Danish · Main
Boller i Karry
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 500 g minced pork
- 1 onion, finely grated
- 8 g fine salt
- 1 egg
- 40 g plain flour
- 120 ml whole milk
- 1.2 litres water
- 2 bay leaves
- 40 g butter
- 40 g plain flour, for the sauce
- 2 tsp mild curry powder
- 100 ml double cream
- 300 g long grain rice, to serve
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilSalted water & the float testStraining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg
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
- Work the mince with the salt and grated onion alone, beating hard for 2 minutes, until it turns sticky and glossy and hangs off the spoon. 2 min
- Beat in the egg, then the flour, then the milk a little at a time, until the farce is soft but still holds a rounded shape on a spoon.
- Bring the water and bay to the boil, then drop it to a bare shiver at 85C (185F); shape the boller with two wet spoons, lower them in and poach 8 to 10 minutes, until they float and feel firm at the centre. Lift out and keep warm. 10 min
- Melt the butter, fry the curry powder in it for 30 seconds until it smells sweet rather than dusty, stir in the flour, then whisk in 600 ml of the strained poaching stock.
- Simmer 10 minutes to a sauce that coats a spoon, stir in the cream, and return the boller to warm through without boiling. Serve over rice. 10 min
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.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chenin Blanc (Vouvray sec)
- 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.
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