Smoked pork collar I found at a local eastern European butcher.\u00a0 This kind of smoked meat is quite salty, so it’s necessary to soak for a long time to remove some of the brine.<\/p>\n
Weirdly, one of the recipes I found for this says you can smoke a pork neck yourself by putting it on a rack in a dutch oven, putting rice and herbs under it, and heating the pot until the herbs start smoking.<\/p>\n This strikes me as nonsense, and the pictures of their results would seem to confirm it.\u00a0 The fully “smoked” pork in their recipe looked grey, rather than ham-colored pink like ours did.<\/p>\n At any rate, the actual cooking process once you’ve soaked your pork is pretty straightforward – you just boil it for several hours along with a bunch of aromatics like carrots and leeks.\u00a0 There IS an onion in this recipe, as per usual, but in this case it only gets chopped in half and has a few cloves stuck in it.<\/p>\n Which leaves us to talk about the much more labor intensive part of this recipe – the fava beans.\u00a0 While on my shopping trip, I picked up a bag of dried fava beans, but then to my great surprise, the next store I walked into had them fresh.\u00a0 In Canada, in February.\u00a0 Definitely not what I was expecting.<\/p>\n We’ve never cooked with these things before, and they are kind of monsters. They look like this when you first get them.<\/p>\n Those have to be shelled, and the inner beans look like this.<\/p>\n Wait… a\u00a0velout\u00e9<\/em> sauce?\u00a0 Is this… is this FRENCH cooking?\u00a0 Oh dear.\u00a0 OK, let’s figure this out.<\/p>\n First, you make a roux with flour and butter.\u00a0 Different recipes disagreed on the color of the roux, and the associated cooking time.\u00a0 We went with about 10 minutes of constant stirring and a medium blonde color.<\/p>\n We didn’t detect any petroleum ourselves, fortunately.<\/p>\n Once the sauce has thickened, you toss in the beans and your seasoning.\u00a0 The recipe calls for fresh savory, and we subbed that (as suggested) with sage and thyme.\u00a0 However, we forgot to reduce the quantity for dried, rather than fresh herbs, so it took on a bit of a grey cast.\u00a0 It didn’t TASTE overseasoned, but it looked somewhat weird.<\/p>\n Finally, we parboiled some new potatoes, fried them in oil, and then let them soak up some more of the stock.<\/p>\n And here’s our final spread.<\/p>\n Not bad, right?\u00a0 The pork is the healthy pink color it’s supposed to be, and was still a nice chewy texture.\u00a0 The beans were OK by themselves, but great scooped onto a bite of pork.\u00a0 And finally, what’s not to like about fried potatoes in pork stock?\u00a0 We drank the rest of the wine, and it was a nice accompaniment.<\/p>\n So that’s Luxembourg! I’d make the pork part again, although I’m not sure fava beans are worth the effort.\u00a0 Next up, the “M” countries, starting with Madagascar.\u00a0 And there are a LOT of M countries, so we’ll be here a while.<\/p>\n Recipe: At Yale, there’s a saying: “Your Veritas sucks if you ain’t got no Lux.”\u00a0 I could explain that, but it’s not worth the effort, really. I think a BETTER saying for today’s post would be “Your Benelux sucks if you … Continue reading ![\"Pork](\"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/20250223_171033.jpg\")
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\nThose beans have to be blanched, i.e., tossed in boiling water for a few minutes, and then dropped in ice water to stop cooking.
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\nAnd then…. you have to peel them some MORE!
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\nThe final peeled, blanched beans have a lovely green color (mostly) and a taste that’s like a lima bean but a bit milder.\u00a0 These are prepared with a velout\u00e9 sauce.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nNext, you go in with stock (from the pork) and wine. Now, our local liquor store din’t have any Luxembourg wine, but we did find a Riesling from very nearby. (Nearby to Luxembourg, not nearby to the liquor store.)\u00a0 Neither Leigh or I were terribly familiar with Rieslings, but we were a bit taken aback by the Wikipedia subsection: “Petroleum notes in aged Riesling wines<\/a>“.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nJudd mat Gaardebounen<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"