Herbs

I've been mentioning herbs in my recent posts so I thought I'd be a little more specific. In general, I am a big fan of the 'whatever herbs are available' school of thought. However, that's a bit lazy at times and there are some thing for which you should stop and think.

In breton cooking, there is a lot of bay leaf, because there are huge laurel trees everywhere. I find that it goes well with fish, crabs, and meat alike. It's not too pungent, and so you can use as much as you'd like. Don't break it into pieces, though: you won't get any more out of it and you'll have to fish them out later.

Rosemary is tricky because it will give a strong flavor to your broth. It's possible to make delicious rosemary tea, but you don't want to be drinking it with your meat or fish. Use sparingly in a broth. However, in roasting, use as much as you'd like.

On the photo above, you can see the herbs I put in the baked/grilled duck from the previous post.

On the photo below, you can see my daughter picking fresh cilantro seeds off of a blooming cilantro twig. It's tedious work, but perfect for a 4.5 years old who wants to help. Cilantro is a personal favorite, and I often grind it to rub on meat (when it's dry) together with some pepper, or plunge it whole in a sauce.

Thyme is also a personal favorite. I use it often and grow it on my balcony in Paris when I can. I use lots of it everywhere, though some people think it's overpowering.

Duck! Duck!

On a day when some friends and my parents came to visit (6 adults in all), I decided to make some roast/bbq duck. Why the mixed recipe, you ask? why, it's so that you can have the best of both worlds: the tenderizing and degreasing effect of baking, and the crispy and smoky effect of grilling.

My butcher advised me to get two smaller female ducks (canette) rather than one big male one (canard), seeing how the males tend to be more fat. He went to his neighbor's yard and picked a couple out for me. 

I stuffed them in the over with some herbs in their cavities. I cooked them long and slow (about 2 hours at 170C= 335F), just to get the inside nice and tender. Duck can be chewy and tough if it's not cooked completely through. Fast cooking is something that works well with duck breast (I'll do a post about that, it's one of my wife's favorites), but it's better, in my opinion to cook a whole duck through completely.

After the birds had been in the oven for roughly 2 hours, I attempted to split them in half, thinking it'd be nice to have 4 half birds on the grill. I obviously needed a bigger knife, despite my knife being quite large, thank you very much (you can se it on the right side of the photo). I decided to abort the procedure before destroying my knife or making a mess. Sometimes cooking is about knowing when to say enough is enough.

 Once outside, I basted the ducks in my homemade thyme/rosemary syrup. It worked really well.

On the grill, the birds got nice and crispy, though I think they could have been baked a little longer in preparation.

And they got smoked as well! 

 After taking them off the heat, it's best, as with red meat, to let duck rest under aluminum foil. Of course, you want to actually cover them so that they don't get cold.

After 10 minutes' rest, during which the fibers retighten to prevent the juices from running out of cooking, you can carve the birds. Notice the super-cool circa 1975 platter underneath - it's been in my family since I was born, a true heirloom!

All right, that's all very well, but what to serve with the duck? I made a veggies stew with the following ingredients. Here I made a mistake. I intended to cook everything but the beans (fresh, shucked that morning) for a while and then add the beans. However, this meant cooking the cabbage, turnips, and carrots in too much water, preventing them from getting nice and crispy/caramelized with the onions.

In a future attempt, I will cook the beans separately and mix everything together at the end. Don't forget to put a bit of pork belly and herbs with the veggies, to give the sauce flavor.

For those without a grill, you can achieve the 'grill effect' by raising the temperature your oven to the maximum either at the start or the end of the cooking. Personally, I prefer to do it at the end, when the skin is pearled with greasy drops that will participate in the grilling process. No need to use the broiler unless your oven can't get hot enough.

Fish is meat

I know this has been mostly about meat, but I spent a good amount of time cooking fish during the summer. Technically, fish is meat, so I guess I'm not too far afield.

On these two photos, you can see what happens when you cook a fish on coals. As an aside, I filled the fish cavity with herbs and a couple of slices of lemon. The difficult part is to ensure that the fish isn't overcooked, and also that it doesn't disintegrate when it gets flipped. 

The trick that I learned is to let it grill significantly, until it gets nice and charred, and then flip it. 

