Goetta, egg and cheese buttermilk biscuit sandwich

The goetta:
Add the water, sliced onion, black peppercorns, bay leaf and pork to a large pot over high heat.

Once boiling, reduce the heat and simmer for at least 1.5 hours until the meat is easily pulled from the bones.

Strain, reserving the liquid and meat separately. Measure out 4 cups of the reserved liquid, adding additional water or stock if necessary. Add 4 cups of liquid back to the pot, bring to a boil. 

Once water is boiling, add the steel cut oats and the gelatin.

After you've added oats and gelatin, reduce the heat under the pot to simmer. Cook, uncovered for 20 minutes. Stir the pot often to make sure the oats do not stick to the bottom of the pan. While the oats are simmering, remove all pork from the bones and finely chop the meat. Discard the bones.

After the oats have cooked for 20 minutes, add the finely chopped pork to the pan with the oats and season with the dried onion, thyme and cayenne pepper.

Stir everything together very well, place a lid on the pot and allow it to cool for 30 minutes. 

Once cool, remove all the cooked goetta to a bread loaf pan or another baking dish to solidify. Press down to mold it all into shape. 

Refrigerate goetta for at least 24 hours to firm up before slicing and searing. 

For the biscuits:
Weigh your flour. Grate frozen butter into the sifted self-rising flour. Stir to combine until the butter is fully coated with flour.

Put the bowl in the freezer for 10 minutes. It's important to keep the butter as cold as possible through this process. 

Combine buttermilk to the cold flour/butter to bring together as a dough. Stir no more than 15 times. Overworking the dough at this stage could cause your finished biscuits to be tougher. Your dough at the end of 15 stirs will be very shaggy and not smooth at all.

On a floured surface dump out dough and roll with a rolling pin. If you don't have a rolling pin, you can just use your hands. Dust with flour as needed when the dough gets sticky. Fold the dough over on itself five different times. This folding process is what creates the layers in the biscuits. 

Roll or flatten the dough to 3/4 to 1 inch thick/tall.

Cut biscuits into circles or squares and place them on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. When cutting, you do not want to twist the cutter. Twisting while cutting will ruin the layers that you created with folding. Place your cut biscuits next to each other (touching) on the sheet pan. Touching biscuits help each other rise taller. 

After cutting biscuits, you can grab any scraps of dough and re-roll and re-cut them. There's no need to waste any dough. The last few biscuits might not look as uniform as the first ones, but they will all taste the same. 

Bake at 475 degrees F (245 C) for around 15 minutes. Check around the 12-minute mark to make sure they do not brown too much.

When biscuits are done, transfer them from your baking pan onto a cooling rack to stop the bottoms from cooking further.

Paint the melted butter on top of each biscuit.

Searing the goetta and making the sandwich:

When you're ready to make a sandwich or sear the goetta, you should remove it all from the refrigerator and slide the goetta out of the mold. Slice off a piece of goetta and make sure it's shaped the way you want. At this point, prior to searing, you can form or shape it the way you would like. 

Once it's shaped, heat up a non-stick skillet to medium-low heat. Once it's heated up for 4 or 5 minutes, add your goetta patty. 

Cook for 8 to 10 minutes in a medium-low heat skillet with no oil or butter. Do not press on the top of the goetta patty, that will cause it to crumble. 

Once the 8 or 10 minutes have passed, you can carefully flip the goetta patty. If anything spills out or if the goetta crumbles, you can push it back together. If you are too rough, you could end up crumbling it into goetta hash instead of a patty. Goetta hash still tastes good though. 

Add your cheese to the cooked side of your goetta while the second side sears, this will allow the cheese time to get melty. 

After 8 or 10 minutes on the second side, you should be finished searing. 

Split your biscuit, cook your egg and make your sandwich.