Wak Al Galda - Meghalayan Pork w/ Sorrel (from India: The Cookbook)

The recipe:

1 kg/ 2 1/4 lb pork, cut into 2 inch pieces
5 sorrel leaves, roughly torn
2 tsp Boiled Onion Paste
2 tsp chopped ginger
2 tsp chopped garlic
2 tsp green chili paste
salt

1. Place the pork in a large, heave-based pan over low heat without oil or water, cook for 20-35 min, stirring occasionally, til the water from the pork has evaporated.
2. Add the remaining ingredients and keep stirring and cooking until the sorrel leaves disintegrate and are well mixed. Stir in 1/2 cup water, then increase the heat, bring to the boil and boil for about 15 min or until the pork is cooked and the sauce thickens.
   
   Source: India: The Cookbook

Challenges

This seems like a simple recipe, but there are challenges. The first is that I’ve never tasted or cooked it before - for that matter never traveled to Meghalaya. This kind of cooking is exciting and fun - it’s a sort of virtual tourism, like watching a travel documentary. However, unlike a documentary, there’s the worry that one might do things wrong, resulting in at worst disaster or inauthenticity. One might think that the way to solve this is to follow the recipe exactly. Sadly, mere diligence doesn’t solve all our problems because of our next challenges - the ingredients.

American pork is rather lean and mild compared to pork in most other places. I’ve never cooked with sorrel, and I’ve not been to north eastern India so I don’t know how my sorrel differs from the local sorrel there. I don’t have either onion or green chili paste. So… yeah, even with such a simple seeming recipe, the majority of ingredients are either missing or different from the original. We’re going to have to adjust. And there’s yet one more challenge…

2 tsp of green chili paste is likely quite spicy, and my family tends not to like food that is painfully spicy. Such adjustments - spice level, omitting or replacing ingredients because of allergies or intolerance - are an important part of cooking, especially at home.

Solutions

So this was my approach to cooking this…

The pork. Adding up the cooking time, 20-35 min at low heat + 15 min final boil + time to stir and cook sorrel to disintegrate ~ 15 min = 50-65 min total. My pork is not going to get cooked in that time. Solution - I’ll use a pressure cooker.

The 20-35 min at low heat is interesting, I don’t understand what it’s for. It’s at a low temp so it’s not going to result in much carmelization. I’ll try it for this version, see if it makes any difference.

Sorrel quantity - I check some other recipes (more american, eg. https://theculinarychase.com/2016/05/sorrel-pasta-pork/) to get a sense for how much sorrel of the sort I am working with is generally put in a meal. Two handfuls seems to result in a pretty punchy dish, which I’d guess is important if you’re working with pasta. I go for a bit less punchy than 2 handfuls, but a bit more than 5 leaves - 10-12 leaves.

Cooking notes

As the recipe goes, I start with 2.25 lb pork in a Le Creuset dutch oven over low heat. Cook it for 30 min, till the pork is dry. The result seems to be a slight browning, much lighter than typical w/ a western pre-braise sear. Transfer the pork to the pressure cooker.

Then make a bit of onion paste by tossing chopped onions into the dutch oven. Add a bit of water and cook (also pick up and leftover browning from the pork), then add the sorrel leaves (roughly torn, as requested), ginger and garlic paste (yeah, too lazy to actually chop ginger and garlic).

Add salt. Salt is one place where a lot of people tend to adjust their recipes and I tend not to. Salt changes the way things cook - it helps browning, and osmosis/reverse osmosis due to salt concentration is a key way to transfer flavor. How much salt do I use? I tend to know how much salt my family likes - about 1 tsp for the main course for a meal, about 1.5 tsp total. 2 lbs of pork is going to last me two meals, so I go with 2 tsp of salt.

Similarly with chilies, I have a general sense of how many chilies/how much chili powder my family would like in a meal. About 1 green chili in a main course works for us, so as with the salt, I put in 2 chilies since this is going to last us 2 meals.

Transfer this mixture to the pressure cooker, cook for the “normal” amount of time (I add a 1/2 cup of water as requested, cook for 50 min as my pork normally requires).

Release pressure. Now the dish is a bit runny compared to what it would have been had a cooked it uncovered for ~ 40 min. I want to reduce the liquid, but I worry that the pork will disintegrate. Solution - take the pork out of the dish, reduce the sauce, return the pork once it’s thickened (rather like one would a french braise).

Results

The dish had a pleasant but not overpowering lemon tartness from the sorrel. Quite happy with the flavor. The initial cooking of the pork seemed to give the sauce a gentle browning without getting too intense. Of course, I can’t say that this is exactly what it should be like, but it’s distinct, everything is well cooked, the spice level and saltiness work for us.

Overall, quite a lovely introduction to the cooking of Meghalaya in the north-east of India.

Image: Sorrel. The original uploader was Burschik at English Wikipedia. - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., CC BY-SA 3.0