I am ready to eat Colombian food again. That was not the case when Martha and I got back from Colombia in mid July. On the flight home, somewhere over the Caribbean, I became violently ill and Martha was in the same state by the evening. Although our flu lasted less than 24 hours, eating anything made me nauseous for about a week, and thanks to the magic of taste aversions even the thought of an arepa made my stomach churn. But by last Friday I was over that and ready to reexperience Colombia through food. Where better to start than chicharrón?

If your mouth isn’t watering already, perhaps a quick translation is in order: deep-fried pork belly. That is the very fattiest part of the pig cooked in even more fat until crispy. In terms of eating pig, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Making chicharrón requires pork belly, which is not easy to find. To make things more difficult, chicharrón is made with bone-in pork belly. That is the belly with part of the ribs still attached (for a quick visual aide, run your fingers down your sides — mmm, delicious). Martha’s Aunt Stella, my mentor in all things Colombian, mentioned that they have never found this cut available in the US.

Obviously, they never went to Clancey’s. It required a special order and a wait of a couple of weeks, but last Thursday Kristin Tombers of Clancey’s was on the phone saying the pork belly was in.

Given all the fun I have breaking down chickens, I was looking forward to throwing this substantial hunk of pig on my counter and hacking away. Luckily, Kristin of Clancey’s is wiser than I and advised against taking the pork belly home in one piece. She didn’t think I was going to get very far without a cleaver and a bone-saw, but was kind enough to fire up her electric saw and cut the belly into more manageable pieces: 1″ wide by about 4″ long, and 2″ deep (that last measurement depends entirely on our friend the pig).

When Martha got home from Clancey’s with this big, white paper wrapped package it was better than Christmas and my Birthday combined; I could not wait to open it up.

The mound of white pork fat and pink pork flesh did not disappoint.

As excited as I was I had to exercise a little self-control: 8 pounds of pork belly was a good thing, but probably too much of a good thing. I kept four pounds in the fridge and split the other four pounds into three portions for freezing, frozen treats for another day.

Four pounds of pork belly is still a lot to deal with, but chicharrón requires very little prep. It was already sawed up for me by the butcher; I just added bone-deep cuts at 1″ intervals through the belly meat on every piece that still had a bone attached (some pieces had become boneless from the cutting process). I learned to do this in Colombia: the justification had something to do with — I think — preventing the meat from buckling or bending. I don’t really understand why that would matter, but cutting the pork in this way does create a number of extra edges — edges that will become crispy when deep-fried. Other than that no additional prep is needed; the meat will get salted after it leaves the oil.

Speaking of the oil, I poured an inch of vegetable oil into a couple of cold pots (if you had a really big pot, or not very much pork belly, you could do it in one). Before turning on the heat, I added the pieces of pork with bones bone-side down. The bone-in pieces have to cook the longest since bones don’t conduct heat as efficiently as flesh. After adding in the pork belly the skillet was pretty packed and my inch of oil was mostly covering the pork. I turned the heat on high and let the oil come to temperature.

Within a few minutes, a mouth-watering crackling sound was issuing from the stove and the apartment was filled with the warm smells of gently cooking pork fat. I added the boneless pieces around the time that I heard the first crackles. Someone with a powerful stove might need to reduce the heat at some point to avoid an oil fire, but since my stove is weak and pathetic I left it on high the whole time. It took 20 minutes for the pork to be crispy dark brown, and some pieces were done before others — just remove them as they look ready to a paper-towel lined tray and hit them with a shower of salt. And resist the temptation to eat the whole pile without advising your guests that dinner is ready (I couldn’t resist a few samples; had to make sure it was good!)

What can you possibly serve with chicharrón that won’t seem inadequate next to this pile of fried glory? That’s a tough question to answer, but here are the typical Colombian sides that I made:

Tostones/Tostadas/Tacadas/Fried Plantains. These deserve a post of their own: peeled green plantains (ours were actually a little too ripe — the skin was starting to yellow) are cut horizontally into 1 inch pieces. Fry these pieces in hot oil until they start to brown in spots — if you have a pot of pork-fat infused oil from frying chicharrón to use for frying, all the better. Drain the fried plantain chunks on paper towels. Then, take each chunk and place it on a cutting board. Using another cutting board or, even better, a culinary rock, smash the fried plantain piece until reasonably flat and circular — about ½” thick. With plantain pieces flattened, add them back to the oil and fry till golden. Drain and salt and serve immediately.

