Sangiovese Braised Wild Boar with Dark Chocolate and Juniper | Brasato di Cinghiale al Sangiovese con Cioccolato e Ginepro

Sep 28

11 min read

Brasato di Cinghiale al Sangiovese con Cioccolato Fondente e Ginepro (Sangiovese Braised Wild Boar with Dark Chocolate and Juniper)

This is a Tuscan braise with a secret at the end of it. Wild boar shoulder spends a day in Sangiovese with juniper, then three hours in the oven with the reduced marinade and a soffritto. What separates it from every other red wine braise happens in the last thirty seconds, off the heat, when grated dark chocolate goes into the sauce.

The chocolate is not there for sweetness. Twenty grams across six servings is about three grams a person, far too little to taste as chocolate. What it brings is cocoa tannin, bitterness and cocoa butter, and those three do precise work in a sauce built on game. Nor is it modern: Tuscan cooks have finished wild boar with chocolate since the eighteenth century, in the dish called cinghiale in dolceforte.

Yield: 6 servings. Marinating: 24 hours. Prep: 45 minutes. Cook: 3 hours 30 minutes. Rest: 20 minutes. Difficulty: intermediate. Course: secondo. Region: Tuscany, the Maremma and the Sienese hills.

The Story

Wild boar is not an ingredient in Tuscany so much as a fact of life. The animal has run in the scrub oak and macchia of the Maremma for as long as anyone has written about the region, and the autumn caccia al cinghiale still organises village life from November to January across Grosseto and Siena. A driven hunt brings in a great deal of lean, tough, strongly flavoured meat at once, and the kitchen answered with the pot: long braises, wine, and the juniper and rosemary of the same hillsides.

Sangiovese is the other half of the answer. It is the grape of central Tuscany, high in acidity and firm in tannin, and it was the everyday wine in the farmhouses where the boar was butchered. That acidity is what makes it correct rather than convenient: it tenderises, it cuts the gaminess, and it survives three hours of oven heat without turning jammy.

Chocolate entered through a stranger door. Cacao reached Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century, and Italy first treated it as a spice, filed with cinnamon and pepper. Renaissance kitchens used it in savoury cooking without hesitation, and Antonio Latini published a chocolate sauce for meat in Naples in 1692. Out of that habit came cinghiale in dolceforte, a Sienese braise recorded in nineteenth century cookbooks, finished with bitter chocolate, pine nuts, raisins, candied peel, vinegar and sugar. This version keeps only the chocolate and gives the aromatic work to juniper.

Ingredients

For the wild boar

Boneless wild boar shoulder, 3 lb 5 oz (1.5 kg), in 2 1/2 inch (6 cm) pieces
Coarse sea salt, 2 tsp (12 g), and black pepper, 1 tsp (2 g)
Pork back fat or fatty pancetta, finely diced, 2 oz (55 g)
Extra virgin olive oil, 3 tbsp (45 ml)

For the marinade

Sangiovese, young and unoaked, 3 cups (720 ml)
Yellow onion, quartered, 1 medium, and carrot and celery stalk in chunks, 1 each
Garlic cloves, crushed, 3
Juniper berries, lightly crushed, 12
Bay leaves, 2, and black peppercorns, 1 tsp (3 g)
Rosemary sprig, 1, and 4 sage leaves

For the braise

Yellow onion, finely diced, 7 oz (200 g)
Carrot and celery, finely diced, 3 oz (85 g) each
Tomato paste, 1 tbsp (16 g)
Unsalted veal or beef stock, hot, 2 cups (480 ml)
Juniper berries, crushed, 8, tied in cheesecloth
Bay leaf, 1, and cinnamon stick, about 1/2 inch (1 cm)

For finishing

Dark chocolate, at least seventy percent cacao, finely grated, 3/4 oz (20 g)
Unsalted butter, cold and diced, 1 tbsp (14 g)
Red wine vinegar, 1 tsp (5 ml), plus fine sea salt and pepper to taste

For the polenta

Coarse stone ground polenta, 1 1/4 cups (200 g)
Water, 5 cups (1.2 L), and fine sea salt, 1 1/2 tsp (9 g)
Unsalted butter, 2 tbsp (28 g), and grated Parmigiano Reggiano, 1 1/2 oz (40 g)

Preparation

Step 1

Choose and cut the shoulder. Shoulder carries far more collagen than leg or loin, and collagen is what makes the sauce glossy. Ask for a moderate sized animal, since a large old boar is powerfully gamy. Cut pieces of about 2 1/2 inches (6 cm), trimming only hard fat and silverskin. Buy from a licensed dealer or an inspected hunt: wild boar carries a real risk of Trichinella and is never served pink.

Step 2

Marinate in Sangiovese. Put the meat in a nonreactive bowl with the quartered onion, carrot, celery, garlic, the twelve crushed juniper berries, bay, peppercorns, rosemary and sage, pour over all 3 cups (720 ml) of wine and press it down so it stays submerged. Refrigerate 24 hours, turning once. The wine loosens surface proteins and the strongest gamy compounds leach out.

