Brawn

Our latest foray into traditional and interesting foods (following on from black pudding, sausages and haggis) is brawn. This is a sort of semi-preserved coarse meat paste made from the head of a pig. It’s not as disgusting as you might think – there’s lots of proper meat on a head (the cheeks in particular), along with fat to lubricate the meat and some other bits and bobs to give it texture. So, you get your butcher to quarter the head, you clean it (including the teeth…Mmmmm), brine it for 24 hours to give it some hammy flavour, then boil it gently for 4 hours until the meat is meltingly soft, with onion, herbs and spices (I used bay leaves, oregano, thyme, coriander, peppercorns, cloves, fennel seed and mustard seed) and a pig’s trotter if you’ve got one to help make sure that the stock will set solid. Once it’s cooled, roughly chop all the meat (including as much of the fat and skin as you fancy – or as little!) and add some of the rich stock you boiled it in to moisten and help it set, then press into a terrine dish and put it in the fridge to set, covered with a weighted plate to compress it.

The result is something like this:

Eat cold with bread or in a salad, or fry it up so that it goes nice and crispy! Lovely :-)

pax et bonum

Article posted at 10:15am on 14 June 2005
Category: Food, Life, Struggling, General

sounds… er. ...delightful ! I especially like the part about ‘other bits and bobs to give it texture’. Would that be the eyes, ears, tongue and brain bits?

Jon Taylor () (URL)
3:42pm on 14 June 2005

Mostly – ears, tongue and brain, certainly. I suspect that the eyes are too tough to make good eating, and we certainly didn’t include them! The tongue, of course, is rather like beef tongue, which still has a place as a lunch meat. We did wimp out a little and left most of the ears out (still rather tough), but the brain went in (pig)

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
3:53pm on 14 June 2005

Hmmm, I heard about Brawn for the first time today, as someone mentioned it on BOL, saying that after taking it they felt a lift in their mental depression.

The reason I guess, could be the opiod peptides you would get as a result of boiling this meat for so long. It’s not a cure for depression. Just another chemical that gets the brain buzzing for a short while. And the buzz can be addictive. Check out http://www.waisays.com

Meat protein is bad when cooked!

Peace out.

Haggis from BOL ()
11:37am on 28 December 2006