A recipe for pork, girolles, and burnt apricots

Something unseasonally seasonal

Hello and welcome back to you, dear reader.

It is a particularly fine and sunny day here in Finland, a day on which you find me thinking about how much of a filthy, British, goblin I really am.

And it’s all because of this concept of “summer” food.

You see, I admire those discerning gastronomic sorts, decked out, as I tend to imagine them, in their white linen dresses, Gallic striped tops and sailor shorts, who willingly alter their eating habits with the arrival of warmer months. I find it so sophisticated when they opt for their cold soups or “variations” on grated tomato.

I, meanwhile, lovely as I know such things are, remain firmly in the category of British degenerate person who gladly eats deep-fried cod and chips on the beach, in 90 degree heat, with a little handkerchief tied round their head for protection from the sun.

(Find archive image below demonstrating what I look like on a beach/hot places, for those interested…)

Portrait of the writer as a young man about to pass out in the heat of Sri Lanka

I suppose I love what I love to eat so much that such details as heat or equivalent bodily discomforts just don’t factor in to my decision making. Which, TMI and all that, is why my wife has no sympathy for how miserable I am the day after eating my favourite spicy curry.

No, it’s never too hot for this British troll to fancy something greasy, or rich, or, preferably, battered.

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But I’m being silly. Eating light and “summery” food isn’t really just about the heat. It’s about the quality and freshness of the ingredients we are blessed with during these months of warmth and sun and life. Months that are particularly few up here in this most northern reach of Europe that I call home.

In the restaurant at the moment, for example, we have two very different forms of carrot that tell this story perfectly:

1. We have the big-uns that have been stored, most likely in a cold cellar somewhere, for months, and…

2. The little-uns, delivered daily at the moment, still with their unblemished green plumage rudely erupting from their tops.

I’ve been using the old ones for carrot puree, which requires long, slow cooking, lots of butter, and enough sugar to give a rhino diabetes to get the sweet richness from them.

The young carrots, however, so sweet and so tender as they are, need nothing but a few minutes in salted boiling water. The difference between summer’s freshness and those from the cellar unmistakable.

So, yes, I get the grated tomatoes, the quickly blanched and crispy carrots, the cold soups. Nature doesn’t need much help from the cook with the ingredient at it’s freshest and finest.

That said, my recipe today, in it’s creamy, slow-cookedness that hardly screams summer, makes use of some exceptionally seasonal ingredients in a slightly unseasonal way to get something lovely from them.

The hero of this dish, the thing everything else dances around, is the girolles. AKA chanterelles or, rather pleasing to my ear, kantarelli in Finnish. Now July is but an otter’s whisper away, I will soon be found during my free time in various wooded areas in south-west Finland foraging for these lovely wild mushrooms. They have such a rich, buttery, even fruity smell that some people consider reminiscent of apricots. Finding them on the woodland earth growing like weeds here in Finland (I’m really not exaggerating) makes up for the 8 months of snow to be found in the darker months of the year.

It is this fruitiness of the mushrooms and how much pork loves a fruity friend on the plate that gave me the idea of bringing them together with in-season apricots and cider. The fatty cream, meanwhile, provides my very favourite way of coaxing the flavour out of these very special mushrooms. Living in countries such as Sweden and Finland where girolle foraging is a national pastime, I’ve had them prepared all manner of ways. Pickled girolles are particularly lovely. I’ve had them used to flavour caramel which I promise is a real treat. But my favourite will always be eating them in a cream sauce.

Whether or not this dish is summery, it’s one of my favourite ways of using some very summery ingredients.

A note about burning things…

Another recipe from Wil Reidie, another request for you to burn something. What’s it with the burning? I want to explain with an anecdote. Last week in the restaurant I was tasked with coming up with some kind of herby butter to use on a lunch special. The next morning I put my idea into action and I was very happy with the result. When my colleague, a very good cook I should add, tasted it he tried to guess what was in it. His guess was sage and thyme and chives.

The truth is there was only chives in it. Half of the chives, however, I’d grilled until charred.

What burning things a little bit does, adding a little char, is add complexity. It requires people far more intelligent than me to explain flavour compounds and chemical reactions and all that, but burning things (in a controlled way) does something so much more than just adding a “burn” flavour. After all, the vanilla, toast and butterscotch notes found in expensive cognacs all come from the burning of the barrels.

I particularly love what burning fruit can bring to a recipe, as I do here with the apricots. But if you’re interested in trying this technique out very simply, one of my favourite uses of burned fruit is lemons with fish.

Next time you are planning to use a lemon wedge with some fish, grill the hell out of the lemon first. By which I mean, slice the lemon in half, rub a little oil on the cut side, and place cut side down in a hot pan, skillet or barbecue grill. Keep it there (no need to move it) until it is nicely charred and really starting to blacken. If you’re anything like me (and hundreds of people I’ve cooked for in restaurants in Sweden) you’ll never squeeze raw lemon over your fish again.

