Contemporary deconstructed panellada

How to make it

1. Tuesday, the broth. Blanch the cow's foot for 5 minutes in boiling water, discard the water and rinse. Put the shank, the cow's foot, the onion in its skin, the peppercorns and the coriander in a large pan with the cold water. Bring it to the boil and skim off the foam as it rises. Turn the heat to its lowest, half-cover and leave for 5–6 hours, barely trembling, until about 1500 ml is left. Strain through a fine sieve, cool and refrigerate until the next day.In a pressure cooker, with water just to cover: 1½ hours once it reaches pressure. The broth can be made weeks ahead and kept frozen; the block goes onto the cloth on Thursday morning. The shank meat makes another meal.
2. Wednesday, freeze it. Lift off the fat that has set on top. The broth should be firm, like a soft, wobbly jelly. If it is still liquid, boil it down to about 1200 ml and chill it again. Melt it over low heat without boiling; if it had set firm enough to slice, add 200–300 ml cold water, since a softer jelly lets more broth through. Pour it into a container about the width of your sieve and freeze until solid all through, 12–24 hours.
3. Thursday morning, clarify. Line a sieve with a thin cotton cloth, wetted and wrung out, or with paper coffee filters, and set it over a deep bowl. Turn the frozen block out into the sieve, cover, and leave it in the fridge until Friday afternoon. Don't press or stir: the broth drips through slowly, clear as tea, about 600–800 ml. In the evening, put the chickpeas to soak in plenty of water.The gelatine left in the cloth holds back what made the broth cloudy. If the block doesn't fit, break it into pieces. No time? Chill it, lift off the fat and strain it through a paper coffee filter: less clear, but good.
4. Friday morning, the chickpeas. Drain, cover with 2000 ml of fresh water and simmer gently for 45–60 minutes, until tender but whole. Lift out 150 g with a slotted spoon and spread them on a towel to dry. Add the bicarbonate to the rest, which will foam, and cook 20–30 minutes more, until the chickpeas fall apart.The bicarbonate softens the skins and makes the purée smooth. Don't use this cooking water: it tastes of soda.
5. The yellow purée. While the chickpeas finish, crumble the purée's saffron into 3 tbsp warm water and leave it for 15 minutes. Crumble the broth's saffron into 2 tbsp cold water in a small jar, cover and keep it in the fridge until Saturday. Drain the soft chickpeas, rinse them under hot water and blend while still hot, in a food processor, or a blender with the lid vented and covered with a towel, with the saffron water, the 80 ml olive oil, 1 tsp salt and hot water a little at a time, about 150 ml, to a smooth, thick cream. For a silky finish, push it through a fine sieve with a spatula. Taste for salt. Keep it covered in the fridge until Saturday.No lemon in the purée: acid fades the saffron's yellow, and so does long heat. That is why the purée waits in the fridge, and the lemon goes on the table.
6. The spices and the oil. Toast the pepper, coriander, cumin, cinnamon stick and cloves from the spice list in a dry pan for 1–2 minutes, until fragrant, and grind them fine in a mortar or spice grinder. Shake 1 tsp of the powder through a fine sieve and mix it with the ground cinnamon and ⅛ tsp fine salt: that is the spice dust for the table. The rest goes with the meat. For the spice oil, lightly crack its spices in the mortar and warm them with the 50 ml olive oil in your smallest pan at 80 °C, without frying, for 20 minutes. Leave to cool for 1 hour and strain through a paper filter.No thermometer: the lowest heat until fine bubbles rise around the seeds, then turn it off and cover. The spices' fragrance passes into the fat, and this oil brings it back on the plate. What is left keeps for weeks in a closed jar.
7. The dough lids. Mix the flour and salt, add the oil and water and knead for 3 minutes into a firm, smooth dough. Cover and rest 30 minutes. Heat the oven to 180 °C. Divide the dough into 6 pieces, one per plate, and roll each one with a pin on a floured worktop, very thin, 1 mm, thin enough to see the shadow of your hand through it. Cut each sheet into a disc 2 cm wider than the rim of the plates you'll serve in, about 20–22 cm. Brush with oil, scatter over the cumin, the cracked coriander and a pinch of fleur de sel, and run the rolling pin lightly over them. Bake in batches on a tray lined with baking paper for 8–12 minutes, until golden and dry. Cool on a rack and keep in a closed tin.It is the dough that sealed Branca's lid, here with a little oil so it snaps. Bake a test disc first: the edges brown fast.
8. The crunch and the petals. Toast the cashews in a dry pan for 4–6 minutes and chop them roughly. Dry the 150 g of chickpeas very well: wet chickpeas spit in hot oil. In the same pan, fry them in the 5 tbsp olive oil over medium heat for 12–15 minutes, shaking, until golden and rattling like pebbles. Lower the oven to 150 °C and finish them on a tray for 20–30 minutes, until one broken in half is dry inside. Salt them, dust with a pinch of the spice dust and let them cool completely, uncovered, before closing the jar. Keep them out of the fridge, with the cashews. Peel the small onions, halve them through the root and set them cut side down in a hot, dry cast-iron pan for 6–8 minutes, until the cut face is almost black. Let them cool, separate the layers into petals and keep them in the fridge. Wash the coriander and mint leaves and keep them rolled in a damp cloth, also in the fridge.
