Confit Food

Today is the first of the month, so I have a new Hot Flash — a tiny little story to add to my collection.

porkconfit1Okay. T. Lee Harris and I went to Context this past weekend. As usual, we took our own food. Hotel food is usually expensive and fast food is usually kinda bad, and T is gluten-intolerant, so taking our own is a good idea. T even has an electric cooler, so we’re generally good to go. A microwave in the room is nice, but we always have enough stuff that’s good cold that we can scrape by.

This time, I decided to make pork confit. I started with a nice little pork roast rubbed with Mrs. Dash’s Original Blend, a sliced Honeycrisp apple, a sliced sweet onion, some garlic cloves, and some oregano from our back yard.

Yes, really.
Yes, really.

You cook confit long and slow, completely submerged in fat, with maybe a little water or, in this case, white wine. I started by melting 2 cups of lard in my crockpot. I added another cup or so of olive oil. When all that was good and hot, I slid in the pork roast and the other ingredients.

I could have used another cup of olive oil, because the pork roast drew up as it cooked, so some of it was above the liquid level and some of it was barely covered. The part that was covered most deeply was nicest.

After the oil had returned to heat, following the addition of the cold meat, I turned the heat down to LOW and cooked it, UNCOVERED, for 4 hours.

Let it cool in the fat. Remove the meat and store it in the refrigerator.

NOW, if you’re going to do a real confit, you pull off the fat and cover the meat with it. Here’s a good article about how to make confit. Since I wasn’t preserving this, I did NOT store the meat under fat. I stored the fat/juices in a bowl with a plate over the top. As a special bonus surprise, the fat not only congealed overnight, it stuck to the bottom of the plate; when I lifted the plate off, all the fat lifted off with it, leaving the lovely meat juices in the bowl.

So I was left with these products:

porkconfitresultsMeat juices; onion, garlic, and apple; pork roast chunks, pork roast slices. At Fatal Foodies today, I’m telling what I made from them.

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: Characters take their own food somewhere they aren’t, strictly speaking, supposed to.

MA

About

I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, but now live in the woods in southern Indiana. Though I only write fiction, I love to read non-fiction. The more I learn about this world, the more fantastic I see it is.

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One thought on “Confit Food

  1. Jane

    October 1, 2013 at 9:13am

    Yeah. I know some character who did that. 😉

    Permalink  ⋅ Reply

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