On this one, you can see that I left a little too long. It turned out good enough to eat (frankly quite good), but it could probably have been flipped a little sooner. I didn't cook it quite as long on the other side.

You can do the same thing with any whole fish, fresh or saltwater.

Les forces de l'ordre

Sur le site du Figaro (28/08/12):

"Alors qu'il était en vacances à Porquerolles, le préfet du Var a été surpris à plusieurs reprises circulant à scooter sans casque, rapporte France Info. L'histoire est d'autant plus étonnante que Paul Mourier a fait de la sécurité routière son cheval de bataille.

Les habitants de l'île s'en sont plaints à la police, estimant injuste d'être verbalisés alors que le haut-fonctionnaire enfreignait le code de la route en toute impunité, précise de son côté Europe 1.

Conséquence : la police a été contrainte de s'adapter à cette situation peu commune.

Jean-Bernard Soriano, le secrétaire départemental d'Unité police, s'en explique à France Info : "Il est difficile pour un défenseur de l'ordre de verbaliser tout le monde et de fermer les yeux sur un haut-fonctionnaire qui lui-même se soustrait à des règles de simple bon sens."

Les forces de l'ordre sont donc désormais plus clémentes sur l'île de Porquerolles. "Il vaut mieux ne pas verbaliser que de créer une rupture d'égalité entre citoyens", explique Jean-Bernard Soriano. "

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On croit rêver... comme il est impossible de verbaliser le préfet (ah bon? ce n'est pas un citoyen comme les autres à qui s'appliquent les lois?) on ne peut plus du tout appliquer ces lois.

On se demande ce qu'il se passerait si on découvrait un préfet en train de tricher sur ses impôts, faudrait-il amnistier tous les fraudeurs afin de ne pas devoir poursuivre le fonctionnaire en justice?

Et après les gens se demandent pourquoi le citoyen lambda ne se sent pas concerné par le respect des lois...

Summer grilling

This summer, I had a grill, and seafood, and time.

I went to the market and bought some calamari and cuttlefish fished the night before. The calamari was so fresh that it was slightly transluscent. I decided to make ceviche with it, which is to say that I winged a marinade with some lemon, lime, and orange juice, garlic, shallot, herbs, and coriander. I added a touch of sugar to correct for acidity. It was delicious, if a bit goopy.

I then used the same marinade for the cuttlefish, priori to grilling.

I beheaded and gutted some sardines, which come fresh from local Breton waters.

 On some hot coals, I layed out my cuttlefish.

It really doesn't need to cook at all, so you can cook it as little as you want. Personally I like to see some caramelizing of the marinade, but be sure not to overcook, as it gets chewy.

Sardines on a grill.

The trick I learned recently is to way until they no longer stick to the grate to flip them.

All served for a nice and simple lunch with tomatoes and a few pan-fried vegetables.

Adventures with twice-cooked pork

In some Chinese cooking recipes for pork, you're to cook it twice. Once boiled (or some other slow-cooking method) and once grilled. I am not sure about the science behind this, but the taste is really good.

I tried this with pig ears in June, and I'd tried it with some fatback in my wok. This summer, I had access to a barbecue, and so I decided to give it a go with some spare ribs. My butcher likes to cut his spare ribs thick as a brick, including a few healthy layers of meat and fat on top.

To make this, I decided to boil the meat with some random herbs (random because you could use any herbs, really): thyme, laurel, and rosemary, together with some pepper and coriander. Once the meat had been in boiling broth for about 1.5 hours, I took it out, let it cool for a few hours - because I had a few hours, but cool is cool enough - and broiled it on the grill.

While broiling, I covered it with some thyme syrup that I'd made by making thyme tea and adding lots of brown sugar over heat.

I served with home-made chips and grilled eggplant. It was as good as it looks.

Grilled pig ear (BBQ) - and a côte de boeuf

On a recent (and one would say rare) sunny day in Paris, I headed over to a cousin's house to prepare a BBQ. I had decided to make 'côte de boeuf' and pig ear. The beef piece is out of the rib but without bone - though you can buy it with bone as well. In France, it is considered to be the most noble piece of the beef and was a bit of a splurge.

