Tag: carrots

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

164. Beef Bourguignon p.440

The recipe

I grew up on boeuf bourguignon, we could be guaranteed to have it at least once a month during the winter. Since a braised dish like this is better a day or two after it’s cooked, my mom would usually make it on a Sunday, and it would sit on the chilly garage floor in her big orange Le Creuset Dutch oven until dinnertime on Tuesday. I remember being very small, and being tasked with bringing the stew upstairs, I swear that cast iron pot weighed more than I did, and it was so cold it burned. Since a bottle of wine goes into a boeuf bourguignon, and even after a long braise not all of the alcohol cooks off, I’m wondering if this dish didn’t contribute to some of excellent sleeping we got done as kids.

The recipe starts with some home butchery, getting beef shoulder off the bone, and cubed. The cubes are then seasoned, coated in flour, and thoroughly browned. The meat then braises for an afternoon with sweated onions, garlic, and carrots, tomatoes, red wine, and a bouquet garni. While that’s going on you get to blanch and peel boiling onions. I hate peeling boiling onions, but I did it anyway. The onions then get browned with some butter, and simmered until tender. You then sauté some mushrooms in butter, and add the mushrooms and onions to the braise, and let it simmer for a few minutes. Once everything’s done cooking you can eat it right away, or better yet stick in in the back of the fridge and forget about it for a couple of days. The Book recommends serving this dish with buttered potatoes, but I’ve always been a fan of egg noodles with boeuf bourguignon, so that’s what we had.

There’s an error in this recipe. The first ingredient listed is a quarter pound of bacon, and the fist cooking direction is to simmer the bacon in water for a few minutes. That bacon is never mentioned again. The linked Epicurious recipe has the error fixed, you’re supposed to crisp up the bacon in the pot before starting the braise, but it’s mystery bacon if you follow The Books version. I guessed that it was meant to go into the braise, and that worked out well, but I hope they’ve caught this mistake in the updated version of The Book.

I was entirely satisfied with this dish, it tastes just like what mom used to make, it’s hearty, rich, stick to your ribs, winter cooking. The flavours were right on, this is not a difficult dish to get close to right, but making it really well is a challenge. This is a really solid boeuf bourguignon recipe, my only complaint is that it was a bit too salty. I’ll certainly be making this one again next winter.

Categories
Basics The Book

161. Beef Stock p.928


The recipe

I can’t escape the conclusion that I’m a food snob. I take satisfaction in looking down on packaged and processed foods, and I give people points for making meals from scratch, double points if the ingredients come from an ethically superior source, and triple points if they grew the food themselves. The ultimate ridiculousness of snobbishness is that no one can live up to the standards they judge others by. I enjoy pickling my insides with Doritos, I pay outrageous prices for a tiny package of hummus that I could make at home for twelve cents, and I don’t find that organic vegetables taste better than their fertilizer drenched cousins. My ultimate sin though, is that I don’t make my own stock.

Stock making and apartment living aren’t an obvious combination. Making stock takes most of a day, so you’ll want to make up a big batch. That’s well and good if you’ve got a spare freezer in the basement, but our tiny freezer is spilling over with leftover ravioli, pesto ice cubes, and pork tenderloin that went on a crazy sale. There’s just no room for three liters of stock. The food network has filled hundreds of hours by having famous chefs repeat the refrain that the biggest reason the professionals’ food tastes better than home cooks’ is that they make their own stock (and use unconscionable amounts of butter). The sin that will get me kicked out of the food snobs annual picnic is that I don’t think that store bought broth is all that bad, in fact I like it. It’s convenient, perfectly servicable, and unless you’re using it as a gigantic component of your dish no one is going to be able to tell the difference. You usually have to reduce the salt in the rest of the recipe, because even “low sodium” broth isn’t all that low in sodium, other than that store bought broth is perfectly fine, and not at all a pain in the ass.

Making this stock was a pain in the ass. It’s not actually difficult, but it’s messy and takes six and a half hours. Your day starts with a trip to the butcher, who is happy to provide meaty beef and veal shanks, but thinks you’re an idiot when you ask him to saw them into one inch slices. He’s been making stock his whole life, and doesn’t think this step is necessary. He’s old and Italian, so he’s probably right. You then bike home with a plastic bag full of chopped up bones hanging from your handlebar, and dump them into a roasting pan along with some carrots and onions. Roast this mess, stirring occasionally for an hour at 450. Stop cursing Ruth Reichls name, because the house is starting to smell pretty good. Make a bouquet garni by tying parsley, thyme, and a bay leaf in cheesecloth. Start cursing Ruth again, because you’re going to be running the stock through a fine mesh sieve later on, and a bouquet garni is totally unnecessary. Transfer the roasted bones to a stockpot. In transferring them drop several meaty bones on the floor, this is interesting for the cat, but annoying for you. Deglaze the roasting pan, and transfer the scraped up brown bits to the stockpot along with celery, the bouquet garni, and water. Bring it to a boil, and spend half an hour skimming the nasty meat froth that rises to the surface. Disgust your girlfriend by sneaking up on her with the meat foam while she tries to read the paper. Let the stock reduce for 3 to 5 hours. Don’t leave the house, because that’s a fire hazard. Break up the monotony by skimming more foam every once in a while. Once you’ve got 8 cups of liquid left, fish out all the bits of bone and mushy vegetables, and get rid of them. Then try to set up a sieve over another big pot, and pour the stock through the sieve. Mess this up, and have the sieve fall into the filtered stock. Do it all again. Touch the hot stockpot and burn yourself. Swear for a while. Do a side to side comparison of your stock to Campbell’s low sodium beef broth, and realize that they’re really not that different. Swear some more.

