Gebratene Frischling Schulter-Slow roast shoulder of Young Wild Boar

Gebratener Frischling Schulter – Roast shoulder of young boar

I used half a shoulder about 1.125kg

Game spices (see my recipe)

1 bunch of root vegetables (carrots, celeriac, leek and parsley root)  diced

1 onion halved and each half studded with a bay leaf held in place with a couple of cloves

3 cloves of garlic

1 pint of game stock (made from game bones and trimmings)

200ml of red wine

Put the shoulder in a Ziploc bag or vacuum pouch with the dry game spices and allow to dry marinade overnight in the fridge.

Next day

Peel the pear, add it together with red wine to cover to a small saucepan together with a stick of cinnamon, a couple of cloves, a good scraping of nutmeg, 2 crushed cardamom pods,  1 star aniseed and a twist of orange peel, bring to the boil, lower the heat and simmer until the pear is soft, turn off the heat and allow to stand covered.

 Scrape the game spices off the meat (scrape it into the roasting dish) salt and pepper all over, place on a bed of roughly chopped root veg  pour over the wine and stock, salt and pepper the meat, cover and put in the oven set at 180°C, after 30mins reduce the heat to 150°C and slow roast for 2 hrs.

Roast Brussel sprouts.

Clean the sprouts (remove any dirty shriveled outside leaves), cut crosses in the stem end if you are that way inclined. Blanch in plenty of rapidly boiling salted water. Remove and stop the cooking process by placing in iced water. Remove from iced water and dry on a clean kitchen towel. Set aside until 30 mins before end of the roast cooking time.

Heat oil in a roasting dish, add a diced onion and some smoked speck, when the onions are translucent, add the sprouts shake the tin to get them all coated in oil, and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Put into the oven along with the roast.

Red wine sauce

This sauce is only thickened by reduction and the addition of cold butter at the end.

Remove the roast from the roasting dish, set on a tray and cover to rest.

Pour the remnants from the roasting dish through a sieve into a sauce pan, squeezing all of the root veg etc to get maximum flavour out of them. Bring to the boil and reduce to about half, adding cold butter at the end (monère) so that the sauce has a nice shine.

We served it with red cabbage and potato dumplings.

Red cabbage see the hairy bikers recipe.

Potato dumplings half and half. (50% cooked-50% raw)

1kg of floury potatoes (peeled weight)

2 teaspoons of salt

100 ml milk

80g (approx., this depends on the amount of water you can squeeze out of the grated potatoes)

3 egg yolks (L)

Salt and pepper to taste

The day prior cook 400g of floury potatoes in salted water, pour off water, cover and allow to dry overnight.

Next day grate (or use a cooking machine with a grating attachment) the remaining peeled raw potatoes into water. When all are grated remove from the water pressing in the hands to remove as much of the starch as possible, repeat the process in a change of clean water.

Place the potato mass onto a clean Tea Towel, wring this together (I knot the corners of the towel together and place a wooden spoon through the loops that are formed, then twist until as much liquid and starch is removed as possible).

Place the resulting mass into a bowl and add the boiling milk stir cover and allow to cool.

Next pass the cooked potatoes from the previous day through a ricer, add the flour and eggs and mix well.

Add this to the raw potato mixture (it is here that you will find out if you need to add anymore flour). Salt and pepper to taste.

Form into smooth balls (I make mine about the size of billiard balls)

Carefully lower into boiling salted water, immediately lower the heat so that the water is just moving and cook for approximately 20 minutes.

So that is about it, other than carve the frischlng, pour your already opened bottle of good wine, we had a very nice Spanish Crianza 2009.

Bon Appetite 

Gills rough spuds and Gordons belly

There had been a nice discussion on the BBC message board http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbfood/NF2670471?thread=8275218&latest=1#lastpost about Patatas Bravas and Gill the painter had come up with a menu using them as a back up to Gordon Ramsey  pressed belly pork, it had been mooted around that this Sundays lunch would be slow roast shoulder of lamb, how wrong Moot was!

While shopping at the market on Saturday morning (we needed the freshest of fish for that evenings Sashimi) we also got a slab of pork belly, weighing in at 1.5kg (it still had the bones in so was about the 1.3kg recommended by Gordon.