A recipe for pork shoulder with girolles and burnt apricots

Ingredients 

1 kg to 1.5kg boneless pork shoulder
450ml dry cider (I mean the alcoholic stuff, which I think is known as hard cider in the US. I like brands like Magners or Bulmers because it’s what I can get here in Finland)
300g chanterelles/girolles
6 apricots
250 ml heavy cream (I use 36% fat content)
A good handful of dill
5 allspice berries
1 medium onion 
4 or 5 cloves of garlic

Orange and green

Method

First step is the easy one. Heat your oven to 150°C/300°F

Second step is to brown off the meat. Heat a little oil in a dutch oven/casserole and colour all sides of the meat so it is golden and caramelised and lovely. Set this aside and "deglaze" the pan of any residue with a splash of water.  Be sure to save this liquid once you've removed any bits (they have a name for this in France, it's called déglaçage). It should be full of flavour but do taste it to see if it’s worth keeping. If the residue had coloured too much before deglazing the déglaçage will be bitter and no use to anything other than the bin.

Dry your now "clean" pan and cook off the girolles on a medium-high heat. Don’t use any oil at this stage. Let the mushrooms cook dry and slowly release their water until they are taking on some colour. This stage cooks away their water, concentrates the flavour and (for those of a scientific bent of mind) encourages enzyme activity that develops flavour as well.

(Note: Rolling out that enzyme factoid and the déglaçage thing will absolutely make you irresistible to anyone at your next social event/church meeting/court summons. Admittedly, I haven’t tested this myself but I’m almost certain it’s true. Thank me later.)

Anyway, once you have that colour on the dry cooked mushrooms, set them aside for later. Add your pork, déglaçage, and the rest of the cider back into your dutch oven. Slice your onions and garlic and add them to the pot along with the allspice berries and about a teaspoon salt. Cook this with the lid on for around 2.5 to 3 hours, turning the pork occasionally, until it is starting to become really tender. This amount of cooking time is pretty much the minimum I leave it with a 1.5kg cut, but leave it for longer and it just gets more and more tender. 

Meanwhile you can burn your apricots. Slice them in half, remove the stone, and rub each half with oil on the cut side. Now, in a very hot pan (really hot) fry them cut side down until they have blackened. Then set them aside for later, they don't need to cook through, you just want the colour and flavour of that char.

Burnt apricots. Beautiful and delicious

After your pork has been cooking for 2.5 hours, check whether the meat is tender enough for you. I like it best when it still has some body to it, not totally falling apart, so I can portion into chunks and return it to the sauce.

With the meat cooked to your liking, you’re ready to start the final cooking stages by adding the mushrooms and cream. Check how thick the sauce is. If you'd like it thicker, remove the lid, if you like a thinner sauce keep the lid on. Either way, cook with the mushrooms another 20 mins or so before checking the seasoning and adding the apricots for a further ten minutes to heat through and soften slightly.

To serve, cut your dill finely and stir it through your sauce. Serve with bread, rice or, my favourite, mashed potatoes.

You’re damn right I’m a mashed potatoes in summer kind of guy.

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A new thing… from my bookshelf

Over the past weeks I’ve had a couple of messages asking me to share my favourite food reads. That in mind, I thought it would be a nice addition to my free weekly newsletter to recommend a book/newsletter/article/whatever for you to check out, be it one I’ve loved for years or recently discovered.

First up is a writer I’ve admired and had on my shelf for many years. His name is

Thom Eagle

. And do you see that? I can even link to him directly because he, too, writes a newsletter that I can very much recommend.

Over and above that though, it is his book First, Catch that I absolutely implore you to go out, buy, and start enjoying. It is a “cook book”, but unlike any I’ve read before. Instead of step by step recipes, it tells the story of a single meal. Thom’s prose is great but what I love most about the book is that the experience of reading it is like being in the kitchen with a great head chef. You don’t just follow recipe steps blindly with this book. Instead, by absorbing the theory, the explanation, and process behind the cooking choices Eagle takes you through, you learn by doing through the act of reading alone.

Anyway, I couldn’t be happier to start this little recommendations section with Thom’s book. It’s a cracker.

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Well that’s it for this week, and thanks for reading.

If you enjoy my work, and can stretch to becoming a paid subscriber, then I hope you will click the button below and upgrade today. I treat this newsletter like a second job, if you can help make it a paid one it would mean the world to me.

See you next time,

Wil

PS.

If anyone (family and friends not allowed) replies to this email or comments with the explanation for what I was doing in the above archive picture, there’s a free yearly paid subscription in it for you. (1st person to give right answer only of course)