Goan Pork Vindalho (Carne de Vinha d'Alhos)

// SUPPLY LIST

// OPERATIONS

1. 1 Trim only hard gristle from the pork shoulder and leave every scrap of fat on it, because that fat is the sauce; a lean cut such as loin gives you dry meat sitting in a thin, split gravy. Cut the shoulder into 4 cm cubes and the belly into 3 cm cubes, toss both with the 2 1/2 tsp fine salt in a glass or stainless steel bowl, and leave at cool room temperature for 30 minutes while you make the masala, by which time the surfaces should look wet and glossy rather than sitting in a puddle.
2. 2 Snap the stems off the Kashmiri and hot chillies and shake out most of the seeds, keeping the seeds of one or two hot chillies if you want more bite, and wear gloves or your fingers will sting for hours. Warm 150 ml of the palm vinegar to about 60 C / 140 F, hot to the finger but nowhere near simmering, pour it over the chillies and press them under with a saucer for 30 minutes, until they are soft and leathery and bend without cracking; vinegar any hotter than this sets the skins and they will never grind smooth. Palm vinegar is the one non-negotiable ingredient, and buying it bottled rather than drawing your own toddy vinegar is universal in Goa now, but malt or distilled white vinegar tastes of nothing but acetic acid and will wreck the dish, so if you cannot find palm vinegar use unfiltered cane or coconut vinegar from a Kerala or Filipino grocer.
3. 3 Tip the chillies and their soaking vinegar into a blender with the 25 peeled garlic cloves, the ginger, cumin, peppercorns, whole cloves, broken cassia, mustard seeds and turmeric, and blend for 4 to 5 minutes, stopping to scrape down the sides. Loosen it only with more vinegar, a tablespoon at a time up to about 50 ml, and never with water, because the acid is what cures and firms the pork while water only dilutes it and shortens the keeping life. The paste is ready when it falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon and feels smooth between finger and thumb; any grittiness means the chilli skins have not broken down and the finished sauce will stay grainy, so keep it running. A stone rogddo grinds finer, and some cooks first dry-toast the cumin, peppercorns, cloves and cassia for 30 seconds until fragrant, but every Goan kitchen uses a mixie and raw spice for this now and no one will hold it against you.
4. 4 Rub the paste through the pork with your hands until every cube is coated and no pale patches show, pack it into a non-reactive container of glass, ceramic or stainless steel, cover and refrigerate at 4 C / 39 F for at least 24 hours and up to 48, turning the meat once. Aluminium and bare cast iron react with this much vinegar and will give the pork a metallic, inky taste. Do not cut the marinating time: two hours gives you chilli-coated pork, while a full day gives you vindalho, the cubes noticeably firmer to the squeeze and stained red-brown right through to the centre rather than only on the surface.
5. 5 Take the pork out of the fridge 30 minutes before you cook so the pot is not fighting fridge-cold meat, then heat the coconut oil in a heavy 5 to 6 L pot, ideally a 28 cm enamelled cast-iron casserole or thick stainless pan but never bare cast iron or aluminium, which this much vinegar will strip and turn metallic. Warm the fat over medium heat only until it thins and slides freely, not until it shimmers or smokes, because wet acidic paste hitting smoking oil spits hard and scorches the chilli into bitterness; scrape in the pork with every last smear of its marinade and stir for 3 to 4 minutes, until the paste loses its raw wet sheen and clings to the cubes. Do not brown the meat first as you would for a European stew, because searing strips the cure off the cubes and vindalho browns later, in its own rendered fat. There is no onion and no tomato in the pot and that is deliberate, since their water and sugar shorten the keeping life of a dish that was invented to keep, and the pork fat with forty-odd cloves of garlic gives the sauce all the body it needs.
6. 6 Cover the pot, drop the heat to low and cook for 25 minutes without adding a drop of liquid; the pork will release enough of its own to come about halfway up the meat. Keep it at a bare simmer, about 95 C / 203 F, with lazy bubbles breaking only at the edge of the pot, because a rolling boil tightens the muscle fibres before the collagen has a chance to melt and you will never get it back.
7. 7 Uncover and simmer gently for 45 to 60 minutes, stirring and scraping the base with a flat wooden spoon every 10 minutes so the paste does not catch, and adding the hot water 50 ml at a time only if the pan threatens to go dry before the meat is tender. The pork is ready when a skewer slides into a cube with no resistance at all but the pieces still hold their shape; if a dark crust starts building on the base of the pot, drop the heat and add water at once, because once the masala catches that burnt note runs right through the sauce and cannot be stirred out.
8. 8 Stir in the 15 whole garlic cloves and the slit green chillies and cook for a further 15 minutes, until the garlic is soft enough to crush against the side of the pot with a spoon yet still whole, and the chillies have gone dull green and floppy. Add them now rather than at the start, because an hour in the pot collapses them into the gravy and you lose the sweet whole cloves that are half the point of the dish.
9. 9 Raise the heat to medium and let the sauce reduce for 8 to 12 minutes, stirring almost constantly, which is the stage that makes the dish: the gravy thickens and pulls away from the side of the pot, a clear red-orange fat breaks out and pools around the rim, and the masala starts smelling toasted and sweet rather than raw and sour. If the fat never separates the sauce is still too wet, so keep going rather than serving it early, but do not stop stirring now, because a sauce this thick over medium heat catches in seconds.
10. 10 Stir in the palm jaggery and the last 2 tbsp of palm vinegar, poured fresh from the bottle rather than swilled out of the raw-meat marinade bowl, simmer 2 minutes and taste for salt. A finished vindalho should hit sharp first and land round and savoury; if it tastes harshly sour give it 2 or 3 more minutes over the heat and a pinch more jaggery, and if it tastes flat add salt, not sugar, because sugar much past a couple of teaspoons turns it into a curry-house sauce.
11. 11 Take the pot off the heat, let it cool uncovered for 30 minutes and no longer, then refrigerate overnight, because vindalho is a keeping dish and is better on day two and better still on day three as the acid softens and the fat re-emulsifies into the gravy. Reheat gently over low heat with 2 to 3 tbsp of water, stirring, until it steams and reaches about 85 C / 185 F right through; a hard boil at this stage splits the sauce and leaves a greasy film on top.
12. 12 Serve hot with Goan pao or poee to mop the gravy, or with plain boiled ukdo tandul (par-boiled red rice), and nothing more complicated alongside than a plate of sliced raw onion and a wedge of lime. It keeps in a sealed glass or ceramic jar in the fridge for up to 5 days, the vinegar doing exactly the job it was there to do in the first place, but reheat only the portion you want to steaming hot rather than taking the whole pot up and down.

// CLASSIFICATIONS