Paisano: Duck Rillettes

For years I thought the Paisano was essentially a bum. A charming, well-groomed, erudite bum who could cook like a top chef, but a bum nevertheless. He spent most of his life wandering from place to place, he certainly didn't work for a living, and he seemed to survive largely on the generosity of others (including me). So it was a tremendous surprise when, shortly after moving to California, he invited me to spend Thanksgiving with him in Tahoe. Frankly, knowing he sometimes house-sat for friends, I assumed that was the case here. I had no other plans for T'day and hadn't been to Tahoe before, so I readily agreed.

I drove up on Thanksgiving, a glorious sunny day, forsaking the Interstate and instead taking a blue highway that wound slowly into the mountains. There'd been a couple of snows already, but the roads were clear and it was a delightful drive. I'd bought one of Charles Kuralt's books on tape and his warm baritone, telling of his travels across the country, was the perfect company. After a couple of wrong turns I finally found the place: a medium-sized, 1 1/2-story log cabin some distance out of town on the lake.

The rillettes were a revelation, how could something so simple taste so good?

The cabin had huge great room/dining area/kitchen dominated by a stone fireplace in which a fire was crackling noisily. The mantle featured a huge copper tray that I recognized as Arabic. Beside the chimney were five or six of shelves featuring a huge collection of ceramic and terracotta platters and bowls. The other walls sported a few impressionistic watercolors, which I subsequently learned were originals, not prints. A stairway led up to a loft and the second of two bedrooms.

As you might expect, the kitchen drew my attention. It sported a commercial (genuinely commercial) range, a large work island, a fridge, and a huge soapstone sink. The cabinets were stained green (as was all the trim in the house) and a similarly green door led into what I found was a walk-in pantry — thus sealing my complete envy. It almost goes without saying that the house smelled wonderful.

Paisano was making duck confit, or I should say, he'd just finished making duck confit. There were half a dozen legs cooling on a pan. Also on the counter was a pork loin — our Thanksgiving dinner. We sat and had a couple of glasses of wine and caught up, and that's when I learned the cabin belonged to him.

He told me it stood vacant much of the year, except for a housekeeper who kept an eye on it and dusted and vacuumed as needed. As we chatted I learned he kept the cabin because he needed a place to keep the few things he valued — the paintings (it turned he'd done several of them), his collection of platters and bowls, and a few other things. And also, despite his wanderlust, he found that he needed a home base where he could paint, and cook, and catch his breath. I also learned that my invitation to the cabin was an exceptional honor. It was his private space and he seldom shared it with others.

We started making dinner at about 4:00, the pork loin was browned in a cocotte (as Paisano calls it, a Dutch oven in my terms) and then he added milk and garlic. I steamed some beans to be sautéed with garlic, pancetta, and anchovies. Then I prepped Potatoes Anna while Paisano made Tiramisu for dessert. The last step was duck rillettes for an appetizer. I knew about rillettes but had never made or eaten them.

Rillettes are some kind of meat (rabbit, pork, goose, or in this case, duck) slowly cooked in fat and then pounded into a paste. Rillettes are an old method of preserving meat, very much a peasant dish in origin. It's served spread on bread or crackers.

Duck Rillettes
Serves 6 as an hors d'oeuvres.
Recipe adapted from Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.

8 oz duck confit at room temperature, about 2 legs
2 tbsp duck fat
1/4 c duck gelatin (from duck confit, a friend calls it "duck goo", it's the liquid that settles to the bottom when making confit)
plenty of ground black pepper
some salt, maybe

Place all ingredients in a stand mixer fitted with the paddle blade. Process at high speed until meat is completely shredded, scraping down sides of bowl occasionally. Taste and adjust seasonings. Serve on slices of baguette.

The entire meal was delicious, but the rillettes were a revelation. How could something so simple taste so good? Even when you factor in making the confit it's simple and easy. The champagne Paisano opened was perfect for cutting through the fat.

Note: Paisano is a fictious character and events presented may or may not be true.

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | paisano | duck | duck rillettes | French | charcuterie

Read more...

Duck Confit

Confit to be Tried



Sometimes it takes me forever to get around to things — years even. It's because there are so many things I want to do, so many things I have to do, and because sometimes when I have time to do some of the things I want to do there are things I need to do instead that I also haven’t gotten around to. Nevertheless, "God willin' and the crick don’t rise," I do eventually get around to most things.

The particular thing I've finally gotten around to in this case is making duck confit.

Duck confit has long been on my list, I initially planned on making it a few weeks after I made pork confit, somehow I didn't get around to it. Oh sure, I got busy, but the real sticking point was the duck fat. The idea of buying rendered fat from a company such as Hudson Valley Foie Gras (HVFG) offended me. I can get both pork and beef fat free at the grocery. If I need duck fat I should just cook enough ducks to have the fat I need. Paying for fat just seems wrong.

