A Futures Market in Flavor: Pork Bellies Are Just the Start
By JULIA MOSKIN NY Times 5/7/2003
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TEN years ago, pork bellies were about as likely to appear on a fancy New York restaurant menu as sorghum or feed corn. Bacon in its raw, uncured state, pork belly is the fattiest part of the mature hog, thick stripes of pure white fat and rosy meat. New York chefs have, of course, long used bacon (and its European cousins pancetta, lardons and ventrèche) discreetly, or as a garnish. They have been even more discreet about pork bellies. But now, pork bellies, along with other rich, unabashedly fatty cuts of the pig, have landed right on the menu. The futures market looks fat and happy.
Whopping chunks of pork belly are being served at WD-50, Alain Ducasse, DB Bistro Moderne, Zoë, 66, Brasserie 8 1/2 and 11 Madison Park. Filmy slices of lardo — pure white pork fat — are proudly presented at Le Cirque 2000 and adorn a buzzed-about pizza at Otto. Roast suckling pig, with a pillow of soft fat left intact under crackling skin, has been the most popular main dish at Pico and Chicama since each restaurant opened, and connoisseurs are mourning Christian Delouvrier's suckling pig confit at the late, lamented Lespinasse. Niman Ranch, the esteemed Colorado meat producer, is developing a pure lard in response to consumer demand.
Apparently, connoisseurship of fat, long a competitive sport among chefs and food enthusiasts, has finally trickled down to the culinary cognoscenti. Americans have always had a national weakness for pork at breakfast time, but if you prefer your bacon crisp and your sausages cooked through, you don't belong to this new club. This unctuous pleasure is reserved for those who enjoy the velvety limpness of prosciutto, the soft shreds of a country ham. A taste for pure pork fat, long restricted to a furtive devouring of the white nubbin in the can of baked beans, can now be worn as a badge of honor.
It was Daniel Boulud who first smuggled pork belly onto the main dish side of a menu, in 1993, at Daniel. However, Mr. Boulud admits that in French tradition, it is not eaten at fine restaurants. "You eat it sliced, with mustard and bread, for lunch," he said. "It's cheap. Children love it."
In other words, it's French bologna. Called poitrine de porc, or breast of pork, salted pork belly is a key ingredient in earthy French classics like potée from the Auvergne, Alsatian choucroute and the bistro salad of frisée aux lardons.
By poaching it at low temperature, Mr. Boulud left the cut's thick streaks of fat intact. Then he tricked it out with an exotic spice cure and black truffle jus, crisped the top and sent it out in a charming copper saucepan to favored customers and visiting chefs. With its unabashed stripes of juicy fat and toothsome meat, pork belly became all the rage among Mr. Boulud's colleagues, who busied themselves reinventing the dish.
Chefs love nothing more than a new challenge, and traditional recipes, which often call for curing, poaching, roasting and searing the pork belly, offer plenty of scope for personal variations.
Example: Mr. Boulud's bellies are salt-cured for just a week, but at the restaurant Alain Ducasse, Didier Elena, the chef de cuisine, leaves them hanging (from strings tied to the kitchen ceiling) for at least two months. Julian Alonzo has evolved his pork belly dish at Brasserie 8 1/2 from a tender chunk served with lentils and a poached egg (a worthy bacon-and-egg variation) to an excessively luxurious plate of pork belly topped with osetra caviar and cauliflower foam. Earthily appropriate lentils are the most common sidecar for pork belly (see Patroon, DB Bistro Moderne), but the best dishes also play off the fattiness of the meat with astringent vegetables like endives, leeks or mustard greens.
Fast-forward to this year's model. Just out of the gate at WD-50, Wylie Dufresne is already serving the best high-end pork belly in town, with turnips and a spicy-sweet gingerbread-inspired garnish for contrast. The thin layer of pure fat he leaves on the top is the icing on the cake — extra, but integral to the full effect of the dish. Rachael Carron, the restaurant's assistant manager, said, "I see people cutting off the fat and it just breaks my heart."
