If you are a regular reader of Cook’s Illustrated, you are familiar with the front matter that precedes the recipes: a folksy editorial by Christopher Kimball, the misnamed “Notes from Readers” (it’s questions from readers), and the Quick Tips.
It’s the Tips that I find most interesting; a collection of handy hints from kitchen MacGyvers who have solved problems you didn’t know existed. Concerned about getting your iPad dirty while cooking from an on-screen recipe? Use a baby carrot as a stylus! Can’t find your rolling pin? Use a 2-lier bottle filled with water! The ideas range from the completely obvious to the outright ingenious, most employing muffin tins, ice cube trays, microwaves, ice cream scoops, and aluminum foil.
There’s at least one tip a month that I had independently discovered, which left me wondering if I could come up with an original suggestion. My eureka moment came when I was figuring out how to store a huge batch of garlic chips that had come out of my dehydrator. I had run out of the little desiccant bags that She Who Must Be Obeyed liberated from her company’s lab, and didn’t want to order them online. Remembering that uncooked rice absorbs moisture (that’s why you see it in salt shakers), I looked around for a porous package to hold a few spoonfuls, which is when I remembered the Japanese loose tea bags I use for making herb sachets.
I filled the bag with rice and tossed it in the container with my chips, which have been perfectly dry ever since.
I didn’t remember seeing a similar tip in Cook’s, so in August I submitted the idea along with the two photos in this post. In September I received a reply informing me that my tip would appear in the January/February 2012 issue. And it did:
Not quite a MacGyver feat, but I’ve already done that. Next up is a culinary application for duct tape.
My last attempt at making homemade ramen noodles was such an utter failure that I gave up on the idea permanently. Then I read the inaugural issue of Lucky Peach, which was devoted to all things ramen and included a new recipe for alkaline noodles as well as a revised ramen broth (which I had first heard about at David Chang’s Harvard lecture). I already had roasted pork shoulder and belly, and a new batch of broth (made with the new method), so it was time to try the noodles again.
Ramen noodles are made with alkaline salts. I had tried mixing my own for my first attempt, but the same issue of Lucky Peach also had a technique from food scientist Harold McGee for creating the alkaline component from simple baking soda. It couldn’t be simpler: spread half a cup of baking soda on a sheet pan and bake it at 250°F for half an hour. The resulting sodium carbonate is one of the two salts used in noodles, sufficient for home recipes.
I dissolved 12 grams of the baked soda in 100 grams of warm water, added another 100 grams of cold water, then stirred in 400 grams of all-purpose flour.
After five solid minutes of forceful kneading, I wrapped the dough in plastic and let it sit for 20 minutes before kneading it for another five minutes. After an hour in the fridge, I wound up with a smooth ball of dough.
I cut the dough into six pieces, cranked each piece through my pasta machine, and then passed the sheets through the pasta cutter. My cutter makes angel hair pasta, thinner than I’d prefer for noodles, but I was willing to compromise if they cooked properly. I floured the noodles and hung them on a drying rack until needed.
I prepped all of the other ingredients – broth, tare, pork belly and shoulder, naruto, nori, scallions, and slow-poached eggs – while I brought a pot of water to the boil. It was time for the moment of truth:
The noodles held together and didn’t clump into a solid mass. I gave them a quick rinse to wash off the excess starch, then added them to bowls before topping off with broth and the other components.
I’ve already commented on the broth; this was all about the noodles. They were a bit thin, a result of the cutter, so they didn’t have the chewiness I expect from ramen, but they tasted the way they should and held up in the broth. The more astute among you may have noticed that the noodles didn’t have the usual deep yellow color, which I attribute to the lack of potassium carbonate in the mix.
I consider the exercise a success, and am now confident that I can make fresh noodles on demand. I have ordered a larger pasta cutter (for spaghetti) and recently found a bottle of kansui (a solution of the alkaline salts in water), which I hope will help me fine-tune the final product. Stay tuned for ramen 3.0.
Once again, illness and massive cooking projects have conspired to keep me from posting my review of last year in a timely fashion. Now that I’m healthy again (both physically and possibly mentally) I expect to resume with a more regular schedule. Here’s my “best of” list for 2011:
Cookbook
No contest. The best cookbook I encountered last year was Modernist Cuisine. As I mentioned in my last post, it may take me the rest of this year to finish reading it.
