French · Starter
Rillons de Tours
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, acid holding everything up to the light.
Ingredients
- 1.2 kg pork belly, rind on, in 5 cm cubes
- 24 g coarse salt, 2 percent of the meat
- 4 g cracked black pepper
- 4 g thyme leaves
- 2 bay leaves, torn
- 1.2 kg lard
- 15 g caster sugar
- 100 ml dry Vouvray or other dry white wine
The skills inside
Deglazing & pan saucesBrining & curingThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
Allergen screen
Found: 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
- Toss the belly cubes with the salt, pepper, thyme and bay and cure them covered in the fridge for 12 hours, then pour off the brine that has collected and pat every face of every cube dry. 600 min
- Melt the lard in a narrow, deep pot over low heat and lower the cubes in rind side down, adding more lard if you need it so the fat stands above them; they should whisper, not sizzle.
- Hold the fat at a lazy blip, around 90C (195F), uncovered, for 2 hours, until a skewer meets no resistance and the rind gives under a thumbnail. 120 min
- Lift the cubes into a wide hot pan, scatter the sugar over them and let it darken to the colour of an old penny, then deglaze with the wine and roll the rillons in the syrup for a minute. Eat warm, or cold with mustard and a sharp salad.
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.
Deglazing & pan sauces 49 recipes
- The pan still holds its fond. Nothing has been rinsed, wiped, or soaked, and the browned layer is intact on the floor.
- Excess fat was poured off first and the browned layer left behind; the fat is not the flavour and a sauce carrying all of it will not come together.
- The liquid went into a still-hot pan and the floor came clean: scraped while it bubbles, the base goes from stuck brown to bare metal and the sauce darkens as it takes it up.
- The fond was brown and not black. A burnt floor dissolves into bitterness that cannot be seasoned out, and is better washed away than deglazed.
- Reduced first and seasoned afterwards, tasted at the consistency it will be served at rather than at the start.
Where it goes wrong The pan was left to stand and go cold before anybody came back to it. Cold fond will not dissolve, so the scraping lifts nothing, and the sauce arrives thin and pale with the flavour it was supposed to carry still welded to the metal.
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
- 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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