Pork Rillettes

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.

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.