The pig ear, on the other hand, cost less than 2 euros. I boiled it for an hour before letting it cool and marinating it in a mixture of soy sauce, ketchup, and olive oil. Once it had been sitting in the marinade for about 30 minutes, I threw it on the grill until it was nice and grilled all over. 

The rule here is that you can't overcook a piece of cartilage. The longer it's cooked (boiled+grilled), the more tender it will be. In the end, it's crunchy and chewy at the same time, and quite fatty to boot. Delicious, in other words.

The idea of making this came after I made twice-cooked pork for my parents a few weeks earlier. I used pork belly (poitrine). After boiling the the meat for an hour with some star anise, I let it cool overnight and sliced it thinly. I then grilled it in a wok, set it aside, and made stir-fried vegetables to serve with it. It was amazing.

I don't have anything good to report about the beef, which I sadly overcooked. Here's a photo that shows just how nice a piece of meat it was: you can tell from the marbling and the nice color. The butcher also removed a nice layer of fat from the outside, which, along with the marbling, is a good sign that the cow's been outside, eating grass and getting cold - instead of inside, eating god-only-knows-what.

Pink slime - it's the new insult

Paul Krugman compares the latest Republican budget to "pink slime", and finds it wanting.

Good to know that the meat industry's sludge is better than what the people who are elected (and paid) to represent us are doing in Washington.

Eating beef pear - really!

One of the nice things about getting to know your butcher is that he'll sell you the "butcher's pieces" as they are known in France. These are little-known muscles that make great eating. The "pear" (la poire) is one of these muscles. It is a little round muscle, weighing in at a little more than a pound, with short fibers, and shaped like ... a pear! Right, that was tough.

It is very tender and makes great steak or fondue meat. As you can see, the butcher mangled it a bit, but that was on purpose as he removed all of the nerves from it. This makes me think that I should make a post about my butcher - soon.

I just grilled this puppy in a heavy pan, and put some salt and pepper on it when it was done, which is to say nice and rare. Delicious!

The absence of marbling might lead one to expect a dry piece of meat, and you'd be ill advised to overcook it on that account alone. However, if you keep it rare, it is a very delicate and tender piece of steak.

In pink, the part of the beef that "pear" comes from.

I'd be curious to know if it's even possible to get these cuts of meat in the US, where it doesn't seem that anyone goes through the trouble of identifying them, although perhaps it's what's called "round steak". I can remember that when my family first moved to the US in the late 1980s, and for years after that, the lack of correspondence between US and French meat cuts was a topic of conversation among French expats.

Moon shot

One of the nice things about having a digital camera - not that this is a novel thing these days - is that you can take lots of photos in the hope that one will turn out.

I thought that this one was pretty cool.

Pink slime, it's what's for dinner!

According to recent news stories (here and here), the USDA has approved the use of so-called "lean textured fine beef" or "boneless lean beef trimmings", aka "pink slime", in school meals.


Pink slime is basically recovered beef meat that has been treated with ammonia gas. In this case, "recovered" refers to the fact that this meat used to be deemed unsuitable for human consumption, in part because slaughter conditions made unhealthy by exposing it to cow feces. It is "recovered" in the sense that it's no longer used as dog food. In other words, it's recovered because it now generates a higher revenue than it used to.

If you live in the USA, pink slime can be part of your hamburger today, and you'll never know it because it doesn't have to be labeled - after all, it's just meat.

If this seems strange to you, it's because it is.

Pink slime might well epitomize the problem of industrial meat production. We have animals that are slaughtered in factories, their carcases treated with toxic chemicals, and the resulting "meat" sold to unwitting consumers. At the same time, the USDA refuses to mandate clear labeling thereby preventing consumers from making informed purchasing decisions.

Digression: why oppose labeling? those with nothing to hide will not fear labeling requirements, unless it's the cost of the label that's the problem??


To argue, as the president of the American Meat Institute, that pink slime reduces waste and is therefore a "sustainable" product is to insult the intelligence of one's audience. There is nothing sustainable about the mode of production that produces pink slime. Industrial meat production is, by its very nature, unsustainable, as argued elsewhere on this blog. While I do not doubt that producing and selling pink slime is financially profitable, its production cannot transform an unsustainable industry into a sustainable one. To invoke sustainability is disingenuous, if not outright mendacious.

