Caul fat: intestinal delight

So, you want to stuff your chicken or pork and keep it from bursting during cooking. Just reach into your kitchen fridge for your Caul fat, you know the fatty intestine linings of cows or pork that you pick up at your local grocer. Well, actually if you really want this lacy, translucent fat (anatomically speaking it’s called omentum) to wrap foods for baking or roasting, you’re going to need a good butcher shop. But here in France, it’s not so difficult to obtain. Thank goodness! Otherwise I would not have had a chance to play with this intestinal delight.

Caul fat did work great for keeping my “farci” or stuffing of pork and chicken in my “Jambonette” (a style of Habillage or cutting and dressing my leg/thigh piece to resemble a ham). Other non-innard techniques for stuffing control include sewing the skin together with a trussing needle, or how about the simplest—wrap your meat or poultry in some aluminum foil and remove near the end of cooking to brown your meats. I will say that caul does help keep the meat most and mostly melts away near the end of cooking. Plus, I have this cool picture of the spidery web look of intestine linings.