How To Season a Clay Cooking Pot

Cooking in an unglazed ceramic cooking pot is a time-honored and marvelous way to create soups, stews, grain and legume dishes, and braised-meat dishes. The thermic properties of clay, which allows for cooking a dish at low temperature over a long period of time, unattended, makes cooking in clay ideal for the cook that wants to assemble a dish then basically let it cook itself, leaving the cook free for other activities. Think of cooking in clay as the origin of the slow cooker - it only lacks electricity.

Before using a clay pot for the first time it is essential to season it. Because the clay is unglazed and therefore somewhat porous, the earthy taste of the clay itself will leach into the food if the pot is unseasoned. Once seasoned, however, you can use a clay pot without fear of the taste of clay spoiling your dish.

Seasoning a clay pot

This technique for seasoning an unglazed clay pot is adapted from from Brazilian food writer and blogger Neide Rigo and can be found on her blog Come-Se. Her seasoning process is a two-day process and begins with a twenty-four hour soaking of the pot in cold water. One the second day, she removes the pot from the water, drains it completely then fills it half-full with fresh water. She fills the pot with chunks of pork belly with its rind in the water and heats the pot slowly over low heat. She lets the water come to the boil and then continues the cooking until the water evaporates completely and the pork belly begins to fry. She continues to fry the pork belly using a silicone brush to paint the entire interior of the pot with melted fat until the pork skin becomes crispy  - fried pork rind (torresmo in Portuguese). At this point, she removes the pot from the heat, allows it to cool completely, drains it completely, wipes the interior dry, then washes the pot in hot water only. Once the pot is completely dry it's ready for its first use. (Added bonus - the pork rind, or cracklings, are delicious!)

Clay pots should be cleaned with water only - detergents can have an effect on the taste of food cooked in clay. Use hot water and if needed a plastic scouring pad to clean. It's also important to dry the pot quickly after washing to avoid musty flavors developing. In Brazil, cooks just put the pot in direct sunlight. In less tropical climes, fifteen minutes in a 150F oven will do the trick.

TECHNIQUES - Food Preservation

Since prehistoric times, ensuring a daily supply of food for oneself and one's family has involved not only the cultivation, catch or purchase of that food, but also its preservation once it is at hand. Most foods, both of animal and vegetable derivation, are very perishable, and within a very short time will be rendered inedible by spoilage unless something is done to preserve them. A primitive hunter may be successful in making a large kill, but cannot take advantage of this bounty unless he can preserve the meat. Anyone who has ever cultivated home-grown vegetables or fruits knows the problem of an entire crop ripening overnight, turning abundance from a blessing to a problem.

Traditional cuisines around the world have dealt with this issue in a large number of ways, but interestingly, there are really only a handful of basic means of food preservation, and many of these have not changed significantly over the millennia. Many of the best-loved foods in every culture are not only a question of what the basic food product is but how it has been preserved. Kosher dill pickles, strawberry jam, smoked salmon, Roquefort cheese are all foods that are characterized more by the way they have been preserved than by the basic food products they are made from.

Traditional Brazilian food makes full use of most of the types of food preservation, and in the next few posts, Flavors of Brazil will highlight some of the results. Discounting more recent modern techniques, such as irradiation and chemical preservation, the list of traditional food preservation techniques includes the following:

Heating/Cooking
Cooling/Freezing
Drying
Smoking
Fermenting
Pickling
Salting
Sugaring

All of these techniques have long histories, though freezing as a food preservation technique, outside the Arctic regions, is a modern, technological innovation. Without them, we'd all be eating for dinner tonight only what we'd harvested or killed today. And we'd be eating it raw, at room temperature. And there would be very few recipes indeed on Flavors of Brazil, or any other blog. Bless food preservation!

Techniques - Desalting Salt Cod (Bacalhau)

Since salt cod (bacalhau) is always sold salted and dried, it's necessary to desalt and rehydrate it before it can be used in cooking. Depending on how salty the fish is, this process should begin 24 to 48 hours prior to cooking the fish. If the bacalhau is very dry and covered with salt, start earlier. If it still has some moisture in the flesh and no visible salt, you can begin only 24 hours before.

Prior to the desalting and rehydrating process, if the bacalhau is still in the form of fillets, the fillets should be cut into thick slices of approximately 3 inches each. Most bacalhau is sold with the skin of the fish still attached, and it's better (and easier) to remove the skin prior to desalting. Simply lift the skin away from the flesh with a sharp knife at one corner of the piece, and then grasp the skin with a hand towel and firmly peel it away from the flesh.

Place the skinless pieces of bacalhau in a large bowl, preferably of glass or ceramic, then cover with cold, fresh water. The bowl should then be covered and placed in the refrigerator. (Bacalhau desalted at room temperature spoils very quickly). Every 6 hours or so, the fish must be removed from the refrigerator, drained, rinsed, returned to the bowl and covered with fresh water.

You can separate a small sample of fish and taste it to determine if it has been sufficiently desalted prior to begin cooking. The sample does not have to be cooked - bacalhau can be eaten safely uncooked, as the preserving technique "cooks" the flesh without heat.