Stuffed Pork Roast in Honor of Fermentation

The Space Between Fresh and Rotten – A Fermentation Festival



Reedsburg Fermentation Fest Photo



According to Katz, fermentation is the flavorful “space between fresh and rotten, where the world’s most prized delicacies exist.” – Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, September 9, 2012.

Sandor Katz is a man of sublime truth. He’ll be a participant at the Live Culture Convergence, this year’s edition Fermentation Fest – that will run from October 12^th through the 21^st  in the general vicinity of Reedsburg Wisconsin [Link]. He wrote the bestselling book Wild Fermentation. Riveting.

Many might dismiss a fermentation festival as odd, but then sometimes the most beautiful lunch can simply consist of a little bread, some wine and a few slices of cheese. Top it off with a few pieces of chocolate for desert. That beautiful lunch was all a product of fermentation. In that light a fermentation festival isn’t odd. It makes perfectly good sense.

And almost larger than life, compost falls into the category of things fermented. We don’t think of it that way, but it is. More importantly, it is the mother that nurtures fertility.  

Growing Power Photo  -- An Urban Farm

Milwaukee’s Will Allen is all over that story. It seems, he’s writing an interactive textbook, scattered among small postage stamp sized plots of land, here there and elsewhere. The book’s title is Growing Power [link], but it isn’t a book. It’s a model.

The Fallacy of “Organic”

“Organic” has been has been the high profit, boutique side of agriculture for a long time. It’s been thought by many to be the salvation of the diversified family farm. For some it has been. The Organic Valley Co-Op in southwestern Wisconsin [Link], for example, has been hugely successful. But it isn’t necessarily a panacea.

Compost is part of the organic farming method but it doesn’t favor small farmers alone. Corporate/industrial farms can spread manure to grow organic produce and animal feed. And they do. A confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) can produce “organic, cage free” chickens, reap all of the benefits from that label and do so with little additional costs. “Organic” doesn’t necessarily imply all that we might think it does. It doesn’t necessarily imply wholesome foods produced through agricultural and environmental best management practices.

The trouble is the economics of food production is always weighed in terms of the cost of production versus the market value of crop. So land spread raw manure is an organic alternative to commercially produced nitrogen fertilizers. Well manure isn’t soil. Nutrient overloaded waterways don’t distinguish between organic and commercial fertilizers. What’s lost in the equation is the value and beauty of fermentation.

Will Allen's Composting Urban Farm

That’s where Allen’s model is a game changer. The finished crop isn’t the only product brought to market. It’s one of many byproducts of fermentation. 

On Allen’s farm soil is the first product. Everything else is a byproduct from producing soil. On Allen’s urban farm, organic feedstock for composting is the first stream of revenue. He is first dollar comes from picking up and disposing of vegetable wastes from restaurants, grocers, and produce wholesalers. On that he competes with the land fill garbage haulers.

That garbage is his raw material. From it comes a second stream of income in the form of the organic potting soils and slow release organic fertilizers he sells.

Earthworms and worm castings are a cash byproduct from the compost heap. Finally year round fresh salad greens, herbs, mushrooms and tomatoes are a final compost byproduct.

Years ago when I first visited his Milwaukee three acre farm, he estimated that as a family business it could produce nearly $500,000 net revenue a year. Allen stumbled into a new way of viewing agriculture. Rather than looking at economic model based on cost inputs and harvest yields. Allen instead saw the entire process from compost to table ready produce as productive. The result is an economically viable, environmentally sound, highly intense agricultural method suitable for small acre farms. It makes small footprint urban agriculture commercially possible.

The cost input isn’t fertilizer, herbicides, insecticides and hybrid seeds. It’s garbage, which he get paid to haul away. His farm-to-market logistics do not require a legion of food processors, transporters and wholesalers to resolve.

Allen is the son of a sharecropper whose career as a professional basketball player in Europe led him to rediscover his love for the garden and growing things. One thing leads to another. Allen’s basketball career led to a corporate career. His marriage and love of growing things lead to taking over his wife’s parent’s vegetable farm. The farm led to his purchase of the site of few vacant greenhouses on Milwaukee’s urban north side. He thought of it as a produce market for the farm. One thing leads to another. His willingness to help out a local boys and girls club establish a garden on his property, as a club activity, led to putting the three acres back into agricultural production.

Ultimately, the greenhouses led to Growing Power [Link], an internationally renowned non-profit educational organization demonstrating the viability of small site urban agriculture and the distribution of locally produced foods. It’s hands on. A conference it hosted a few weekends ago drew more than 2000 attendees from around the world.       