However, I never managed to cook enough ducks in a short enough period of time to accumulate enough fat to immerse even one leg in. The problem is duck fat is so good that it simply doesn't last long in my freezer. (Try making a grilled cheese sandwich using duck fat instead of butter or adding a dollop to grits or polenta.) So when NPR's Kitchen Window accepted my proposal for an article about beans I broke down and placed an order for 2 pounds of duck fat (1.75, actually) and six legs.

Beans persuaded me to make duck confit?Yes. Specifically cassoulet, that marvelous, multi-step bean dish from France. This is to be the primary recipe of the article and although you can skip the goose or duck confit it's just not the same. So I looked up HVFG on the Web and placed an order. Two days later I received a large box containing six vacuum-packed fresh legs, a quart of duck fat, and 2 duck breasts. I didn't order the breasts but I learned that HVFG often tosses a freebie into an order — you've gotta love a company that gives away duck breasts. I'll be smoking those babies.

With duck on the way, I needed a recipe. I began with the recipe from Charcuterie then moved on to the 'Net. I also queried Derrick Schneider at An Obsession with Food who had written a blog post on duck confit that had stuck in my mind. Derrick was a tremendous help and sent me three e-mails with suggestions and advice. I owe Derrick something tasty.

So I combined everything I'd learned and did the following:

Duck Confit

3 duck legs (with thighs)
1 qt duck fat (minimum)
Seasoning:
20 g kosher salt
1/8 tsp cracked black pepper
1/2 tsp Herbes de Provence
3 small bay leaves
2 cloves garlic — sliced

I trimmed all visible fat from the legs and trimmed the skin so it just barely covered the breast (harvesting more fat). The fat went into a small pot with a cup of water over low heat where I rendered the fat until the solid parts were mahogany brown. This garnered about another cup of fat. I drained the solid chunks on a paper towel, sprinkled them with sea salt, and enjoyed a snack.

Meanwhile, I mixed together the salt, pepper, and Herbes de Provence in a pinch bowl. I rubbed this mixture into the legs, then placed them cut-side up in a deep baking dish, rubbed in the garlic on the cut side, and pressed a small bay leaf into the meat. I covered the dish with plastic wrap and refrigerated it for about 36 hours.

At the end of that time I rinsed the seasoning mixture off the legs, dried them, and arranged them in a dutch oven. Then I added the duck fat I'd purchased along with the fat I'd rendered after trimming. As you can see in this photo, a quart plus 1 cup of fat barely covers three legs.

At this point there are three options: cook the confit on the stove-top, cook it in the oven, or do both. I elected to do both.

I brought the fat to a simmer (190F) on the stove-top then placed the pot in a 225F oven. I pulled out one leg at the two-hour mark, the next at three hours and the third at four hours.

Notes:
Ruhlman recommended starting on the stove and then continuing in a 180F oven for as long as 10 hours. Derrick recommended cooking on the stove top (again at 180 - 190F) for around 2 hours, and Madeleine Kamman suggests a 275F oven for 2 - 2 1/2 hours. The real key here is that you're not frying the duck, you're poaching it in fat. It's a gentle process.

I have a bias toward oven cooking — I like the indirect heat coming from all sides for this type of dish. But I didn't want to wait 10 hours. Nevertheless, Kamman's 275F oven seemed harsh, so I chose 225F.

As for the seasoning mix, the recipes were all over the map. I decided on the Herbes de Provence because I like the mixture and thought it would be perfect for the cassoulet. I did mean to add some allspice but forgot. Spices we associate with sweet (as opposed to savory) flavors figure prominantly in a lot of the recipes I found. I've quit making such presumptions about the fitness of one flavor for one kind of dish and the fitness of another flavor for another kind of dish. But I understand my culinary roots and so where I need to begin learning. I plan to try "sweet" spices on the next three legs.

Many of the recipes I perused recommended 3 - 4 cups of fat for as many as six legs. Wrong. As you can see in the photo 5 cups of fat just barely covered three (moulard) legs. I found the same apparent disconnect when I made pork confit — not nearly enough fat called for. Perhaps it's simply that my pots are the wrong size and so require more fat. Or perhaps it's because the writers are afraid to mention how much fat you really need. But whatever the case, it's better to have too much fat than too little. And trust me, you'll find a use for it.

Results:
Each leg was good, but the 4-hour leg clearly shone for tenderness and savor. Next time I'm planning on four hours in the oven at 225F. The seasoning mix was surprisingly mild despite the 36-hour cure. Part of the explanation is that the skin side absorbs relatively little flavoring, but I still plan to increase the herbs used and choose just a few. (note that I expect the spices such as allspice and nutmeg to have more impact). Nevertheless, even the salt had less impact than I expected.

There's still a lot of fat (even after 4 hours) under the skin over the thigh. Depending on your plans for the confit this may or not be good. In the cassoulet I suspect I want that fat to render during cooking, but for rillets perhaps I don't. I'm going to score the skin on one leg next time.

The duck fat can be filtered through cheese cloth and reused. Because I have another three legs to work on, I decided that instead of literally storing the legs in fat that I would filter it, let it cool, then dip each leg in the fat before wrapping in plastic and storing in the freezer. I ended up with six cups of duck fat (meaning another cup rendered out while making the confit), clearly you need to have duck fat to make duck fat.

