As the biggest holidays approach, September has so far been dedicated to endless kitchen experiments. Some turned out to be awesome, some were total disasters while others were mild disasters that we managed to fix.
The meatballs were the hardest to remedy. The ground meat was originally meant to be the stuffing for jalapeño poppers, my daughter was too liberal with the salt so more than half of the meat mixture went back into the fridge while we planned how to make it edible.
But let’s start with the easier problem with the easier fix. Stew. Callos, to be more precise. If you’re not familiar with the dish, here’s a link to the recipe.
Slow cooker callos
The Filipino version of the Spanish beef tripe stew, callos is often served as a special occasion dish because of the laborious cooking process. Using a slow cooker makes everything easier and the stew even tastier.
My husband had been dreaming of callos for weeks but it wasn’t easy getting all the ingredients together. When we finally had everything, I made a mistake.
Adding potatoes to soak up excess saltiness
Callos takes long to cook. Hours and hours in the slow cooker. It’s smarter to let the stew cook during the day, let it cool, keep it in the fridge overnight and reheat it the following day. It’s a stew, after all, and stews always taste better after reheating.
My plan was to serve air fried crispy pork belly first then use the already flavorful cooking liquid to simmer the meat component of callos — cow leg and tripe. Now, if you’ve seen my crispy pork belly recipe (if you haven’t, the link is below), the first part consists of slow cooking the slab of pork in heavily salted water.
Air fried lechon kawali (crispy pork belly)
Simmer a slab of pork belly, drain and transfer to the air fryer. Thirty minutes later, you have perfectly cooked crispy pork belly with crackling skin.
After we had eaten the crispy pork belly, I reheated the cooking liquid, dropped in the slices of cow leg, set the cooker on LOW for four hours. I scooped them out, deboned them and cut the tendon-rich leg into slices. I popped a piece into my mouth. Oh, my goodness. It was so salty there was no way I could complete the dish as planned.
I poured out and discarded about three-quarters of the cooking liquid, replaced the liquid with water, dropped in the sliced leg, the tripe, sausages and vegetables. I tasted the liquid and it seemed fine. But as the cooking continued, the intense saltiness of the cow leg bled into the liquid.
I took a large potato and dropped it in the stew. The leg and tripe needed to cook for about two more hours anyway so the potato should have enough time to soak up the saltiness.
An hour later, I tasted the sauce again. Still too salty. I was out of large potatoes so I dropped in about four baby potatoes. Another hour later and the callos was done. But still a bit too salty. I let the callos cool without taking out the potatoes. When I refrigerated the stew, the potatoes were still there. Overnight. The next day, I reheated the callos, still with the potatoes in it, and the excess saltiness was gone.
How I fixed the too-salty meatballs issue
Step one. Add panko to the ground pork mixture. The bread flakes should soak up the salt and act as binder too. I mixed the panko in, formed the mixture into balls and lightly fried them. Still too salty.
Step two. I set the meatballs aside and made salt-free tomato sauce. The meatballs were simmered in the sauce but the sauce turned salty too. I didn’t want to pour in water to avoid thinning out the tomato sauce. It’s a sauce, after all, and I wasn’t making soup.
Step 3. I took a bag of macaroni from the pantry and boiled the noodles in salt-free water for three minutes. When the noodles were just as hot as the meatballs simmering in tomato sauce, I drained them and stirred them into the sauce with the meatballs.
The noodles were already hot so there was no need to wait for everything to simmer. The simmering never stopped even after the noodles were stirred in. I set the heat to LOW and let the noodles absorb the flavors of the tomato sauce including the excess salt.
Well, that did the trick. No waste. Good lunch. If you’re wondering if you can do the same trick with another starch, my take is that rice will work just as well.
