The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

Aotearoa & Maori · Main

Boil-Up

  • Intermediate
  • 35 min
  • roughly 2 of 4 for cost

silky Leads with a silken, spoon-slow texture.

Ingredients

  • 1.5 kg pork neck bones or hock, cut through
  • 3 L cold water
  • 2 onions, halved
  • 600 g kūmara, in large chunks
  • 500 g potatoes, in large chunks
  • 300 g pūhā, or watercress
  • 250 g plain flour, for the doughboys
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 150 ml water, for the doughboys
  • salt

The skills inside

Steaming: basket, leaf and lidThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilSalted water & the float testSkimming: foam, fat and a clear brothRubbing fat into flour

Allergen screen

Found: gluten

Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.

Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.

Method

  1. Cover the bones and onions with the cold water, bring them to a bare tremble and skim the grey scum off until the surface runs clear.
  2. Hold that tremble, never a rolling boil, for about two hours, until the meat slides off the bone at a push.
  3. Rub the pūhā between your palms in a sink of cold water until the water clouds and the leaves go limp, then wring them out; that is where the bitterness goes.
  4. Add the kūmara and potato to the pot and cook until a knife slides out of them clean.
  5. Rub the flour, baking powder and a pinch of salt to a soft dough with the water, drop it in spoonfuls onto the surface, put the lid on and steam until the doughboys are dry at the centre, about 15 minutes. 15 min
  6. Push the greens under the broth, give them four minutes until they collapse and darken, and serve straight from the pot.

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Rubbing fat into flour 47 recipes

  • The fat is cold when it starts and still firm when the rubbing stops, and the bowl has not warmed under the hands.
  • Stopped early, while it still looks like coarse crumbs with pieces of fat visible in it, not worked on to a smooth even sand, which means the pieces have gone.
  • Nothing is greasy or glossy and nothing has smeared into a paste against the side of the bowl.
  • Liquid added last and only enough to bring it together: pressed, it just holds, with no wet patch and nothing sticking to the hand.
  • Rested cold before it is rolled or shaped, so the gluten relaxes and the fat firms again after being handled.

Where it goes wrong The fat was too warm, or it was rubbed until the mixture looked uniform. Once the fat has melted into the flour there are no solid pieces left to steam apart in the oven, so the bake is sandy or tough instead of flaky, and nothing done later puts those layers back.

Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth 73 recipes

  • It is held below a rolling boil for the whole time. Agitation drives fat and fine protein into the liquid as an emulsion, and nothing skimmed afterwards will take them back out.
  • The grey foam that rises in the first minutes is lifted off and discarded rather than stirred back in.
  • Fat is taken from the surface where it gathers, the pot moved off the centre of the heat if that is what it takes to collect it in one place.
  • The liquid is visibly clearer at the end than it was at the start: it is possible to see down into it.
  • Nothing lifted off goes back in. What was skimmed is discarded, not tipped back once the ladle is full.

Where it goes wrong The pot was allowed to boil, usually while something else was being attended to. Fat and protein emulsify into the liquid under agitation and cannot be lifted off afterwards, so the finished broth stays cloudy and greasy however patiently it is skimmed from then on.

At the Table

The Pour
Riesling or Grenache
Also Right
Cru Beaujolais
From the Taps
Farmhouse saison
Zero-Proof
Cloudy apple juice, chilled

Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.

Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.

Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Boil-Up Technique: Building an emulsionThe skill inside this recipe The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Aotearoa & Maori kitchen