Runners-up: Lucky Peach, the food magazine curated by David Chang. Apart from its singleminded point of view, it’s refreshingly free of the lifestyle ads that choke the pages of most other cooking periodicals. Odd Bits, another book about cooking “the rest of the animal” that will join Fergus Henderson’s two nose-to-tail cookbooks as references of first resort.
Cooking Blog:
Cookblog by Peter Barrett. He was a runner-up in my 2009 best of, but his inventiveness and creativity – especially during the Charcutepalooza competition – never cease to amaze me. If you need convincing, read his Thanksgiving post.
Runners-up: I made a lot of new online friends during Charcutepalooza, but the blogs I keep coming back to are The Butcher’s Apprentice and Wrightfood. The former provided much-needed cheerleading and moral support, and the later provided the technical advice that puled me out of a series of cured meat disasters that almost made me quit. They’re also both wonderful accounts of two different approaches to charcuterie.
Cooking Show:
Now that Good Eats is gone and Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen have both become studies in delusional psychopathies, the only show I watch to learn about food is Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and his recent spinoff, The Layover.
Runners-up: There are none. There’s nothing out there worth watching. In a world where Paula Deen has managed to leverage a diet-induced diabetes diagnosis into an advertising deal for her medication, “food television” is now dead to me.
Recipe I’ve Cooked:
Braised Short Rib with Crispy Beef and Shallot Salad with Sweet, Sour, and Savory Glaze, the main course from She Who Must Be Obeyed’s Sixth Annual Birthday Dinner. My first Modernist Cuisine recipe, it required a week’s worth of prep that involved pressure cooked stock, sous vide cooking, dehydrating, blowtorching, and deep frying. And it tasted amazing.
Runners-up: Any of the dishes I made from the Charcutepalooza challenge were, by definition, technique-heavy, but I’d have to give the nod to the three meals I finessed out of a slab of homemade corned beef, which I plan to do again this year.
Single Restaurant Dish:
“Street food,” the appetizer course for Next’s Thailand menu. Those five little bites set the stage for an exceptional restaurant experience.
Runner-up: The foie gras dog at Hot Doug’s in Chicago -Â a foie gras and Sauternes duck sausage with black truffle aioli, foie gras mousse and fleur de del. With a side of duck fat fries. What’s not to love?
Complete Restaurant Meal:
A Tour of Thailand at Next. I’ve gushed about it previously, but the meal managed to be both tightly managed and spontaneous at the same time, a very difficult feat to pull off.
Runner-up: Dinner at Publican, a family-style meal for eight that showed just how good well-prepard charcuterie and grilled food could be.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’d Gladly Do Again:
The Charcutepalooza challenge, which forced me to work through all of the techniques in Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie, a book I had filed in the “I should try that someday” category. Now that I’ve worked through all of the challenges, I know that time, patience, and precision are all that are required to make delicious cured meats.
Runners-up: My initial forays into cheesemaking have succeeded. Now that I’m not preoccupied with curing meat, it’s time to try some more complex cheeses. I’ve also streamlined the production of the DIY sous vide rig, the first serious electronics project I’ve tried.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again:
Last year’s entry in this category was cooking for and feeding about 500 people a day at a local convention. I said I’d never do it again, but I must report that I just completed a near-repeat of the experience. As a favor to a friend running hospitality services for the convention, I agreed to cook – and only cook – half of the food for this year, knowing that we’d be feeding only 60% of the total number that was fed last year. After two days of shopping I spent four days cooking in the Belm Utility Research Kitchen, which was much more pleasant and relaxed than I had expected. Taking advantage of some economies of scale, some hard-learned lessons from the previous run, and the vegetable chopping skills of She Who Must Be Obeyed, I banged out fifteen gallons of beef steew, eight gallons each of chicken and vegetable stew, fifteen pounds of baked chicken, and forty pounds of roasted vegetables. That I maintained my sanity and my sleep schedule makes me think that I may have a future in catering, as long as She Who doesn’t have me committed first.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I didn’t do anything last year that I wouldn’t want to do again. Which isn’t such a bad way to end my most interesting cooking year to date.
