Love Apples

Cassoulet.

Following the recipe for duck confit, I'm here filling a friend's request for the way we make Cassoulet.

1. The Pork Skin. Yes. The first ingredient is something that's rarely found in a cookbook, but that to me is in every way the foundation. You line the ovengoing pot (I use an oval Staub or Le Creuset--oval shouldn't matter, but makes my heart go pat pat) with the skin, after first taking most of the fat off. I conceive of the inclusion of the skin as plain magic--or more prosaically, I think that it provides protection to what's within, that its high collagen would provide body to the liquids, and, needless to say, it provides a great complexity of flavour.

2. The Rest. Scatter in some 3 cups of flageolet, rinsed. a few bay leaves. Pepper corns. One each dried hot and mild pepper. A twig of rosemary. A sprig or two of thyme. 3 whole echalottes grises. 6-8 garlic cloves. We add 4 tablespoons of homemade tomato paste (Bertolli's Conserva), though sometimes we don't--. Then add a fair piece of pork shoulder, cut into two inch cubes. Cover generously in stock (if homemade and salt free; I usually use duck stock with some fat on top) or water or a mix of both. Braise in a 130C/Gas Mark 1/275F oven for 4 hours, checking on fluid levels after 2. At this point add simply-spiced sausage, and 6-8 pieces of duck confit. Allow to warm and meld for about an hour and fifteen minutes. I usually place the duck pieces somewhat on top so as to allow the skin to take a bit of colour.

This is the cassoulet we made last weekened, before we put it in the oven.

December. Duck Confit.

One of the vertebrae in my kitchen is making confit. Here a smaller lid is used in the bigger pot to ensure that the duck pieces are submerged. This is how I make it:

Love Apples' Duck Confit.

I usually make double this, but it looked obscene on the page and I couldn't bear it. This confit is therefore for 6 duck legs (2-2.5 kg/4.5-5.5lbs). Add gizzards and wings with the tips cut off if you have them.

The Confiting Fat. You can buy rendered duck fat, but it's best to make it at home. Commercially available fat is rendered at too high a temperature, and it effects texture and taste. To render your own, take about 4 kg duck skin, or 2 kg cavity fat; chop into a rough dice and place in a deep heavy ovenproof vessel (I use my Staub or Le Creuset) with about ½ cup of water. Set oven to 110C/225F/Gas Mark ¼; place in oven. It may be ready in 2 hours, or may take longer to fully render. Allow to cool enough to handle safely; strain. If using duck skin, reserve solids to crisp for another use.

This should yield about 7 cups of rendered duck fat, but it depends on the water content of the skin. I believe it will make enough, but it depends on the shape of pot you use to make the confit. I always think too much is better—so many uses, plus it freezes well.

Salting and Curing. For 6 whole duck legs use 16 generous tablespoons coarse sea salt alone, or with the addition of any or all of the following: 3 tablespoons peppercorns, crushed; 2 bay leaves, crumbled; 2 tablespoons juniper berries, crushed; 4 sprigs fresh (or 1 tsp dried) thyme; 2 small sprigs fresh rosemary, leaves chopped (or one healthy pinch dried and crumbled); and 2 cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped. I go through periods of using lots of herbs, to periods of using only austere bay, juniper, thyme, pepper to periods of finding salt alone the best thing. Rub salt or salt mix into duck pieces. Cover and chill. Commonly it's said that it should be allowed to cure refrigerated from 8 to 24 hours. I don't disagree, but I do note that there's a significant difference between 8 and 24 in terms of the saltiness of the final confit. And so if I intend to serve a whole leg per person, I allow only 8 hours of curing, while if it's for smaller pieces in a bigger context (such as for cassoulet), I let it go for longer. But usually I keep to 8 hours or so—it's sufficient yet doesn't overwhelm.

After curing time, rinse salt off under cold water, and pat duck pieces dry.

Confiting. Allow rendered duck fat to come to room temperature. Pour into a very heavy enamelled pot or heavy ovenproof crock. Slip duck pieces into it, making sure all pieces are submerged in fat. At this point you may add some whole garlic cloves or a head of garlic with the top sliced off and/or 1 or 2 cloves (as in clous de girofle, not garlic) Cook over a low flame/in slow cooker/in very low oven until fat reaches 90C/195F (it should take nearly an hour to reach temperature), and allow to cook for another 1 ½ or 2 hours, monitoring temperature periodically. It is ready when meat seems tender at the bone.

