What I Cooked This Week
Iberico Pork Belly Steaks
Things are settling down in the kitchen at The Flower Shop and I’ve finally gotten some time to experiment with new dishes. As I’ve detailed here, when we opened the restaurant my request to hire a Sous-Chef was denied so I didn’t have the space and time to be creative. My entire focus was solely on staffing, training, and getting the menu that ownership signed off on in October implemented.
Now that things are working and people are enjoying the food, I’ve gotten a few hours each week to try something new and push the menu a bit.
The dish that kept me up at night was our Mustard Sauce Iberico Spareribs with confit persimmons. It’s been my favorite dish on the menu and some customers even DM me before coming in to see if they’re available, but because Iberico Spareribs are pretty inconsistent from animal-to-animal it’s been tough do deliver consistently.
On each rack, there are about 2 to 3 bones with very little meat on them and sometimes even 4. We never want to short people with the lean end of the rack so the yield was low and the dish was naturally inconsistent.
A younger version of myself would continue serving the dish because I found it delicious and people kept ordering it, but the mature version knows that you have to cut a dish if you cannot deliver it consistently every time.
That’s basic.
Diners don’t like looking across the room at another table with a significantly healthier portion of ribs. And while we didn’t get complaints, things have to be equitable in a dining room; I simply didn’t sleep well knowing the yield on each dish was inconsistent.
That said, I still wanted to showcase Iberico Pork on the menu. I think its a fantastic product that I personally enjoy working with so I went through the offerings of many butchers/purveyors. While the cut I enjoy the most is the Secreto, it’s floating around $26/lb right now which simply isn’t realistic to offer in a bar. If you’re cooking at home, I highly recommend treating yourself to some Secreto on the grill and Campo Grande ships my favorite version of it. I do not work with them, but they have the best product in this category.
Ultimately, the two cuts that fit our price point at The Flower Shop are the pork chop and the pork belly steak. They have great yields, fantastic flavor, and embody what you want in a bar or tavern entree.
I started with the pork chop by applying a 2-vinegar marinade, letting it chill out in there for 12 hours, then pulled it out, and roasted it at 250 in the combination oven for 6 minutes with no moisture. Because there is sugar and a touch of soy in the marinade, we got instant coloration in the oven bringing up a lot of delicious flavor on the surface of the chop. After 6 minutes, we pulled it out, let it rest in the walk-in, then marked it hard on the grill serving it medium-rare-plus with a gravy I picked up with the 2-vinegar marinade.
This was the result.
I always take my food photos with frontal flash because I like seeing all the imperfections and weird shit. Obviously the gravy could have been whipped harder and smoother, but I made this on the line in the 20 free minutes we had before service one day.
That was another concern as well. We do quite a bit of volume at The Flower Shop so the pickups have to be quick, we are very reliant on prep, and there can’t be a lot of wasted movement or tweezers on the line.
All that said, we loved this pork chop: tender, juicy, and surprising with the acidity from the marinade cutting through the unctuous Iberian pork flavor.
We thought this was the winner, but on the second day we put it on the menu as a special there was a traffic jam at the oven during prep. Additionally, if you fire the pork chop in the oven and par cook it before service, you have to sell that chop. That’s why certain restaurants will tell you we only have 3 orders or 5 orders of so-and-so dish tonight, because its true. They’ve par cooked those items and that’s all they got for the evening. If you sell out, people are upset. If you don’t sell out, you have a lot of waste and neither is satisfactory to me.
So, we changed the technique and went from marinade straight to the grill.
Now, this chop was juicy, delish, and flavorful, BUT, it looked like something fired from a 80s steakhouse. Gone was the brownish-reddish coloration from 360 heat in the oven as well as the flavor that browning and caramelization creates.
While I love nostalgia, grilled steak and chops simply aren’t my thing. I’ll stomach it at Musso & Frank’s because of the dining room, but a chop or steak needs heat all around it like a Montague Broiler, Josper Oven, or a Rational/Blodgett Combination Oven which we use.
Simply put, the chop going from marinade to grill didn’t feel special and it had no place on the menu.
That’s when I turned to the pork belly steak.
What I find appealing and interesting about the Iberico Pork Belly Steak is that it comes thin and flat like a flank steak or skirt steak perfect for high heat grilling or searing, but has that untuous flavor you know from the belly. When you cook it on high heat, it comes out crispy with Iberico fat dripping off the surface very similar to the secreto.
So, I popped the pork belly steaks into the 2-vinegar marinade for a couple hours, then dropped them straight on the hottest part of the grill and pressed it with a weight. After a minute, I turned it, then pressed it, then flipped it and did the same on the other side to mark it.
What we got was a perfect, beautiful, Iberico steak with alluring grill marks. I then cut some scraps off the sides of my Pork Belly Steaks, confit them, then took that fat and made a jus with onions and the marinade to lay underneath the steak.
To finish the dish, I stuffed Peppadew Peppers and Castelvetrano Olives with goat cheese as a nod to Basque food without fully being a cornball trying to mimic it with Piquillo peppers etc. I was inspired by Iberico Pork, I used a Chinese marinade, I used 80s steakhouse technique, and I stuffed a pepper in an Australian-Chinatown-NYC Bar.
Wah lah.
Full Recipe below for paid subscribers.
