Duck Day (Part III) -- Cassoulet/Confit

I have to start out by saying that this dish turned out way better than I hoped. I knew it would be good, but wow! This is the epitome of carnivore, meat-on-the-bone, high fat, slather-yourself-in-greasy-animal-products good! Think of it as Provincal French BBQ.

There's nothing better on a frigid winter day. Just ask the residents of the South-Western French town of Castelnaudary.

Rumor has it that during the Hundred-Years War, in 1355 AD, the town was beseiged by the English as they moved through the region. The English were camped outside the town, and it was becoming clear that the walls would be breached and the town would be taken. So, rather than allow the Engligh to loot the town's food supply, the inhabitants decided to put everything in a giant clay pot (or "cassole", which now refers to a much smaller version) and cook it for one last communial meal. The ingredients included local fare, such as beans, cured meats, sausages, tomatoes, wines, vinegars, and, best of all, duck confit.

So it goes that, two days later, the town was taken, and the pot full of local goodness was still simmering over the communal hearth. The English invaders were so impressed by the slow-cooked stew of local ingredients that they packed up the giant pot and dragged it with them as they traveled through France. Each time they stopped, after invading this or that rural town, they would put the pot over a fire and fortify the stew with whatever regional ingredients they looted from the town. It is said that, in this manner, the original cassoulet lasted for decades. This story explains why there are so many different recipes for cassoulet, and why each and every person with a recipe insists that it is the original.

Mine is in no way, shape, or form, an "original" cassolet recipe. In fact, some would say that it is a stretch to even call it cassoulet, but no matter. It is a tasty and delicious way to use some of that Duck Soup and the other duck parts you have in the freezer.

This is a weekend dish, because it takes so long to make the confit. However, If you get a pile of ducks and spend a weekend making confit, you can freeze them and have them ready to go during the week.

Start by thawing those duck legs that you have left from Part I.
Cover a large plate with Kosher salt, and some chopped rosemary leaves (it is more traditional to use fennel seed to season confit, but my wife hates it, so I substitute with rosemary -- either is good). Place the legs skin-side down in the salt, cover the legs with foil, and place them in the refrigerator for one hour -- no longer or they will be too salty.

After an hour, pull the legs out and rinse them off. Place a few sprigs of rosemary (or fennel seed) in the bottom of a baking dish. Place the duck legs on the rosemary, skin-side-up, and cover them with your freshly rendered duck fat (see Part I). Make sure you add enough fat to cover them completely. (You can buy duck fat in the store, too, if you do not have enough from your rendering).Sprinkle a few cracked black peppercorns on top, and put the pan uncovered into a 225 F oven. I used the toaster oven. Let them cook for FIVE hours.

When the legs have about 30 mins left in the oven, begin to put the stew together. I would usually use duck sausage and cold-cured (non-smoked) pork belly, but these were not available at my market. Instead I used Andouille sausage and double-smoked pork belly bacon. Cut the sausages into 2-3 inch pieces, and dice the bacon into 1/4 inch cubes. Place both in a saucepot over medium heat until the sausage is cooked (not an issue with Andouille, since it is hot smoked) and the bacon fat begins to melt. Add about two rough-diced tomatoes and cook them until they begin to break down. Add the duck soup, and bring it to a simmer.

By this time, your duck legs should be done. Pull them from the oven and remove them from the fat. (Strain the fat and save it -- it is now infused with rosemary. Yum!). Let the legs drain on a rack for a few minutes. Put a few spoonfuls of the stew in a "cassole" (or use pasta bowls, like I did) and top it with the confit and a sprig of rosemary. Voila, a rural French classic right in your kitchen in Queens!!

Like I said, this dish surprised me. Since the available ingredients had much more flavor than the intended ingredients (spicy sausage and smoked bacon), I was concerned that I would not be happy with the result. Man, was I ever wrong! Sometimes I get lucky. The spicy sausage and smoked flavors from the bacon worked together perfectly.

