Published: Oct 15th, 2008
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The New York Times

Here Daniel is showing where the loins are located on a boar, so they can be removed and wrapped in chicken skin.

After long delay we are proud to display some additional images from the boar dinner we held on Saturday, August 15th of this fine year two thousand and eight, in the municipality of Homer, NY. I will attempt to preserve brevity in our hopes to just dazzle you with the brilliant photography of Jennifer May and our good friend Michael Knight.
Our goal for this meal was to prepare and serve a locally sourced meal based around wild boar. This brought us to Cold Brook Hunts http://www.coldbrookhunts.com/ near the ancestral site of my family’s farm. It was to be a celebration of the great pre-mythological being in whose honor we have sacrificed of all of our whole animals to this year; Lewis. He was a pseudo-deity that retained his stature from pre-history by giving the gift of smoking, straws, and other processes that were greatly improved with suction to man. In these dishes we sought to transfer the body of this boar into a meal for twenty four cooked almost entirely by ingredients sourced within a 50 mile radius of the farm personally picked up by me the day before in a great scavenger hunt.

Menu
1. Wild Boar Rillette with a Pot-lickies Gelee and Duck Skin Crackling
2. Sweetbread and Offal Raviolo with Wild Boar Ragu
3. Chicken Fried Wild Boar Loin, Succotash Custard, Molasses Kimchi, and Soju Watermelon
4. Smoked Wild Boar Ribs with Collard Green, Mac and Cheese and Black Eye Peas
5. Aleppo and Vanilla Ice Cream with Amish Mellon and White Peaches

Menu created with Daniel Castaño, Andrew Rosenberg and Mark Low.

First you start with a whole wild boar. Slightly chilled and very wild.
Photo by Michael (Santi) Knight © 2008 www.photo.sarcfilms.com

Then you cut the ribs apart at the sternum and break the ribs off the spine using only shear force and maybe a cleaver later on if things get dirty. Either way you make Tom very happy.

If you plan on wrapping chicken skins around the loins you first need to skin the birds making sure this doesn’t happen.

After the skins are free from their flightless carcasses you may now wrap them around the loins and bond them using Activa RM. Roll into a tight torchon, vacuum pack them and drop them into a water bath at 55C for 6 hours. Water that is just cool enough not to kill the Activa enzymes but high enough to pasteurize the chicken skins after 131 minutes of cooking.

While the pork is cooking make fresh ricotta and be slightly sad that you couldn’t find sweetbreads anywhere in Cortland County that weren’t processed in Ohio or south of the Mason Dixon Line so your ravioli will just have to be filled with the creamy richness of raw milk ricotta and basil.

Grind the shoulders, hams and all of the extra fat into a 70/30 lean/fat ground boar, with a touch of pork and beef fat thrown because it was fresh. Dice up some fresh vegetables that you picked in your aunts garden and some jarred tomatoes from last year’s harvest and make up a Bolognese base.

Take the wild boar liver and kidneys as well as some left over pork, chicken and duck livers and simmer them with some caramelized onions, thyme and a bottle of red wine until glazed and slightly crisp. Add cream and puree until smooth.

Make pasta dough, then make 100 ravioli and let them rest.

Add pâté to Bolognese right before serves and lay lightly cooked ravioli on top with a light chiffonade of basil.

The night before it would have been wise to take a little extra Activa RM and bond the leftover chicken skins and purposely cleaned duck skins into a tight torchon and refrigerate overnight. Only to freeze in the morning, sliced wafer thin on a deli slicer and then deep fried in beef tallow. Add salt and enjoy.

Or to place on top of the wild boar shoulder rillette that you confit in pork fat for the last 12 hours and formed over a slice of spicy and floral pot lickies gelée that you made with Agar-Agar later that same morning right after the boar was butchered but before the pasta making.

While you are at it the night before you might as well also cut 4 types of melon into steaks and spend an hour compressing them in a vacuum with a little salt and lime juice to give them a bright color and smooth consistency.

Once done in the sous vide take the chicken skin wrapped boar loin out of the bag, batter dip it and deep fry it until golden brown. Slice it into thin rings (here you can see both tenderloins bonded together to form a larger loin sized cut).

Actually the most important thing you should have been doing right after they were broken out of the carcass was getting the ribs into a pork confit to soften for 4 hours and then into a smoker with layers of boar belly stacked on top of them and hickory smoke circling past the glassy meat.

Whip up a mac and cheese, some collard greens and a black eyed pea and aji mash and you have a rib entrée and hopefully a tiny bit of room for desert.

And serve those over the molasses kimchi with melon and scallons

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