Italian · Main
Cotechino con Lenticchie
- Advanced
- 1 h 30 m
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, an earthy, grounding base, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- 400 g pork rind, scraped clean of bristle
- 700 g pork shoulder, in 3 cm cubes
- 300 g pork back fat, in 3 cm cubes
- 31 g fine salt, 2.2 percent of the 1.4 kg of meat
- 3.5 g curing salt number 1, 0.25 percent of the meat, weighed on a scale reading to 0.01 g
- 4 g ground black pepper
- 2 g ground cloves
- 2 g grated nutmeg
- 2 g ground cinnamon
- 3 garlic cloves, crushed
- 80 ml dry white wine
- 1 m beef middle casing, 55 mm to 60 mm, soaked
- 400 g Castelluccio or Puy lentils
- 1 onion, in 5 mm dice
- 1 carrot, in 5 mm dice
- 1 celery stalk, in 5 mm dice
- 30 ml olive oil
- 1 bay leaf
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Brining & curingSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilKeeping the cooking liquidKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
Allergen screen
Found: celery · alcohol
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
- Simmer the rind 45 minutes, until a fingernail sinks in, cool it hard in the fridge, then grind it with the shoulder and back fat through a 4 mm plate into a chilled bowl. 45 min
- Work in the salt, curing salt, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, garlic and wine for 2 minutes until the mass is tacky, stuff it into the beef casing with no air, tie both ends, and rest it in the fridge 24 hours. 2 min
- Prick the sausage in six places, lower it into water held at 80C (175F), and poach 3 hours. The water must never boil. 180 min
- Sweat the onion, carrot and celery in the oil, add the lentils, bay and water to cover by 3 cm, and simmer 25 minutes until tender but still whole, salting them only once they are soft. 25 min
- Rest the cotechino 10 minutes out of the water, cut it into 1 cm rounds, and lay them over the lentils with a spoonful of the poaching liquid. 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.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Syrah (northern Rhône) or Nebbiolo
- Also Right
- The braising wine itself, better bottle
- From the Taps
- Belgian dubbel
- Zero-Proof
- Beet & blackcurrant shrub
Long-cooked beef trades bite for depth: savory, structured reds echo the pot; and pouring the braise’s own region is law.
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