3 Ingredients or Less: Easy Steamed Clams

This recipe for steamed clams is so easy. Using only water, butter, and white wine, the base of the broth provides a blank canvas to let your culinary imagination run wild. The herbs can be parsley, oregano or thyme, with added flavours coming from pancetta and chorizo, while the broth can be fortified with chicken stock and/or a bit of cream. Make it Thai with lemongrass, coconut milk and lime, or French with saffron and tomatoes for a light version of a bouillabaisse. Whichever way you go, the result will be a casual, but sophisticated dish made for sharing.

It doesn’t take more than 20 minutes to make, which gives you a lot of time to do something else, like setting your TV to record the Olympics closing ceremony.

Steamed Clams in Herbed White Wine and Butter Broth
recipe via Mac’s Oysters

INGREDIENTS
3 lbs of clams
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup white wine
(alternatively, you can do 1 full cup of just water or wine)
3 big tablespoons butter
Onion, garlic, parsley, and smoked bacon, diced and chopped to your taste and liking
Lemons

INSTRUCTIONS
Bring water to a boil in a medium pot. Add butter and let melt over medium heat. Add onions, garlic, parsley, and bacon and cook for 2-3 minutes until the onions become translucent. Pour in the wine and let it simmer before adding in the clams and a squeeze of lemon juice. Cover the pot and cook the clams for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until they open. Discard unopened clams and serve in a bowl with bread to dip into the broth.

Enjoy!

Easy Pork Belly Crackling

I’ve been badgering and hounding Leo over the past few months to write something for the blog, especially after he went and made a roast pork belly without me one weekend (sad face)! After a solid week of pushy, cohersive tactics and petty whines, here’s a tasty sample of what’s to come from this guy. Photos are also by him. – P

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“You might say that the secret ingredient… is salt.” – Marge Simpson

Pork belly is a widely available and relatively inexpensive cut of pigmeat you may know as PURE AMERICAN BACON. In Toronto, porcine crackling has been observed as a storefront staple of Chinese BBQ restaurants for decades now, and one hopes that same longevity will  be shared by the recent spate of Italian porchetta in hogtown (not to mention the gold standard that is Filipino lechon). As a fan of all these varieties but not the prep work required, I was taken by the results of this stripped-down DIY version. This may well be the most forgiving (read “easy”) pork crackling recipe ever and you can count on it to yield crisp savoury crackling that peels away to reveal a succulent roast every time:

Ingredients & Tools

• Coarse salt
• Slab of pork belly
• Blow dryer (yes, a hair dryer)
• Box cutter (I’ve found that a single edge razor blade works best)
• Kettle of boiling water

Step 1 – Buy some Pork Belly

Start with a slab of nice, fatty pork belly that’s available at most grocery stores. Your choices will be with bone or without bone. I usually go boneless as bones weigh/cost more and can take longer to cook through, but it’s your preference. Don’t be afraid to buy a fattier cut either, this is where bacon comes from remember?

Step 2 – Score, Scald & Salt
Carefully score the skin if your butcher didn’t already do it for you. Break out the hardware supplies for a box cutter with a new blade or razor. You’ll need a sharp blade to do this cleanly because scoring raw pig skin is a bit like cutting through a piece of leather on a foundation of jello.

Score about 1 cm deep through the skin and down into the fat (or just before you hit the meat in leaner areas). Once you’re done, set the pork on a baking rack in the sink and slowly pour an entire kettle of boiling water over the skin, scalding the entire surface evenly. The runoff will cook the sides of the meat a bit too but don’t worry, scalding the skin is essential as it causes separation between the scoring – its edges will curl up slightly and create nice gaps for you to rub salt into.

Pat everything dry with tea towels and blow-dry the meat for about 10-15 minutes until it is drier than a Woody Allen joke. Drying out the skin thoroughly is the trick here for crispy crackling.  Finish the preparation by rubbing salt all over, making sure you get lots of salt into the gaps of the skin.

Cover your dehydrated and salty pigmeat with a dry tea towel and stick it in the fridge overnight to let the salt draw out any remaining moisture.

Step 3 – Baking

Preheat your oven to the highest setting. Some people brush the skin with oil or even hot fat before baking but I find it’s not necessary if your cut is fatty enough to begin with. In a deep baking tray, place your pork belly on the middle shelf skin side up (you can roast some potatoes on the side if you have the room) and leave it to crackle on the highest setting for about 20 minutes or until you see that all the skin is browned, bubbled and blistered. Turn the heat down to 180 ˚C (356 ˚F) and let it slow-roast for an additional 30 minutes per pound of meat.

You’ll know it’s ready to eat if you can pull the pieces of crackling off and away from the fatty layer effortlessly. At this point you can singe off any unappetizingly stubborn pig hairs that survived the fires using a lighter or blow torch.

Done!

Enjoy it with rice, potatoes, or in a sandwich (with lots of mustard).