The Mystery of Bread -- Fermentation Forgotten and Remembered

It seems the mysteries of fermentation are seeing renewed attention in our increasingly manufactured and digitized environment. With that, we would do well to pay attention to bread. It is our culinary corner stone. And before we turned the baking of it over to the large commercial bakers, a fine loaf was presented as part of almost every meal. It offered a beautifully chewy explosion of yeasty flavor that filled both body and soul. It’s something not to be wasted.

What had once been the crown jewel of our diets has become an uninspired and insipid ingredient for sandwiches and toast. The large scale commercial bakers, like the large brewers, are interested primarily in an acceptable, uniform product with a long shelf life. With that, the individual and often unpredictable glory of fermentation is carefully removed from the recipe, and so are its delights.

The home brewer or baker has no fear of fermentation’s unpredictable charms. Things sometime go badly, but more often wonderfully well.

Turning back to the simple supper of a good soup, good bread, a few slices of cheese and a decent glass of wine or beer, in it are all the elements of a charming and delicious meal. Replicate that with a condensed soup, a soggy, enriched, machine sliced commercial white bread, processed cheese and a “light” low calorie beer, and the result might be as nutritious but it will be miserable.

Adding Fermented Goodness to a Pork Roast

Unrolling the Roast

Our bread has been so degraded that we settle for grossly inferior bread crumbs, and rarely think of bread dressing. If we do think of the bread dressing, it comes in a boxed kit with almost flavorless croutons.

So good stuffing begins with the bread. It should be bakery bread or rolls. If you’re frugal, it will come from left over bread and rolls that have become somewhat stale. These are cut into croutons and thoroughly dried in a 200^o oven for about an hour. Stored in an air-tight container these keep almost forever and are ready to use for bread stuffing or ground into bread crumbs.

The Roast Secured for the Oven

The bread dressing here is a simple sage dressing. It could be many others. For pork a bread dressing with apples and spinach is beautiful. I’ve made it in the past, but have not written a recipe for it. So unless you’re adventurous a sage dressing will do.

Stuffed Pork Roast for Six

1 ¼-1 ½ pound pork sirloin roast flattened

6 cups of sage dressing

Out of the Oven

4 strips of bacon

Sage Dressing (about six cups)

¾ Cups diced celery

¾ Cups diced onion

3 Tablespoons butter

1 Heaping Tablespoon sage

2 Cups chicken broth (must be low sodium)*

2 Cups beef broth (must be low sodium)*

4 -6 Cups bread croutons

*Bacon figures into the final roast. There is plenty of salt in that.

Saute the onions and celery in butter. When the onions are translucent add the broth and sage. Bring to a boil then simmer for ½ hour. Gradually add croutons to make a stiff dressing. If necessary ripped up fresh bread can be added to stiffen.

1 ¼ -1 ½ Pound Pork Sirloin Roast, Flattened

To flatten the roast, think of it not as a round log but a spiral. To unroll the spiral begin cutting horizontally along the bottom of the roast at a depth of about ½ inch. Unroll the roast as you cut. This will yield a large pork cutlet. Place this between two sheets of wax paper and additionally flatten it with a mallet to somewhat uniform 3/8 inch thickness.



Sliced and Ready for Gravey

 Stuffing the Roast

Layer 3 or four slices of bacon on the flattened roast then mound tightly packed bread dressing in the middle along the full length. Roll the sides of the roast over the dressing so they slightly overlap and secure with bamboo skewers.

Bake the stuffed roast in a 350^o uncovered for an hour with ¾ cups of chicken broth and ¾ cup of beef broth and 1 rounded tablespoon of sage. After an hour, repack any dressing that might have spilled from the roast, add liquid if necessary, cover and continue to bake at 300^o for another hour or until the roast reaches and internal temperature of 160^o. Prior to serving, again repack any stuffing into the ends of the roast and allow it to rest for about 10 minutes before slicing. While the roast is resting make a pan gravy with the pan drippings, adjust liquid and flavor and thicken with a flour and water whitewash.

Slice the roast into 12 portions, two per serving and top with the rich gravy. This can be served magnificently with mixed oven roasted root vegetables, think carrots, parsnips, rutabagas and onions.

Delicious. This works well with turkey thighs too.

54 MPG & Veal Oscar for Nixon

  

Richard Nixon was a veal Oscar kind of guy. I mean the imperial presidency, Watergate and all that. But mostly it was the way over the top, gaudy and ridiculously ostentatious garb he foisted on the Whitehouse uniformed security staff that tipped his hand.

Like Nixon's uniforms, veal Oscar is kind of over the top. It is a plate of breaded veal cutlets, first topped with asparagus then crab meat and finally all is sauced with an egg yolk-butter based hollandaise or béarnaise sauce.

