Fall charcuterie

You don't think that just because I haven't blogged here for a while, I stopped cooking, do you? In fact, I was so absorbed in developing my Personal Chef business and bringing up the new USPCA Bay Area Chapter website, I just didn't have energy for my dear own food blog. But I'm going to change this. And I've been cooking all the time!

The changing season requires some cured meat. Simple country-style pâté can be a great comfort.

When it comes to bistro-style cooking I like to rely on recipes from Antony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. If Jamie Oliver is the naked chef, this is a chef, skin off. He takes classic recipes and strips them from all the bells and whistles, leaving just the bare 3-ingredient (well, sometimes 14) essence of the dish. And they work amazingly well!

Also, Bourdain's recipes withstand modifications very well. This is one of the very few cookbooks that I actually cook from. It's not just for browsing by the fireplace.

For my pâté de campagne I used chicken livers instead of pork liver. Marinated the livers, pieces of pork butt and pork belly with wine, cognac, and spices overnight, ground them using my old trusted manual meat grinder, and divided the meat into three portions. One I decorated with rosemary and thyme, the other with sage leaves, and the third with chopped almonds. Pictured here is the one with almonds. R. got both rosemary and sage ones to take to work for lunches during his crazy work week.

The sausages are pork with some beef. The red ones on the right have bright red, super aromatic paprika that a friend brought directly from Hungary. The ones on the left are mixed fresh herbs, and the light ones in the center are apple and cognac. If you are like me overwhelmed with tons of apples this season, check out my personal chef blog post on Dealing with all these apples for more ideas.

Here all three kinds of sausages are roasted and served with cannellini beans and tomato sauce.

Celebrating the US national holiday by totally disrespecting the rim of the plate

Happy 4th (and 3rd, and 5th) to everyone! I was told that in other parts of California the last few days were cold and foggy. Not here. It was a lovely weekend, sunny and hot, just as a 4th of July weekend should be.

Our friend Y. was busy sailing to see the fireworks and was not making it for dinner on 4th, so we had him over on 3rd. I got a 3-pound New York roast at half price at Safeway; after trimmimg all the extra fat and slicing it really thick, I got three serious steaks out of it. Seasoned with salt and pepper, brushed with grapeseed oil, grilled at 450 degrees to medium-rear, about 4 minutes aech side, let rest for a few minutes, and served with herb-lemon butter.

Sliced and grilled assorted summer squashes from the farmers market. The "very sweet" corn from Safeway turned out very tender, but not nearly as sweet as advertised. I pulled off the husks carefully, brushed the cobs with olive oil and sea salt, replaced the husks, and grilled over indirect heat.

For our 4th of July family grill, I marinated thick slices of pork tenderloin in red wine with sage, thyme, a lot of red onion slices, and some olive oil, for pork kabobs.
It was a very hot day, and while the meat was marinating, we went to China Camp park on the Bay, to catch some breeze, and to see what other people are grilling. One of the parties was placing bacon-wrapped sausages on the grill. The light went on in my head. Double pork! This is what we should eat! And with my kabobs, it'll make it a triple!

On the way home we picked up Adelis Italian sausages and a pound of bacon. Wrapped each sausage in a strip of bacon and grilled slowly to perfection, together with the kabobs and summer squashes.

Pork three ways

This winter seems to last forever. Heavy storms come every other day. The market is all cabbages and root vegetables. Oh, well. Cabbages. Actually, this red cabbage I got last week was super pretty. And I had meats to go with it.

So I sauteed cubes of pork loin, chunks of my home-cured bacon, and my Italian sausages with onion and garlic, added chopped cabbage, and braised the whole thing with thyme, rosemary, bay leaves, black pepper and juniper berries, in red wine.

Added a handfull of prunes halfway through cooking, as an afterthought. It turned out to be a good idea - the sweetness of the prunes balanced the salt of the meats and the wine's acidity, and

I didn't have to add any sugar to adjust the flavor.

It looks like a glorious mess, but that's part of it's charm as a comfort dinner at home on a rainy day.