Ají. No tostón would be complete without some ají to put on top. Ají is actually just the word in Colombia for hot peppers (chiles) but it also refers to a whole range of sauces that are used on everything from meats to arepas to empanadas to, well, tostones. I made Stella’s version: I took half of a white onion and roughly chopped it,and then put it in a bowl with about a quarter cup of white vinegar. Apparently, the vinegar takes some of the bite out of the onion. To this mix, I added two expertly selected (by Martha) Haas avocados (in Colombia we always used much larger, green-skinned avocados) also roughly chopped, a half cup of chopped cilantro, a few dashes of Tabasco (it’s not ají without something spicy) and enough salt to be able to taste everything. The vinegar in the ají is vital in this meal for cutting through the fat that coats your mouth from the chicharrón. Beer is also very helpful in this regard. Two beers more so.

Frisoles/Frijoles/Beans. The national bean of Colombia is the cargamanto, a large red bean with white flecks; maybe the same as cranberry beans. Since I don’t have a convenient source for either kind of beans, I used red kidney beans. At least the color would be right! For the beans I followed my usual procedure: I soaked a pound of beans overnight (yeah, yeah, you don’t have to soak beans; I still think soaking reduces cooking time and on a 90 degree day any minute without the stove on is golden), then boiled them for two hours with a ham hock and an onion, split in half. To finish the beans, I cooked three minced cloves of garlic in oil until fragrant then added the cooked beans, their liquid, and the shredded ham from the hock and let them cook until they were nice and thick.

Rice. Nothing special here, just regular white rice. It seems like we ate white rice with every large meal in Colombia — it just wasn’t a complete meal without a bowl of rice on the table.

Avocados. A couple more avocados cut into slices are a great garnish for the beans.

And so it was that after a month of food aversion I dove back into the cuisine of Colombia. If you are trying to remember the merits of Colombian food, you could hardly find a better place to start than crispy, fatty chicharrón. It’s like pork candy! This opens up new possibilities to me; there are a lot of Colombian dishes I want to try to replicate, some of them not involving deep fried pork fat. But, then again, three packages of pork belly sitting in my freezer say I’m making chicharrón again.

Remember that roast pork from a couple of days ago? I sure do! I always get really excited when I have leftover roast pork on hand, because it inevitably leads to one thing: cuban sandwiches.

In addition to roast pork, a cubano contains dijon mustard, ham, pickles and swiss cheese. Real cubanos are made on soft white Cuban bread, but I used my usual wild-yeast boule. After all, I’m not a real cubano either.

When everything is stacked together, the sandwich is ready for a hot plancha, griddle, or cast-iron pan. And then comes the crucial step in cubanos: pressing. Pressing the sandwich compresses all the ingredients together and gives it a nice, thick texture and also seems to make the grilled surfaces of the bread extra-crispy. Home cookery stores sell all kinds of ridiculous weighted accessories with handles for this purpose, but you could just as easily use a culinary brick or anything else that’s heavy. I use a second cast-iron pan.

This sandwich is so great because it combines a lot of contrasting flavors into a neatly compressed package: hot dijon mustard, sweet, salty pig meats, tangy swiss cheese and sour pickles, all forced together into a warm, crispy amalgam. It’s rare that I will make a pork roast expressly for the purpose of making cubanos, but it’s even rarer that I’ll roast pork and not make sure there’s plenty leftover to fulfill my cuban sandwich needs.

A few weeks ago I got a nice surprise in the mail:

I don’t usually keep herbes de provence on hand, let alone a huge box of them, so I wasn’t sure what to do with my newfound friend. One whiff of the box and I was thinking one thing: pork. But how to ensure that each bite of pork would taste deliciously herbaceous? Stuff that pork!

The pork I ended up with was a very economical yet ethically produced pork butt from Beeler Farms via The Wedge. If I were feeling lazy and had a lot of time, I might just rub down the outside of the roast with herbs, salt, pepper and oil and roast it slow for a few hours, then pull the pork in order to distribute the herb flavor. But since I only had a couple of hours for roasting and was feeling slightly less lazy, instead I cut the roast into a big, flat sheet o’ meat. This is actually really easy: I just started making a cut into the roast about a half inch from the edge and kept cutting, always keeping 1/2″ of meat under my knife and rolling the roast away. If you want to get really fancy you can pound this to an even thickness.

At this point, the meat is ready to be stuffed, which is to say covered in stuff. Inspired by my herbs-by-mail, I made an herb paste. I used probably a third cup of herbes de provences, mixed with olive oil, a chopped shallot, lots of salt, and cracked pepper and slathered it liberally on the meat.

With herb paste covering the whole surface, I rolled it back together. With a little twine it was good as new, but with surprises hidden inside, peaking out the edges. At this point, it was practically begging me to sear it and roast it at 350°F to an internal temperature of 145°F.

The great thing about taking the trouble to stuff and roll a roast like this is that it distributes the herb flavor throughout the meat, rather than having it hang out on the surface. Additionally, because it doesn’t require flavorings to be applied to the outside of the roast, you can sear the meat without getting the bitter flavors of burnt herbs.

