My friend Ginny and I have been going on – and on, my partner would add – about Fette Sau, a very brilliant restaurant in Brooklyn, New York, where the beer comes in jam jars and they serve Southern-style barbecue. Think slow-cooked pulled pork, slow-barbecued Berkshire beef, all cooked with secret sauce, lots of slaw and white bread rolls – as in the salivating picture above. It’s white trash food, only with organic single-source meat. I visited it last March when Ginny and her partner David were living in Brooklyn and it was one of the highlights of my eating career.
We had a gig to go to on the Saturday night at the Wine Cellar and, seeing as we were approaching the shortest day of the year, a slow-cook ribfest seemed to be in order. Ginny had some pork ribs in her freezer from Nosh, which she hauled out, defrosted and then proceeded to marinate in her secret sauce, which she won’t tell me the recipe to but which seems to involve red wine, tomato paste, molasses, juniper berries, pepper corns and a bay leaf – it’s a sticky sort of marinade which she reports she would normally leave ribs in for a couple of days. Then she slow roasted them for about four hours, uncovered, on a rack in the oven.
We arrived about 7, armed with 2kg of Agria potatoes and a kilo of brussels sprouts. While Ginny put the rubs under the grill – ordinarily, this is when you’d put them on the barbecue, but, new-fangled crazy apartment dwellers that we are, the old Shacklock had to do – I boiled up the spuds and chopped up the brussels sprouts.
There are three keys to good mash. Firstly, bring them to the boil in cold water and cook until they’re soft enough that you can poke a fork through them easily – and make sure you add plenty of salt to the water. Then drain them and leave for a few minutes to dry – this ensures you don’t lose all that lovely starch. The second key is loads of butter, less milk. The third is to use hot milk – my theory is that it does something to the starch in the potatoes that renders them silky and fluffy almost instantly. Whip like hell and add lots of salt. (I have, on occasion, slipped some cheese in there too, as well as caramelised leeks, just for variety.)
We finished this off with Brussels Sprouts, which have a bad rep but which are truly spesh, especially if you braise them. Choose ones that aren’t too large and have tightly packed leaves; ignore the ones with any brown spots or yellowing leaves. This means they’re old: supermarkets in particular are awful at leaving Brussels sprouts too long.
Rinse the Brussels and remove the tough outer leaves, then cut the last of the stalk off and slice them in two vertically. Then get a nice big skillet or frying pan and put a good dollop of good olive il in it. Heat it up and add the Brussels, cut side down. Jiggle them a bit but don’t move them too much, even if it looks like they’re burning – they’re not. Once they’re sufficiently brown, add a tiny bit of water (or even wine) and then pop a lid on it. The end result should be nice and caramelised and cooked sufficiently through. When they’re cooked – you want them soft but not squidgy – put them in a bowl and top with shavings of parmesan or grana padano and salt and pepper to taste.
The combination was truly fantastic – mash, greens in the pan (no sissy steamed veges here: it’s all about the frying pan) and the ribs, which were sticky and soft and which you could pull apart virtually with your fingers. It was, in all, brilliantly Flintstone food, and we will do them again.
