4 Hour Potatoes and Pig's Ear

Look at that post title, could be the name of a new cop drama, couldn't it? 4 Hour Potato is the nickname of the tough guy, because he's hard boiled! and Pig's Ear is his sidekick, because he's so ugly. Don't steal my idea.
Over the weekend I decided to tackle these two projects since they both take a long time, but hardly any effort, so I could get on with unpacking some clothes that have seriously been in boxes since we moved into the house a year ago.
I have a fascination with offal and 'variety meats' in general. I love that you can buy tripe and trotters in some supermarkets now - for absolutely different reasons, mind. Tripe is sold in my local Morrisson's which is in a largely Eastern European part of London, and trotters are cool and sexy now so the Sainsbury's near my office in Westminster has started carrying them. But for everything else Chinatown will always be ahead of the curve, none of it will be organic or lovely, but at least it's there.
Loon Fung Supermarket on Gerrard Street has a huge butcher counter with a fierce female butcher peeking out from behind piles of odd joints, hearts, ears and feet. Occasionally you can find something like beef eye of round for a fraction of a supermarket price. There are always live razor clams, and sometimes crabs wriggling around, it's a great place to explore. I always overspend here.
This is what the ear looks like when you get it home, exactly the same colour and texture as my own skin, which is incredibly unsettling. Larousse instructs you to burn off the hair with a blow torch which really tests your resolve because it fills the room with a rancid stink and makes you feel like a murderer disposing of your victim.

You braise the ear slowly in wine and stock and carrots in a covered dish in the oven and after an hour it emerges a completely different color. Instead of an unsettling hue of human skin it is now brown and purple, like the bruises on a cadaver someone left out in the rain.
That's my internal monologue, if I was writing this up for people to read I would describe that shade as 'caramelized' and 'unctuous'. Better?
Anyway, you let the ear cool and then smother in a sauce you had been making all this time and leave for an hour to let the flavors develop, I guess.
The sauce is something else, I love Larousse Gastronomique for including this ridiculous recipe, because I doubt anybody else would invite you to make this with a straight face. The sauce you want is called Villeroi, which is just Allemande sauce diluted with stock and mushrooms (didn't you know that?), you obligingly flip all the pages of the book back from the V section to the A section and discover that the basis of the Allemande is the Veloute. Back to V, and thankfully the beginning of the shrubbery maze, and begin. A Veloute is Bechamel made with stock instead of milk, to make Villeroi you thicken your Veloute with egg yolks and cream and then add more stock and mushroom essence. On it's own this was delicious, rich and creamy. I stopped taking photographs of the pig's ear by then, but if I had to describe it as it sat in the thick, yellow, congealing sauce for the requisite hour... I would choose not to.
After an hour it's finally show time, you take the sliced ear out of the sauce, roll in breadcrumbs and fry.
The end result is spectacular. It's incredibly satisfying to add value to an essentially valueless thing, and even though I will never be able to justify the time commitment to make this again, I'm glad I tried it.
The boyfriend and I had pig's ear at a Szechuan restaurant in King's Cross a few years ago, I loved it, he hated it, we would both describe the dish as spicy, slimy and crunchy, which I think I'm in the minority in thinking of as a delicious description. My pig's ear was meaty and crunchy, which has more of a universal appeal and cost very little to produce.

Accompanying my folly above was the 4 Hour Potato, for which I got the idea from Oishibo, the Manga about food that has frustratingly not been fully translated into English. The particular storyline is about a guy who has to eat a potato, but had a bad experience with potatoes once so can't do it. But if he doesn't do it, he will be a laughing stock, so the main characters set about producing a potato dish he will eat. I'm making is sound stupid, but it's really really good!

The technique they describe involves simmering a peeled potato in dashi and butter for 4 hours, a method that I would have though would result in a mush but instead produces a soft, tender potato floating in a golden soup. It tastes nothing like a potato, the typical earthy flavors are inexplicably replaced with sugar so the whole thing is oddly sweet. In the book this is described as the 'true essence' of the potato, but honestly, I can't recommend this. I like the idea, but if I'm going to be extracting potato sugar it will be to make my own vodka.
And this concludes my report on how I spent my weekend.