to read English.

Aside: is this some sort of Bizarro world? Maybe the first caveman recipes were chiseled into a rock wall. Then the Egyptians invented paper and recipes were portable and accompanied by illustrations and later photos. Fast-forward to the internet: food blogs have photos of every step of the recipe. Is this where the world turns around? Now photos of every step put back on paper? Should we be sharpening our chisels?

Here is the entrée from Meal 24 which consists of Garbanzo Beans with Spinach & Egg, Glazed Teriyaki Pork Belly, and Sweet Potato with Honey & Cream.

Glazed Teriyaki Pork Belly

Teriyaki is a sweet Japanese sauce used for marinating before roasting or broiling. You can make the teriyaki sauce yourself or use a good-quality, store-bought sauce.

photo © by Francese Guillamet

Serves 6
Ingredients
For the teriyaki sauce
(Makes 4 1/3 cups)
1/3 cup lemongrass, chopped
2 tablespoons fresh ginger, chopped
1 3/4 cups chicken stock
3 cups sugar
1 3/4 cups soy sauce
1 3/4 honey

For the pork belly
2 1/2 pounds pork belly
10 1/2 cups water
2 teaspoons salt
12 black peppercorns
3 garlic cloves
1 onion, roughly chopped
2 1/2 cups teriyaki sauce

Method
For the teriyaki sauce
1. Using a rolling pin or other heavy utensil, crush the lemongrass and ginger.

2. Put the chicken stock, sugar, and soy sauce into a large saucepan.

3. Add the honey.

4. Add the crushed lemongrass and ginger. Put the pan over medium heat, bring to a boil, then boil for 15 minutes.

5. Strain and reserve.

Make the pork belly
1. Put the pork into a large pan with the water. The pork should be well covered, so add more (water) if necessary. Add the salt and peppercorns.

2. Coarsely chop the onions and add to the pan with the garlic.

3. Bring the water to a simmer.

4. Cook the pork covered, for 1 1/2 hours, until cooked through, adding more water if necessary to cover. Remove and place on a cutting board.

5. Preheat the oven to 350°F.

6. Cut the pork into strips about 3/4 inch thick.

7. Place the pork in a roasting pan in a single layer, then cover with the teriyaki sauce.

8. Roast the pork for 30 minutes, regularly basting with teriyaki sauce to glaze.

9. Serve the pork with spoonfuls of the teriyaki sauce.

Tags: cookbook review, El Bulli, Glazed Teriyaki Pork Belly, Linda Avery, pork, recipe, The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adria
Posted in Book & Product Reviews, Pork, Recipes | 5 Comments »

Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels
by Heather Shouse
photos by Leo Gong and Heather Shouse

Facts: Ten Speed Press, 208 pages, $20.00 (or Amazon at $11.65)
Photos: Of cooks and trucks, patrons and food: too many to count
Recipes: About 50
Give to: Road Warriors

I feel like a food truck info magnet. Days after I received Food Trucks by Heather Shouse, I received notice of a free street food app: Roaming Hunger iPhone. (You can check out the app at Roaming Hunger).

Of course I’m on high alert and this all drives me crazy because my hometown, Chicago, is so far behind the ball in this arena. A city, which holds food in such esteem that there is a Director of Culinary Affairs position in its city government, has thrown stones in the path of this culinary cavalcade.

I say “hey, it’s Chicago” (thinking that sometimes it takes a while for the grease to hit the skids – if you know what I mean) but Tom Acox is more eloquent in expressing the situation in Sanitation and Regulation: The Case for Food Trucks.

Heather Shouse (a senior food and drink correspondent for Time Out Chicago as well as Chicago reporter for Food and Wine magazine) may have roved the country in search of food trucks having been spurred by the frustration she experienced in Chicago. I envision friends commiserating with her over a few cocktails, and in a moment of inspiration Heather holds up her glass and yells “ROAD TRIP!!!” And what a road trip it was.

This book belongs in both cookbook and travel sections. If you travel on business, put it on your iPad or Kindle for quick reference.

Shouse features 19 major metropolitan areas with over 60 food trucks, and throws in a few maps and websites “to keep up with” these mobile muncheries.

The photos of the trucks and food are indicative of the creativity that abounds in this arena. Here is just one I fell for. How cute is this???