9. Friday, around 1 pm, the bath and the onion. Fill a 15–20 litre container with hot water from the tap or the kettle, up to the immersion circulator's maximum mark, and set it to 72 °C. In a wide frying pan, cook the sliced onions in the 5 tbsp olive oil with ½ tsp salt over medium-low heat for 35–40 minutes, stirring now and then, until deep gold but not brown. Set a third aside for the meat and let it cool. Add the rice and 100 ml water to the rest, cover and cook over low heat for 20–25 minutes, until the rice falls apart, then uncover and cook 3–5 minutes more until thick. Blend until smooth, check the salt, put it in a container, cool and refrigerate.The rice thickens it instead of cream.
10. The meat and eggs. Trim off the thick fat cap and cut the meat into 3–4 large pieces, no more than 6 cm thick. Rub them with the salt. In a very hot pan with 1 tbsp of the olive oil, brown the pieces 2–3 minutes a side, in two batches, and let them cool for 10 minutes. In the same pan, over low heat, warm the other 2 tbsp olive oil with the ground spices and the ginger and stir for 1 minute, until fragrant; let it cool. Rub the meat with this oil and with the onion you set aside. Lay the pieces in a single layer in a vacuum bag, in two bags if needed (each double-bagged if zip-lock), and press out the air. Put the eggs in another bag with the washed onion skins and water to cover, press out the air and seal.The bag does what the dough did on the lid: nothing escapes, and all the meat's juices stay inside. The first time, cook a test egg on an earlier weekend.
11. By 4 pm, everything into the bath. Warm the clear broth in a small pan until it steams, without boiling; taste and adjust the salt. Scald a 1-litre glass jar with a screw lid with hot water, fill it with the broth and close the lid without forcing it. Put the meat and egg bags and the jar into the 72 °C bath, the jar upright with the water up to its neck, and set a plate on the meat bags only, so they don't float. Cover well, with a lid cut to fit the circulator or two layers of cling film stretched tight and pressed onto the rim: covered like this, the water barely drops overnight. Leave until Saturday at noon, at least 20 hours. Where the sun sets before 5 pm, bring everything forward so it goes in before sundown.No immersion circulator: the prepared meat goes into a pot sealed with dough, as in the main recipe, with the eggs and the onion skins between the pieces, water to a finger's width below the top of the meat, about 300 ml, and ½ tsp more salt, in an oven at 100–110 °C from Friday afternoon to Saturday noon. The clear broth goes into a second pot, lidded and sealed with dough, in the same oven.
12. Saturday, 11 am. Take the purée, the onion cream and the petals out of the fridge. Cut the lemon into wedges and set out on a tray everything that goes on top: the petals, the crisp chickpeas, the cashews, the leaves, the spice dust, the spice oil and the lemon.
13. At noon, open up. Lift the bags and the jar out of the bath, or the pots out of the oven. Open the meat bag over a sieve set on a bowl and keep the juices that run out. Skim the fat off them (a fat separator helps), pull the meat into large pieces and moisten it with as much of the juices as it will absorb, about 150 ml; the rest goes a spoonful over each serving or keeps for another meal. Peel the eggs under a thin stream of cold water, starting at the wide end: the shells come out stained by the onion, the whites tender and faintly beige, the yolks set, somewhere between creamy and fudgy (from the oven, the white is firmer and the yolk drier). Halve them with a wet knife. Stir the purée and the onion cream; if they have firmed up too much, loosen them with a spoonful of the clear broth. Put the saffron water in a jug and pour the rest of the hot clear broth over it.On an ordinary day you can go further and serve it the next day: press the pulled meat with 100 ml of the bag juices into a loaf tin lined with cling film and weigh it down with full tins. Set the tin in a bowl of iced water for 30 minutes, then refrigerate it for 6–12 hours. Cut 6 blocks and brown them in olive oil, 2 minutes a side, in a very hot pan. The rest of the bag juices, reduced to a glaze, are brushed on top.
14. Build the plates. Warm 6 deep plates or pasta bowls, 18–20 cm across the rim, with hot water from the bath, or from a flask filled on Friday, and dry them. In each one, drag a large spoonful of purée, of about 100 g, with the back of the spoon, and put 2 heaped tablespoons of onion cream beside it. In the middle, the meat: press a portion into a 7–8 cm ring, or shape it with two spoons, and spoon a little of the bag juices over it. Lean the two halves of an egg against it, yolk up, and sprinkle the spice dust over the yolks. Scatter 3–4 onion petals with a few drops of spice oil in each, a drizzle of the same oil over the purée, the crisp chickpeas, the cashews and the leaves, and grate a little lemon zest over the top. Cover each plate with its dough lid.With two people, it takes about 5 minutes.
15. At the table. Everyone breaks their lid with a spoon. Pour the hot clear broth into each plate, a small ladle of about 80 ml, over the broken dough. Serve with the lemon wedges.It is the panellada's gesture: breaking the dough at Saturday noon. The pieces that fall into the broth soften like the sops of old.