Pork Saltimbocca - Food Wishes

[Music] hello this is chef john from food wishes comm with pork saltimbocca that's right besides their great taste the thing I love about Italian recipes is that they always have the most interesting names I mean there's tara misu which means pick me up tortellini which means belly buttons and of course pasta Puttanesca which also means something in Italian but I believe my favorite is saltimbocca since that translates to jumps in the mouth which is pretty much the most accurate recipe name ever so with that let's go ahead and get started and first up we're going to need to trim in portion one pork tenderloin which run about a pound in a quarter each and what we'll do using a nice thin sharp knife is remove what we call the silver skin so we'll slide the knife under and trim that off as shown wherever we see it and by the way some of that softer white fat on the surface you can just leave we're mostly just removing those tougher silvery membranes and what you're going to notice after removing most of those is that there's more meat at the top than at the bottom of the tenderloin okay that extra meat up there is sometimes referred to as the head and we could just leave it on but it makes it harder to portion so once this is trimmed up I do like to remove that cutting where it sort of naturally separates and if we want we could finish trimming that up and use it as an extra portion but I'm not gonna do that I'm actually gonna add that to the rest of the scraps to make our pan sauce even better but we will get to that what we're gonna do once we've trimmed off that silver skin it may be trimmed up those ends little bits let's cut that into two pieces sort of cheating up a little bit towards the bigger end and what we're trying to accomplish after cutting each of those pieces in half is to give four pieces roughly about the same size give or take no one's going to measure so those are looking pretty good and what I'm gonna do is transfer those into the fridge while I deal with my scraps and by deal with I mean chop up really fine so I'm gonna take a cleaver and mince up all the trimmings and extra meat and again you could have trimmed off that extra piece we took off the top and got one extra small portion but it's only a couple ounces and as you're about to see it's gonna help make our pan sauce even more rich and delicious because what we're gonna do once all that stuff is chopped it's added to a saucepan where we've melted about a tablespoon of butter and we're gonna cook that over medium-high heat until it's caramelized and nicely browned which I believe it the same thing so we'll go ahead and cook that stirring until it looks a little something like this at which point we're gonna go ahead and dump in some chicken stock preferably homemade or what I'm using here and then in a little bit of a plot twist we're also gonna add in 1 teaspoon of unflavored gelatin powder and we will stir that in and then last but not least we will add some nice cold fresh water because what we're gonna do is simmer this slowly for about an hour and a half to basically simulate a nice rich sticky pork stock which is exactly why we added that gelatin since that's what naturally comes out of the bones when we make a real stock so we will adjust our heat so that's simmering nice and slowly and like I said we'll let that cook for about an hour and a half or so okay you could probably get away with an hour but the longer the better and if you need to add some water to it go ahead we don't want to drain out and I should mention if you want to skip this entire step I will let you know how to do that in the blog post and then what we can do while our cheater pork stock is working is go ahead and finish prepping our pork and to do that we're gonna want to pound out these pieces of pork between two pieces of plastic not too too thin maybe somewhere between a quarter and an eighth of an inch and then what we'll do once those have been flattened is remove that top piece of plastic and flip these over which seems like an unnecessary step but it's not and then once those are turned over we'll go ahead and season that side generously with kosher salt as well as freshly ground black pepper and then we'll finish those off with just a very very light dusting of flour okay so just put a couple teaspoons in your hand and then space your fingers a little bit apart as you shake her fist that will allow you to Desi's very lightly with flour and then once that set we'll go ahead and flip these back over to the side we pounded which is always going to be a little rougher than that other side and then what we'll do before we get to the good stuff is sprinkle this side with a little bit of pepper but no salt or flour okay the prosciutto we're gonna put on here is salty enough so we will just season this side with a little bit of pepper at which point we're gonna press on our fresh whole sage leaves okay and for me the perfect amount is three okay I don't think twos enough and I believe four is too many but of course that's going to be totally up to you you are after all the Jimmy Page of applying the sage so go ahead and put as many leaves as you want and then once our pounded pork has been saged we will move on to the last and probably most important ingredient our thinly sliced prosciutto ham so we will take some of that and somehow territory into several pieces enough to cover the sage and go all the way to the edges of the pork and yes it's totally find overlap and probably an advantage so we'll go ahead drape some of that over our sage like I said fully covering that surface and then once that set we will want to give this one last gentle pounding so we'll lay some plastic back over the top except this time we're just going to pound it very lightly okay we're just making sure that prosciutto sticks to the pork and then what we'll do once those have been whammed and very lightly slammed is transfer