Homage to Cataluña – Catering

mounting the exhibition

April 20th, 2012

I helped with the framing and mounting of the Homage to Cataluña exhibition yesterday,

framing

but today I got on with cooking and preparing the food.

edible photographs

I’d spent some time working out how to put edible photographs into jelly

photos in jelly

and then how to make the jelly taste of gin and tonic – amazingly, that seemed to be working!

test jellies

I got two trays of photo jelly into the fridge and went off to the Boqueria in search of some interesting ingredients to feed the opening night expo visitors.

cansaladeria

I went to buy two pork bellies intending to roast both of them and embed a large edible photograph into each one.

pork

To my surprise – there seem to be about ten beef butchers and numerous stalls selling cured pork products in the market, but I could only find two pork butchers! I’m sure that the one I bought the bellies from (La Moianesa) was the best one, the lady who served me was so charming I nearly asked her out!

carnisseria

My next stop was the same carnisseria (beef butcher), A. Casanovas, that I’d been to back in November,

beef

to purchase a good beef roasting joint to make English tapas (mini Yorkshire Puddings, with roast beef and horseradish). Once again I was given a very tender piece of meat weighing 2.7 kilos.

browning the beef

I picked up a few other things on the way back to the flat, before getting on with cooking. I browned the beef all over…

roast beef

before cooking it for 50 minutes in a fan assisted oven at 180º C and letting it cool down before wrapping it up and chilling it for tomorrow.

pork belly

The two big pieces of pork belly were cooked separately for about two hours at 180º C – both weighed about 2.5 kilos.

roast pork belly

I scalded the skin with boiling water first, dried it and sprinkled on some salt. Normally I’d score the skin with a knife or scalpel, but I didn’t this time because it might be harder to get the photograph into the skin if it cracked too much.

oscar pork belly

While all the cooking was going on I cut out the edible photographic prints for the pork and finished off adding the credits and checking the Catalan subtitles for the shooting of, Homage to Cataluña video – showing at the expo tomorrow…