Alsace & the North · Starter
Potjevleesch
- Advanced
- 45 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, wood-smoke running underneath, on a rich, rounded finish.
Ingredients
- 300 g rabbit, boned, in 3 cm batons
- 300 g chicken thigh, boned, in 3 cm batons
- 300 g veal shoulder, in 3 cm batons
- 300 g pork belly, in 3 cm batons
- 1 pig trotter, split
- 400 ml white beer or dry white wine
- 100 ml white wine vinegar
- 2 onions, sliced
- 8 juniper berries
- 3 bay leaves
- 10 white peppercorns
- 12 g salt
- 12 thin slices unsmoked streaky bacon, to line
- 2 leaves gelatine, as insurance
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieveMarinating: acid, salt and timeKnife cuts: dice, julienne, biasThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · 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
- Marinate the four meats overnight in the beer, vinegar, onion, juniper, bay and pepper, turning once; the surfaces firm up and pale.
- Line a terrine with the bacon, stand the batons upright and packed tight with the four meats alternating, and tuck the split trotter down one side.
- Pour in the strained marinade to just below the top of the meat, cover with paper and a lid, and cook at 150C (300F) for three hours, until a baton parts under a fork with no spring left in it.
- Spoon a little hot cooking liquid onto a cold saucer and wait five minutes: it must set to a firm wobble. If it slumps, dissolve the soaked gelatine into the pot.
- Weight the terrine lightly, chill overnight until fully set, then turn out and slice thick, serving at cellar temperature with frites and mustard.
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.
Marinating: acid, salt and time 70 recipes
- Contact is total: every surface is wetted, and the pieces are not welded into a clump with dry faces where they pressed together.
- The stated time was kept and kept cold, read against a clock, because this is the one technique where longer is a different result rather than a safer one.
- It worked at the surface and no further: cut a piece and the marinade’s colour stops a few millimetres in. A protein gone opaque and chalky to the centre before any heat reached it has been cooked by the acid.
- The texture is still springy and whole, not mushy, mealy, or fraying at the surface when it is lifted.
- Where the next step browns it, the surface was patted dry first: a wet surface cannot brown, and the marinade’s sugars will scorch before the food colours.
Where it goes wrong It was left well beyond the stated time on the assumption that more is better, so acid and salt worked through the thin edges: those cook to cotton and read grainy while the thick centre tastes of nothing at all.
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
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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