Rillettes de Tours

• To cut the pork lengthwise into 1 inch thick strips, take the sharpest knife you can find in your kitchen. Now cut these strips again vertically into half so that they are half an inch wide or ¾ inch, and place them on a clean plate or in a bowl
• Now take the back pork fat and cut it into small pieces and mix these in the bowl where strips of belly pork are. This extra fat helps keep the pork meat tender and moisturized while cooking.
• Add thyme, ground mace, salt, and garlic in the same bowl and mix them together until it is evenly applied all over the pork.
• Crush the peppercorns and juniper berries with the back of a tablespoon or you could crush it in pestle and mortar, if you have one, and add them to the already seasoned bowl of pork and mix everything together.
• Now take a clean terrine or a loaf tin and transfer all the mixture from the bowl to it.
• Pour wine into it and mix everything so that the flavor gets mixed overall.
• Cover the loaf tin or the terrine with foil and place it in the center of the oven and leave it for 4 hours in a pre-heated oven at 140°C
• Take the tin out and empty everything on a sieve placed over a bowl and let the fat drip into the bowl. Place this bowl in the fridge and let the fat separate from the jelly.
• For the meat in the sieve transfer it on a plate and use a fork to further shred it into thin pieces. Once shredded pack them together in a tin loaf and leave it to get cold.
• Now separate the jelly from the bowl of fat, melt it and drizzle it over the shredded meat to enhance its favor
• Finally, keep it in the fridge to set for around 2 hours
• Your Rillettes de Tours is ready to be served along with some freshly baked croutons.

Trivia

• The classic French tip to cook pork to perfection is to slowly let it cook until it starts falling apart, which is then shredded, mixed with the melted pork fat and then left to set for final use

Rillettes are similar to pates and have been around for at least six hundred years.