This is one of those dishes that is so full of fat that if your mom is deceased, you'll definitely be one step closer to seeing again, but if she is alive, you'll wanna slap her for not making you something so delicious.
Note: It is important to realize that these recipes are merely guidelines to follow. They'll taste great as they are, but I encourage you to play with them and make the recipes your own.
Note: It is good practice to read the entire recipe, while paying particular attention to the "Notes", before you try to make the dish, as there are often subtleties that can be easily overlooked, which sometimes, can make all the difference in the world for the outcome.
Makes 2-4 servings, depending on weight of chicken.
Skill Level: Intermediate
Prep time about 30 minutes.
Cook Time about 30 minutes.
Ingredients:
- 4 Thin Cut Pork Chops
- 2 sticks and 1 tablespoon of sweat cream Unsalted Butter (Note: For butter sauces, some cheaper butters do not work well. Land'O'Lakes is good, but Great Value from Walmart does well also.)
- 1 cup Buttermilk
- 1 pack of Broccoli
- Heavy Cream
- Cheddar Cheese
- White Wine (not necessary)
- Chicken Stick/Bouillon/Base
- Lemon Juice, fresh or bottled
- Dried Angel Hair Pasta
- Dried Tarragon
- Extra Virgin Olive Oil
- Vegetable Oil (Not Pictured)
- Kosher salt
- Pepper (Note: preferably fresh cracked from a mill)
Tools Needed:
- Large Stock Pot
- 1 medium Sauce Pot
- 1 Sautoir Pan
- 1 Large (14"-16" Diameter) Frech Grill
- 1 Gallon Size Heavy Duty Freezer Bag
- Meat Mallot or Unopened Wine Bottle
- Pan, Tray, or Cookie Sheet
Cut the zipper off the freezer bag with either a pair of scissors or your chef's knife.
Use your chef's knife to split the left and right seems of the bag.
It should look like this when done. You may want to make a few of these if your using a meat mallet as the mallet has a tendency to damage the bags.
Using your petty knife (or paring knife), clean the pork chops, removing the bones, gristle, and fat.
Note: Save the bones and fat and put them in a appropriate sized freezer bag and store in your freezer. When we build up enough, over time, we will make a stock from the bones and lard from the fat.
Bring water for the angel hair to a boil. Add some salt, but only after the water has come to a boil. The reason for this is, salt is corrosive to your cookware, pitting the metal, which can eventually cause a leak. Bringing the water to a boil allows the salt to dissolve instantly, minimizing its corrosive effects.
The best way to measure out portions of pasta is to grab a bunch tight like this and see its diameter. About 1½ inches in diameter, or 6.2 ounces, will feed 3 people (1 inch in diameter will feed 2, or 4.1 ounces, and 1 ¾ inches in diameter will feed 4, about 8.1 ounces). The reason I am making 3 portions is so that my wife can have the third portion for lunch tomorrow.
Note: When measuring, or eyeballing, the dosimeter of the pasta, make sure you make the pasta circular shaped, unlike the elliptical shape in he photo. After years of cooking, you no longer need the diameter, as you can just feel the portion size.
Drop the pasta in water that is at a hard rolling boil.
Note: it is not necessary to break your pasta in half. If a portion of the pasta is out of the water, don't worry, in a few moments, the pasta will become malleable enough to fold on itself and fully submerge.
Stir immediately to prevent the pasta from clumping together. You only need stir long enough to see that all the pasta is separated.
Do not add oil to the water, as it does nothing but waste your oil. If you want to keep your water from boiling over, you can use a large pot, like I have, where boil over is not possible. If you don't have a large pot, you can keep boil over from happening by controlling the heat. When the water returns to a rolling boil, after the pasta is added, begin reducing the heat to the lowest setting you can, and still maintain a boil. Placing a wooden spoon over the pot can also help. The spoon effectively pops the bubbles and keeps the boil over under control if you don't get the heat turned down low enough.
While the pasta is cooking, start to pound the pork, by placing a pice of he meat in-between the plastic flaps we made earlier.
So, what do you do if you don't have a meat mallet? Well, if you just happen to have a unopened wine bottle, then your good to go.
Gently pound the pork as paper thin as you can get it.
Note: The wine bottle's rounded edge can cut through the meat, so be gentle as you pound, or you'll find yourself with a lot of little pieces when your done.
Pound the pork from different directions, so that you can get the meat as evenly thin as possible.
When done with a piece, carefully peel it off the plastic and roll it up, so that it takes up less room as we work on the other pieces.
Note: You can put the pork in a container and store like this for several days.
If you use one hand for your bottle of wine and the other to handle the meat, your bottle of wine will remain pristine and can be saved for some other occasion.
Here is where the "Poor Man's Veal" comes in. Soak your pork in butter milk for about an hour or two. The enzymes in the buttermilk have an effect on the pork, as to give it a very similar flavor and texture as veal.
When the pasta is done boiling, stain and pour some vegetable oil over the pasta.
