Day 6 (4th April)

Hugh: Fife Diet: Comparative Methodologies

So yesterday I would have made those of you who occasionally get tired of hearing about all my technological innovations proud.

I cooked for basically the entire day without using a food thermometer, sous-vide machine, hydrocolloid, or anything else.

Breakfast was fried duck eggs, which were rather burned on the underside—I need to figure out the optimum temperature for my Hob of Doom—crispy bacon, which was lovely, and steamed spinach, which was grittier than a collaboration between Frank Millar and James Ellroy. Honestly, do terribly organic vegetables require you to wash every leaf individually with pure sparkling mountain water, or something? My quick wash clearly didn’t do it.

Lunch was, an a surprise emergency shocker, oatcakes. And in another shocker, late. But then I made up for all that by grilling one of the Fletchers of Auchterwhatever venison steaks in the health grill. The damn thing was far too thin to get a thermometer into reliably, so I just guessed and worked by texture, pulling it out after about three minutes when it was still vaguely spongey.

My god, it was absolutely bloody fantastic. Tender, juicy, incredibly flavourful, a lot like fillet steak but with a much darker, meatier edge.

Since I was still off my game as far as reflexes and energy went, I decided to skip kickboxing in the evening, as I didn’t want to inflict my poorly-controlled limbs on anyone, and instead went for the shocking proposition of actually having a decent meal.

Slow-ish roasted pork belly

Borrowing a recipe from Don’t Sweat The Aubergine (fantastic book, by the way), I took my remaining 800g of pork belly, rubbed salt into the thoughtfully pre-scored skin, and stuck it in my oven at 200 degrees for 25 minutes. I didn’t really know what temperature the meat was supposed to reach, so I stuck a meat thermometer in the belly mostly as insurance.

Once it’d been in for 25 minutes, I turned the temperature down to 140. By now the internal temp of the meat was about 63, which was a bit alarming, but I decided to let it run, and attempted to figure out exactly how long I should let it run for. Sadly, all the pork belly recipes bar one I could find seemed to be for 2kg cuts of belly (which, I have to say, is a hell of a lot of belly), but they all advised approximately 2 hours of cooking time, so 2 hours it was going to be. Handily, that’s almost exactly the right length of time for a reasonably competent group to run through Magister’s Terrace in WoW…

I think that may be the only time my group had ever heard the phrase “AFK 30 sec, have to wash and chop a leek”.

Virtually clutching my phat lewtz from that run, I returned to my belly—well, you know, the belly I’d cooked, not my personal belly, which had been there all along. With it I was having leeks, which I’d just cleaned, sliced, chopped the green and the roots off (still haven’t found what you do with the green, I’m afraid) before slowly pan-frying, and potatoes, which I’d just cleaned, quartered, and boiled with salt.

Worryingly, the meat thermometer was holding at 100 degrees centigrade—waaaay too high, according to normal thinking, for meat.

I was a bit afraid that the belly might not have formed crackling. It was immediately obvious that wasn’t the case – indeed, it was less crackling and more ablative armour. I barely managed to cut slices of the bloody stuff with my [Ridiculous Knife of Sharpness], having to lean really hard on the knife to cut through the terrifyingly solid crackling. Taste-wise it was delicious, but incredibly tough and sticky, to the point that I was afraid that I was going to end up swallowing it with a side-order of fillings.

The rest of the meat was fantastic. Strangely it managed to be more tender than the 67-degree sous-vide, which was just peculiar. The fat was less appetising than it had been in the sous-vide recipe, where it was lovely, but the tender meat made up for that, and there was a lot more “roast” aroma to the meat, presumably because of maillard reactions in the first 200 degree cooking section.

I’m not sure how the meat came out more tender. I think it may be a combination of the much shorter cooking time, leaving less time for the muscle fibers to contract, and possibly increased gelatinisation of the connective tissues in the meat, although I didn’t think there was that much collagen in belly meat. Also, more melting in the fat may have lubricated the meat more and prevented water escaping.

Regardless, I was very pleased with the result, although I’d like to marry it with the lucious glutinous texture of the sous-vide version, and maybe make the crackling a bit less armour-plated. I’m thinking a short roast of about 10–15 minutes in a tremendously hot oven, followed by a sous-vide at about 72 degrees to melt all the fat.

Anyone got any tips on pork belly?

Paul: I’m doing Science and I’m still alive

White flecks have started to appear in my fingernails. The calcium deficiency is getting to me.

Breakfast this morning was a success. I had Toast.

Well, not exactly.

I thought I’d try experimenting a little further with the McMuffin™ I invented the other day. Made up some porridge last night—using proper porridge oats is a delight after four days of the wrong stuff—and, since I still don’t have a porridge drawer, left it to set overnight in a frying pan.

Woke up this morning to a a thin disc of porridge cake. Toasted it crispy under the grill and spread jam on it. Marvellous.

It’s still porridge, but to at least get some variation in texture was strange and wonderful and glorious.

I cooked lunch and dinner at the same time so we could film them. Apart from having to do everything at a 60-degree angle so that I wasn’t blocking the shot, it all went largely according to plan. Lunch was another fantastic omelette. Dinner was a cottage pie made with pork mince, carrot, swede and mashed potato.

The mince was a couple of days out of date, bought at the Farmers’ Market on Saturday. To live on the Fife Diet you really need to go shopping at least twice a week, and it’s worth noting again that all the shops are miles out of town and you need a stay-at-home partner who can be available during the working day to take the family’s second Chelsea Tractor and drive around farm shops. We’ve just about managed by doing all of our shopping at the beginning of the week, but only at risk of slight poisoning.

With no milk and no butter, the potato did not mash to my exceptionally high standards. I added all the rest of the dripping and some cheese, and the result was palatable, but not worthy of the Mashed Potato King. The mince with added vegetables was filling enough, but it was crying out for some seasoning. Just some dried mixed herbs would have made all the difference, but what I really wanted was some Worcestershire Sauce.

Also, had I not been on the Fife Diet, I would have deglazed the pan with sherry and added the leavings into the gravy. Gravy. I never thought, on starting this, that one of the things I’d miss most would be Bisto Granules.

As I write this, the clock ticks languidly past midnight, and my 178 168^[0] hours on the Fife Diet draw inexorably to a close. I’ll be back with some Final Thoughts some time after the orgiastic frenzy of consumption that begins tomorrow morning.

—
[0] I blame the blood sugar for having got that wrong. It would never have happened under normal circumstances. No.

Alex: Days 6 and 7

At this point, realizing that the diet was nearly over I actually ate very little. I cooked scrambled eggs with bacon bits and spinach (both explained sufficiently earlier) on Day 6.

On Day 7 I just did another roast, this time with a gammon joint. I found that if I made the baking area of the joint smaller, (in this case by making a small foil tray) I could turn parsnips, potatoes and carrots halfway through cooking and thus have lovely fried vegetables. It would have worked better with a normal joint though, as the gammon juices were extremely salty.

That evening, having reasoned that as I finished eating at 10pm the previous week, I could start eating normally again at 11pm. I did this with great gusto, consuming a third of a pizza and half a bag of popcorn in short order.