So many cookbooks were published this year that I couldn’t pick just one or two to list as favorites, but I was able to narrow down the list to about a dozen. Here’s what I have been reading and cooking from in 2011:
Modernist Cuisine: My number one pick is also the largest and most expensive cookbook in the Belm Utility Research Kitchen Reference Library. It will probably take me the rest of the new year to finish reading, but it has already paid off with new techniques for stock and duck confit, and one stunning meal.
Heston Blumenthal at Home: If The Fat Duck Cookbook is too intimidating, this book is the introduction you need to Blumenthal’s cooking. In addition to some simplified Fat Duck recipes, he provides his takes on classics like onion soup, roast chicken, shepherd’s pie, and lemon tart. if you’re feeling more adventurous you can try the cinnamon and vanilla ice cream that changes flavors as you eat. As an added bonus, the book is beautifully designed and photographed.
Odd Bits: How could I not love a book about cooking “the rest of the animal”? Author Jennifer McLagan takes you in order from nose through tail, with a roast suckling pig interlude. This is a worthy successor to Richard Olney’s long out of print Variety Meats.
Hunt, Gather, Cook: I’ve already written about Hank Shaw’s guide to finding your own food. Â No matter where you live, Hank can help you find something edible in your back yard or neighborhood.
Mission Street Food: The story of how a food truck became a popup restaurant that has since become a real dining destination in San Francisco, this book is half biography and half cookbook. Worth the read just for the hamburger and PB&J (pork belly and jicama) recipes.
Momofuku Milk Bar: Crack pie and compost cookies are just two of the addictive creations found in this companion to the Momofuku cookbook. Like its predecessor, the Milk Bar recipes are full of sub-recipes for things like “crunch” and “crumbs,” but once you develop a stockpile of the precursors, the main recipes come together quickly. My family inhaled the cornflake-chocolate chip-marshmallow cookies I brought home for the holiday, a winning endorsement from a long line of dessert bakers.
Lucky Peach: It’s not a cookbook, but it’s a magazine about food and cooking complete with recipes. And it’s curated by David Chang. The two issues released this year (on a quarterly schedule) were devoted to ramen and “the sweet spot,” and were both “single-minded in their pursuit of what’s wonderful about cooking and eating food.” I’m hoping that the promised iPad app arrives soon; the accompanying videos promise to be quite entertaining.
Serious Eats: The subtitle says it all: “a comprehensive guide to making and eating delicious food wherever you are.” The book condenses the Serious Eats web site into one manageable volume while still leaving plenty of room for argument about where the best burger/pizza/hot dog/ice cream/barbecue/sandwich can be found. Not satisfied with providing comprehensive “best of” lists for each category, the editors unleash their secret weapon – cook/scientist J. Kenji Lopez-Alt – who developed recipes for everything from pancakes to sliders to Korean fried chicken.
Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream: This is the first ice cream recipe book I’ve read that doesn’t rely on the traditional egg custard as a base for its finished product. Jeni’s focus is on using milk and cream alone, removing as much water as possible, and adding starch to produce a creamy, gelato-like texture. Her maple flavor is the base for my own french toast ice cream, but her other recipes present unusual flavor combinations. I’m still feasting on her Queen City Chocolate Cayenne.
The Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook: I have been a Cook’s Illustrated subscriber since 1996, and have the shelf of back issues to prove it. My complaints about the single issues are the need to update the separate index every year and an absence of issue numbers in the indexing. This book solves those problems by compiling every published recipe, grouping them by type, and providing a comprehensive index. You lose the writeups for the recipes as well as the non-recipe features from the magazines, but you regain a whole lot of shelf space for a very reasonable price.
Eat Your Books: This site, which I have written about recently, is a meta-cookbook with search and filtering capabilities. If you have more than a single shelf of cookbooks, you should be using Eat Your Books.
Next: Paris 1906: I didn’t et to eat the inaugural menu at Next, a homage to classics from Escoffier, but I can look at the photos and cook the entire menu myself, thanks to this iPad-only cookbook/souvenir. I hope they continue the trend because I’m dying to cook some of the dishes I ate from the Thailand menu.
Life, on the Line: Not a cookbook at all, this is Grant Achatz’s autobiography, following his cooking career from the CIA to the French Laundry and then his Chicago restaurants Trio, Alinea, and Next. Achatz’s chapters are interspersed with commentary from his business partner Nick Kokonas, which makes for some jarring transitions, but Kokonas’s no-nonsense style and willingness to dish dirt about the restaurant business is a fitting counterpoint to Achatz’s drive to perfection. Lest you forget, he beat a potentially career-ending case of tongue cancer and opened two new restaurants.
