Ground Pork

I’m particularly proud of our house-made sausages, which we have been making and selling at the Market since day one. They’re delicious, and they’re also free of the fillers, additives, and preservatives common in commercially made sausages. You don’t need a meat grinder or a sausage stuffer to make sausage at home. You can use preground pork shoulder, mix in the spices of your choice, and form them into patties or kebabs. Here I share three of my favorite spice combinations: a classic breakfast sausage, a hot Italian variety, and a sweet Spanish-style chorizo. If pork is not your thing, ground chicken or turkey that has a 15 to 20 percent fat content will work as well.

Panko bread crumbs give these beef-and-pork meatballs a lighter texture than those made with regular bread crumbs. Serve over spaghetti, if you wish, or in a small loaf of soft Italian bread for meatball sandwiches.

Look for wonton wrappers in your supermarket’s refrigerated section (often next to tofu); they are also available frozen. Unused wrappers can be frozen, wrapped in plastic, for up to two months.

A boiled dinner, which to be more precise might be called a simmered dinner, is an assortment of meats and vegetables simmered slowly and gently until tender. The resulting broth is clear and full of flavor and the meat is fork-tender and moist, comfort food at its best, restorative to body and soul. A variety of meats can be put into the pot; among them is usually a gelatinous cut to add a bit of body to the broth and a bony one to enrich the flavor. Some favorites are short ribs, brisket, beef cheeks, shanks, oxtail, chuck, beef tongue, chicken (either legs or a whole chicken), and sausage, or sausage-stuffed cabbage leaves. A boiled dinner is often served with the broth as a first course followed by the meats and vegetables, but I prefer to serve it all at once, with the meat and vegetables arranged in deep soup plates, moistened with a generous ladle of broth. Typical accompaniments for the meat are coarse sea salt, pickles, and a piquant sauce such as salsa verde, Dijon mustard, horseradish cream (grated horseradish, heavy cream, a pinch of salt, and a splash of white wine vinegar), or a tomato sauce spiked with capers. It is worthwhile to get the meat a couple of days ahead and to season it generously with salt and pepper. This will make it even more succulent and tasty. When a beef tongue is included (and I am quite partial to tongue in a boiled dinner), it should be soaked in salted water for at least eight hours to purge and season it. When deciding how much meat to buy, plan for ample leftovers. The broth makes fabulous soups and risottos and the meat is great sliced and served hot or cold with salsa verde, or in sandwiches, or chopped for hash. Classically, a boiled dinner is made with water. For a richer, sweeter broth, I like to use chicken broth instead, or half chicken broth and half water. This dish is easy to make, but it does take a while to cook, so plan for a few hours of simmering. Keep the pot at a bare simmer, with bubbles breaking the surface only now and then. Cooking meat at a boil will make it dry and stringy. Because their flavors can dominate the broth’s, beef tongue, sausage, and cabbage should be cooked separately from the beef and chicken. As an option to cabbage and sausage, or as a lovely further addition, consider preparing stuffed cabbage leaves. Add vegetables to be served with the meats towards the end of the cooking so that they leave a fresh, sweet taste in the broth. Here is a recipe for a complete boiled dinner—a classic Italian bollito misto—that includes different cuts of beef, a beef tongue, chicken legs, sausage, and stuffed cabbage. This is a bountiful dish that can easily be pared back all the way to the simplicity of boiled beef with carrots alone. Although this is a long recipe, some parts can be prepared in advance. The meats and tongue can be cooked ahead and stored in their broth. The sausage, stuffed cabbage, and vegetables are best prepared and cooked close to serving time. Timing is not critical; once everything is cooked and ready to eat, all the meats and vegetables can be reheated together in the broth and served.

Sausage is quite easy to make. This recipe is for sausage meat that won’t be stuffed into a casing. It is good for making patties and meatballs, and for stuffings and pasta sauces. In general, for sausage to have a good texture it should contain 25 to 30 percent fat. Much of this fat is rendered while the sausage cooks, but without it the meat will be dry and lack flavor. It follows that the best ground pork to use is ground from the shoulder, which has more fat than the leg or loin. When made with fresh meat, sausage will keep in the refrigerator for up to a week.

I like to make these meatballs about the size of Ping-Pong balls and toss them with tomato sauce and spaghetti. Sometimes I make them a bit smaller, roll them while still hot in grated Parmesan cheese, and serve them as an hors d’oeuvre.

You can substitute italian linguine or spaghetti for the rice noodles in this dish. Although the texture will not be the same, the dish will still be good. Boil the noodles nearly to doneness in the normal fashion, then rinse before proceeding

You can find fresh Chinese-style (and Japanese-style) wheat noodles at most supermarkets these days. They’re a great convenience food and, for some reason, seem to me more successful than prepackaged “fresh” Italian noodles. Here they’re briefly cooked and then combined with a stir-fried mixture of pork, vegetables, and Chinese sauces; it’s very much a Chinese restaurant dish. Both ground bean sauce and hoisin sauce can be found at supermarkets (if you can’t find ground bean sauce, just use a little more hoisin), but you can usually find a better selection (and higher-quality versions) at Chinese markets. Usually, the fewer ingredients they contain, the better they are.

