Basic premise…go pork crazy. Stock made from split trotters and smoked hocks. Roux made with lard. The usual trinity & pope. Lardons. Andouille. Tasso. Pulled pork. Black eyed peas. Collards.

Just try to stop your tongue from beating your brains out! Mouthfeel of stock made with “trotters” or with any hoof/foot for that matter has incredible body. The main drawback with this recipe is that my usual method of defatting was a complete failure. Typically, I cool overnight and remove the risen fat layer in the morning. This recipe basically turned the entire dish into a giant terrine when cooled (fairly gross). Had to reheat and skim…skim…skim…it was worth it.

JW

It becomes a quest. For the ultimate ______ . In your head you know what your ideal steak is, you just need to figure out how to get there. In my case it’s well browned on the outside, almost charred with consistent temperature throughout the remainder. Thyme, salt and pepper. And the most reproducible way to do it is sous vide. It’s amazing to have that much control over food, since most of the time we’re at the mercy of chance. While its possible to cook things for too long, it’s very difficult to overcook anything.
So when is it done? There’s a minimum time it has to cook for that’s related to thickness, and then it’s ready to sear. Whenever you are.

Sous vide ribeye
Vacuum seal the bags with butter, season with salt, pepper, and herb.
131 degrees for about an hour while you’re working on something else.
Take it out of the bag and sear on highest available heat.

because you can’t have enough bacon, right? I’ve posted recently about cooking the bacon in the oven. I know it sounds simple, but if you cook it that way, it’s going to curl up. For a little more elegant presentation, just put down another sheet pan on top of the bacon while it’s cooking to keep it pressed. It’s a little harder this way because you can’t watch it while it’s cooking, and you have to peek every now and then. But if you’re going to serve the bacon whole as a garnish or part of a dish, it shows that you took that extra step.

Here’s a dish that we put together recently utilizing the whole thing.

Seared scallops with grilled fennel and citrus/butter/fennel sauce.

We’ve already talked about brining shellfish for 10 minutes in a 3% salt solution (remember weight in ice/water/liquid x 0.03 = salt weight). Seared on high heat in a stainless (not nonstick) pan with 50/50 unsalted butter and neutral oil, continuously basting. Even though I mention this first, it’s the last thing I did.
I separated the bulbs from the stalks, quartered them, and grilled to light char.

Problem: they cooked on such high heat that they were still too hard to eat. The solution? Steam. In my case, I transferred them to a bowl with water, covered with foil, and let that boil until they were fork tender. And yes, right on the grill.

For the sauce, it’s still kind of a work in progress. I separated fronds from stalks, and diced the stalks.

Under about an inch of water, I pressure cooked them for about 15 minutes (I’m going to have a lot more pressure cooker experiments coming soon). This effectively made fennel stock which I reduced and flavored with lemon juice, salt, pepper, finishing with xantham gum and a little butter to make an emulsion. This would have been a lot more fennelly(?) if I’d used the bulbs I guess. The fronds of course don’t taste like much but I used them for garnish. Because they look interesting.

The point to get across is that fennel is a nice veggie that you really should try if you haven’t. Here are some other ways to use it:

1. Stock, we talked about. Add the stalks and/or diced bulbs to any stock.
2. Shaved raw with lemon vinaigrette and pepper for salad. It has some crunch and brings a different texture. This is one of my favorite preparations.
3. Roasted with butternut squash and pureed with stock or water to make soup.
4. Sauteed and part of a basic tomato sauce. It adds a subtle sweetness to the sauce and can enhance your tomato quality.
5. Roasted or pickled with olives and orange zest/juice. This has become a new favorite.
6. Roasted and ground fennel seeds as either garnish or spice.
7. If you eat Indian food a lot of the restaurants have fennel seeds in a bowl with little candies as a digestive.
8. Roasted and served with sausage either in pasta or as a pizza topping.

Any other fennel ideas out there?

Holiday tradition at the White House…Christmas Foie. Here’s the drill. 1 1/2 to 2 lb liver arrives from Hudson Valley Farms. I slice into 1 to 2 ounce servings. We saute and eat about 1/4 immediately. The remainder get food saved and frozen.

Foie gras is the undisputed king of food in Jennifer’s world. I also love the stuff. How do we foie? Primarily, we score & dust with a little salt/pepper/flour mixture and saute for about 45 seconds per side. A quick preparation atop a crouton with fig jam and basalmic vinegar is the standard.

Here, I kicked it up a notch with a roasted peaches, peach syrup, and arugula oil. While I wasn’t looking, my high maintenance daughter (Julia), snatched about a 2 ounce piece off my plate with her bare hands and swallowed the thing whole…this was after she eaten the smaller piece I gave her to try.

Last night, Lucy wanted macaroni & cheese for dinner. Julia said she’d take foie gras.

Where have you been, and where are you going?

Top 5 food lessons learned in 2011

1. Vegetarianism is harder than it looks. While you could live off spaghetti and salad, at some point, you have to learn how to incorporate protein into a vegetarian diet.

2. The pressure cooker is your friend. The more you learn how to use this tool, the faster things go, especially for stocks, soups, etc.