Charcuterie in the middle of a storm

It's an El Nino year, the weather pattern that repeats every seven years and brings a lot of water to our otherwise dry coastal desert. The last storm went on for two weeks, with the water pouring down from the sky continuously, the roofs leaking, ponds and creeks overflowing, highways flooded, visibility zero or less, and driving a nightmare. Stay home and cook. I used the time to do more charcuterie.
This time I used lots of herbs and spices on both my duck legs confit and the bacon, with mixed results. The bacon cured for 6 days with sea salt, sugar, a dash of pink salt (sodium nitrite), torn bay leaves, rosemary, thyme, garlic, and black pepper, then slowly oven-roasted at 200 degrees (no smoking), developed a deep and interesting flavor. On the other hand, the same spices (minus sugar) made almost no difference for the duck legs.
After I cured the legs with salts and spices for about 24 hours, rinsed, dried, let rest for an hour at room temperature, then slowly cooked them in mixed duck and goose fat in a Dutch oven for a couple of hours, and then seared them over high heat in a skillet, the confit didn't taste much different from the previous batch made with just salt and pepper. The duck flavor and the salts overpower all the spices.

For smoked beef sausages I used 2/3 beef chuck and 1/3 pork belly, ground through a small die and seasoned with salt, pink salt, sugar, pepper, rosemary, juniper berries, and red wine. Stuffed in hog casing and tied into handsome rings, dried at room temperature for a couple of hours, then smoked in my water-smoker for two hours over apple wood chips. The sausages came out pretty dry, fully cooked, and tasting very meaty and savory.

They are good sliced thinly as a part of our late-night cheese and fruit board. I have also cut them into thick chunks and fried them with bacon and potatoes, and chopped them for a pasta with cauliflower and cavolo nero (drop them in hot water for a few seconds to loosen the casing, then peel it off).

The salted duck breasts hang dry-curing, wrapped in cheesecloth and tied with kitchen string, in my outside laundry closet right now. The temperature in the 50-ies and the high humidity are perfect. I'll try them in one or two days.

Another storm is coming.

Fat, skin and guts: Italian sausage with garlic and sage

The latest addition to my cookbook collection, Paul Bertolli's Cooking by Hand, is not strictly a cookbook. It has recipes, all right. But with it's lyrical narration, whimical structure (the book is not organized by course or ingredient, but is composed of chapters dedicated to various icons of traditional Italian cooking, like tomato, balsamico, pasta, ragu, sausages, wine), charming black-and-white photos, and method-based rather than step-by-step recipe presentation it's more suitable for fireside browsing for ideas and inspiration than for use in a busy kitchen. Totally my kind of book. Love it. My plan of getting into the holiday mood included making Italian sausages. One of the ideas I got from this book was adding cooked pork skin to the sausage mix, to add texture and flavor. The book arrived just as I trimmed a pork shoulder picnic and a belly slab, wrapped the skins in plastic bag and prepared to toss them into garbage. Taking a short break to check out the book paid off. I unwrapped the skins, trimmed, chopped, and cooked them for about 50 minutes, rinsed, and refrigerated them alongside the seasoned meat, to grind into the sausages the next day.

The seasoning included fresh sage leaves, garlic, fennel seeds (required to make them Italian), salt, sugar, InstaCure #1 (I plan to smoke some of them, and it's a good idea to add a pinch of sodium nitrite to keep bacteria from growing in the smoker), and red wine.

My meat grinder surprised me by not making any trouble this time. Nothing got stuck, nothing became an awful mushy mess. Just good clean grind. May be I am getting better at trimming and chilling the meat.
What I used:

2.2 lb pork shoulder picnic, trimmed
a little over 1 lb. pork belly
skin from both, cut up, boiled for 1 hr, rinsed and chilled
1/2 bunch sage (leaves only)
5 large garlic cloves
1 tsp fennel seeds

1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
about 3 Tbsp basic cure (1 part pink salt, 4 parts sugar, 8 parts kosher salt)
1/2 cup iced red wine
2 lengths hog casing (mine come cut in about 3-ft lengths, packed in salt; I soak and rinse them through)
This made 18 short plump sausages, just under 3 oz each. One serves as a snack, two as a regular dinner serving; when I come home from work, starved, I'd eat three.

