Peruvian · Breakfast
Pan con Chicharrón
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, an earthy, grounding base, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 1 kg pork belly, skin on, in 3 cm cubes
- 500 ml water
- 15 g salt
- 6 garlic cloves, crushed
- 5 g ground cumin
- 2 g black pepper
- 600 g orange sweet potato (camote), in 1 cm slices
- 4 crusty white rolls (pan francés)
- 1 quantity salsa criolla
The skills inside
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs outThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
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
- Put the belly, water, salt, garlic, cumin and pepper in a wide heavy pan and simmer uncovered, the meat barely covered.
- Cook until the water has gone and the sound changes from soft bubbling to a sharp crackle, roughly 45 minutes, then stop stirring and let the cubes fry in their own rendered fat. 45 min
- Turn them once the underside is amber and the skin has blistered glassy, then lift onto a rack; they should sound hollow when knocked together.
- Fry the camote slices in a little of the rendered fat until the edges caramelise and the centre gives to a knife.
- Split the warm rolls, lay in camote, then chicharrón sliced thick, then a fistful of salsa criolla, and eat it standing up.
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.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
The wobble & the skewer: testing a bake 135 recipes
- Tested at the true centre and the thickest point, not at the convenient edge: the edge is done long before the answer is.
- The skewer comes out as the recipe describes, clean and dry or carrying the stated moist crumb, and it does the same on a second test in a different spot.
- The wobble is read in motion: nudged, the centre moves as one set mass with a faint tremble, rather than a liquid ripple travelling across the surface.
- The other signs agree with the test: risen and just shrinking from the sides, the top set and dry to a light touch with no wet gloss on it.
- Pressed lightly at the middle it springs back and leaves no lasting dent.
Where it goes wrong It was judged on the clock and on how the edges looked, so a centre still liquid went to the rack and sank as it cooled, a dense wet seam under a perfectly browned top.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Mimosa (weekends only)
- Also Right
- Cava, straight
- From the Taps
- -
- Zero-Proof
- Fresh orange juice & café au lait
Morning food wants brightness and bubbles, or honest coffee: nothing that argues before noon.
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