West Virginia · Side
Ramps and Potatoes
- Easy
- 35 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 300g ramps, cleaned, whites and greens separated
- 700g potatoes, sliced thin
- 115g bacon, diced
- 2 tbsp bacon fat or butter
- Salt and black pepper
- Cider vinegar to finish
Equipment
Skillet
The skills inside
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy
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
- Render the bacon in a cast-iron skillet until crisp; lift out and keep the fat.
- Add the potatoes in an even layer and cook over medium heat 12-15 min, turning occasionally, until browned and tender. 15 min
- Add the chopped ramp whites and cook 3 min until softened. 3 min
- Stir in the ramp greens and cook 1 min only: they wilt instantly. 1 min
- Season, return the bacon, and finish with a splash of vinegar.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique 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.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- 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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