Note: DO NOT rinse the pasta under cold water, as the pasta is still hot and cooking, and if you run water over it, you run the risk of your pasta over cooking.
Give the hot pasta a good stir, to mix the oil well, and then place on a pan, tray, or cookie sheet to cool.
Note: Do not use olive oil if you want to keep the pasta for a few days, as olive oil can sour the pasta quickly. Use vegetable oil instead, and you'll find your pasta can last 4-6 days in the fridge.
Pile the pasta up in nests that are the portion size you want to serve and let cool.
After the pasta has cooled, the nests that we made will be lightly bound together, which makes handling them easy.
You can place the nests in a container until you are ready to use them.
Note: The beauty of making the nests are, if you want to make many servings of pasta ahead of time, then since the nests are individual, you can easily grab out however many portions of pasta you need to fix the meal at hand.
After the pork has soaked, lay out and salt, pepper, and cover with tarragon.
When prepping the broccoli, cut the florets off. Then, using a bird's beak paring knife (or regular paring knife), peal the stocks. 1/5 of the total edible part of he plant is the stock, and in my opinion, it is the tastiest 1/5, so don't just throw it away.
Note: You can use a potato peeler, but you'll still need to do a little knife work to get the stalks completely peeled.
Once you have peeled off the skin, you can easily see how far up the stalk has dried from the farm cut. Remove the dried end.
The stalks should look like this when peeled.
Slice the stalks on a bias, about ¼-½ inch thick or roughly the thickness of the florets you cut previously.
Use the pot from the pasta and bring more water to a rolling boil. Heavily salt. You want to water to have a slightly salty flavor. This not only flavors the broccoli internally, but salt also keeps the chlorophyll from leaching out into the water, keeping the broccoli bright green.
Note: This works for all green veggies that you might want to blanch: green beans, haricot verts (French green beans), Chinese long beans, asparagus, broccolini, rapini, etc...
Drop the broccoli into the boiling water. Cook until tender.
Note: If the color starts becoming grey, it is overcooked. If all the dark green florets begin braking off , the broccoli is over cooked. You want to still be a little firm when you remove it from from the boiling water.
Note: Before you blanch anything, it is always a good idea to have the ice water ready, at the wait.
Strain the broccoli when done.
Dump into the ice water and carefully agitate to cool the broccoli off as quickly as possible.
You want the broccoli to soak in water for as brief a time as possible, so the moment all the broccoli is cool, strain again. If ice cubes remain, run cold water over the broccoli, which will quickly melt the ice.
In a sauce pot, heat some chicken stock or water mixed with bouillon or base.
So, when we go to get our cheddar cheese, this is what we find. Well, have no fear, there is plenty of good cheese here.
Simply use your chef's knife and remove all six sides and discard. What is leftover is perfectly good cheese.
Put a few tablespoons of olive oil in a large French Grill and get smoking hot.
Add the pork.
Bring the chicken stock to a hard rolling boil and reduce to intensify the flavor.
Add about ½ cup of heavy whipping cream. Bring back to a boiled and begin reducing again.
Flip the meat when well browned on one side.
Grate the cheese
Add the cheese to the heavy cream and chicken stock reduction and reduce to a simmer.
Then take about tablespoon of cornstarch and a few tablespoons of cold water and mix together. Add the the cream and cheese mixture a little at a time. You want the sauce to have a nice nape, not to thick as to be pasty, but not so thin it will run all over the plate.
After the meat is removed from the French grill, pat any excess oil out, as any oil can break the sauce we are about to make.
Deglaze the pan with some white wine, if you have it, or some chicken stock or some water mixed with bouillon.
After the French grill has been deglazed (all the good flavor has been dissolved into the deglazing liquid), pour into a sautoir pan to finish the sauce. Add about ¼ cup lemon juice and return to a hard boil to reduce a bit.
Cube up 2 sticks of cold butter.
Note: When making beurre blanc, you want to use the coldest butter possible, as this lessons the chance of the sauce breaking.
In a sauté pan, melt ½ tablesppon butter, browning just slightly, to bring out a little nutty flavor. This is a separate pat of butter from what we cubed for the beurre blanc sauce.
Add the broccoli, salt, and pepper. Flip until warmed through.
When the de-glazing liquid is reduced by half, begin adding the cold butter, a little at a time.
Note: Once you start adding the butter, you cannot stop whisking it until all the butter is completely incorporated, or the sauce will break.
Once all the butter is in, keep whisking until all the butter has 100% melted.
If you have done it correctly, you will have a nice thick butter sauce, or beurre blanc.
Note: If you have made the beurre blanc correctly, then you will be able to reduce the sauce at a hard boil, without it breaking. Just make sure not to reduce to much, as that will break the sauce.
Note: You can warm the pasta up by sautéing in some butter, or dipping a basket of the pasta in boiling water, or you can serve it room temp, like I did.
To serve, place a nest of the pasta on the plate. Fan some of the pork around the pasta. Use the butter sauce for the pasta and the meat. Place the broccoli next to the meat and pasta and ladle the cheese sauce over.
Enjoy.