those to a plate or tray because I really think we should wrap these up and transfer them into the fridge for at least a half hour so they're nice and cold when we fry them okay if you're totally starving I'll say this is optional but I do think they come out better if they hit the pan when they're nice and cold so I did pop mine in the fridge and what we can do while we're waiting is check our fake pork stock which as you can see mine has reduced nicely and for whatever reason if you're still has a lot of liquid just go ahead and turn up the heat and try to reduce that down to about a half cup or so and then what we'll do at this point is go ahead and strain it so it's ready to use and thanks to those brown pork scraps Plus that little bit of gelatin we added we are gonna have a nice rich sticky flavorful broth which as you will see we're gonna use to create our pan sauce so we will strain that and set it aside and then assuming our meat has been chilled we can go ahead and pull that out unwrap it and proceed to cook our saltimbocca which by the way is going to take a shockingly short amount of time so what we'll do is place a nice big skillet over high heat to which we've added a couple tablespoons of olive oil and once that shimmering and we think it's nice and hot and it's just about to start smoking we will place in our pieces of pork prosciutto side down and we're gonna let that side cook about three minutes and while that ham should prevent it from sticking to the bottom since I did sort of crowd the pan I'm gonna go around with my spatula because I could see was kind of sticking to the outside of the pan so I made sure that was loose so there's no problems when we flip this and like I said we're gonna let that first side cook for about three minutes since we really do want that pursuit to caramelize and crust up nicely and what you're going to see after about two-and-a-half to three minutes is that heat rising up through the meat and our edges are gonna turn white and once it looks like this we'll go ahead and carefully turn it over and we will just give the second side about a minute all right since these pieces were just about all the way cooked through so we will give that second side about 60 seconds at which point I like to turn off the heat and I'm gonna go ahead and transfer those onto some nice warm plates and place those in a warm spot or in a warm oven while I finish the sauce so with the heat off what I like to do is take a paper towel and go ahead and blot up any of that excess oil at which point we will add some white wine to this still very very hot pan as well as our strained pork broth and at that point we can turn our heat back to high and simply cook this until it reduces down and thickens up a little bit which I'm going to guess takes about four to five minutes and just to throw out a measurement I'll say reduce it by about half but I'm probably gonna go a little bit under that and when I think it's getting close I will taste it and if necessary season it with some salt which I did and since it's impossible to see with all this steam let me go ahead and turn it off so you can see exactly how far I went and that's it thanks to all that amazingly delicious goodness that was caramelized on to the bottom plus our wine and broth we've just created a very simple but intensely flavored sauce so let's go ahead and spoon our piping hot sauce over our still warm meat and then I finished my novel a few extra leaves of sage you know for the pictures and that my friends is one of the most gorgeous culinary concoctions of all time I mean look how beautiful this came out I know you're not supposed to compliment yourself but hey I'm the only one here and as stunning as this looks it tastes even better hence the name I mean the flavors really do jump in your mouth and what happened here is that prosciutto caramelized all that hot sizzling pork fat kind of exploded that sage flavor into the meat creating just this amazing level of savoriness not to mention textures since we have that sort of crusty ham exoskeleton attached to that still moist tender pork so there is really nothing I don't love about this dish and really once that little bit of trimmings done and your meats pounded it's actually a very easy recipe to make but anyway that's it pork saltimbocca the dish formerly known as veal saltimbocca but these days people don't think it's cool the young cows anymore okay people are fine with young pigs but young cow is not so much but regardless of whether you use pork or veal I really do hope you give this a try soon so head over to food wishes comm for all the ingredient amounts and more info as usual and as always enjoy you

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 789,435

Rating: 4.9373674 out of 5

Keywords: Pork, Saltimbocca, Prosciutto, Scalopini, veal, italian, chef, john, foodwishes, cooking, recipes, food, meat, entree, dinner

Id: HPefVdIO9ok

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/constantlymat]

Made the recipe last Sunday with a few slight alterations. As advertised it tasted really amazing.

Making the pork broth with one these Knorr chicken stock pods is a great alternative to gelatine for those who don't have it in their pantry. I also added the stems of the sage leafs that were used on the Saltimbocca to the broth which adds amazing sage flavour to it.

Chef John recommends dry white wine or Marsala for a sweeter sauce. For those of us who don't want to spend big on Marsala but like it a tad sweeter, a semi-sweet white wine is imo a perfect compromise. It worked very well for me.

Also using upscale Italian prosciutto is also not necessary. Any decent air-dried prosciutto tastes most likely just ad good. I used one made in the German Alps.

The only way to ruin the dish aside from drying out the meat is to get impatient while reducing the sauce. If it's not yet tasting like an amazing heavenly potion it still needs a while longer.