It’s all a little much, pretentiously combining a number of plain and simple things and doing justice to none. It’s a pompous meal first cooked up to suit the fancy of Sweden’s King Oscar II. It more reflects imperial fiat rather than culinary art.

I made it once and concluded breaded veal cutlets served simply with buttered asparagus and garnished with a wedge of lemon does honor to both. And save the crab for another meal, or a simple appetizer before the main dish.

In food and fashion imperial pretentions are harmless, in governing ruinous. It seems it wasn't just Nixon's White House guard uniforms that tended toward imperial. His administration was steeped in it.

The term imperial presidency, according to Wikipedia, surfaced in the 1960s. The concept of the president governing beyond constitutional bounds was formalized by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in The Imperial Presidency, first published in 1973. The book was an historical perspective and critique of President Nixon’s conduct, particularly in regard to foreign affairs. In the introduction to the Mariner Edition to the book, Schlesinger writes:

“In August 1998 I wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled “So Much for the Imperial Presidency.” . . .

“Alas, the obituaries were premature. I had written the Imperial Presidency in the latter days of Richard M. Nixon. The American Constitution, the book argues, envisages a strong presidency with an equally strong system of accountability. When the constitutional balance is upset in favor of presidential power and at the expense of presidential accountability, the presidency can be said to become imperial.”

In the introduction he takes issue with the Patriot Act and the abuses to which it opens a wide door. The imperial presidency is back. But Schlesinger is wrong. Its reach extends far beyond excesses based on national security concerns. Now, its origins lie in a multitude of laws enacted since the 1970s when Schlesinger’s book first appeared.

Since then we have allowed a similar unbridled reach of federal authority into almost every aspect of our social and economic lives. By and large this expansion, motivated by the best of intentions, has occurred regardless of which party was in power through expansive legislation.

But each new law, to varying degrees and too often startlingly so, grants additional ambiguous authority to the executive branch. It is an authority that the executive can use in entirely novel and unexpected ways without any accountability and more importantly without the consent of the people, without legislative oversight.

So the headline in The Hill reads “Obama, EPA actions make cap-and-trade more likely.” [Full Text] Sadly, it is a headline that is unlikely to cause any of us so much as to raise an eyebrow. Worse, both Congress and the Senate are asleep. We’ve been caught napping too.

The article’s lead calmly proclaims: “President Obama’s use of executive authority and his Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) interpretation of existing laws might have laid the groundwork for renewed cap-and-trade efforts experts said Wednesday.”

In short, the article, through former EPA secretary Carol Browner’s assessment, envisions new regulations that are so onerous and costly that they will force industry beg for relief through carbon cap-and-trade alternatives.

We the people will pay for costly reductions in carbon emissions without ever engaging in a debate on carbon forced anthropogenic global warming. On a different front we will pay considerably more for cars and light duty trucks as auto makers are forced to meet a 54 mpg mandate. [Full Text] What would you call these additional costs? Consumer compliance tax?

It’s no small thing. In 2010, the U.S. Small Business Administration commissioned a study to quantify federal regulatory compliance costs imposed on American business. That study pegged annual regulatory compliance costs at a staggering $1.75 trillion. For perspective, if this cost was distributed equally it would amount to $15,586 per American household. It’s 50 percent more than all private spending on health care. (Full Text)

That’s not the worst of it. Through executive orders we are no longer equal under the law and our imperial presidency has veto powers over existing legislation. On this Thomas Sowell, in an Investor Business Daily editorial wrote [Full Text]:    

“When a president can ignore the plain language of duly passed laws, and substitute his own executive orders, then we no longer have “a government of laws, and not men” but a president ruling by decree, like a dictator in some banana republic.

“When we confine our debates to merits or demerits of particular executive orders, we are tacitly accepting arbitrary rule. The Constitution of the United States cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution. But, if we allow ourselves to get bogged down in the details of particular policies imposed by executive orders, and vote solely on that basis, then we have failed to protect the Constitution – and ourselves.”

Today, September 13, Federal Reserve Chairman, "helicopter Ben" Bernanke said the treasury will begin printing up to $40 Billion a month to buy down federal debt. I don't recall congress debating this radical policy, much less voting upon it.

If we are to endure an imperial presidency and its court, we should probably drag the Nixonian uniforms out of the attic and make those governing us wear them. As for the bazar hats, they could be different colors, variously identifying members of legislature and their staff, the White House, the administrative agencies, and lobbyists. Bernanke's hat should be red.  

Should we do so, upon visiting Washington our home grown imperialism would shockingly be on full display.