Remove duck pieces to a heat-proof glass jar or a crock. Pack tightly. Heat fat until small bubble form (well short of smoking point), and carefully ladle over duck pieces, making sure all pieces are covered in fat. Allow to cure refrigerated for at least one week. If you wish to keep for several months, seal in a further layer of home-rendered lard (lard is more dense than duck fat, and therefore seals with greater efficiency), and cover with parchment paper.

Pork shoulder, lamb shank, goose, and even turkey make for fairly fantastic confits, and this recipe suits well, and only needs to be adapted for cooking time.

Vanilla, & Suddenly Christmas.

The first snow didn't make me do it. Nor did the unrelenting Christmas music coming from every store as I walked on St. Catherine Street the other day. It wasn't the offers reaching my inbox every ten minutes from online bookstores, even as those usually tempt me.

It was my delivery of vanilla. 1 kg of organic tahitian vanilla, to be precise. Swoony swoon swoon. Even through all the wrapping the whole entry way was perfumed by them. I couldn't wait to break it open. I love making my own vanilla extract, of course, but I love too having the beans on hand.

Let the baking begin. Let Christmas come. I'll either be ready or so blissed out on the scent that I won't care.

Labels.

Each drawer has a label for content. Mixer attachments. Cookie cutters piping bags and tips. But then lots more. Lots. I couldn't stop. I know it's weird. I'm quite amused that they've taken over my kitchen, when it's quite not me. Yet I also don't really know what it says about me.

But I've noticed the labels serve as a new Rorschach in my kitchen. Labels that then let me label. Here I thought myself fairly innocent in my decision to make them.

People who love them. (Hm. A bit controling of you, no?) People who hate them. (I so get it! But what's with being so judgemental?)

People who want to love them, but can't believe they do. (Me too! So right and yet so wrong.) People who want to hate them, yet drool in lust. (You're right--I'm still trying to suppress the drool...)

People who judge me as obsessional bordering on the insane. (Point taken.) People who suddenly like me a bit better, and never thought I had it in me. (Frankly, neither did I. But I worry about it, so should you!)

The truth is it's one of the best things I've ever done in terms of having a social kitchen. People who borrow the house for a weekend know their way, friends who visit maneuver without me. And then, the selfish part, friends and family who help put away dishes do so now with astonishing accuracy.

**

I love this photo taken by my friend David (whose most excellent photo work can be seen here--updated daily). It accentuates yet obscures the obsessive order of the labels.

Cinder Toffee.

I love days where I get to think through the homemade treats I shall give away for Christmas presents. It brings together three distinct joys:

1) I'm able to anticipate the pleasure of giving homemade things. It's a feeling not unakin from the thrill of as a kid giving my mum a potpourri jar fashioned out of modeling clay. Nor do I now, in my grown self, trust much better the pleasure that will be felt in the actual thing rather than in just the gesture, but it somehow doesn't matter.

2) I get to practice my kitchen-scientist persona, in an attempt at anticipating what will keep how well for how long, and, hence, how far in advance in can be baked and given.

3) I get to eat the final results.

The cinder toffee above hasn't passed step 2) very well--it becomes tacky quickly so would need be given right away. But it's fun to make--candy-making always is magical. Sugar made molten as shown the first small photo. Then in the second, baking soda. That's all. And tasty shards on icecream.

Croissant Custard Tart

Yesterday I made the twin to this tart. This one I made when D.--a friend who's really a brother--was visiting. He was to arrive around 5, and though we had dinner plans and cocktail foods might have been in order, I thought that he would want a warming homey welcome instead.

It's a custard tart, but made with croissant dough. I looked in the freezer, I was sure I had some dough stashed away. I was wrong. But determined! And so in a heavy day of work, I found myself compelled to rush home in mini breaks to roll out the dough, and folding and turning, each time rolling out with it the ever thinner layers of butter encased within.

Work

Run

Roll

Fold

Chill

Run

Work

And again. And again.

Though huffing and puffing, I thought I had done it all seamlessly until I noticed someone looking at me perplexed and I realised I had flour on my face. But it's for D.! He'll love it!! He'll feel everything he's meant to from it!!!

When it came to baking, a bit of distraction set in, and it got a bit more time in the oven than I intended. See the darker edges. Damn. But surely it won't matter he won't notice he'll read through it it's ok I mean look at it and it's CROISSANT.