I wrap portions of two, three or four sausages in parchment paper and freeze them in labeled freezer bags. Well wrapped frozen sausages keep without losing moisture for at least two month, and they will thaw and be ready to cook after three hours in the refrigerator.
They are good sauteed, roasted, or gently grilled over indirect heat. On the side, steamed and quickly browned root vegetables and/or cabbages.

Good, unhealthy, Old World food. R's praise caught me by surprise: he said how meaty and juicy my sausages taste, and much leaner than the store-bought ones. Wait, I know for sure that they are about 40% pure pork fat, I put it in! Magic of the seasoning and careful mixing? Or are store-bought sausages all fat?

Getting in shape for the holidays: duck two ways

I've been trying, not very successfully, to switch myself from "when summer?" mood into the holiday mood. When the days become short and cold, it doesn't make sense to weep over the sunshine gone before I get home and the last fig on the tree, it's time to enjoy long evenings by the fireplace and seriously high-fat slow cooking.

I’ve been craving a duck breast for a while. I checked local stores – special order; checked online – you can get a very fancy frozen duck breast (a choice of varieties) for about $15, but you’ll pay $30 for shipping. I want it, but not that badly. Then I figured that the easiest way to satisfy the craving would be to buy a frozen duck in Safeway, cut off the breast, and use the rest for soup and cooking fat. This may be not the best duck breast out there; in fact, it turned out very small; but it was available.

While the duck was thawing in the fridge, a book arrived in the mail, Charcuterie, by Ruhlman and Polcyn. An exciting book for the season, a soulful, engaging and precise description of cold meats, pates, sausages and confits. The only drawback is that it doesn’t have color photographs, but the charming hand-drawn illustrations by a Russian artist almost make up for this.

The duck, sage and roast garlic sausage from the book was just what I needed. I bought additional 8 duck legs in a Chinese grocery to supplement the two I already had, and set out to bone them. The book mentions that it’s labor-intensive, it doesn’t say exactly how much. I learned a lot about duck anatomy while removing all skin, bone and sinews from ten duck legs, which mostly consist of skin, bone, and sinews. The first one took me about 25 minutes. The last, three minutes. It’s much easier to bone the legs while they are partially frozen – the meat is stiff and the skin is not as slippery; you can separate them with your fingers, with very little help of a sharp boning knife. I got lots of bones for a stock, and fat and skin to render. I'll be making a confit next time!

As a result I had about 1 kilogram of duck meat, instead of 1.5 kilo that the recipe called for. I guess my legs were skinny.
I followed the recipe almost without making changes – not my usual style. The only two things that I changed were that I had to use pork belly since I couldn’t find fat back, so the sausage got some pork meat in it, and should probably be called duck and bacon sausage; I also used regular roasted garlic instead of steamed garlic recommended by the recipe – I already had roasted two heads of garlic before I got the book, and I love roasted garlic flavor anyway.

Keeping everything cold, I seasoned, ground, and stuffed the sausage in hog casing. I only got 1.7 kg of sausage instead of 2.2 kg in th recipe (skinny legs, and my old temperamental Porkert hand-grinder messed up some meat, as it usually does, before I managed to adjust it for a nice clean grind), so it was a good thing that I went light on the seasoning and fried and tasted a piece of meat before seasoning more. It still gave me 20 sausages (plus one 3-inch half-sausage at the end), because mine are a little short: not 6, but rather 4.5 – 5 inches.

The Saturday dinner was mixed duck: one duck sausage and one small half-breast per serving, with cauliflower, bok choy, and mushroom sauce.

I scored the skin on the duck breasts half way through, seasoned it with salt and white pepper, and cooked it over medium-low heat skin side down until the fat melted out and the skin crisped. Then turned them over and finished cooking over medium heat, until medium-done, or almost firm to the touch. The sausages were cooking in the same pan, it took them a few minutes longer to acheve an internal temperature of 150 degrees.

I then sauteed the mushrooms in the same pan, deglazed it with some white wine and duck stock, added sallots, reduced the sauce, and laddled it over the duck breasts.

Wine: Boeger Milagro 2006