Sunday Cookbook Adventures: Sweet Corn Soup with Pork Belly Dumplings

For no good reason that I can think of (other than that I am a little bit crazy...), I decided that I should make two Thomas Keller recipes on Sunday. I also decided that one of them should be from Under Pressure, which it generally considered his least accessible cookbook. There are a couple reasons for this, not the least of which is the fact that you need $1500 - $2000 of equipment to execute most of these dishes properly. Most of the recipes are going to make you wish you owned a chamber vacuum and proper sous vide equipment (e.g. a thermal immersion circulator or a product like the SousVide Supreme). The recipes in Under Pressure seem a little more meticulous than those in The French Laundry Cookbook or Bouchon, but this also means that weights are given for every ingredient, and that’s something I’m a big fan of (because, really, how big is a small leek?). I’ll talk more about the style of this book – both the maddening and the beautiful sides of it – as it comes up in the cooking below…
My Under Pressure dish for this weekend was Sweet Corn Soup with Pork Belly Dumplings and Summer Succotash. Yum!, right? I’m working with a FoodSaver and the SousVide Maestro (a reasonably cheap modification of a slow-cooker, which my brilliant friend T built for me). While I was quite pleased with the Maestro’s performance, the fact that I needed to vacuum-seal bags of liquid definitely left me with a hankering for a chamber vacuum… Filing that one away in the ol’ Things to Buy When I Feel Like My Bank Account is Unreasonably Full pile… The recipe itself looks pretty straightforward, but you will notice that you get referred around the book quite a bit. One of the ingredients in the dumplings, for example, is cooked pork belly, for which you should refer to page 148. On page 148, you need a brined pork belly, for which you should refer to page 265… The pork belly needs to brine overnight, then you can return to page 148 where it cooks for 12 hours and then is chilled overnight before you can turn back to page 48 and use it in your dumplings. Thus, if you don’t get your pork in the brine on Friday night, forget about having this dish for dinner on Sunday. Not a big deal, but a little irksome, especially with such large, unwieldy book. The brine includes kosher salt, sugar, curing salt, bay leaves, and peppercorns...
... plus leeks, carrots, thyme, and onion...
Some hot water dissolves the solids, and then everything is combined along with more water.
The pork belly goes in, and the mixture brines overnight.
The next day, it's time to get down to sous vide business. Keller notes that you don't want herbs and spices directly in contact with the meat while it cooks, so you make a "sachet" by wrapping them in plastic wrap...
The sachet goes into a vacuum-sealed bag with chicken stock and the pork belly.
This is where that chamber vacuum would come in handy. Your typical FoodSaver is not going to be able to vacuum and seal a bag of liquid... The back-up, slightly less cool option is to first seal the liquid in a zip-top bag, pushing out as much air as possible while you do so...
... and then vacuum-sealing that bag before starting cooking.
Into the SousVide Maestro at 180°F for 12 hours... (If your inevitable air bubbles are bringing the meat to the surface, weigh it down with something or other to keep it submerged...)
I'll note here that the Maestro did a fantastic job of holding a stable temperature. I was quite pleased. After 12 hours, you chill the meat in an ice bath and toss it in the fridge overnight. The next morning you will find this:
As with most sous vide cooking, the meat comes out of the bag looking sort of sad... (Quite a different sight than the result cooking it Momofuku style...)
But, as with most sous vide cooking, a quick pan-sear of the meat brings it back to life...
I tasted the seared pieces above (which I only sliced and seared for you, dear reader, to demonstrate that the pork wasn't gross) and... damn. I actually chuckled while I was enjoying my first bite, thinking to myself "Heh... That is really good... Really, REALLY good." The brine was so nice, and I sort of wish I was eating this again right now... This was a fantastic way to do pork belly, and one that will lend itself well to other applications (including pork buns)... The next ingredient you’ll be referred out on is the Quick Pork Sauce. I find the name absolutely hilarious, because even at a glance you can tell that this will in no way be what a normal person considers “quick.” In fact, by the time the last reduction was complete, I had spent 4 hours and 15 minutes making this damn sauce. I shudder to think what it is considered "quick" relative to… Aside from the misnomer, this is actually one of those beautiful parts of the book: the recipe for the Quick Pork Sauce is incredibly well written, featuring both instructions for each step as well as an explanation of why you’re doing things in this specific way. It’s fantastic, and the sauce is actually pretty fun to make... if you're a dork... which I am. Seriously. Pick up this book and read the Quick Pork Sauce recipe someday. You'll be glad you did. You start off with pork bones (I used neck bones).
The bones brown on both sides...
Water is added and reduced until almost gone...
Chicken stock is added next and again reduced until almost gone, with this reduction resulting in a more intense color on the bones. (I used store-bought veal demi glace and roasted chicken demi glace to make the stocks throughout this recipe, by the way. It's cheating, but this was a big enough time sink as-is and they're much lower sodium and higher quality than boxed stock...)
Next come the carrots, onions, and leeks...
After those have all caramelized and the liquid is again almost gone, in go some tomatoes...
Finally, in goes some more chicken stock and some veal stock. (Note that this recipe took 4 hours and 15 minutes without making my own stocks... Yeesh.)
The mixture is moved to a narrower pot to simmer and reduce some more...
When it is sufficiently reduced, the bones and vegetables are strained out.
