What goes into a cooking repertoire? Are they basic recipes like how to make rice and a standard method for roasting a chicken? Are they family classics like plum pie or a cousin’s Christmas Eve roast? Is it a collection of sustainable flexible recipes that you might need last? I’ve been thinking about this ever since I got Jessica Battiliana’s first cookbook Repertoire this spring. I immediately fell in love with the concept: the recipes she relies on most—undemanding but rewarding; not fancy but special. There are recipes for chicken parmesan breasts meatballs and a simplified eggplant with parmesan; chicken tortilla soup pretzel rolls and corn fritters. There’s a recipe for the dish that most quickly found its way into my repertoire—a negroni (though I made it boulevardier-style) and potato chips (spoiler: they came from a bag)—and birthday cake too. But it was this candy pig that I couldn't forget and I'm so glad I chose it as my runner-up.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Publish Date not found |  0 Views |
I finally found the trick to the most tender pork belly! Easy full recipe | Smitten kitchen #fyp
[I wondered what my cooking repertoire would look like but realized that with 1200 recipes in the archives and 105 in each of my cookbooks it's probably a little late to do that since I'd never be able to choose although I tried.]
Battilana is a food columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle but also works on cookbooks like the incredible Vietnamese Home Cooking book (we made the pho here) by Charles Phan. From Phan she learned about Vietnamese caramel sauces made with Thai chiles ginger garlic and shallots. At his restaurant The Slanted Door it’s used on chicken in a clay pot but at Repertoire it’s used to roast pork chunks and it’s one of the best things I’ve made this year. [Her kids call it candy pork because kids know: no one can resist candy.]
There are so many things I love about it: a sauce that’s more salty than sweet glossy and dark the short ingredient list that’s still incredibly complex in flavor the fact that it cooks much faster than a whole pork shoulder and you can use the roasting time to have fun with sides like rice and veggies or I dunno a negroni and chips right? It was kid-friendly and the leftovers were perfect which means it’s also suitable for real life. And with a name like candy pork how could you not want to make it on the rainy cold pre-Halloween weekend we have coming up?
