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Jun

Slow-cooked Pork Tacos à la Olla Podrida

Sean Sellers  in White Wines, Albariño, Blow the Bank, Meat & Poultry , , , , , , ,

InterWined Food
Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

Just because UK food prices are their highest in more than a decade doesn’t mean that we can’t eat well. In fact, in some ways, it might mean just the opposite.

Olla PodridaSlow-cooked Pork Tacos à la Olla PodridaOlla Podrida - Cooking on the HobSlow-cooked Pork

Here’s how: we all know that necessity is the mother of something, be it outright invention or the simply act of taking chances, as a quick search of Google will assure Mark Twain once apparently said; and when it comes to the kitchen that something is prized as culinary inspiration.

For most, if not all, of the world’s great culinary achievements – those techniques that transform ingredients into dishes that speak to our hearts as much as to our stomachs – were born of a necessary kind of culinary inspiration. From salting to smoking to pickling to stewing and offal to sausages to bean curd to…you get the picture…necessity has given us some of our most popular dishes and culinary techniques to help us see out the lean weeks and wait for the happy return of opulence and excess and imported non-seasonal fruits and vegetables.

So, in the spirit of the credit crunch, put down the ready-meal, unplug the microwave, and learn to re-embrace one-pot dinners and the hasty return of leftovers, as ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you its Slow-cooked Pork Tacos à la Olla Podrida.

And, sure it might cost more than a fiver (No offense Jamie; I’m sure shopping for spaghetti with you is very rewarding.), but it’ll definitely last a couple of meals.

Pork is a staple of the Spanish and Latin American diet, which dates back at least to the reconquista of Al-Andalus in 1492 — the year ol’ Cristóbal Colón went sailing to India and landed on the island of Hispaniola (the island divided by the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

The history of this dish isn’t that old, but it’s close. In Spanish, the words Olla Podrida literally refer to a rotten pot of meat. But names can be deceiving — especially when it comes to foodstuffs — because this dish is anything but rotten.

Cooked in a large earthenware pot, the loin of pork is slow-cooked for a couple of hours in a mix of water, roughly chopped onions, cut bulbs of garlic, and a touch of salt and pepper. Later, the pork is removed and the remaining water and ingredients discarded. In the same pot, mustard seeds, paprika, and cumin are heated in olive oil with onion. The pork loin is shredded and returned to the pot, along with a simple vegetable or wine stock, followed by red kidney beans, cannellini beans, and calasparra rice. Once the stock has evaporated, the pot is removed from the heat, re-seasoned and served on warm corn tortillas to become Slow-cooked Pork Tacos à la Olla Podrida.

A bottle of the 2006 Val do Sosego Albariño (12.5%), from Rias Baixas in Spain, available at Oddbins for £8.49, makes a wondrous pairing to this white-meat stew, its mix of apples and pears complimenting the pork as well as the corn tortilla. Pork and apples, like apples and maize are excellent pairing partners; and although there is a tad more of a floral sense on the nose and woodiness in the mouth than I would have liked, it remains light and well-balanced with a crispness that helps further perpetuate the sense of apple. That gives it a score of 8.3, based on the complicated but 100%-accurate ratings system outlined on InterWined.com’s Ratings page. Thing is, it was so close to 8.6.

(As most readers will know, InterWined’s rating system is somewhat arbitrary and largely tongue-in-cheek.)

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