So you'd think. But when he heard my fake humility before a masterpiece--"sorry the crust got a bit too much heat"--instead of telling me that he hadn't noticed, that the whole is divine he answered: "It's okay. I'll just sit here and gnaw on it." Grrr. Yeah, a friend who's just like a brother.

Conserva.

I've long placed Paul Bertolli on my list of people I'd marry without much further thought. His Cooking by Hand has been to me, as to all who read it with eyes open, a revelation. That anyone could pay attention to this extent. That anyone could see through the layers of an ingredient to read its core.

My 2003 copy has lost its dust jacket--something I mind a little, and don't. I miss his floured hands, even as I love the austere pebble-coloured expanses I have now. I have lent it many times, feeling unusually trepidatious over potential loss. My worry stone.

Comes this year, and I've developed a whole new level of swooning love for him: making Conserva. It is Bertolli's version of southern Italy's estratto--tomatoes made into paste--dried into intensity on planks in the sun.

Our Conserva was almost not to be. We though we had run out of summer. The tomatoes had been watery. Getting to the core of them would surely only reveal rain. I didn't have enthusiasm for Quixoticsim when there was so much to do still in the kitchen. But then a few weeks later than one would have expected, some San Marzano tomatoes took in the last of the sun. I couldn't leave them at the market even as I didn't need more sauce. Suddenly, Conserva was back on the horizon.

No plank. No sun. But four days and nights in a very low oven until it was the colour of brick, turned over countless times, to achieve 90% reduction in weight. My heart just lurches thinking about it.

The Zen of Custard.

Today my making custard is a statement against chaos.

I am still. I behold these ingredients; I will know these ingredients. It's process nearly as much as product that's the thing.

The simplicity of custard betrays any shortcut. This is the reason it's irreconcilable with commercialisation. Making it oneself, though--good eggs, good cream, good vanilla--a reflection of their perfection.

I find all variations satisfying to make: custard cream (crème Anglaise, here), ice cream, crème brulée, sabayon, or stand-alone-nearly-needs-a-capital-C custard.

When making it, I'm becoming more and more brazen. It started with not preparing an icebath to halt cooking in case it goes too far. Then I went to using higher temperature. I've now taken to allowing myself to step away for a few seconds at the beginning of cooking. But as much as I admit there's a degree of bravado, it's in essence an exercise in Zen attunement: I know my pot, my hob, I know custard, I know time well enough. Disaster will strike one day, but it will be a canary in the mine rather than a thing to note in itself. At the key moments though, everything else is shut out and all my concentration is on it: not yet, not yet, not yet, not yet, not yet, not yet, now. Even looking into my ramekin drawer, I feel stillness.

Appeasing Briony's Hunger (I): Recipe Update.

The recipes, such as they are.

Gallettes Bretonnes:

Sift together in a bowl and set aside: 300 g (2 1/2 cups) Italian 00 flour, 2 healthy pinches fine sea salt (utterly essential), 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder. In the bowl of an electric mixer set to medium speed, fluff together until pale yellow, for about 3 minutes: 4 egg yolks and 200 g (1 cup) sugar.

Add, in two-tablespoon pieces, a total of 225 grams (which is about 2 sticks or 1 cup) room temperature butter, making sure each addition is fully incorporated before adding next one. Add flour mixture all at once, and mix until just combined.

Turn dough out dividing into halves to two sheets of clingfilm, and gather into disks. Chill for about 20 minutes.

Set oven to 165C/325F/Gas Mark 3. Roll out dough on a lightly floured Silpat mat or on a piece of parchment to a thickness of just over 0.5 cm (just over 1/4 inch). Chill on mat/parchment on cookie sheet, if dough softens. Use a 6 cm (2 1/2 inch) round cooking cutter, place on Silpat mat/parchment paper lined cookie sheet, and bake about 20 minutes, checking at 17. Cool on cookie sheet on cooling rack.

**

Pumpkin Cake:

It is especially important with intricate moulds to have all ingredients thoroughly at room temperature before proceeding.

Preheat oven to 350.

Thoroughly, thinly and evenly brush sides of pumpkin cake mould with soft butter. Sprinkle with flour, and woosh pan about to have the flour cover the butter evenly. Then on an easily-cleaned countertop, flip pan over so the open side rests against the counter top, and with a wooden spoon, strongly and repeatedly tap bottom and sides of pan to release excess flour. This is an essential step, else the creases of the mould will hold too much flour, and will bake a chalky residue onto the cake. This cake can also be made in one standard round cake tin, or two loaf tins, or standard or mini cupcake forms, but you'll need to adjust baking time.