Maximus/Minimus is at 2nd Ave. and Pike St., Seattle, Washington.

Note: Coincidental with the release of this book,  Chicago’s first ever Food Truck Summit will convene on April 19th

Maximus/Minimus Pulled Pork

Serves 6-8

Ingredients
3 1/2 pounds pork shoulder
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/4 cup dried oregano
1/2 cup chili powder
2 tablespoons garlic powder
1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
4 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
Prepared barbecue sauce, for serving
6 to 8 sandwich buns, toasted

Method
1. Trim the fat from the pork, leaving 1/2-inch fat cap.

2. In a small bowl, combine the brown sugar, oregano, chili powder, garlic powder, cayenne pepper and salt. Rub the entire roast with the mixture, massaging it into the meat. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

3. Prepare a charcoal or gas grill for direct cooking over high heat. Preheat the oven to 325°F.

4. When the grill is as hot as possible, place the roast in the center. If you are using a charcoal grill, place the roast on the grill directly over the white-hot coals. Cook each side of the roast just until it is well browned but not burned, moving the meat to a new spot on the grill each time you turn it, 10 to 15 minutes total.

5. Remove the roast from the grill and place in a large Dutch oven or heavy pot. Cover and place it in the oven. Cook until the pork pulls apart easily with a fork, about 3 hours.

6. Break the meat into small chunks using two forks. Mix with your favorite barbecue sauce and divide the pork among the sandwich buns.

Tags: cookbook review, Food Trucks, Heather Shouse, Linda Avery, Maximus Minimus pulled pork, pork, recipe
Posted in Book & Product Reviews, Pork, Recipes | 4 Comments »

It started with a tweet from @ShareYourTable, and a fuzzy shot of a brownie from The Pineapple Room, Alan Wong’s “ladies-who-lunch” spot tucked in the back of Macy’s in Waikiki’s tony Ala Moana Shopping Center.

I tweeted back that the best reason to hop a plane to Honolulu was The Pineapple Room’s Kalua “BLT.”

Or maybe the black rock and white sand beaches, or a mai tai on the Halekulani patio, but no, no, really, that pork is worth the trip alone. And voila! The next tweet I got was a link to Share Your Table’s oven-roasted Kalua Pork.

As luck would have it, I had a pork roast in the fridge that was destined for a little achiote paste and sour orange juice, a la cochinita pibil, but I thought, maybe I could do a little Hawaiian hula instead.

Kalua pork, the centerpiece at so many Hawaiian celebrations, is just another version of pulled pork, like the Yucatan’s cochinita pibil or Southern BBQ pulled pork.

I happened to have a jar of Hawaiian pink salt, called Alaea, a sea salt that gets its pinkish hue from the red clay where it’s harvested.

I didn’t have the banana leaves the recipe called for to wrap the pork, although these days they aren’t hard to hunt down. Check in the freezer section (or even in the fresh produce section) of Latin or Asian markets.

I did have a bottle of liquid smoke on hand, a subject that was tweeted back and forth last week, namely “what the heck is it and is it safe to eat?” (Here’s the answer.)

Armed with the essential ingredients, I set about recreating the Kalua Pork recipe from @ShareYourTable, with a few minor adjustments to accommodate what I had on hand, and now, I’m sharing it with you.

I have to confess that I modified the key ingredient — the pork.

Kalua pork is made with pork butt (also called picnic shoulder). It’s a gloriously fat-laden hunk of swine, but I had a top loin roast in the fridge so that’s what I used. It probably resulted in a slightly drier end product, but I can tell you that it is still lip-smacking delicious.

Oven-Roasted Kalua Pork

(adapted from Share Your Table)

Serves 6

Ingredients
2-1/2 pounds top sirloin pork roast (or, for real decadence, pork butt)
1 tablespoon of Hawaiian Pink Alaea salt (or sea salt or kosher salt)
2 cups water
2 tablespoons liquid smoke
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Method
1. Heat the oven to 500°F.

2. Rub the pork with the salt and place in a roasting pan. Mix the water and liquid smoke together and pour into the pan (but not over the pork or you’ll wash off the salt.) Cover tightly with foil.

