TGRWT#5: Meat with chocolate - are you kidding?

To try and eat meat with chocolate – that’s no easy challenge. Like – no way. But the more I thought about it, the more tempted I felt. Not only to test myself but also to shock others to see what they’d say and if they’d have anything to say at all. Well, they had. Amrita’s challenge for this months TGRWT#5 – combining meat and chocolate – has been the most intriguing one this far.

A traditional mole would have been a safer choice, I guess, because it’s widely known that it has chocolate in it and people actually eat it and like it and they actually do. No mole this time, amigos. I used an Italian recipe (Cinghiale in agrodolce) that actually called for wild boar (not a good idea to spend a pile of money if you’re mixing meat with chocolate for the first time – trust me), but used pork, I also lessened the amount of red wine vinegar. Otherwise I followed the recipe, word for word. Quite a scary afternoon.

Pork in chocolate and prune sauce
(adapted from Hans Joachim Döbbelin’s ’Italy’)

100 g prunes
75 g big raisins
600 g pork chops
75 g bacon
3 tbsp olive oil
salt
50 g bitter chocolate
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 dl red wine vinegar
3 laurel leaves
cinnamon

1. Soak prunes and raisins in lukewarm water
2. Cut the meat into slices
3. Chop bacon and heat it with olive oil until transparent
4. Add pork chops and fry them on both sides, then add salt and fry for additional 10 minutes on lower heat.
5. Drain prunes and raisins and grate chocolate (for me it was easier to just chop it into little pieces)
6. Heat sugar, laurel leaves and red wine vinegar on a pan until sugar dissolves, then add the mixture to the meat
7. Also add raisins, prunes, chocolate and some cinnamon, then heat almost until boiling point (don’t let it boil!)
8. Mix meat and sauce well and heat everything for another 15 minutes, not letting it boil.
9. Serve with pasta or be a traitor like me and serve with rice instead.

I don’t imagine eating something like this with pasta. Really really really. Pasta with sweet and sour chocolate sauce? No. Rice was definitely much better.

Cooking this dish filled the kitchen with overwhelming vinegar smell – that was a bit alarming, especially for my mother. ’If I had known you were going to use it for meat, I wouldn’t have bought you this bottle of vinegar,’ she said when she came home. And also – ’If you asked me to buy meat I thought you’d be making something really good, but you made something sour.’ Okay, not a very bad start.

The dish is best described as sweet and sour chocolate meat. The taste of chocolate, most of all, is strange. It may be strangely good, but it’s still strange, strangely chocolate-y. What I actually like the most, are the prunes – delicate, soft, somehow maintaining a good balance between tastes. I’d rather eat the meat and pick out the prunes (into my mouth, of course), adding some yoghurt to my rice instead of chocolate sauce! The meat has an interesting accent to it, but isn’t flavoured by the sauce in a taste-killing way.

When my parents came home, I kept repeating, ’Really-really, you don’t have to eat this, you can just have rice with smoked chicken, really. Really.’ But strangely this time they wouldn’t listen, although I refused to reveal the components of the dish and hid myself in my room, doing all kinds of, you know, important stuff. After they’d called me for several times to go and explain the mystery, I heard the words ’this meat was good’.

I’m in awe. I’m confused. Something’s wrong in the world.
My parents liked meat in chocolate sauce.

Tiramisu muffins

I've never had tiramisu, the Italian dessert. It's a pity, but it's true. But I took the idea of the dessert and turned it upside down. Or rather - inside out. Savoiardi cookies were turned into muffin batter, coffee-liqueur mixture was stirred smoothly into it and mascarpone topped with cocoa powder...well...remained mascarpone topped with cocoa powder.


Tiramisu muffins

4 dl wheat flour
1 dl oil
1 egg
1 1/2 dl sugar
2 tsp baking powder
2 dl milk
2 tsp instant coffee powder
2 tbsp Amaretto liqueur
salt

Topping
250 g Mascarpone
2 tsp sugar + vanilla/
vanilla sugar
unsweetened cocoa powder

1. Beat the egg with sugar and oil. Add Amaretto.
2. Dissolve the coffee powder in milk and add.
3. Mix flour with baking powder and a a tiny pinch of salt, add to the batter, mixing only until just combined.
4. Pour the batter into a muffin pan and bake at 200C for about 18 minutes
5. Mix Mascarpone with a bit of sugar and vanilla or just add some vanilla sugar to it. Cover cooled muffins with Mascarpone and sift some cocoa powder on them.

I like how the mascarpone is only slightly sweetened and the flavor of vanilla can stand out. None of the tastes in these muffins are too overwhelming, although they seemned to appear stronger when I tasted the batter. Tiramisu-like? Probably yes! The topping seems somehow refreshing on the tender and soft muffins.

These muffins are created for the event Muffin Monday #2 - Muffins that Make you go *Ooooh!* hosted by Experiments.
My idea would be to host an event about muffins full of inspiration. So that the readers would get the reaction 'now where did that muffin come from?' The inspiration should come from any type of dish: no matter if it's a soup, a dessert, a casserole, a cake, anything. Just like my inspiration came from the Italian dessert tiramisu. A brief description of the inspirational dish should be included too. There are millions of recipes out there - let there be millions of muffins as well!