Special thanks to every publisher who sewed a cloth bookmark (or bookmarks) into a cookbook. They’re very useful, and show that you’re actually thinking about your readers.
When we last visited the Cabinet of Doctor Charcuterie, I still had bresaola and lonzino curing in it that were not quite ready to eat. By Saturday, ten days later, however, they had both lost 35 percent of their weight and had become firm to the touch. I couldn’t wait any longer, so I released them from their cold, humid prison in preparation for eating.
The lonzino is on top, the bresaola below. Both are covered with the same white mold that I introduced with the salami that had been curing at the same time. I made slices at the end of each to see how well they had cured over the course of a month.
Both were significantly darker in color, but the bresaola showed a gradient from a much darker outer portion to the lighter interior. The lonzino had the same color throughout, due to it being wrapped in a beef casing, which regulated the moisture loss.
I shaved of slices of both on my deli slicer.
The bresaola tasted as I expected: beefy, but not intensely so, with just a hint of the curing spices. The lonzino, on the other hand, was a surprise. As one of the tasters noted: “it has a funk to it.” It took me a while to place the taste, but it has a pronounced ham flavor, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, it is cured pork.
I’m glad they both turned out well and that there’s plenty to go around. I plan on slicing up a batch or two and bringing it home for my holiday visit. There are a couple of Italian relatives who have to pass judgement before I declare the project a complete success.
Much to my surprise, my last Charcutepalooza post was selected by Food 52 as one of the ten best posts for the November challenge. I’m honored that my chronicles of near disaster were considered worthy of their attention.
I had no time to rest on my laurels for successful salami making because there was one more challenge due just a few days later: Show what I’ve learned after a year-long crash course in charcuterie. When I saw that cassoulet was a suggested dish, I knew that’s what I’d have to make – it wasn’t just a technical challenge, but a personal one as well.
When I began cooking 35 years ago (!), almost every recipe presented what appeared to be an insurmountable technical difficulty. As my skills improved, the list of recipes I would never attempt grew much shorter, to the point where there are now only a handful of foods still on the list. I won’t make croissants, I won’t bake baguettes, and I wouldn’t make a cassoulet – they all had a low payoff to effort ratio. But I saw that cassoulet would let me incorporate all that I had learned into one huge dish.
Before I could begin cooking, I needed a recipe. There are probably as many “authentic” cassoulet recipes as there are towns in southern France, not to mention scores of Americanized recipes that promised “the same great taste in half the time” (feh). I had the time, I had the ingredients, so I finally settled on Ariane Daugin’s recipe as a base, with some variations introduced from Modernist Cuisine and Anthony Bourdain’s The Les Halles Cookbook.
I knew I wouldn’t have the time to cure and dry ventreche (French unsmoked bacon), so I planned to substitute a slab of my own bacon. According to Larousse Gastronomique, smoked meat is never part of a cassoulet, but I  didn’t want to thrown in a slab of uncured pork belly. I liked the idea of adding duck and armagnac sausage, garlic sausage, and goose confit, which meant I would end up with a cassoulet Toulousain (from Toulouse), one of the three regional variations. I had my battle plan, now it was time to get cooking.
Goose Leg Confit
I had made goose leg confit before, using a recipe by David Rosengarten. It required a brief salting followed by a shallow low-temperature poach in duck fat. It didn’t have to be perfectly falling-off-the-bone tender since it would be braised for at least three additional hours. I also discovered that all goose legs come from the same place, whether you have your butcher order them or if you buy them directly.
Garlic Sausage
This might be the simplest recipe in Modernist Cuisine. Five ingredients: pork, pork fat, garlic confit, salt, and nutmeg. I salted the meat, put it through the grinder, followed it with the fat, added the garlic and nutmeg, and stuffed the mixture into beef casings. I tied off two one-pound links, vacuum sealed them, and poached them at 59 °C for an hour.
Duck & Armagnac Sausage
I’ve got sausage making down to an exact science; all I do is vary the spices and meat mixture. This version of duck sausage was seasoned with sage and bound with armagnac.
