Rillettes

This dish can't really be assigned to a particular day since they were cooked on Wednesday, "processed" on Thursday, and then aged until today and they'll be eaten over the next few days. Na ja...

Anyway, I made rillettes. I based the recipe on the one in Techniques, but I made modifications based on what I found at the Coop and what we had in the fridge.

For the meat I used 500g pork shoulder and 300g pork breast (with bones). I cut the breast meat off the ribss and cut everything into 2-3cm cubes and then poached with the ribs, a supplemental soup bone that was left over from Wednesday's meal, an herb packet (made from two sprigs of parsley, two sprigs of thyme, 2 crushed allspice berries, 1 clove, 1 bay leaf, and four fennel seeds), a few grinds of black pepper, a good quantity of salt, and enough water to cover the whole mess by a few cm. This poached gently for 6 hours, then I fished the bones and herb packet out and let it sit overnight. On Thursday morning I transferred everything to a bowl and stirred it vigorously to break the chunks of meat up into threads. Along the way I picked out any large pieces of fat. After testing the salt levels, I packed the meat into ramekins, covered them, and put them in the fridge to mature.

We tried the first ramekin this morning and were very, very pleased with how things turned out.