Day 3 (1st April)

Paul: Auld claes an’ parritch

Traditionally, leftover porridge was placed in the “porridge drawer” (I am not making this up) and left to set into cakes. These cakes were less brittle than oatcakes and easier to transport.

I don’t have a porridge drawer, but I do have leftover porridge in the pan. Lesser minds might consider it merely congealed porridge, but it has indeed set into a cake. It is round and flat, like the bottom of my saucepan. You could take it into the fields with you and munch on it while you plough, or do whatever it is you do in the fields.

But I’m not gonna.

Ten minutes under the grill to crisp it up on the outside, cut it in half, and put bacon and a fried egg in between the two bits.

The Fife Diet: Putting the Mc back into McMuffin™.

Hugh: Hugh / Cairmen – The Fife Diet: Bites

So far, things have been going fairly smoothly on the Diet of Fife. Yesterday was my normal oatcakes and two boiled eggs for breakfast, more oatcakes and reheated soup for lunch, and chops, potatoes and kale for dinner (which was such a meat-and-two-veg dish that I didn’t bother to formally write it up).

However, today things are going to start getting interesting. There are two reasons for that: one, my atomic crockpot (as I believe it has now officially been named) has sous-vide pork belly in it, and has done for about 14 hours, at 67 degrees, and two, I’m running out of potatoes.

One thing that this diet really is demonstrating is the spectacular difference in peoples’ personal metabolisms. Paul has hardly eaten any potatoes this week so far. I’ve been eating them at a rate of between 4 and 10 (no kidding) per day.

Since I really don’t have the time to take a trip to Fife, I now have two choices – either scour Edinburgh for Fife potatoes, with no guarantee of success, or start coming up with alternate recipes.

Tonight, therefore, I’ll be eschewing potatoes altogether in favour of an Atkins-like meal, probably involving a lot of carrot and swede. I have no idea what you do with swede—anyone?

In other news, I’ve come to the sad conclusion that I just don’t like duck eggs. Various high-faultin’ chefs love ‘em, but certainly boiled they don’t do it for me. The white is vastly tougher than comparable hens’ eggs (and yes, the Pillars of Hercules eggs we bought are *lovely*), making eating them a real challenge, and I’m just not getting the depth of flavour off the white or the yolk that I’d expect.

Hugh: Fife Diet: Happiness is…

Discovering that you’ve still got a punnet of raspberries in the fridge that you’d forgotten about.

Mmm. Now if only I had some cream…

I swear, the lack of dairy’s the biggest problem on the Fife Diet. If I had butter, milk and cream—oh, and tea—I’d be pretty darn happy to do it for a week.

Hugh: Fife Diet: I win the Porkonet.

Just because the diet I’m currently consuming looks like something from Blackadder, doesn’t mean I can’t get a bit of molecular gastronomy into it, dammit. And so it was that about midnight last night I fired up the atomic crockpot to 67 degrees, vacuum-sealed a pound of pork belly, and dropped it in there.

See, the thing is that traditionally cooks have assumed that you need to cook tougher cuts of meat, not to mention fattier ones, at 70-80 Centigrade or higher to dissolve the collagen into gelatin and melt the fats. However, that isn’t strictly true—you just need to hold it at a lower temperature for longer, for the collagen at least.

The fats, meanwhile, mostly melt at 63 degrees approximately (with 30 percent melting above that, around 69.6 degrees).

I don’t understand all the chemistry behind this, but the bottom line is that if you cook something like a pork belly for about 20 or so hours (according to Ideas In Food) you end up with a stonking piece of meat. And I’ve had a couple of truly awesome pieces of pork belly in the past, so…

To accompany it, I sliced half of my mega-swede into rounds and steamed it with carrots also cut into similar thickness rounds (it’s the thickness that determines the cooking time, boys and girls). Once again I blessed my expensive chef’s knife, as even the hardiest root vegetable stood little chance against the raw power of 56 folds of Japanese steel. Seriously, Mr Swede, give it up.

Having done that, on Lilian’s suggestion coupled with a quick read of Don’t Sweat The Aubergine, I whacked them both in the food processor. Well, that’s not strictly accurate. Actually, I fucked the timing up, realised I didn’t have enough time to eat before badminton, left the swede and carrots to cool whilst I swiftly ate some jam on oatcakes and some raspberries, and ran off to fail to hit slow-moving things with a large racquet.

When I returned, about ready to gnaw my way through my front door for lack of other sustainance, I slapped all the veg in the food processor and blitzed it like it was 1939.

Added to that, I put an enormous amount of pepper, some salt, and all the juices from the sous-vide bag, which had now been sitting in the water bath for about 18 hours.

So how was it?

The pork belly was absolutely bloody astonishing, that’s how it was. It sliced with the barest of pressure from a normal eating knife, and had an incredibly unctuous, rich, tender taste, almost creamy (and for very good reasons, because it’s the fat in the cream that makes it taste like that). The fat—and there’s a lot of fat on pork belly—was just gorgeous, the meat was maybe a little tough but still fantastic. I wish I’d been able to crisp it a bit more—must buy a blowtorch—but I pretty much devoured half a pound of the stuff at a sitting.

The mash, meanwhile, managed to hold up against the rich, gelatinous goodness of the belly. It was sweet, very flavourful, with a lovely semi-crunchy texture unlike that of potato mash. I fear I may have discovered that I like swede. The smell was fantastic too&mdashvery earthy, very planty, a smell that said “this is food, and it’s from the country”.

And an odd thing happened. See, I was absolutely bloody starving when I sat down. But I didn’t get anywhere near finishing the meal. I didn’t feel stuffed – my body just went “ok, that’s enough now” and I stopped eating.

That’s down to the richness of the meal, of course—a thick layer of fat on a lovely joint. But it was a very pleasant sensation, and means I have quite a bit of pork belly and some belly fat, to say nothing of quite a bit of swede mash, left over.

To quote XKCD:

Science. It works, bitches.