I de-fatted with a fat separator at this point, but you should feel free to diligently skim during the above reduction process (as Keller instructs) if you'd like. My way worked pretty well, and I was left with a good looking liquid...
This reduces (again) by a little more than half, leaving you with something thick, dark, and gorgeous...
So... After more than 4 hours, 3 pounds of bones, almost 2 pounds of vegetables, and 17 cups of liquid... you are left with just under 2 cups of "Quick" Pork Sauce. (This was a double-batch, because it freezes well and I'll be damned if I'm going through this process again, fascinating as it was, every time I need some...)
As I mentioned, it was actually kind of fun watching this sauce develop... seeing the color deepen and the glossiness increase... the texture become more supple... Pretty cool stuff. Science and whatnot... Anyway.... Time to prep some soup… Corn wasn’t super-ideal just yet, but I was hell-bent on making this dish, so I made do with what I could find. Kernels are removed…
... and cobs are simmered with cream, chicken stock, and a little sugar. I once again cheated on the chicken stock, but I have no regrets because this mixture tasted fantastic…
The mixture is strained and cooled over an ice bath after which the kernels are added and the whole mess (along with a tarragon sachet) can be vacuum-sealed (stupid lack of a chamber vacuum… grumble grumble…), ready to cook in the SousVide Maestro.
After a half hour at 185°F, the mixture is puréed and then strained. (You're supposed to use a fancy, expensive strainer, but I went ahead and used one from the 3-for-$1 set that I impulse-bought in the grocery store check-out line in Melbourne once...)
The soup is now good to go and can be set aside, ready to be reheated when dinner rolls around. Back to our components. Remember the pork belly and “quick” pork sauce? Those are ready to be turned into pasta filling. This is a rare moment for Thomas Keller, in which he actually explains that the idea for the filling came from trying to find a good use for oddly-shaped pork belly trimmings that (you guessed it) he had set aside for another use when making assorted dishes. Awesome. I punted on one detail here, in that I diced the pork belly larger than the 1/8-inch that Keller asks for. The thing is, if you’re going to ask me to carefully make fine dice of a large quantity of something slippery and fatty, you should probably ask me to do that before I spend over 4 hours making a damn sauce… Fatigue was starting to set in by this point, so my dumplings were a bit chunkier than Keller intended (which I actually really liked). After the too-big pork spends a little time in the skillet and is sitting in a strainer allowing fat to drain off (as above), an onion sweats in a little oil and then you make gastrique in the pan with equal parts red wine vinegar and sugar.
The pork belly and "quick" pork sauce go in, and the whole mixture reduces down until the liquid coats the pork. This is all poured into a dish to chill until it's dumpling-making time...
Alrighty. No time to rest. Next up is the pasta dough. I was originally planning to make the dough recipe as written, but I had to make fresh pasta for my other Thomas Keller dish as well… Since I was on pace for a 10pm dinner (at best) at this point, I made the executive decision that French Laundry Cookbook pasta dough would have to be good enough for an Under Pressure recipe. The ingredients are the same, but I’m not sure if the proportions are identical since one is in weights and the other in quantity/volume. I'll pull a Thomas Keller here and refer you to my French Laundry recipe post for more on the dough... After it's rolled out, 10(-ish) gram mounds of the cooled filling are spaced out along the pasta sheet.
The dough is folded over and sealed, then cut into half-moons.
At this point I should fold again into a tortellini shape, but I over-stuffed with my too-chunky filling, so I left them as half-moons and was quite pleased with the result. (I'll show the full-moon shape option below, as well...) These are ready to be used, or can be tossed in the freezer for instant yumminess at a later date. The final components are for the "Summer Succotash," and consist of charred red and yellow peppers and blanched hericot verts.
This is the only real case of Keller's "reserve for another use" syndrome, but it's not like you can buy a sixth of a bell pepper, so I'm not going to gripe too much...
The beans are supposed to have the ends sliced off on a bias, then be sliced in half on a severe bias. I may make smaller pieces in the future, because I enjoyed the flavor but wanted to spread it out across more bites.
The bell peppers are cut into 1/8-inch dice and set aside with the blanched beans until service.
This post is getting really long... but I spent 12 hours in the kitchen (not including pork-belly cooking time) on Sunday so that seems kind of appropriate... I was pretty exhausted by the time I started plating. The soup re-warms. The dumplings are cooked. Veggies are placed atop said dumplings. Here's the half-moon style that I made last night:
Creamy, delicate, delicious sweet corn soup is poured over the top of this... and you have yourself a lovely appetizer (that you spent the whole day making):
This was very good, but also very exhausting. I think next time I will (a) prep the dumplings (or at least their time-consuming components) one weekend and the relatively simple soup the next, and (b) not make this on the same day that I'm working on another Thomas Keller recipe. If I had just been pulling my pre-made dumplings from the freezer and making a batch of soup, I would be in love with this as an easy, impressive dish... The dumplings are a complex mixture of sweet and savory, the soup is creamy and subtle, and the roasted bell pepper bits add a beautiful smoky accent when they drift into a bite. I'm not sure how much more awesome the soup would have been if I had an $1100 chamber vacuum... but it was pretty awesome without one, so I can probably wait a good long while to find out... In the end, I'm going to chalk this one up as a success... An exhausting, complicated, time-consuming, delicious success...