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| Salt pork is used for one of the best slow cook French dish: salt pork with lentils.
The curing process with salty brine gives a nice taste, concentrating the meat flavor, while keeping it tender, because there is no drying. It is not necessarily cheap meat, it depends on the kind of cut you use, you can find shoulder, belly, shank. Ham uses a brine too, but not as salty as salt pork, which usually requires a few hours of debrining and a couple of fresh water rinsing, depending on how salty it is.
The French salt pork with lentils recipe usually has 2 different cuts, like belly and shank, green Le Puy lentils, and is served with strong mustard. The debrined meat needs to be simmered from cold water at first, so you can remove the foam with a skimmer, which was made for this very purpose. Then you finish simmering it for an hour with a carrot, a leak, an onion with 3 cloves nailed into, a few garlic cloves, laurel, peppercorn, a branch of thyme, some parley all inside a clothe bag for easy removal, after which you can add the lentils, one whole carrot per person and more fresh herbs (remove the bag of cooked vegetables and herbs), salt to taste, and simmer for another 45 minutes until the lentils are tender. No need to soak the lentils before.
If you don't have salt pork but have access to fresh pork, you can very easily make your own. It's nothing more than pork in a salty brine kept in the fridge for anything from a few hours to a week or 2, so it's very forgiving too, you can cook it at any time during this period. You'll just need to adjust debrining accordingly.
Here is one recipe that looks close to the traditional French one: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/9487883/Petit-sale-...
Edited by Chimel 5/14/2015 04:51
 (Salt pork with lentils.jpg)
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Salt pork