This is not a stir-fry but a simmered dish, easy and fast. The cooking time totals about ten minutes, and the preparation time is about the same, so be sure to start the rice first.

Steamed dishes are not common even in Thailand (most Thai dishes are stewed or stir-fried). But this is a lovely, mild, sweet dish I had at an upscale restaurant in Bangkok; I thought it was an innovation, but it turns out to be quite traditional. You can prepare the mixture ahead of time, cover, and refrigerate the ramekins until you are ready to steam them. Serve it with rice and a salad or vegetable dish. To make ground chicken yourself, cut boneless, skinless breasts or thighs into chunks and put them in a food processor; pulse until ground, being careful not to overprocess. You can use turkey or pork in place of the chicken if you like. Information on Thai fish sauce (nam pla) is on page 500.

Of all the powerful ingredients in these burgers— lemongrass, shallots, garlic, chile, and nam pla (called nuoc mam in Vietnamese; see page 500 for information on these Asian fish sauces)—none survives the cooking as well as the lemongrass, whose distinctive scent and flavor override all the others, reducing them to bit players. Lemongrass is changed less by cooking than most seasonings, and this goes for its woody texture too, which is why you remove the tough outer layers. You can grind the tender cores with the meat instead of chopping them if you like. Serve the burgers on rolls, rice noodles, or salad. Other cuts of meat you can use here: ground beef sirloin or chuck, which may be combined with pork if you like.

A fairly complicated, lasagnelike dish and, like lasagne, perfectly homey. With advance preparation (you can make the sauce a day ahead and sauté the plantains several hours ahead), you can throw this together quickly, but even if you do it all at once you can make quick work of it. Great with a salad, this needs nothing else. Other meat you can use here: ground turkey, chicken, veal, or pork.

Almost every country has a sausage or two. These skinless Romanian ones are among the easiest, essentially well-seasoned hamburgers that were undoubtedly created in a pinch and are known as “the little sausages without skin” and remain popular today. Note that these contain caraway seeds, one of the distinctive flavorings of Eastern Europe—the Italian variation uses fennel instead. Other cuts of meat you can use here: Ground beef, veal, or a combination.

This is not a stir-fry but a simmered dish, easy and fast. The cooking time totals about 10 minutes, and the preparation time is about the same, so make sure to start a pot of rice before anything else. Other meat you can use here: ground turkey, chicken, veal, or beef.

Incredibly quick and perfect on a weeknight with steamed Sticky Rice (page 508), which of course takes twice as long as the dish itself! See page 500 for information on nam pla. Other meat you can use here: Ground turkey, chicken, veal, or beef.

I had been making meatless potato croquettes for years when I found that my favorite condiment (for these and many other fried foods) was soy sauce mixed with lemon—so imagine my self-satisfaction when I was served these at a Tokyo lunch counter with exactly that dipping sauce. I like to add curry powder, for both flavor and color, but it’s not essential. Substitute canned salmon or tuna for the meat if you like, but don’t cook it; simply toss it with the onion and seasonings after cooking the onion. The Japanese bread crumbs called panko are available at Japanese markets and many supermarkets. In Japan, these are almost always deep-fried; I find panfrying suffices, though of course you can deep-fry if you prefer. They’re usually served on a bed of plain shredded cabbage, sometimes as an appetizer, sometimes as a main course. You can make both mashed potatoes and the meat mixture in advance; you can also make the patties in advance and cover and refrigerate them for up to a day before cooking.

Start with stock, use just about the same seasoning asin regular pho (preceding recipe), and substitute quick-cooking meatballs for chuck. The result is a relatively fast pho with all the flavor of its slow-cooked big brother. See page 500 for information on nam pla, Thai fish sauce.

With a couple of good side dishes, this delicious standard makes a satisfying main course.

Quicker and easier than the preceding recipe, this one usually relies on mushrooms and meat for flavor. Though it’s a cross-cultural technique and not at all traditional, I think adding a small handful of soaked dried porcini to the fresh mushrooms as they cook is a big improvement. You can buy toasted sesame seeds in Korean (and usually Japanese) markets, but toasting them yourself takes less than 5 minutes.

This dish contains a lot of flavors, but one distinguishes Indonesian cooking from almost every other: dried shrimp. These tiny crustaceans can be bought at most Asian markets and need only be soaked in hot water for a few minutes before use. (There’s also a shrimp paste, which requires no soaking; you can use this instead.) But, like nam pla—Southeast Asian fish sauce—dried shrimp are an acquired taste for many people. I like them, but I’ve also made this successfully without them when I fear guests will balk. Other vegetables you can prepare this way: I’ve never seen this without green beans, but certainly you could substitute any root vegetable for the carrot and zucchini or any other summer squash for the eggplant.