Many people ask us how we develop our menus and dishes, and the truth is it involves a highly unscientific process. Shaped by meals from childhood, inspired by food we eat, and refined by ideas in magazines and books—something clicks, and the ideas unspool like a ball of thread.
Not unusually, we will text each other with cryptic messages: “Toms candied, curds”, “another example.” Recipes and flavor combinations are found scribbled on post-its, receipts, or whatever piece of paper that happens to be within arms reach. Our most favourite recipes become shape-shifters, showing up as an entrée here, converted into a one-bite popper there, and even end up as a sandwich. One such recipe is our Lemongrass Porchetta.
Over at Kickshaw Cookery, we have an unabashed love for pork. And the two-day process for our Lemongrass Porchetta is testament to this. Reading old e-mails, we realized that the original idea for this recipe has been kicking around since we started Kickshaw Cookery ~ a little over a year ago. The charge was to develop a sample item to be given out at an indoor Farmers’ Market. So immediately, the nature of the event gave us some parameters to work around. 1.) It had to be fairly easy to eat, 2.) We had to be able to make a lot of it, as we would need to be at the market for 8 hours, and 3.) In that one bite, it had to evoke what Kickshaw Cookery was about.
We settled on pork as a protein fairly quickly, and a sandwich form (for ease of eating) soon afterwards. But, what kind of pork sandwich? That was the question. Did we want to do a Cerdo al Horno, using pork belly slow roasted until a beautiful crackling developed? Or did we want to do a spin on the Southeast Asian Bánh Mì, with grilled pork, paté made from scratch and served with house-made pickles?
Neither of the above were quite what we were looking for, so we then hit the cookbooks for some additional research and came across the Zuni Café’s Mock Porchetta. It was a slow-roasted pork shoulder (perfect, affordable and high yielding!), was stuffed with aromatics and herbs (sage, onions, rosemary, garlic), and it could totally be sliced and served in a sandwich (easily consumed!) This was a great jumping off point, but how could we build on it and make it distinctively Kickshaw Cookery’s?
We had an idea: Earlier that summer, we had brined and then roasted a whole suckling pig, the results of which had sealed our faith in brining meat. We knew that whatever the end recipe, we definitely wanted to brine the pork. And, as is always the case with us, ideas come back around. We returned to our Southeast Asian roots and revisited the initial inspiration of a Bánh Mì. We loved the idea of pickles in a sandwich to add a crunch, as well as acid to cut through the fattiness. In the Visayas region of the Philippines, when they roast a whole pig on a spit, they stuff it with lemongrass, garlic, scallions and onions and swath it with a sugared coconut water as it is cooked over an open flame. People all over the world, Bourdain included (check it out here), swear by this mixture. Using that as a base, we then developed an herb stuffing mixture that included lemongrass, garlic and scallions, as well as Thai bird chilies, five spice, fish sauce, ginger, cane sugar and coconut milk. And since we were slow roasting it in the oven, we used the coconut water (this time un-sugared) to baste as it cooked slowly for 4 hours. The result is Lemongrass Porchetta: whole pork shoulder that has been brined for 12-hours, stuffed and slow roasted like a traditional Porchetta, using Southeast Asian herbs and spices instead. It is truly a gorgeous and versatile roast. We have served this as a sandwich with the pickles, a Sriracha aioli and Enoki mushrooms, as well as an entrée with shredded red cabbage for a wedding banquet for 300 people.
We shared our recipe with the December-January issue of FOOD Magazine (Philippines.) Click here to check it out.
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