This tastes like tetra-packed beef broth from the store, only it takes a long time. Homemade does have more gelatin in it, so it has a richer mouth feel, but I’m sure blooming an eighth of a teaspoon of gelatin in store bough broth would nullify this difference. Final verdict, totally not worth it. I used it as the basis for French Onion Soup, which specifically calls for making this stock, and suggests that it won’t be nearly the same with store bought, but frankly the stock wasn’t amazing in the soup. Maybe there are beef stock recipes out there that will blow the cheap, readily available, and very convenient competition away, but this is not one of them.

Categories
Poultry The Book

159. Duck Legs and Carrots p.398


The recipe is from Fergus “Nose To Tail” Henderson’s London restaurant, St. John.

My dining companion and I adore duck, and eat it often, so a new preparation is always exciting for us. I really like the thinking behind this recipe. It takes an underused part of the duck, and brings out its absolute best. Incidentally duck legs are a wonderful bargain, they’re exceedingly flavorful and they’re nicely inexpensive. Duck breasts and fattened livers are worth their weight in gold, but that means that there are a lot of legs hanging around, and there’s only so much demand for duck confit. There’s loads of duck produced in Quebec, so it’s always easy to find.

In this recipe duck legs are trimmed of excess fat, and that fat is rendered in a skillet. The legs are seasoned with salt and pepper, and browned in batches. Most of the fat is then discarded from the skillet and a mixture of chopped leeks, onions, and garlic are softened. A truckload of sliced carrots are then added to the pan and cooked for a few minutes. The veg is then seasoned with salt and pepper, and spread in the bottom of a roasting pan. A bouquet garni of parsley, rosemary, and bay leaves is added to the veg, along with a jalapeño. The duck breasts are then nestled on top of the carrots, and chicken stock is added until it covers most of the legs, but the skin is left exposed to the direct heat of the oven. The dish is then baked at 400 for an hour and half-ish. The duck and carrots are served with the defatted juices on the side.

I was really pleased with what this preparation did for the duck. The meat was falling off the bone tender, and perfectly braised, while the all important skin was cracklingly crisp. The meat gave up some of its goodness to the surrounding liquid, but it has flavour to spare, and it benefited from the arromatic infusion. I would happily eat this duck again and again, but I’d leave the carrots off the plate. Carrots braised for an hour and a half are well in to mushy territory, and there were a lot of them. Everyone at dinner was going back for seconds on the potatoes and Brussels sprouts, but the bowl of carrots was mostly ignored. It actually tasted pretty good, but the texture was just not appealing. I’d leave the carrots in the kitchen when you make this, and turn them into the basis for a lovely carrot soup the next day. The duck legs, and accompanying pan juices were an excellent centerpiece to the meal, and the carrots were a worthy sacrifice, in this case the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one.

I liked this dish on a lot of levels, first off, the flavour was fantastic, the duck meat was heightened by the arromatic infusion, and the skin had the almost but not quite too rich quality of bacon. The meat was fork tender, and the skin perfectly crisp. I also loved the concept here, it’s a really simple and smart way to bring out the best of duck, with tender meat and crispy skin, all in one go. If the vegetables had been less done, it would have been a conceptual trifecta, and a perfect little symbiotic ecosystem. As it was I wasn’t quite sure what to do with fourteen carrots and two leeks worth of mush, and I didn’t think of making soup at the time. I turned some of it into a middling pasta sauce. As a standalone the duck and pan juices would earn about 4.5 mushrooms, but the carrots are dragging the rating for the whole dish down.

Categories
Soups The Book

136. Mushroom Barley Soup p.113


The recipe

This soup suffers from a serious branding issue. If it had been billed as barely soupy barley stew, with extra barley, some carrots, and hardly any mushrooms at all, I would have known what I was getting into. The blurb for the recipe talks about all the contrasting mushroom flavours and blah blah blah, but I really had to do some food styling to get any mushrooms in the photo at all. I picked this recipe because I wanted a mushroom soup, and I was looking forward to a little added body from the barley, and a nice background of aromatics. I ended up with a perfectly OK barley stew that I wasn’t at all in the mood for.

The recipe starts by browning garlic and onion in a large pot, then adding sliced white mushrooms, soaked and sliced shiitake’s, soy sauce, cooking out the liquid, then adding sherry and evaporating that too. The liquid is then added in the form of chicken stock, water, and the mushroom soaking liquid. The barley, carrots, and dried thyme and rosemary are added and the soup simmers for an hour. When it’s ready it’s seasoned with salt and pepper, and some parsley is stirred in just before serving.

The texture was very thick and hearty, with most of the flavour coming from the chicken stock and aromatics. It actually tasted a whole lot like my mom’s beef and barley soup, but without the deep beef stock and hearty chunks of meat that made that a satisfying winter lunch. The chicken stock left it tasting thin and whimpy, and seriously overpowered by the mushy barley texture. I should reiterate that for a mushroom barley soup, mushrooms were not a flavour consideration.

Unfortunately this soup was in a rotten in between spot. With less barley and four times more mushrooms it could have been the nice mushroom soup it advertised itself as, or using a more concentrated stock, and adding rich chunks of meat, could have resulted in a thick barely stew worth eating. As it was, it was perfectly edible, but nothing to look forward to.