Norwegian buffet ~ sylte

17th December 

I love baking and making cookies, I enjoy

Sytle, Norwegian cold cut of meat

cake making and playing with different desserts BUT we cannot live on sweet alone.  I felt it time to share some traditional savoury Norwegian dishes with you and today the first one up would be perfect for a Boxing Day buffet, that is when we are going to be eating our pressed herb pork roll, or as they say in one word in Norwegian: sylte 





Sytle
A note on timing:
The pork needs to cook for two hours before pressing for 24 hours and then leaving in brine to soak until needed.


You will need:

pork belly without bone
salt
pepper
ginger
whole cloves  
string
a press if you have one, if not a couple of loaf tins and heavy weights



METHOD 1

1  If the piece of meat has too much fat on the outer edge, trim it down a bit.

2  Boil in water with 2 tbsp. salt in per 1 litre used.  Fast boil for five minutes, thereafter simmer for two hours.




Meat ready to boil and simmer for 2 hours

  3  Remove meat from the water and leave to cool for about 20 minutes.



Meat ready for a rub of spices

4  Rub in a generous amount of salt, pepper and ginger into the meat, these flavours are important so do not be stingy.
 



Salt, pepper and ginger rubbed in

5  This next bit may require two sets of hands.  Roll the meat up as tight as you possibly can into a roll shape and tie string around it.  you will need to do this a few times to hold the roll in shape.

 



Roll the meat as tightly as you can



Add string to secure the meat

6  Cover the rolled meat in a clean old tea towel as tightly as possible.

Cover tightly in a clean old tea towel

7  Place the meat in the press if you have one for 24 hours.  If not place the meat in a loaf tine, with a second tin pressed down on top of it and weighted down with as much weight as possible.  Remember we are trying to 'press' the meat.

 



Leave to press for 24 hours

8  After 24 hours remove the meat from the tea towel and it should now look very squashed.  This is good.  Place whole cloves into the skin of it to increase flavour.  



Once pressed the meat should look flattened



Push in whole cloves into the skin for added flavour

At this point the meat could be sliced and used as cold cut, or alternatively to keep it for a while in a container full of brine  (for each litre of water used add 75 g salt plus 2 bay leaves regardless of the amount of water, boil the water until the salt has dissolved, allow to cool before adding in the meat.) When ready to use, remove the meat from the brine, pat dry as use as normal.  The meat can stay in the brine for up to 14 days.  you do need to keep checking the water daily, should it turn white, then change the brine for fresh brine water.

METHOD 2  -  I will do this next time.

Instead of boiling the meat whole, the less messy option would be to rub in the spices and salt immediately and roll up the meat with string BEFORE boiling and simmering for 2 hours. 



Sytle sitting in brine ready to be eaten at the Boxing Day buffet

♥  What do you eat on Boxing Day?  ♥