In a bowl, whisk together 165 g (1 2/3 cup) Italian 00 flour or all-purpose flour, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon sea salt, 1/2 teaspoon ground cassia cinnamon, 2 healthy pinches allspice, 30 gratings nutmeg, 1 pinch ground dry ginger. Set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer on medium speed, cream together 115 g (1/2 cup or 1 stick) butter with 300 g (1 1/2 cup) sugar for about 3 minutes. Add two eggs, one at a time, mixing until fully incorporated. Mix in 1 cup pumpkin purée, and 125 ml (1/2 cup/122 g) milk. Then with the mixer set to low speed, add flour mixture, and mix until just combined.

Bake for about 45 minutes, until tester comes out clean, but check at 40 minutes. Place on cooling rack, and allow to cool 20 minutes or so before unmoulding. Allow to cool completely and trim domed centres of the cakes flush so the halves stack well.

The photo above is of butter set out by R. to come quickly to room temperature.

I'm Out of Control: Pumpkin Cake

If you're one of the people coming for Thanksgiving on the weekend, avert your eyes now.  Because it's better as a casual surprise treat.  Because I've been known to  change my mind.   

I know what I'm about to admit labels me as a food snob, and to amplify the injurious term, here's insult: it makes me a very unoriginal one. 

But here I go: I hate fancy cake moulds.

It's cake.  It's made of butter *and* sugar.  If it's not gorgeous-enough on its own, something's gone terribly awry.  I think of the fancy cake mould as dreadful cake's attempt at alibi  ("I can't be bad, your honour.  Look at me! I'm CUTE!"), only it turns out to be its M.O..

The betrayal of my principles started with my mum requesting a kugelhopf pan.  I thought this innocuous-enough: we're central European; we're allowed kugelhopf.  But then suddenly I'm buying heart-moulds, small ones, for dense chocolate fallen and purposefully wobbly Valentines.  The cakes seemed to me adorable in their flawed states, and--I clung to hope--spoke for me.  (I can't be a crap wife organising Valentine's at the last minute, your honour, look I'm heartshaped!  And self-deprecating!") 

From there, I'm not sure what turn the spiral next took.  But... well... here's a cake from a mould I found at the back of the pantry.  The photo is of the trial run, to make sure the cake would hold up.  By the weekend, I need to find some kind of sandwiching icing.  (I am a good hostess, your honour, I made pumpkin cake for party favours!)

Slow. Roast Garlic.

The kitchen is a roller-coaster of existential victories, and angst.

Often I feel overwhelmed with the weight of responsibility of a fine ingredient. As I hold it, I feel a definite sense of Don't. Mess. Up--.

It's a perfect [goose or char or yellow beet], don't mess it up.

And this isn't only in fits of self-loathing. I'm simply very aware that there's bit of perfection in my hands. There's a lot I can do wrong, whilst the only right I can perform is to preserve its integrity, or nudge it to make manifest its hidden beauty.

Yet at other times, I feel as though I created the perfection.

I'm not blind to the heresy of this. But I tell you, it's a ticket into heaven nonetheless.

Just now, as I write this, I'm making bread. The dough is in a process that's enormously dynamic--bubbling, transformational--and I'm metres away from it, as I will be for the rest of day. Yet with the loaf in my hands, I will feel I. made. bread.

Roast garlic shall never strike me with the same power, and really, in the end, nothing shall. Nonetheless, there's was a bit of magic here too. It is the first time it came to me that I might roast garlic in the slow cooker. Necessity was the mother of my invention: all the usual heat sources taken up with other things. And voila.

I didn't make the garlic gene, I didn't grow the garlic bulb, I didn't invent the slow cooker, surely I'm not the first to put them together. But somehow it registers as though I had. And how perfectly!

****

These were roast for a soup. But they are lovely spread on bread or such.
Heads of garlic, root-end intact, tops nipped.
Thin drizzle of olive oil.
A slow cooker.
A few hours.

For Short Let's Call Them Galettes Bretonnes.

E: "What's in them?? they're so good! Almonds?"

Tori: "No."

E: "Vanilla?"

Tori: "No."

E: "There's something."

Tori: "They're flour, butter, egg, sugar, salt, baking powder."

I always thrill when great things are made of the most elemental things. Alchemy so apparent.

Summer Squash Custard.

Normally I just grill them, and pray the bore will scorch out of them.