And then there’s the presentation. Each slice has a little spiral of green goodness encircling fields of pink pork. If you should be so fortunate as to be gifted with a box of herbs through the mail, there are worse ways to show them off.

Since the bánh mì is the sandwich of the moment—with a New York Times article and plenty of blog coverage—I thought I’d add my voice to the chorus.

My relationship with the venerable Vietnamese sandwich started well before I knew its name, when Emeril Lagasse (a man who I am not ashamed to admit inspired me to cook in a big way) featured a recipe for “Vietnamese-style Poor Boys” on one of his many Food Network shows. Emeril was taking a bit of liberty with his nomenclature, but I recognized a good thing when I saw it and made this sandwich several times over the years. My other bánh mì breakthrough was when I began working as a cook at Blackbird Café in Minneapolis, which features a pretty excellent version on its menu. Nothing like making a sandwich a hundred times to come to appreciate its nuances.

So there are my two big influences in banh mi-making: a creole TV chef and a South Minneapolis neighborhood restaurant. I’ve never been to Vietnam. But, great food knows no borders—earlier this week I set out to make my banh mi from scratch.

As with any sandwich this popular and widespread, or any sandwich at all for that matter, there is no exact consensus on what ingredients go in it. But from my experience eating the sandwiches, I knew what I wanted: liver pâté, roast and pulled pork, pickled carrots and daikon, sliced cucumber, cilantro, jalapeño and mayo all on a baguette-style roll.

Just as every house needs a foundation, every great sandwich needs to be built from a strong, tasty base; the first thing to tackle was the bread. Because it works very well for me, I used my standard sourdough bread recipe, which consists of mostly white flour with a little wheat flour thrown in and is hydrated to about 68%. This produces a nicely airy crumb while not being so wet as to be unworkable. After the initial rise I cut off 8 0z pieces and shaped them into rough bâtards. After a rest, a slash and 20 minutes on a 450° baking stone, I had respectable rolls on which to build my sandwich.

Although some restaurants omit it, in my mind liver pâté is essential to a great bánh mì—something about its rich fattiness and that funky liver flavor. Ever since finding an old copy of Terrines, Pâtés and Galantines in an antique store in Red Wing, MN I have been thoroughly immersed in the world of potted meats. Since it was going to be a spread for my sandwich, I needed to make a smooth pâté, rather than my usual chunky, rustic terrines. A food processor made this really easy: chunks of lamb liver, chunks of pork fat, spices are pureed in a matter of seconds. (Not really a process for the squeamish, you’re basically making liquid meat). If I were really anal retentive (ok, more anal retentive) I would have passed the resulting puree through a drum sieve to make sure it was perfectly smooth. To cook the pâté, without overcooking it, I utilized a double boiler. I cooked the ruby mixture until it had become more beige and granular and looked done. Pâté!

With the pâté resting in the refrigerator developing its wonderful flavors, it was time to tackle what is in some ways the star of the show: the pork. The question of the preparation of the pork is another area where pretty much everybody differs, but I fell back to experience. For one thing, I know that I prefer tender pulled pork to pork cooked more quickly.  Many of the bánh mì I have tried seem to use some kind of hoisin barbecue sauce, but I just rubbed the meat with salt, pepper and chinese five-spice. The warm, sweet spices are already somewhat present in the pâté and complement the heat of jalapeños.

Since the chunks of pork form a craggy, uneven layer, for a level sandwich you need something to build up while filling the cracks. This is where I like to bring in the pickled carrots. Since there was daikon at the farmers’ market, I used that as well (apparently this is traditional), shredding both.

I fell in love with making quick pickles at Blackbird. It’s as easy as taking a vegetable, cutting it into small pieces (or shredding), tossing it with a hot pepper, a garlic clove, whole peppercorns, coriander seed, and/or whatever other pickling spices call to you, and pouring boiling vinegar, water, salt and sugar over it all, then letting it sit in the refrigerator over night. I put a lot of sugar in to make a sweet pickle, since pork loves sweet things.

With a solid level built up by my pickled roots, I was ready to stack on the fresh vegetables. This was the only part of the process that felt like cheating since I didn’t have to do anything except for clean and cut the vegetables—it felt like it would have been more “from scratch” to have grown them myself. But since I won’t be growing hot peppers in my northern-exposed apartment windows anytime soon, store vegetables would have to do. It’s not like I raised the pig.

Thick slices of cucumber are essential to cool your tongue from the punishment meted out by thin slices of jalapeño. If you are one of those unfortunate individuals to have been cursed by God with a distaste for cilantro,that’s too bad, because the best bánh mìs pile it on, both the fragrant leaves and the crunchy stems.

With the sandwich elements perfectly balanced structurally, there remained only to add the finishing touch to top it all off and bind it all together: mayonnaise.

