Review: The Reader's Mulefoot Pig Dinner at Blackbird
By Chuck Sudo in Food on Oct 20, 2008 4:28PM
The participating chefs take their places on the line with Paul Kahan (right) directing.
Kahan thanks the assembled diners and guests.
First Course: Pork belly and house cured sardine with local honey, celery and green apple jam. Prepared by Jason Hammel and Amalea Tshilds of Lula Café. A very good way to start off the dinner, running the pork belly through the honey. Meanwhile, the sardine and apple jam were prefect complements.
Second Course: head cheese ravioli with whole grain mustard pasta, cavolo nero (a black cabbage), pork consommé and lemon oil. Prepared by Justin Large from avec. The consommé was very forward, muting the flavor of the testa. Still, a good trade-off.
Third Course from Vie\'s Paul Virant: Roasted crepinette with Tuscan kale sauerkraut, plum and pinot noir jam, pickled onions, country bacon and pork jus. Simply our favorite dish of the evening, with flavors layered atop each other. Virant\'s fascniation with pickling and canning continues to impress us every time we eat his creations.
Blackbird\'s Mike Sheering stepped up to the plate with the fourth course: braised country-style ham with cippolini onions, matsutake mushrooms, red grapes and butternut squash-miso. Some diners were wondering how Sheering could come up with ham in only a couple of days, but it had a wonderful texture to it and we loved the complement of autumnal flavors. The bright color of the miso made for a good contrast in color with the ham.
The Publican\'s Brian Huston provided the fifth course: porchetta, lentils, lobster mushrooms and black mission figs. The porchetta had some rich fat to it that melted in the mouth, while the lentils had some firmness to them that we appreciated.
Blackbird pastry chef Tim Dahl ended the evening with a dish of Muenster Gerome with larded brioche, golden raisins, Korean pears and grattons. We recognized the pork rinds from our visits to the Publican; they\'re as airy light as we expected. Any dessert that ends with pork rinds is a-okay.
Last night we attended the sold out mulefoot pig dinner at Blackbird sponsored by the Chicago Reader. Reader food critic Mike Sula has been chronicling the progress Dee Dee since he persuaded the paper to buy her last year, bringing attention to this rare endangered breed of swine in the process.
Mulefoots are distinguished for their non cloven hooves, which resemble, well, mules. They also reach a weight of 400-600 pounds by the age of two, with a rich texture to the meat and good fat content. Sula frequent filings for the paper and the Reader's "Food Chain" blog have charted the growth of Dee Dee under the care of farmers Linda Derrickson and Mark Kessenich, who were in attendance.
Instead of being served some of Dee Dee last night, diners were served dishes prepared from three separate mulefoots by an all-star lineup of chefs assembled by blackbird's Paul Kahan. With the exception of Jason Hammel and Amalea Tshilds of Lula Café, the menu was created by a veritable family tree of chefs working under Kahan. The other featured chefs were Justin Large of avec, Blackbird's Mike Sheerin and Tim Dahl, Brian Huston of the reaching-overhyped-status Publican, and Vie's Paul Virant (a former chef under Kahan). the dishes ranged from Hammel and Tshilds's simple and elegant pork belly with house cured sardine to Virant's roasted crepinette, delicately layered with pickled onion, country bacon and a pinot noir jam. Wine pairings were donated by a board member of Slow Food Chicago, which also was the beneficiary of the dinner