Summer squash, yellow, as I used here, or green (zucchini, courgette--take your pick of names) so abundant and asking for love, even as if by mid September, I'm hard-pressed to muster it.

And on this day, for someone delicate coming for lunch, I knew that my usual dispatching with branding-iron scars wouldn't do.

I remembered that Saveur had recently reminded me of a Barbara Kafka recipe. My take goes like this:

Blanch 1.5 kg squash in 1/2 centimetre wide long thin strips in well-salted water, all of 25 seconds. Dry them on a wire rack for a few hours.

In a baking dish whisk together 3 eggs, 1 1/2 cups cream, some 1/2 to 3/4 cups Parmigiano and with a few thyme or chervil leaves, and freshly-ground pepper--two more twists of the mill than you'd think. Lay the slices in on their sides so their skin-on edges peak through the custard. In a 450 oven until golden and set, which might take as little as 35 minutes or 45, depending on the configuration of your baking dish.

The Pigeons. The Pesto.

On this day--pesto-making day--rain threatening, I was stopped at a light on Avenue du Parc, on the Plateau in Montreal. I saw a flock of birds flying from one side of the street to the other, sometimes stopping for a second atop one of the buildings, often just changing direction again. One glinting flash of belly white, the next the sober grey of their wings. Over and over. Pigeons acting their true nature. Whilst it sometimes occurs to me to think them "only pigeons," I remind myself that I, too, keep choosing the city. This, we have that in common. So in this moment I just took wing, dart, rise, with them. An urban ballet, ours.

And here I was on my way to perform another mix of ancient yet metropolitan. An elemental grinding together of pinoli, basil leaves, olive oil. But for me, city girl, instead of the repetitive motion of stone on stone, it's one of the new loves of my life: my VitaPrep with its three(!) horsepower at my personal service. Sigh, yet grin. And then with it, taking the breath of an ephemeral season and freezing it for frozen days that will need memory or hope.

800 grams of basil is what I had, and so:

Pesto alla Genovese
800 grams basil leaves
800 grams pinoli
8 grams salt
2 heads of gorgeous pink garlic
Enough Ligurian olive oil to make it whirl.

Coaxed into those otherwise annoying ice cube bags. To this, when thawed, Parmigiano and more olive oil will be added.

This translates to my Pesto alla Genoves rule of thumb:
2 parts by weight basil leaves
2 parts by weight pinoli (pine nuts)
1 part by weight ground Parmigiano
Enough Ligurian olive oil to make it whirl, and more to achieve desired consistency.
Salt
Garlic

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

Love Apples: the Canning. The 2008 Edition.

Normally canning tomatoes goes like this:

Get up before dawn, without an alarm set, just from the excitement. A sensation not unakin to Christmas morning.

Tie hair back
Brush teeth
Wear something that likes tomato
Tiptoe downstairs
Make tea
Peer outside
Turn on Puccini
Put blanching kettles up to boil
Wash tomatoes

By the time it's Saturday morning for the rest of the world, serious progress has been made. I feel virtuous and aesthetically pleased. I feel like I've been to church.

This year, er, not exactly that.

Everything was off schedule: our house, the market, the lands. We had just gotten home from PEI, and I had placed an order for heirloom San Marzanos. When I saw them, it was love at first sight. Yet to start all of this on a Monday, one day before a Big Family Visit, and work deadlines looming, made for less than ideal conditions.

And so: Wash. Blanch. Grind. Cook. Can. All of it in fits and starts. R. did the bulk of it: early, late, in small spaces in between. It all felt disjointed; hollow; burdensome.

Ah, but then, a moment of grace-- As I was coming home from a late meeting, and several breaths before I turned the key in the front door, I was already able to detect the glorious scent of my tomatoes emanating from every brick and stone: sweet yet, now, burnished; their depth discernable. My senses trilled with them. Is it any wonder they call them love apples? It was the incense of our home. It was church after all.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

No Translation Required: the Korova.

A lot of translation work is required in my life, when I try to explain how my pained and ecstatic search for meaning-transport-safety-beauty is answered all day and all night in the likes of a gaze, a sentence, a jar of duck fat.

But not here. I could tell about A Clockwork Orange, Korova the name of its milkbar that drugs through innocent-looking treats, just as these. I could tell you about Pierre Hermé and how he developed them. I could tell you how they need to be bitter and salty along with the sweet.

But all I need say is: "M., I made these for you."

And she answers with a thank you that says, you didn't need to, I shouldn't eat them, but how lovely! And then a few hours later a "these are good."