Mayonnaise can be put together from scratch really easily and can taste a bit richer and have a silkier texture than the heavily processed stuff from the jar (but honestly, if it weren’t for the ‘from-scratch’ gimmick behind this post, I probably would have whipped out the Hellmann’s). It’s just a matter of whisking an egg yolk with some lemon juice, salt, pepper and sugar and then slowly whisking in olive oil until you have mayonnaise.

And so, applying the top piece of bread, I had the scratch bánh mì: built from the ground up, each element custom designed to my exacting specifications. Was it worth it? Well besides the fact that it was more like fun than work to build each element of the sandwich, the sandwich itself was very good; I wouldn’t to call it “the ultimate bánh mì” because I have yet to meet a bánh mì I didn’t like. With pork, pâté, cool cucumbers, jalapeños, fragrant cilantro, sweet pickled carrots and rich mayonnaise on good bread you can’t go wrong. So while I instinctively bristle at all the hype, there is scarcely a sandwich that deserves it more than the bánh mì.

On my first trip to The Four Firkins I bought several beers, some that I had read about and was excited to try, and others simply because of the awesome packaging. Maredsous 8 Dobbel fell into the latter category; how could I resist a bottle that looks like this?

At the time of my trip I had not reached the Belgian abbey ale section of The Brewmaster’s Table so for a time the Maredsous just sat on a shelf looking pretty. I soon reached the aforementioned section and the Maredsous specific paragraph:

Maredsous 8 Dobbel derives its number from the pld scale of Belgian degreees, referring to the strength of the original wort. The beer has a beautiful garnet color and raises a rocky tan head. The aroma is terrific, a dance of biscuits, rum, and raisins. The beer opens up on the palate with foamy pinpoint carbonation and a light bitterness. It seems sweet at first but then dries as flaors of concentrated raisins, dark sugar, and dark rum combine with a winy acidity to bring the beer to a long finish. At 8 percent, this beer is a bit stronger than most dubbels.

On the color, certainly, Oliver was right on; this beer is beautiful to behold:

Tasting the beer, I realized my palate isn’t nearly as developed or sensitive as Oliver’s (okay, I realized this long before I tasted this particular beer, but it underscored the point). Where he tastes raisins and dark sugar I tasted a very strong roasted, carmelly flavor. Which is not to say the beer was excessively heavy; on the contrary, it had the pleasant floral-citrusy-fruitiness that I usually associate with ales. There was also a slight bitterness from the hops, but it was not strong.

One of the best parts of this beer was the carbonation—it feels spritzy and alive on the tongue with bubbles that tickle, rather than bludgeon, as they burst. And I suppose the 8% alcohol was also a best part, although as you can see I compensated by drinking a smaller glass. All things in moderation.

A great beer on its own, what got me most excited about Oliver’s description of Maredsous 8 Dobbel were the pairing notes:

A fine beer to match with short ribs, beef cheeks, leg of lamb, venison sausages, country pâtés, and wild boar.

Country pâtés! Anytime I see those words my heart brightens up, my brain starts churning and my mouth starts watering (the increased heart activity may be in anticipation of all the fat and cholestorol one of these pork loaves packs into my bloodstream). I’ll take just about any excuse to make a terrine, and a bottle of Maredsous seemed better than most. Terrine is neither a fancy nor a technically demanding dish—it’s just meatloaf!

I used:

• 1# Chicken Liver
• 1# Ground Pork
• 1/4# Bacon
• 1/4# Pork Sirloin Chop
• 1/2 c minced parsley
• 3 sprigs minced rosemary
• 5 cloves minced garlic
• 1 c blanched almonds
• 3 T Bourbon
• Allspice, Nutmeg and Cinnamon
• Salt and Pepper

The main meats (liver and ground pork) are pretty standard for country terrines. I chose the herbs because they were on hand and needed to be used up. I had two reasons for including  the almonds; I wanted the chunkier texture and visual interest  that whole almonds impart, and we recently overbought almonds so I am putting them in everything. The pork chop was also to get a chunkier texture; I cut it into half-inch cubes and mixed it in with the forcemeat. The bacon is there for keeping everything moist and fatty, and the other ingredients are pretty standard.

I really loved the chunky texture of the almonds and diced pork—I prefer coarse terrines to fine. The almonds also gave the whole loaf a strong nuttiness that makes a great counterpoint to the richness of (lots of) pork fat.

The pork fat was really the force that drove this pairing. The carbonation of the beer was great for cutting through all that richness and lifting it off the tongue. The mildly citrusy-fruitiness had a similar palate-cleansing effect. The very slight hoppiness in the beer was magnified by the herbs, and the herbs by the hops. The caramel flavors that were so apparent when tasting the beer on its own were still there but didn’t seem to add or detract from the terrine. A sweeter or more darkly-roasted dish might prove a better complement to those flavors. But with an excuse to both drink beer and make a terrine, I can’t complain. Not that I need an excuse.