Personally, I sidestep this entire problem by not eating much hamburger to start with. If I do, I buy it straight from my butcher and watch him grind it for me using his refrigerated grinder - I know exactly what cut of beef he's using to make my hamburger.

If you don't have access to a butcher, or if your butcher won't grind your beef to order, you have three choices if you want to be sure to avoid pink slime:

• grind your own hamburger
• eliminate hamburger from your diet
• shop only at supermarkets that guarantee that their ground beef is "pink slime"-free. There is a list of supermarkets in the ABC story linked above.

If your supermarket isn't on ABC's list, you could ask what their policy is on pink slime. I know I would.

The Human Cost of Animal Suffering

In a column in the New York Times, Mark Bittman discusses some implications of industrialized meat production.

He makes some interesting points, most notably that the disconnect between animal slaughter and the vast majority of meat consumers has insulated those consumers from the realities of meat production, and allowed them to abdicate their responsibilities as meat eaters.

These responsibilities, as I discussed in previous posts, include sticking to the inter-species "contract" established between livestock and humans:

• Humans provide comfort, food, veterinary care, evolutionary advantages, and a humane death to their livestock.
• In return, the livestock provide their meat, skin, milk, etc...

Clearly, this compact is not made at the individual level, but it hard to argue that as species, cows, pigs, ducks, etc... have not benefited from their symbiotic relationship with humans.

The industrialization of meat production violates all of the humans' obligations under the "contract". Animals are raised in uncomfortable conditions, given unhealthy foods, pumped with hormones and antibiotics, culled instead of cured, and slaughtered in abhorrent conditions.  As consumers, we are responsible for the way in which the products we buy are produced: with our dollars/euros/yens, we agree to participate (or not) as the final rung in the production chain. This means that by consuming industrial meat, each one of us is endorsing the violation of the inter-species contract described above.

I'd like to think that most meat consumers are willfully or unwillingly ignorant of the manner in which their meat is produced, and that is why the industry is able to operate as it does. At the same time, it is fairly clear that the industry has taken great pains to hide its practices, sensing, perhaps rightly, that knowledge might bring on scrutiny and reduced meat consumption.

Petit salé aux lentilles - salt pork with lentils

It's still winter, and so it's still slow-cooking season. This week my daughter and I tried a very easy dish: salt pork with lentils (petit salé aux lentilles). This is a traditional French dish that is often served in cafeterias and such because it doesn't have many ingredients and can cook without much supervision.

The trick is to find a good piece of salt pork, and possibly a nice thick sausage to go with it. You can use any piece of salt pork, depending on your budget or appetite. This time around, I used a piece of pork shoulder, from the top of the shoulder (palette). This is the "blade" or "blade shoulder" in the US and UK systems. If you want to make a true-to-tradition petit salé, you can also add a Morteau sausage.

As always, you start by assembling the ingredients. In this case, I went for a slightly fancy stock, with an eye to making soup with it afterwards. My broth had carrots, onions, black radish, leaks (white and green parts), kohlrabi (chou-rave) with its leaves, pork belly, herbs (parsley, rosemary, thyme), cloves, garlic, and peppercorns. You get to eat all of the vegetables in the end, so it's not a loss... You can stick to carrots and onions if you'd like.

Next step, put the well-rinsed piece of salt-pork in a pan of cold water and bring to the boil. When the water boils, take the meat out and empty the water. Be sure to trim any excess fat off, as it won't be grilling away but rather going into the broth.

 

While the water is boiling, prep the vegetables for the broth, enlist your 4 year old if necessary

Tie all of the herbs into a bundle so that you can fish them out at the end. Note that this doesn't work as well as advertised, and I think I am going to buy one of these soon (or this). This is a good time to teach your child how to tie a knot, without the pressure of rushing off to school in the morning and without being bent over to tie a shoelace.

 

The broth ingredients, together with the clove-studed onion.

Put everything back into the pan once the salty water's been thrown out (great task for a small child).

Pour water over the whole thing, cover, and boil slowly for 2 hours or so. Don't worry if the pot is very full: the veggies will shrink over time. You should not add any salt, as the meat will provide all that you need.