3. Hangar steak is far and away my favorite cut of meat.

4. Making pickles is actually fun and pretty easy. We pickled peppers, carrots, onions, and green tomatoes this year, trying to get the most out of our garden. We also made pickles out of cucumbers, eggplant, radishes, and garlic.

5. Making dough is easy. Making bread is difficult. To really get good at it, you have to have a good understanding of the microbiology and exponential growth to take your bread (pizza) to the next level.

* and one bonus. The most satisfying food is that which we cook at home.

Top 5 food projects for 2012

1. Using the immersion circulator (sous vide) just enough, but not too much. Yeah, I haven’t posted much about it, but I’ve got a ton of stuff coming up about how to use it. It’s an amazing device that allows precision on a level I’ve never had before. And when you couple it with the jet-engine grill for high-heat searing, you’ve got something.

2. Greater understanding of sauces, emulsions, soups, etc. With your meat cookery simplified by sous vide technique, more effort can be put towards making sauces and adding flavors.

3. Reprise of pasture-raised meats: chicken, pork, beef, etc. I think if you get the right purveyor, and you’re happy with the product, you should support it. Don’t just buy the free-range chicken at the store to offset guilt.

4. Further refinement of the art/craft. While we get close in a lot of ways, it’s interesting to see how far we’ve gotten in 5 years, and how far we have to go. From representation (photography and prose), to taking that meal that was 85% right and kicking it up to 95%.

5. Balance. In some of my zeal, in protein/carb/fat, meat intake, etc. The more comfortable we get with cooking most anything, the easier that is. And I think there’s a balance to be struck between modernism and farm-to-table as well as in homegrown produce and store-bought.

Confit (Kawn-fee) is a French term that, according to Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking, originated as a technique of salting and then cooking and storing in fat in order to preserve meat.  Today it seems to have branched out a little more to mean almost anything cooked and stored in fat, but not necessarily as a means of preserving.  The fat can be oil, butter, animal lard, etc.  Garlic confit is one of the simplest and yet most versatile layers you can have around.

What you need: 

• oil, (I prefer canola)
• several whole heads of garlic, (Get a sleeve at Sams or Costco)
• a shallow baking dish. 

Preparation:

• Slice the top of each garlic head off, exposing a portion of each clove; (do this first – it’s harder after the next step)
• Remove the outer layers of skin from the garlic, leaving just enough to hold the cloves together;
• My rule of thumb is to fill a shallow dish loosely with the garlic heads cut side up, where there isn’t much space around them, thereby using less oil;
• Pour you oil over the heads of garlic, filling the dish about 3/4 full

I cook garlic confit in a cazuela at about 300 degrees for around an hour.  Keep checking it to be sure that the garlic doesn’t get too dark and cripy on top, or it will become bitter.  Remove from the oven and let cool.  You can store the garlic in the dish with the oil, or remove the oil to a squeeze bottle and reserve for cooking.  If you like a sunny-side up egg on Saturday morning, try frying it in this oil.  It takes the egg to another level.

Just squeeze the garlic confit from the skin when you are ready to use it.  I’ve slathered a pork loin with the confit, then topped with bacon and another pork loin (Bordain: Les Halles); i’ve also added it to a pan with blanched green beans, white wine, shallots, butter, basil and parmesan.

MAB

For a group of 8, what would you do?  Feel free to respond on the blog or in Facebook!

Homemade mac and cheese

Bechamel: an ounce of butter, an ounce of flour and some milk. Melt the butter over medium, add the flour and stir until you get the consistency of cake batter. You can adjust more or less, but you really shouldn’t have to put that much flour in. An alternative would be using corn starch, I guess. Sounds like another post.
Mornay: bechamel with cheese. Seriously, just add grated or crumbled cheese to your bechamel and taste along the way to make sure YOURS is the cheesiest. If it gets too thick, add water. Too thin won’t happen unless you started there.

Boil the pasta elbows while your making your sauce, preheat oven to 400. I like to top with bread crumbs and grated parmesan. Put it all in baking dish, and cook until your topping is browned. You don’t really have to bake it, but it’s nice to go the extra step and turn it into a gratin, isn’t it?

Variations:

1. Soy milk vs regular milk. I’ve tried it with soy milk, and it winds up tasting kinda like cake batter, because I think most soy milk comes with vanilla flavoring. It’s doable, if your kids are used to this kind of milk, they won’t mind.
2. Heavy cream vs milk. You can actually make it with heavy cream, and thinning it with water works pretty well too. This works better if you have good quality butter. Yes there are differences.
3. Other thickening agents. Corn starch, arrowroot, xanthan gum, tapioca. The roux was the classic thickening agent until we figured out how to extract starches from other plants. There’s no reason this shouldn’t work, adding butter definitely improves the flavor.
Other fats. Olive oil, probably not so much. Have I mentioned bacon grease? Wow, that would be a little overkill. Or would it? A neutral fat like vegetable oil would probably work, butter flavored Crisco technically should as well, but why?
4. Additives. Lobster mac and cheese just because it goes so well with butter. What about mascarpone-enriched orzo, creamy lobster broth, and butter-poached lobsters? This is the French Laundry version.