3. Roast for 30 minutes, then turn the oven heat down to 325°F. Roast for 2-1/2 hours. Remove from the oven and let stand, covered, for 10 minutes. Remove foil and shred pork with two forks. Sprinkle with black pepper and toss again.

(NOTE: At this point, you can eat it as it is, or mix in your favorite BBQ sauce.)

Tags: Hawaii, kalua pork, liquid smoke, pork, recipe, Restaurant Journal
Posted in About Ingredients, Pork, Recipes, Tips & Tutorials | 1 Comment »

“What one thing did you always ask me to make for you when you were growing up?” Aunt Sally prodded my husband.

We were gathered in her country French kitchen at her adorable lake house southeast of Atlanta. Jeff rattled off a litany of dishes, to which Aunt Sally drawled, “nope, something else.”

Clearly Aunt Sally’s cooking was a favorite pastime of my husband’s youth, and she even influenced me when I joined the Walters clan in 1989. I credit Aunt Sally and her mother, Jeff’s Granny, with inspiring me to quit my job and go to culinary school.

“Creamy fudge!” Aunt Sally shouted, and brought out a pound of foil and wax paper wrapped chocolaty goodness. In an instant, my 47 year-old husband melted into a boy as the fudge melted in his mouth. Aunt Sally thinks of herself as a country cook, yet her repertoire goes far beyond the basics of down home southern cooking.

For years, I’ve shared Aunt Sally’s pork marinade with friends and family, and I’ve even featured it in my cooking classes. I found out this trip that the recipe actually came from Mary Jo, her sister-in-law.

To me, it’s Aunt Sally’s recipe and now I’m sharing it with you, too.
Use it to marinate pork tenderloin or a center cut loin for at least 8 hours up to overnight. Put it on the grill and cook to medium. I promise you will love it as much as we do, and as much as we love Aunt Sally.

Aunt Sally’s Pork Marinade

Ingredients
1/2 cup pine nuts, finely ground
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons ground coriander
1 tablespoon minced garlic
Juice of 1 lemon
Dash cayenne
1/2 cup soy sauce
1 cup olive oil

Method
1. Mix all ingredients and marinate pork tenderloin or loin overnight. Grill to medium. (Discard used marinade.)

Tags: Aunt Sally, marinade, pork
Posted in Pork, Recipes | No Comments »

June is my unofficial start of the grilling season, although living in Arizona, we grill year round.

I tend to grill more during the summer because I can’t bear to heat up the kitchen by turning on the oven. I created this recipe for a grilled fruits article for The Arizona Republic.

I love the flavor of grilled pineapple and it seems like a natural fit with juicy, ginger-soaked pork tenderloin. Leftover pork and pineapple make a great filling for sandwiches or as a salad topper.

Grilled Ginger Pineapple Pork Tenderloin

Serves 6

Ingredients
For the Marinade
1 cup pineapple juice
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup dark rum
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon minced shallot
1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger
1 tablespoon finely chopped chives

For the Pork
2 pounds pork tenderloin, trimmed
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 (4-pound) fresh pineapple
2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Method
1. Whisk marinade ingredients together. Set aside 1/2 cup for pineapple. Place remaining marinade and pork in a sealable plastic bag. Refrigerate and marinate for at least 4 hours or overnight, turning occasionally.

2. When ready to grill, peel and core pineapple. Cut crosswise into 3/4-inch thick rings. Toss rings with 1/2 cup reserved marinade and set aside for 15 to 30 minutes. Heat grill to medium-high (375-400º F)

3. When grill is hot, remove pork from marinade and season with pepper. Place marinade in a saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to a vigorous simmer and reduce almost by half, about 10 to 15 minutes. Set aside.

4. While marinade is reducing, grill pork, turning once after 8 minutes. Grill until pork reaches 140º F for medium, about another 10 minutes. Remove from grill and cover to keep warm.

5. While pork is resting, grill pineapple rings for 2 minutes, turn and grill another 2 minutes.

6. Slice pork at an angle into 1/2-inch thick slices. Place grilled pineapple ring on a plate and top with 2 to 3 slices of pork. Drizzle with reduced marinade, re-warmed if necessary.

Tags: ginger, grilling, pineapple, pork tenderloin
Posted in Pork, Recipes | No Comments »

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