Archives for the 'pork' tag
Pizza in Pyongyang: Kimchi Pie?
North Korean Dear Leader Kim Jong Il has accomplished a miracle: Pizza in Pyongyang.
It has taken almost 10 years of work, but North Korea has acquired the technology to launch a project very dear to its leader’s heart—the nation’s first “authentic” Italian pizzeria.
That’s a long time to go without a decent slice, and I feel for the guy. But this is a pretty serious case of reinventing the wheel, no?
For those of you keeping score at home:
- New York, center of capitalism: 1,520 pizza joints (search pizza and pizzeria here)
- Pyongyang, communist hermit kingdom: 1 pizza joint
(To be fair, there are those who say it’s impossible to get a decent slice outside New York, even in the good old U.S. of A. While I’d submit New Haven pizza as holding its own, I understand the sentiment.)
And the Pyongyang v. New York pizza smack-down above doesn’t even take into account per capita figures. New York has 9 million residents. North Korea has 24 million (starving) residents. Thus this charming contrast:
Despite the food shortages high-quality Italian wheat, flour, butter and cheese are being imported to ensure the perfect pizza is created every time.
Via Volokh Conspiracy, where we are reminded of another glorious chapter in North Korean culinary history: “Kim Jong Il’s plan to provide pizza for the toiling masses of North Korea seems to have worked out better than his earlier plan to alleviate food shortages by breeding imported giant rabbits, which was aborted when the greedy Dear Leader decided to eat the initial batch of rabbits himself.”
Go here for the recipe for the delicious looking kimchi pork belly pizza pictured above.
Semi-crossposted at Reason.com
Crispy video: Pig in a box
This weekend in Miami my folks threw us a little engagement party and we roasted a pig in the backyard using a Caja China. What is a Caja China? Allow me to explain.
“Caja China” means Chinese box. Cubans engage in a bit of complimentary stereotyping and tend to call anything that’s inventive or ingenuous “Chinese”. Basically, it’s a way to cook a pig under a spit. It’s a stainless steel, aluminum, and wood box into which you put your pig. Coals go on top of the box’s lid and they radiate heat down onto the meat. I’m not sure why this is a good thing, but the result is a delicious pork roast.
My dad’s buddy, Cuco, was the chef in charge and he used his own home-made Caja china. A beautiful thing about Miami is that there are plenty of farms you can go to pick out your still-walking pig and take it home with you in a less-than-animated state. My dad brought home a lean 85-pounder which he marinated in mojo overnight. Cuco put the pig bottom-side down on the stainless steel interior of the box so that the skin receives direct heat only at the end of the cooking.
Cuco was an absolute trooper, braving a couple torrential downpours in his quest for porcine perfection. In the video you’ll see that halfway through Cuco opens the box and removes liquid that has been pooling in the pig’s main cavity. He does this so that the meat won’t stew. Another important step is making sure to remove the ash whenever you add more coal to ensure that it doesn’t block the heat. The box is opened one final time to flip the pig, exposing the not-yet-crispy skin. To get it deliciously crackling, Cuco’s secret is to brush it with saltwater. He says the salt draws moisture out of the skin so that the it crisps. Listen to the crackling when the pork is carved so you can hear just how damn crunchy it got. The meat, however, was succulent—truly crispy on the outside.
This Week in Bacon
Every year since 1991, DC-based Citizens Against Government Waste has released its fantastic and valuable Congressional Pig Book (summary | book). An anti-pork nonprofit, CAGW rails against wasteful congressional pet projects.
This year’s CAGW pork database produces fifty-four different results in a “food” keyword search, including $2.5 million to the Congressional Hunger Center; $1.5 million to design foods for health (Michael Pollan just died and rolled over in his grave); and $1.3 million to survey monkfish and migratory finfish trawling.
This may be pork of a different sort, but at times when we (diners, restaurateurs, waitstaff, and the like) are tightening our own belts, it’d be especially nice to see Congress stop robbing us blind by forcing us to fund their needless food (and other) projects.
Bonus Pork “Link”: I dig that the CAGW pig book cover stands nicely alongside those of food giants Jane Grigson and Fergus Henderson.
