pork

Week 45: Pacific Islands – Kalua Pork Hawaiian Pizza

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This week’s Pacific Island challenge spanned so many countries, it was surprisingly hard to stray from the enticing flavors that Hawaii offers. While Hawaiian pizza may be all too fitting for a pizza metatheme, the style actually originated in Canada, thus Kalua pork was slapped on for extra credit.

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Entrusting a slow cooker with three pounds of pork shoulder led to hours of tasty aromatics roaming around the house.

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In lieu of liquid smoke, I smothered the pork shoulder with a heap of smoked salt from Scotland.

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Canadian bacon was substituted with actual bacon because I do what I want.

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Pineapple meanwhile remained pineapple.

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After a 12 hour cooking session, just a small portion of meat was pulled for topping purposes. The pork leftovers were later transformed into a week-long diet of carnitas tacos.

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The pizza base was a red pie with mozzarella, as per the standard Hawaiian pizza build.

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For wine, I opted to follow the “pork and pinot” pairing mantra and selected a New Zealand Pinot Noir not only for its punchy red fruit characteristic but also for the additional love tap on the Pacific Island theme, albeit sourced from the opposite end of the geographic zone.

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Spy Valley was a refreshing sipper of a wine that played nicely with the pineapple sweetness but also contrasted the heaps of savory notes brought on by the pork and bacon. It also went well with carnitas tacos.

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Week 30: Fermentation – [Cured] Meat Lovers Pizza

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And now for a challenge I’m rather well versed in: fermentation. Let’s all give a quick air-five to Louis Pasteur, the man who put an end to the shoulder shrug of a mystery that we built civilizations around. Yet even without understand the mechanisms, we still managed to bust out thousands of years of worth of food and booze history all very much dependent on the process. Without fermentation, we’d all be extremely sober and things like bread would be seriously impaired.

Having built this blog, and really an entire career, around fermented items, I figured I might try to make a pizza wholly from fermented items. The crust would be a no-brainer but the remainder could really range in personality.

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For the sauce, I made a Spanish vermouth reduction with shallots and parmesan. The sweetness from the vermouth would help to balance out the salty toppings I had planned.

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Salami and cured meats were the biggest shock to find on the list of foods that require fermentation. This very fact would make up the foundation of this pizza, having finally found a reason to use an absurd amount of meat as topping. I selected a range of styles including pepperoni, Calabrese salami, finocchiona salami, and bresaola.

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I also took this as a chance to splurge on some San Dainele Prosciutto and wow was it so, so worth it.

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Parmesan was used to support all the bright, salty flavors, and it also happens to be a fermented product as well. My goal was to finish the dish with greek yogurt for some balanced creamy texture but after a quick couple of tests, opted against it.

 

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With the flavors leaning thoroughly into the super meaty, salty realm, I worked with the textures to create an interesting topography that crisped up just right (despite the lack of lighting in my oven).

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And for the final fermented product: wine. I opted for Champagne, a style that has seen two fermentations, one for the initial still wine and another reactivated fermentation to capture the CO2 in bottle. While I wasn’t enamored with the pairing itself, despite higher expectations, I built a nice little night on the couch around the meal and indulged my dumb face while watching Netflix and petting some dogs so overall, it was pretty okay.