Results tagged “pork”

This past week, Food & Wine magazine announced their selections for the Best New Chefs in America for 2009. Said Editor in Chief Dana Cowin: "We sought out great chefs in every corner of America, from Memphis, Tennessee to Portland, Oregon, and found some extraordinary cooking. Some of our winners are in seriously elegant restaurants. Others are in small, quirky, casual spots. But they’re all immensely talented, creative and driven.”

The New York Times' Frank Bruni came to Los Angeles, and all he got was pork. Well, that's not entirely true, but he did get a menu's worth of pig-meat when he dined at Animal in West Hollywood, and deemed the restaurant so-so, unless you have a pork fetish:

[It] isn’t a great restaurant, or at least it wasn’t when I tried it. But it’s the epitome of a promiscuously meaty approach to cooking that might well be called the carniwhore school.

Bruni recounts the plethora of pork belly on the app menu ("pork belly with kimchi in an Asian preparation" or "house-smoked pork belly with lentils") then noted the pig-plenty on the entrees list ("a pork chop, pork ribs or a pork foot, also known as a trotter"), and even found a little piggy available for dessert (" the house-made bacon chocolate crunch bar"). Other pork names being dropped: "chorizo (with melted Spanish cheese), slab bacon (as an accessory for fried quail), veal sweetbreads, marrow bones or chicken livers," and "foie gras" that "comes on a biscuit that’s doused in maple syrup and gravy, and the gravy includes pork sausage."

The LA Times Food section embarks on a perilous and ambitious project today: collecting 1,001 recipes featuring that porky product most commonly known as bacon (less commonly known as "Taste Explosion Happy Fat Yummy Time!" and "Vegetarians, Weep"). Why bacon? Well, apparently because "bacon works so well in so many dishes, from soups and salads to chili and stuffed pork chops". Uh, yeah guys: is a pig's pussy pork? Anyway, so far the list is only five items long, but includes such creative (if questionable) items as a Candied Bacon Martini (ew?) and a roasted potato salad (that's definitely more my steez). They're welcoming comments and suggestions from readers, so head on over and school those fools on how to add some dazzle to your dinner.

It was an inauspicious start for L.A.'s first Restaurant Week: when first we arrived at Ford's Filling Station for lunch (the first stop on our two-week tour of the event's featured restaurants), the rain was falling, the wind was blowing, and tables were not being filled. But thanks to a brief respite from the storm, and to a hearty, delicious prix-fixe menu, the day redeemed itself.

In the decadent tradition of hand-massaged, beer-fed Kobe beef, a new taste sensation is coming to California: La Quercia artisanal pork. These happy little piggies are raised on an organic farm in Iowa and fed a diet of acorns, just like the famed pigs of Spain's jamon iberico. EaterLA had the scoop yesterday:

These acorn-fed pigs are supposed to produce amazing meat, as they do in Italy and Spain. The company that's responsible for said pigs makes some of the best prosciutto in the country, found on only a few top menus in LA. But more importantly: There were only 45 pigs available, and only 10 SoCal chefs got to participate in the program, which means we'll start seeing this much ballyhooed pork on select local menus.

Even Jeffrey Steingarten himself said that the stuff is "the best American or imported prosciutto I’ve ever tasted.”