Beans
Every recipe I consulted stressed the importance of using genuine haricot tarbais, so that’s what I bought – three pounds’ worth.
I soaked the beans overnight in a large pot of water, then prepared the meat and aromatics for cooking. I left the bacon slab whole and rolled two pieces of pork skin into cylinders.
After an hour-long simmer, I reserved the bacon and skin and discarded all of the aromatics except the garlic.
I cut the skin into bean-sized pieces, cubed the bacon, sliced the duck sausages into thirds, sliced the garlic sausage to match, then deboned the confit legs and separated each at the joint.
I realized that my largest enameled cast iron casserole wouldn’t hold everything. In fact, I would have to use my largest stockpot to cook the cassoulet. I added half the beans, layered all of the meat on top, added the rest of the beans, then poured in enough liquid (concentrated duck stock diluted with the reserved bean cooking liquid) to just cover the beans. I cooked the cassoulet for three hours at 325 °F, until it was just bubbling, then let it cool before storing it in the fridge for three days.
On the day of the big dinner, I removed the pot from the fridge a few hours beforehand to let it come up to room temperature. I baked the cassoulet uncovered for a little over an hour at 400 °F, which is when I realized why I needed a large dutch oven instead of a stockpot: the high walls of the pot inhibited the formation of the traditional  (and by all accounts necessary) crust on top of the beans. I had to settle for some brown spots instead.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, there were other cured items to serve my guests before the main course. I began with a charcuterie platter of lardo, duck rillettes, and the recently cured salami.
Our personal sommelier had a wine picked out for the course, a bubbly red:
I plated the cassoulet, making sure everyone had a few bites of everything.
I served thyme-duck fat focaccia to mop up the juiciness…
…along with a salad of bitter greens dressed with a bacon fat vinaigrette.
We drank a heavily tannic Bandol to balance the richness of the cassoulet.
I had tasted all of the components as I assembled the dish, but I wasn’t prepared for how it would all taste together. The beans were sweet and creamy, with just a bit of crunch where they had browned (which really made me miss the crust), there were caramel notes from the armagnac in the duck sausage, a definite hit of garlic, and some saltiness from the goose confit. I was concerned that the bacon might overpower the other flavors, but it would up lending just a subtle smokiness.
I have enough cassoulet left over to fill my dutch oven, which means the next dinner will have the crust as well as all of the meaty goodness.
I’ve learned the secret of making cassoulet: As I continue with my charcuterie activities, I plan on making a bit extra. When I’ve accumulated pork belly, sausages, and confit in the Deep Storage Facility, I can think about cooking some beans and putting the whole thing together without stressing about deadlines. I’ll have to work out the proportions for a smaller volume – that or ask She Who Must Be Obeyed to authorize the purchase of a bigger casserole.
The November Charcutepalooza challenge was about curing, which included my old nemesis – salami – as an apprentice challenge. When I saw that lardo – which I had made successfully the first time I tried – was an advanced challenge, I thought either I got lucky with the lardo, or I really suck at making salami. I was unwilling to cop to the suckage, but I knew I’d need some professional advice if I was to succeed.
Matt Wright, one of the Charcutepalooza judges, had warned me to bin my last batch of salami due to the likelihood of it being a petri dish full of nasty bugs. I subsequently found his blog, in which he documents his adventures in the art of cured meats. He patienly answered my questions about my failed attempt, recommending a book  (The Art of Making Fermented Sausages) and an overhaul of my curing setup.
From the book I learned that curing meat, like eating oysters, should not be attempted in months whose names don’t have the letter “R.” Working in a hot summer kitchen pre-incubated the meat with whatever was floating around, and it over-accelereated the bacterial fermentation both inside and outside the sausage. I knew I’d have to create an environment that maintained a steady temperature of 55 °F and a humidity of at least 80%. After locating the parts I’d need on Craigslist and Amazon, I assembled the ideal curing rig on Halloween. Behold, the Cabinet of Doctor Charcuterie*:
It’s a repurposed 13 cubic foot frost-free freezer attached to a temperature controller, with a humidifier and fan hooked up to a hygrostat. When the humidity drops below 80%, the humidifier and fan power up and circulate cool, moist air throughout the cabinet. Before setting up the components, I washed, bleached, and dried the interior and shelves – if any bacteria were to be found inside, it would be bacteria that I introduced. I let the rig stabilize for a few days, then got to work on the next batch of salami.