While I was doing the filigree work on the fish, I had left Linda to try her hand at scoring the pork skin, her knife skills are coming along well, I shall have to watch my back!!!!

scoring the skin

Oiled, salted and put on the garlic with the thyme

Just for our friend Kalle, the Swedish salt

She decided to use a Swedish salt (I did suggest it may taste of beetroot, but that pearl of wisdom fell on stony ground). This was rubbed into the surface making sure that it went into all of the cracks, nooks and crannies, a good sprinkling of fresh ground pepper and a rub of olive oil. I didn’t watch the rest of the procedure, as I had much more pressing work to be getting on with, I didn’t hear any cursing and swearing (is that normal for a GR recipe???) I though she was managing quite well without the benefit of me sticking my oar in.



Basting number one





Basting number two




Out and ready to press



She did keep bobbing up during the evening to go and give it a baste and did once inquire why did she have to put heavy tins on top, I believe I replied in the vein of “because bloody Gordon said so”.



Next morning, while I was writing up my Sashimi blog, she started making her Patatas Bravas.

First making the sauce

Shallots, garlic, chili, smoked paprika.

Then in went the pork for its final roasting

The spuds went in to be finished off and out the came all crispy!

The finished pressed GFs belly pork

And the smokey pugnant spicy sauce.



All served with a nice walnut and eichel blatt salad

It made a nice , no, it made a wonderful lunch time meal!



All I can say is thanks Gill, Gordon and Linda it was a very nice meal



Slow roasted shoulder of hoggat and a nice Sundays drive in the sun.

It was a visit to my Turkish butcher (ess) that turned me in this direction, I had originally gone in to get some boned chicken thighs for our evening meal (Linda was coming down from Kiel), I saw that she had some nice looking hoggat shoulder (here most of the meat is either hoggat or mutton and Lamb must normally be ordered (except in the grill season when there are piles of chops and cutlets ready to be BBQ'd). I had also got a bag of  sheep bones to make a nice stock for the finished sauce.

Bones ready to be boiled together with freeze dried veg  a bit of garlic and a litre of vegetable stock. This was all prepared and strained through a seive ready to add to the sauce that the roast had been cooked over.

I bought a nice shoulder and as she had 5 kidneys (not herself but to sell from the counter) I took them as well. (I decided to do a trial for the comings weekends Kikoklu Tapas evening.

I wanted to do it real slow, cooked in my blue Aldi cast iron casserole, with loads of vegetables, herbs and spices.

I first cut the haxe (shank) off, this would be used to rest the main shoulder on.



 I done the normal spiking with garlic, rosemary and anchovies, rubbed it all over with sea salt and cracked black pepper. .

Diced up a carrot, a piece of celeriac, some scallions, a couple of small onionss. I added these with a bit of speck and a couple of table spoons of neutral oil. I fried these until the onions became translucent and the speck took on a bit of colour. I

popped in a few fresh herbs (rosemary, sage, thyme and origano) put a load more dried herbs de Provence on top of the leg.

Drizzled the shoulder with a bit of olive oil, poured  a good 1/4 bottle of Pinot Grigio and popped into the oven at 150°C

and went out for a drive in the smashing spring sun. We drove through the fields and back roads where I shoot, these where full of game and wild life, the trees are just taking on their first green sheen, the colour just prior to bursting into leaf, in fact the hedgerows are full of the bright yellow of  forsythia and the willows hanging with catkins throwing their dusty pollen into the air to cause mayhem to all hay fever sufferers, that in this case is ME

When we returned, the flat was smelling of that smashing Sunday roast smell, that I remember from my young days at home, I had prepared all of the vegetables before going out so it was just a matter of  putting on the cauli, spuds, beans and carrots, straining the liquor from the Aldi blue, adding some of the stock prepared earlier and reducing to a nice gravy, I do not like gloopy sauces.

In the mean time I made a sauce for the cauliflower, I made a flour, butter roux, adding the remainder of the stock, I diced up some blue French cheese and added this. Poured it over cauliflower, a couple of scrapings of nutmeg, a small handful of Parmasan and popped it into the oven to brown.



Served with new minted redskins, mint sauce and a cauli in a blue cheese sauce

accompaniied with green beans, baton carrots and diced tomatoes in a creme frais sauce.

The finished plate