This recipe was heavily inspired by the sweetbreads with bacon, capers ,and brown butter from the now-closed Prune restaurant in New York City. Prune was a restaurant owned by chef Gabrielle Hamilton, and it featured food from her French-Italian upbringing. A lot of the dishes they served had this sense of resourcefulness, pulling techniques and ingredients from ingredients that are often unwanted or usually thrown away. And that was what I fell in love with when it came to Gabrielle’s cooking. Especially because I learned about it through Mind of a Chef while I was a broke college student, trying to save as much produce as I could when I was cooking. I have gone to Prune several times, the most recent time was right before the pandemic in 2020, and while I am bummed that they are now closed, I still love to reference back to some of the dishes I have had there. One of which being this large piece of sweetbread(thymus gland) with this caper brown butter sauce and a piece of bacon on top. In this case, I wanted to make it my own, so I took that initial inspiration, and put a few twists on it. I decided, instead of one large sweetbread, let’s serve the dish in smaller pieces, and with smaller pieces of bacon as well. By breaking it down, it feels less…intense. Especially because a lot of people feel uncomfortable eating a thymus gland(mostly because it looks like a brain even though it’s technically like a pancreas). I also marinated my sweetbreads in a combination of soy, shio koji, and mirin, just to give it an underlying umami, while these were coated in mochiko, because I love mochiko sweetbreads. The mochiko(glutinous rice flour) adds a crispy texture when the sweetbreads are seared, and it is a lovely texture.

For the sweetbreads:
1/2 pound beef sweetbreads
2 tbsp shio koji
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp mirin
mochiko
canola oil

Poach the sweetbreads in a pot of heavily salted boiling water for 5 minutes. Shock the sweetbreads in a bowl of cold water for 3 minutes, and then carefully remove the any thin membrane around the sweetbreads themselves. Toss the sweetbreads with the shio koji, soy sauce, and mirin, and allow the sweetbreads to marinate in that liquid in a covered, airtight container, for at least 1 hour in the refrigerator. Then pat the sweetbreads dry with a paper towel, and press the sweetbreads between two paper towels, sandwiched between two plates for at least another hour, just to draw out any additional moisture. Cut the sweetbreads into smaller 1-inch by 1-inch pieces and toss in mochiko prior to searing them. To cook the sweetbreads, start by heating up a nonstick pan with a generous amount of canola oil and sear the sweetbreads in the oil for 2-3 minutes per side. Transfer the sweetbreads to the finished bacon-caper-brown butter mixture, and allow them to cook in the sauce for another 2 minutes on each side prior to serving them.

For the caper-bacon brown butter:
4 tbsp unsalted butter
1oz bacon, julienned
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 tbsp soy sauce
.3oz capers
1 tbsp cold water

In a pan on low heat, start by melting down the unsalted butter and rendering the bacon. As the bacon gets crispy, remove the bacon bits first, allowing them to drain on a paper towel to remove any excess grease. To the pan, add in the black pepper, and allow the butter and bacon fat to continue cooking until the butter fully browns and stops frothing. Lower the heat and add to the pan the soy sauce, capers, and cold water, stirring rigorously until everything emulsifies into a creamy, velvety sauce – keep this sauce on low heat so that you can finish the seared sweetbreads in the sauce prior to serving.

For garnish:
Fresh watercress

Start by plating the sauce in the bottom of a shallow bowl. Place down the sweetbreads, garnishing them with a sprinkling of the rendered bacon, and some fresh watercress to finish.