Step 3

Drain and dry the meat. Lift it out and keep every drop of the marinade. Spread the pieces on a rack, blot them and leave them uncovered for 20 minutes: marinated meat is soaking wet, and wet meat steams instead of browning. Salt and pepper only once dry.

Step 4

Reduce the marinade wine separately. Simmer the strained marinade in a wide pan and skim off the grey protein foam that rises, since that foam is what makes a marinade sauce taste muddy. Reduce by half, to about 1 1/2 cups (360 ml). In its own pan the alcohol and harsh tannin leave in the steam, so nothing boils hard later beside the meat.

Step 5

Render the fat, then brown in batches. Wild boar is far leaner than farmed pork and brings almost no fat of its own. Render the diced back fat with 1 tablespoon of oil in a heavy Dutch oven until golden, about 6 minutes, and lift the solids out. Raise the heat, add another tablespoon of oil and brown the meat in three or four uncrowded batches, 6 to 8 minutes each, leaving every face undisturbed until a dark mahogany crust forms. A crowded pan greys the meat in its juice.

Step 6

Cook the soffritto and caramelise the tomato paste. Lower the heat, add the last tablespoon of oil with the diced onion, carrot and celery and a pinch of salt, and cook 10 to 12 minutes, scraping so the moisture they release lifts the fond off the base. Push the soft, barely coloured soffritto aside, add the tomato paste to the bare metal for 2 minutes until it darkens to brick, then stir it through.

Step 7

Deglaze and set the liquid level. Pour in the reduced marinade with the rendered fat solids, scrape the base clean and simmer 3 minutes. Return the meat with the cheesecloth sachet of crushed juniper, the bay leaf and the cinnamon, and add just enough hot stock to bring the liquid two thirds of the way up the meat. Meat under liquid is boiling, not braising, and the exposed surfaces keep browning under the lid. Loose berries break up over three hours and leave resinous fragments, which is why the juniper goes in cheesecloth.

Step 8

Braise low and use the fork test. Bring the pot to a bare simmer, cover tightly and move it to an oven at 300°F (150°C) for 3 hours to 3 hours 30 minutes, turning the pieces once halfway. Held between 180°F and 195°F (82°C and 90°C) the collagen hydrolyses steadily into gelatin, which makes the meat yield and the sauce gloss; at a hard boil the fibres contract faster than the collagen converts. The fork decides, not the clock: it should enter the thickest piece with almost no resistance and the meat should tear rather than spring back. Rest it under a loose cover for 20 minutes, or the gelatin rich juices run out the moment it is moved.

Step 9

Cook the polenta. Boil the water with the salt and pour the polenta in a thin stream, whisking. Drop to the lowest heat as it thickens and cook 40 to 45 minutes, stirring often, because coarse stone ground polenta has to hydrate fully or it stays gritty. Finish off the heat with the butter and Parmigiano and keep it loose.

Step 10

Strain, reduce, and finish with the chocolate off the heat. Remove the sachet, bay and cinnamon and pass the braising liquid through a fine mesh sieve, pressing about a third of the vegetables through. Skim the fat thoroughly: wild boar fat is strongly flavoured and a greasy sauce is the usual fault here. Simmer uncovered about 10 minutes, until the fond coats a spoon. Then take the pan off the flame and wait thirty seconds until the surface is still. Scatter in the grated chocolate and swirl until it disappears, add the cold butter the same way, then the vinegar. Nothing goes back on the heat. Return the meat just long enough to coat it and serve over the polenta.

Plating

Warm the plates. This sauce is held together by gelatin and cocoa butter, and both set on a cold surface, going from glossy to tacky in under a minute. Use wide shallow bowls at about 140°F (60°C).

Spoon a pool of soft polenta into the centre and let it find its own level. Set two pieces of boar slightly overlapping on it, browned faces upward, and nap the sauce over them, leaving part of the crust visible, since a brasato drowned in its fond looks like a stew. Grated cheese on top helps least of all, since the Parmigiano is already in the polenta.

Professional Technique

The technique that defines this recipe is dark chocolate in a savoury sauce, and it is worth being precise about what the chocolate does, because nearly everyone assumes it sweetens. It does not. A bar at seventy percent cacao or above holds very little sugar and a great deal of two other things: cocoa solids, which carry polyphenolic tannins and a pronounced bitterness, and cocoa butter, roughly a third of what you add by weight. Both behave as a tannin and a fat, not as a dessert.

The tannins come first. Cocoa polyphenols bind readily to proteins, the mechanism that makes strong tea feel astringent, and a game fond has proteins in abundance to bind to: gelatin dissolved out of the shoulder, plus the residual myoglobin that gives wild boar its iron edge. That ferrous note is what most diners object to in game, and cocoa tannin softens the perception of it by attaching to the compounds that carry it. The bitterness works in parallel, sitting under the acidity of the Sangiovese and giving the sauce a bass register wine alone does not supply. The cocoa butter rounds it off: it melts near body temperature and turns a lean sharp sauce into one that feels finished.

