Cooking with Jonny69 and Gordon: Pork cheeks in spices

[randomshenans]

I bought this yesterday, well a couple of these, at the supermarket...

Decisions...

 

[Jonny69]

Wow, that's pretty cheap! They do whole heads in Brixton market for £5 but I've no idea what to do with the rest of it or how to dispose of the skull without scaring the neighbours

 

[randomshenans]

I'm going to be doing it this week. Braised in wine and stock. Will post it up what I decide to do when I figure it out...

 

[Jolteh]

That meal looks awesome.

 

[madtoady]

Never knowingly eaten/cooked pork cheeks before but your meal looks delicious.

 

[DiCe!]

Awful lot of honey, I will deff try this but might down the honey just a tad as im not a huge fan of it, looks like a good cut of meat though!

yum!

 

[Streeteh]

I love the sound of this but the photos have now made me hungry... very hungry.

 

[Jonny69]

Awful lot of honey, I will deff try this but might down the honey just a tad as im not a huge fan of it, looks like a good cut of meat though!

yum!

It is a hell of a lot of honey. Like I said, you need to use a lot of seasoning to counter it

 

[Streeteh]

Found some pork cheeks in Waitrose today, 520g for £1.50. Going to have a crack at this tomorrow.

 

[Glaucus]

Also got some pig cheeks in my box this month, so will be trying this out at some point.

 

[LeJosh]

Wow, that's pretty cheap! They do whole heads in Brixton market for £5 but I've no idea what to do with the rest of it or how to dispose of the skull without scaring the neighbours

Head cheese.

 

[FrenchTart]

Head cheese.

Brawn is the most disgusting form of food known to man

 

[dinger44]

You can buy tubs of head cheese in the supermarket in Canada. Id always wondered what it was lol.

 

[Streeteh]

Well into cooking this now, it smells amazing but i'm 2.5hours into cooking and there's still no sign of it going tender. Going to give it another 30 mins and hope.

 

[Barry Smalley]

Make sure you update the thread then please - am interested to know how it goes.

 

[Streeteh]

FRIKKIN YUM!

 

[pooey]

Looking good there

I regularly cook pig cheek, my preference for cooking it is confit though.

Such an under-rated cut of meat. Cheap too.

 

[Jonny69]

FRIKKIN YUM!

No words needed, just three of these:

 

[Streeteh]

Just a more wordy update.

In the end it required 3 hours of cooking at 150C (using an oven thermometer, so temp was accurate) to get it nice and tender. Boiling down the sauce took a further 15 mins which was roughly how long the mash took too.

Johnny wasn't kidding, you need a LOT of salt in there. At first it tasted sickly sweet and a didn't have a clue what Ramsay was going for when he wrote this recipe, after adding quite a bit of salt suddenly what it was meant to taste like appeared 'on the horizon' as it were, it started to make sense, i knew what i was aiming for. Added a bit more salt and it was there.

 

[glitch]

Then tip everything into a casserole dish, all the remaining ingedients and put it into the oven at 150 for 2 to 2 1/2 hours. I did mine in the pressure cooker at full pressure but a low heat because of the honey, for 30 minutes.

This is probably the single best 'cooking with' thread that I've seen this far. Amazing work.

One question though - how do you work that particular piece of timing out?

I bow to your superior knowledge where pressure-cooking is concerned, and I'm trying to get my head around the whole thing before I borrow my old dear's Prestige, sans instruction manual.