And in case it's not clear, confit is more than worth the trouble. The poorest leg I made was like a bite of heaven.

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | charcuterie | preservation| duck

| confit

Read more...

Corned Beef

Fugue State



I know. You were thinking if you hung around me long enough I'd eventually publish all the recipes — subject to my adaptations — originally published in Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman. In fact, you may be right. But it will take me years to do so and I may not publish them in the order that interests you and besides, I only publish my adaptations or examples in a review. Relying on me is a sucker bet.

This week I made the Italian Sausage recipe and was disappointed. The learning curve on sausage is not what I hoped and is going to take longer than I wished. I'm reminded of learning to make soufflés 25 years ago after a five-year effort to produce something that looked as good as it tasted. I'm reminded not because making soufflés is anything like making sausage, but because my difficulty in each case is a fundamental lack of understanding.

With soufflés my somewhat obsessive/compulsive personality led me to mix all of the

The big thing here is corned beef and cabbage. In Ireland, you'd have to go looking for it. It's not served on St. Patrick's.

air out of the whites I had so carefully beaten air into when I combined them with the sauce. I learned my lesson. In fact I learned a deeper lesson about not obsessing so much on the rules and developing a deeper understanding of what is going on in a recipe — chemically, mechanically, and, even, philosophically.

With sausage I immediately recognized my problem and the solution; Make more sausage. Although I was disappointed in the Italian sausage I made from Charcuterie, you may not be. The recipe may be closer to what you have in mind than it was to what I had in mind. That's common in recipes and the solution is knowing your ingredients and how to tweak them.

This week I also corned a beef due to either an alarming inability to understand a calendar or because Microsoft Outlook was lying to me, or both. The fact is I spent most of the week before last thinking it was last week and so I ended up making corned beef a week early for next week. But Outlook did (and does) lie and tells me that this year St. Patrick's Day is on Sunday the 18th of March. I'm not entirely to blame.

I got the recipe from Charcuterie and last night, after a week of curing the brisket, I made corned beef and cabbage. This was seriously good stuff, even though I screwed up and cooked the beef in the brine (resulting from too many dishes going on at once and poor production notes to myself). The final dish was too salty, nevertheless, the flavors were marvelous and far better than any corned beef I've ever bought.

Best of all, the hardest part of corning your own beef brisket really is remembering to start a week early — or two weeks early if you're temporally challenged. Like me. Sigh.

Technorati: Food | essay | charcuterie | corned beef

Read more...

Italian Sausage

Sausage is a Shallow Curve



There's something counter-intuitive about the phrase learning curve. Back when I had a real job programming computers for a living the term came up a lot in reference to users learning a program and most folks seemed to think a shallow learning curve was best. The intuition is that shallow is easy and steep is hard because shallow hills are easy to climb and steep hills are hard. But the learning curve's axes are time and amount learned, effort doesn't come into it. This means that a steep learning curve represents a lot learned over a short period of time. Steep learning curves are good.

Yesterday afternoon I made four pounds of Italian sausage — about two pounds more than I should have because it's not great sausage. I made so much because I'm an optimist (or pretend to be) and because I used the recipe in Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn (click here for my review). Charcuterie is one of the two best books on food that I bought last year and one of the best cookbooks (if you can call it that, it's more a primer than a simple collection of recipes) I've ever purchased. Despite earlier travails with sausage, I was sure this book would steer me right because it had on everything else I'd made from it. Nope.

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialistic, otherworldly, New Age spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu and seaweed slime. ~ Edward Abbey

After making it I tried a sample and it was almost flavorless. The fennel seed, coriander seed, basil, and oregano were way in the background. There wasn't even enough salt in it. The only spices that came out as I hoped were the peppers. There also wasn't enough fat, but I can't really blame the book for that lack. Cuts of meat vary in their fat content and the pork butt I bought had been trimmed too closely and I should have added more.

Based on the sample I'd cooked and eaten, I went back and doubled the fennel, coriander, basil, oregano, and salt. The second sample was much better, but still not great.

But here's where you run into the real trick of sausage making. I could have tweaked the mixture again, but doing a third mix on the batch would have seriously overworked the meat, destroying the texture. Also, I wasn't sure what was needed. Thinking back, I suspect I needed some caraway seed, but I'm not on a first-name basis with caraway seed, or fennel seed either, for that matter. Or mace or anis seed. Finally, the spices in sausage need at least 24 hours to meld properly so today the flavor will be different from yesterday. However, I don't know how it will be different.

To make excellent sausage I need to know the seasonings well and know how they'll interact over time.

So I have four pounds of not-so-great Italian sausage. It'll be fine for cooking with, and in fact that's what I planned on doing with it, which is why instead of stuffing it in casings I made up 1/4 pound balls, but it'll be a while before I get to try making Italian sausage again. And it looks like my sausage learning curve is more shallow than I'd like.

Technorati: Food | italy | sausage | charcuterie | essay

Read more...