Salami
I made sure I took no shortcuts. To ensure that the fat wouldn’t smear when it was stuffed into casings, I cut it by hand instead of running it through the grinder.
I used beef casings instead of hog casings to create a thicker sausage which would dry more evenly.
Instead of fennel seeds, I used fennel pollen, which would be more evenly distributed through the filling. I also had a huge container of the stuff that a friend had brought back from Italy.
From that point on, it was the usual series of steps that I had become accustomed to. Season the meat, grind it, mix in red wine, and stuff into casings. The major differences this time around had to do with room temperature (I kept the windows open to create a cold work environment) and sanitation (lots of hand washing, and many changes of latex gloves). I wound up with six foot-long lengths of salami that I tied with butcher’s twine to provide structural support (some people cheat and use pre-formed elastic webbing). The two shorter pieces are a hasty repair of a split casing, the plastic-wrapped bit at the left is what remained in the stuffer – it would serve an important function.
I coated each link with a liquid mold culture, which would control the drying speed, promote the growth of beneficial bacteria on the outside of the casing, and prevent any nasty bugs from taking hold.
I let the salami ferment in a plastic box which I placed in my oven with the light on; it was a perfect 75 °F. After two days, I unwrapped the piece sealed in plastic, made a thick paste of the meat and some water, and tested the pH. It was 5.1, the ideal acidity for curing.
I added a long loop of string to each salami, tied tags to the end, and hung them in the curing rig.
After a few days I noticed white spots blooming all over the casings; within a week they had completely covered the salamis with powdery mold. This was a good thing. I weighed the links once a week and marked the progress on the tags.
After a little more than three weeks, the links had lost 35% of their weight and were firm to the touch. It was time to cut one open and taste it.
I should have diced the fat a bit finer, I failed to account for the shrinkage which would alter the fat to meat ratio. That flaw aside, the salami tasted exactly as I hoped it would: acidic without being sour, with the flavors of fennel, wine, and pepper balanced throughout. I had cut open the shortest link as a test, but we devoured it within minutes – a sure sign of success at Chez Belm. And now we have five pounds of good salami to nosh on.
Bresaola and Lonzino
Finally succeeding at making a batch of salami wouldn’t be enough for me. I had to try something new, so I decided to apply the same set of steps to beef round for bresaola and pork loin for lonzino. I started with about three pounds of each cut, completely trimmed of external fat, and different spice cures for each: salt, pepper, sodium nitrite, and juniper berries (both), fennel and bay leaf (lonzino), and sugar, rosemary, and thyme (bresaola).
I rubed the cuts with the cures, bagged them, and let the sit in the fridge for a week, during which time I was preparing the curing rig (multitasking!).
I rinsed off the cure, let the cuts air dry for a few hours, then prepared them for hanging. I simply tied off the beef.
I tried a different technique for the pork, stuffing it into a beef bung before tying it.
They joined the salami in the curing cabinet.
Notice the white splotches on the beef and a few spots on the pork – they’re the same mold from the salami casings, which got carried over as the spores blew around in the cabinet. (Microbiologists would insert a “species jumping” joke here.)
As with the salami, I weighed the beef and pork every week, but, due to their significant thickness, they took longer to lose moisture. How do they taste? I can’t tell you because they’re not ready yet. As of yesterday, they had both lost about 25% of their total weight, which means they still have at least a week to go.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this series of challenges, it’s that patience is rewarded. And I can be patient. Until then, my bresaola and lonzino are biding their time.
So many duck legs, so many possibilities… I had a dozen legs left following the completion of another duck-related project, it’s been cold outside, and I had a craving for more confit. What I didn’t have was a lot of duck fat or room to store a huge container of confited duck legs, so I searched for a different preparation method, which I found in Modernist Cuisine.
I began with the curing method from the Bouchon cookbook: “green salt” made from kosher salt, thyme, bay leaves, parsley, and black peppercorns.
After a day in the fridge, I rinsed and dried the legs, placed three each in vacuum bags, added about a quarter cup of duck fat (dished out with an ice cream scoop), then sealed them shut.
I cooked the legs in a 82°C water bath for eight hours.
When the legs were cooked I dunked them in an ice bath to cool them down for storage. The fat and cooking liquid solidified, making the bags very easy to handle.