Habitués of Chinatown restaurants know that pork belly is nothing new under the pig. It is on the menu at Shanghai restaurants all over the city, and is treated like other fatty, cartilaginous pieces of meat: it is braised with copious garlic, simmered with a sauerkrautlike preserved vegetable or red-cooked in soy, rice wine and brown sugar. In tong po, the ultimate Shanghai pork belly preparation, the meat becomes incidental and the fat is supreme. "The goal when you're making tong po is to get the fat really custardy," said Ed Schoenfeld, a restaurant consultant and expert student of Chinese cooking. At Yeah Shanghai Deluxe on Bayard Street, the tong po pork is cooked soft and then sliced into petals for serving. Mr. Schoenfeld explained that the flowerlike cut refers to pork bellies' name in Chinese — five-flower meat, for their three layers of fat and two of meat.
On the semi-Chinese menu at Jean-Georges Vongerichten's 66 in TriBeCa are thick batons of pork belly called lacquered pork: diners who expect to find Mr. Vongerichten's signature elegance on the plate will be surprised by the blatantly fatty dish, napped in a sticky-sweet marmalade of ginger and shallots.
Far beyond fatty is a delicacy known in its native Tuscany as lardo; it is, quite simply, pure fat, savored in melting-thin slices as if it were a fine cheese. Though lardo has recently made a splashy landing on the New York restaurant scene, Sirio Maccioni has been serving it at Le Cirque since 1974 and, more recently, at Osteria del Circo, shaved into thin slices and draped on warm toast. In truffle season, a truly intoxicating variation will have white truffle on top; like butterfat, pork fat has a stunning way of making flavors bloom in your mouth.
"I grew up on lardo," Mr. Maccioni said last week, adding that it is most famously made near Forte dei Marmi, where he lived as a child. To make it, the thick streak of fat that runs down the animal's back (the belly is too meaty!) is rubbed with spices, salt and rosemary. The lardo is then aged for at least six months in the dark, cool caves of nearby Carrara, where the favorite white marble of Caesars and sculptors has been quarried for at least 2,000 years.
In the absence of ancient marble caves, you can age your lardo in plastic tubs in the basement, as Mark Ladner, the chef and an owner of Lupa and Otto, does. When his partner Mario Batali proposed putting lardo on the menu, Mr. Ladner was dubious about serving it, and even more dubious about making it. But, he said, the lardo pizza that is now on the menu at Otto is shockingly popular. It is also ridiculously simple — the combination of yeasty crust, lardo melting in the heat and fresh rosemary makes for a perfect combination.
Americans, especially if they couldn't afford the meatier cuts of pork, used to be well aware of the incomparable flavor of the fat. According to Shirley Corriher, a food scientist, every icebox in the South had a chunk of streak-o'-lean, or fatback, in it. A piece of fatback was always tossed into simmering pots of greens and dried beans, melted fatback made the ideal cooking medium for cornbread, fatback stuffed into a leftover breakfast biscuit was a filling lunch.
Fatback, salt pork and lard have almost disappeared from New York restaurants and food markets since what might be called the Great Fat Panic began in the 1970's. The success of the pro-fat Atkins diet, among other factors, has done something to diminish this trend, particularly lately.
"Lard is one of the soapboxes I like to get on," Ms. Corriher said. "Yes, lard is 100 percent fat. So is olive oil." And according to the Agriculture Department, lard is lower in saturated fat, and higher in mono- and poly-unsaturated fats than butter. The department's nutrient database also reports that it is lower in cholesterol.
Dr. Frank B. Hu, an associate professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, said research shows that lard and butter "aren't public enemy No. 1 any more." It is instead the hydrogenated fats — margarine, for instance, the so-called healthy fat of the 1970's — that have turned out to be the real bad guys of fat, he said.
Still, as the American people grew fearful of lard, American pigs grew noticeably leaner. According to the National Pork Board, which regards this statistic as cause for celebration, today's pigs are 31 percent less fatty than those of 1983. Chefs agree that commercial pork is now so lean that it is almost impossible to cook. They are lobbying artisanal pork producers, like Niman Ranch, Vermont Quality Meats and Valley Farmers, to keep their pigs layered with thick, firm, white fat.
As Josh Eden, chef de cuisine at 66, said last week, oblivious of the crowd eating dumplings in the dining room behind him, "When you want flavor, you want to see fat, right?"