Dose and temperature are where this goes wrong. The dose is tiny by design, 3/4 oz (20 g) across six servings, about three grams a person, and at that level nobody tastes chocolate; they taste a deeper, rounder sauce and cannot say why. Double it and the dish becomes a curiosity. Temperature is stricter still: once the sauce passes roughly 113°F (45°C) after the chocolate is in, the cocoa butter separates as a dull grey film, the tannins turn flatly bitter, and there is no way back. That is why the pan comes off the heat and never returns. The ancestor of all this is the Tuscan cinghiale in dolceforte, which drove the effect far harder with candied peel and sugar.

Texture and Moisture Control

Three transformations have to land. The crust from browning is Maillard chemistry and needs a dry surface. Collagen turning to gelatin is steady between 180°F and 195°F (82°C and 90°C) and needs hours rather than heat. The gelatin then thickens the fond, which is why this sauce needs no flour.

Moisture is controlled by the liquid line and the lid, not by adding water. At two thirds of the way up, the submerged part cooks in the fond while the exposed part keeps browning in the trapped steam, and the condensation washes that browning back into the sauce. If the level drops, add hot stock, never cold.

Professional Mise en Place

Equipment and tools

Heavy Dutch oven of 6 to 7 quarts with a tight lid
Wide saucepan for the marinade and later the fond
Fine mesh conical sieve, cheesecloth and twine, and a microplane

Prepared ahead

Meat marinating in Sangiovese, 24 hours before service
Marinade skimmed and reduced by half, on the day
Soffritto diced fine, juniper sachet tied, stock kept hot

Service setup

Meat resting under a loose cover on a warm tray
Chocolate grated at the last moment, butter cold and diced
Bowls warmed to about 140°F (60°C), never cold

Chef Tips

Grate the chocolate, do not chop it. Microplane shavings dissolve into the warm fond in seconds, while chunks sit on the bottom and tempt you to put the pan back on the heat, the one thing that ruins the sauce.

Make the braise the day before. Boar in Sangiovese is better on the second day, and the fat sets into a sheet that lifts off whole. Add the chocolate only on the day of service.

Use a Sangiovese you would drink, but not an expensive one. A young Chianti is ideal, since the dish wants acidity and firm tannin. An oaked bottle brings vanilla and toast that fight the cocoa.

If you cannot get wild boar, use pork shoulder and adjust your expectations. The method is unchanged, but farmed pork has none of the iron edge, so the chocolate has much less to do.

Common Mistakes

Adding the chocolate over heat. Above about 113°F (45°C) the cocoa butter separates as a dull greasy film and the tannins turn flatly bitter. The pan must be off the flame and still, and it never goes back on.

Using the wrong chocolate. Milk chocolate, flavoured couverture and anything under sixty percent cacao bring sugar and dairy into a savoury fond. Use a plain bar at seventy percent.

Tipping the raw marinade into the pot. Unreduced marinade carries alcohol, harsh tannin and a grey protein scum, and boiling it down beside the meat overcooks the meat. Reduce it by half in its own pan.

Braising the meat under liquid. Submerged meat is boiled, and boiled game loses its flavour into the pot. The liquid belongs two thirds of the way up.

Wine Pairing

Chianti Classico DOCG: The bottle to open if you cooked with Sangiovese, because it continues the sauce rather than commenting on it. Its high acidity cuts through the cocoa butter and the rendered pork fat, and its firm dusty tannin meets the cocoa tannin as an equal. The sour cherry and dried herb notes pick up the juniper.

Bolgheri Sassicaia DOC: The coastal Tuscan answer and the most flattering match for the chocolate itself. Cabernet grown on the Maremma littoral gives graphite, cedar and blackcurrant with a tannin denser and finer grained than Sangiovese, which matches the game in weight. Where Chianti argues with the sauce, this one agrees with it.

Conero DOCG: Montepulciano grown on the limestone of Monte Conero in the Marche, a serious wine at a fraction of Tuscan prices. It is deeply coloured and fleshy, with soft ripe tannin and a savoury, almost salty finish that fills the mid palate against a concentrated fond without adding astringency on top of the cocoa.

Cesanese del Piglio DOCG: The red of the hills southeast of Rome and the least obvious choice here, worth making for its aromatics. Cesanese carries black pepper, wild fennel and a brambly spice that runs alongside the juniper and the cinnamon, with moderate tannin and high acidity that lighten the plate.

Storage & Reheating

This dish genuinely improves overnight. Store the meat submerged in its unreduced braising liquid in a sealed container in the refrigerator for up to 4 days. Keeping the two together protects the texture: meat stored dry goes fibrous within a day, and the fat sets into a sheet that lifts off whole.

Reheat gently and always in liquid: the meat with enough fond to half cover it, in a covered pan over low heat or in an oven at 275°F (135°C) for about 30 minutes. Do not microwave it and do not let it boil. Then reduce the remaining fond separately and finish it with freshly grated chocolate, cold butter and vinegar, as on the first day.

Freeze the meat and the unfinished fond together, never the finished sauce, which splits on thawing once mounted with chocolate and butter. Portioned airtight with the liquid covering the meat it keeps 3 months. Leftover polenta sets firm: cut it into slabs and grill them under the reheated boar.