The beauty of this method is how little fat is required to cook or store the duck. The bags lie flat, which makes them easy to fit in an overcrowded fridge (and the Deep Storage Facility is bursting with in-progress holiday cooking projects).
I was eager to make something with part of my new confit stash. I warmed up one of the bags by dunking it in 80°C water for twenty minutes. I cut a hole in the corner of the bag and drained the liquid into a gravy seprator, then let the legs cool slightly so I could remove the skin.
The skin slid right off the warmed legs, and the bones slid out easily. All I had to do was shred the meat and add the rendered fat and cooking liquid, which measured out to about a quarter cup each. I gave everything a quick spin in my stand mixer, adding some extra ground black pepper – instant rillettes.
I portioned out the rillettes into jars and layered the last bit of fat over the tops.
It’s unlikely I’l ever go back to the old confit method. I won’t have to deal with digging portions out of a large container full of fat. I won’t have to worry about storage space, and I won’t have to buy huge buckets of duck fat. Well, not nearly as often; there’s still duck fat fries, duck fat focaccia, and other goodies that will require me to maintain a supply.
The last time I made duck sausage, I turned the trimmed leg bones into a big batch of phở broth, using a recipe I adapted from Into the Vietnamese Kitchen.
I wound up with three quarts of the stuff, which sat in the Deep Storage Facility until last week, when I found myself boning out more duck legs to make more sausage. I remembered this recipe from Cooking Without Borders, I had a few legs left over, so why not make duck phở?
I thawed out two quarts of the broth and simmered three duck legs in it for about two hours. I removed the legs and let them cool while I skimmed excess fat off the broth, then pulled the meat off the bones. I sliced a red onion, boiled some thin rice noodles, and then scored three small chunks of foie gras (only a few bucks each).
I divided the noodles into bowls, then added the duck meat and onion.
Although this was my first time using foie gras as an ingredient, I’d eaten enough of the stuff to know that it needs a quick, hot sear.
I ladled hot broth into the bowls, added the seared foie to each, and garnished with mint leaves (closer in taste to the unavailable Thai basil than Italian basil). I served the phở with the traditional accompaniments of bean sprouts, limes, hoisin, and sriracha.
He Who Will Not Be Ignored poked his chopsticks at the foie, asking “What is this stuff?” When I told him it was fatty duck liver, he dove in – I knew I had him at “fat.”
This was a tasty bowl of soup, just as rich as the more traditional phở dac biet (beef phở). Chewy bits of duck meat, soft foie, crunchy onions – all the textures were there, along with the highly aromatic broth. Once you have the broth (and you do keep a stock pot on the stove al the time, don’t you?), the rest of the dish comes together in two lazy hours, which includes the time while the legs simmer. Do yourself a favor this winter – instead of plain old soup, treat yourself to some phở.
If I got invited to a food event, then I can only assume that food blogging has hit maximum saturation. My theory’s proof was delivered in “The Food Wife,” Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons, in which Bart, Lisa, and Marge start a food blog.
Homer’s love of new food experiences has been well documented throughout the series, sometimes to brilliant effect. The episode in which he eats fugu (written by my friend Nell Scovell) comes to mind, but his appetites are always driven by impulse. Having to think about food ruins the experience, which makes him resent Marge’s new bond with the kids. They try to get him to join in, with the expected result:
There’s an annotated slide show from the episode over at Eater National that’s worth checking out , as well as two clips that include the “Bloggin’ a Food Blog” rap by Time Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (of The Tim and Eric Awesome Show). I have to give them clever points for “I’m frank like Bruni/Ruthless like Reichl/Wiley like Dufrense/and when I take the mike/I’ll rhyme about radicchio/criticize Colicchio.”
Anthony Bourdain makes an appearance (in Singapore, of course) that ends with Homer crashing the party, the source of this deleted scene:
Maybe fresh rhino brains was too out there, or is not yet a hot enough trend to parody. But the writers did manage to crowd a lot of chefs into a short episode.
Who’s missing? “I’m creative like Achatz/Precise like Keller/Buy my spices in packets/Cure meats in the cellar/There’s lardo, coppa, and salami to hang/Then I’ll make ramen noodles with the recipe from Chang.”
) and an overhaul of my curing setup.
, I had a few legs left over, so why not make duck phở?