 

Even though this is a stand-alone meal, you can prepare some side dishes in the meantime. We glazed some yellow turnips and and onions. My daughter has become quite the expert peeler over the last month, and so I delegated the turnips to her while I took care of the onions. As it happens, onions will sting your eyes more if you're shorter, as your eyes will be closer to the chopping board. This is therefore not a good task for a 4 year old.

Once again, this is not a dish that looks all that good at the end (so no photo), but it sure is delicious!

Pot Au Feu - with children

I'm back with more experiments in meat-cooking. This being winter, it's good to undertaken slow-cooking projects that won't be as appetizing in the warmer months (to the extent that it gets warm at all in Paris, but that's another story). 

Last weekend, my daughter and I made this very tasty French dish called a pot-au-feu, which despite its rather scary name, does not involve throwing anything into a fire. It's a slow-cooked, extremely simple beef dish that is hearty and warm and makes for great leftovers.

The premise of pot-au-feu is that if you cook vegetables and meat together long enough, you'll end up with delicious veggies, tender meat, and tasty broth, all with minimal supervision or work. Of course, it gets a little more complicated if you try to involve little hands, but that's part of the fun.

HFW has a recipe for this dish, but I didn't follow it completely, in part because my wife won't let me cook with things like beef tongue (which is a bummer, because it's yummy).

I went to the market and picked up a variety of vegetables to give the dish color, flavor, and texture.

I used the following: carrots, Jerusalem artichokes, heirloom purple carrots, turnips, parsnips, onions, black radish (that large black thing - it's white inside), and leeks.

For meat, I used cheek (leftmost below), paleron (center), which is a piece of chuck in American beef-cutting, and a saw-off veal leg bone for marrow (rightmost).

We had to peel all of the vegetables, and my daughter helped with the turnip. She managed it despite the turnip being quite big for her hands. It helps that we have an awesome (and safe) peeler. So awesome that we actually take it on vacation with us.

The heirloom carrots were a bit of a bust, seeing how they're just orange on the inside...

Once you've prepped, you boil the meat by itself for about 10 minutes, or until the foam becomes white. You remove all of the brown/gray foam as it forms and throw it out.

Once you've got your meat where you want it, you just throw the vegetables in, and simmer for 3-4 hours. You can't really overcook pot-au-feu, but you can under-cook it, so be on the safe side. Just be sure to add enough liquid to cover everything at the beginning and add some herbs to give the broth flavor.

Rinsing herbs in the sink is a good task for a 4 year old. I used parsley, rosemary, and thyme (no sage...) because it's what I had. For spices, I used black pepper and a couple of cloves. Of course, I put a couple of garlic cloves in as well.

Predicting, rightly, that the kids wouldn't be so keen to eat mushy turnip (all the veggies end up mushy, but that's to be expected), we also prepared some sautéed potatoes and carrots on the side. With the right supervision, and a sufficiently-sharp knife, a 4 year old can chop potatoes. In my opinion, it's safer with a sharper knife because there's less risk of slipping. Adult supervision is paramount, needless to say.

 

In my opinion, carrots are too hard, and therefore dangerous, for a child to chop, and so I prepared those. Spooning out lard, on the other hand, is perfect.

Learning to clean up after yourself is a fundamental cooking skill, and it's always easier if your daughter has a Cinderella obsession...

After 4 hours of cooking, you end up with a rather unimpressive dish, but it is melt-in-your-mouth delicious. In this particular case, the purple carrots lost their color and ran all over the other veggies, which all ended up with a dull purple hue - note to self: don't cook with those carrots again, unless they are by themselves or in a salad. It wasn't exactly lovely to look at, but it was mighty tasty. Serve with mustard and cornichons or pickles.

If you're like me, you'll make too much of this, and have leftovers. In the River Cottage Meat Book, HFW recommends pan frying the leftover meat in a bit of oil. I tried this and it's absolutely delicious because the fibrous meat will break down and fry fiber-by-fiber, leaving you with a crunchy treat. You can serve the leftover vegetables in the broth.

The crunchy meat is so good that I am tempted to modify the way I serve this next time: keep half of the meat in its melt-in-your-mouth soft state and fry the rest. Serve together for added texture and flavor.