Here's something we can all get excited about...the next post will NOT involve duck. I still have those breasts in my refrigerator, but frankly, I need a break from duck.
The topic of the next post will be a surprise to both of us! Stay tuned!

Duck Day (Part II) - Duck Soup

After a lovely weekend up to your elbows in duck carcass, you should have the raw materials to build some really tasty weekday meals. Like I said in the past, spend time when you have it - enjoy it when you don't. I personally enjoy the cooking & preparation part as much as I enjoy the eating. So, if you are like me, you benefit on both ends.

Now, the soup:

Start my making the stock. Heat your oven to about 450F. Pull out your duck parts from the last post (carcass, wings and innards) and put them on a sheet pan.Also, pull out some miscelaneous soup veggies; onions, carrots and celery are requirements, but you can also add parsnips, turnip, etc.
Give them a quick rough chop, toss them with a little olive oil, and place them on another sheet pan. Put both pans in the oven for about 20-30 mins, until the veggies and bones start to get a nice roasty brown color.

Once your bones and veggies are roasted, place them in a quality stock pot.

NOTE: About pots. I like the tri-layer pots that have aluminum sandwiched between layers of stainless. They have the non-reactive qualitites of stainless, but they maintain much of the even conductivity of aluminium.
Pure stainless pots are too thin, and don't distribute heat. Pure aluminum pots react with acidic foods and can cause funny flavors. You don't need to buy the most expensive pots, but don't waste your money on crap. Make sure the pots are well made with quality materials and have riveted or welded handles.

Place your goods in the pot, along with a few sprigs of herbs (thyme, rosemary, parsley, chervil). Deglaze the sheet pan with a little red wine by putting the sheet pan from the bones over the flame of one of your stove burners; when the drippings start to sizzle, splash about a cup of wine into the pan and immediately start to scrape the pan with a spatula. Pour the drippings, the wine, and all the crusties you were able to scrape free into the pot with the bones.

Add enough water to cover everything, and place the pot over a high flame. Once the water coems to a boil, turn the flame down to low, put on the lid, and leave it alone for about 2 hours (at least). When I was doing this for a living, we would leave our veal stock on the burner for 8-10 hours overnight -- I wouldn't recommend doing this at home unless your insurance policies are up-to-date and/or you can smell a burning kitchen in your sleep.

After at least two hours (mine was on for about 3 hours), you should have a decent duck stock. Pour the liquid through a china cap or other fine strainer into a separate container. Pull the duck parts out of the strainer and put them in the refrigerator to cool. Rinse out the pot, and put it back on the stove. Toss the veggies.

Make roasted red peppers: To do this, turn two of you stove burners to high, and place a large red pepper on each burner right in the flame. (you can do this under a broiler if you have a good one -- I do not). Once the side of the pepper in the flame turns black, turn it; repeat until the whole pepper is charred. Place the peppers in a bowl, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and put in the fridge to cool. Once the peppers are cool enough to handle, run them under cold water as you gently rub the burnt skins off. Pull out the cores and rinse out the seeds. You could use the peppers from a jar, but they are not as tasty. Dice the peppers about 3/4 inch.

Dice two onions about 3/4 inch. Put them, in the pot with some oil and salt, and sweat them over medium heat until they begin to brown.

While the onions are cooking, pull out your roasted, boiled duck parts, and separate as much of the meat from the bones as possible. If the innards have not completely disintegrated, chop them and put them aside, too. Once the onions begin to brown, throw the meat into the pot. Add a few cloves of minced garlic, sweat this mixture for a few minutes. (You could also add celery seed or fennel seed at this point. I did not because my wife doesn't like it. You have to consider the audience. If the tribe doesn't like it, they won't eat it. All of your time is wasted!). Add the red peppers, turn the heat up a little, and sautee for a few minutes until the peppers are heated. Add the stock, and bring to a boil.

While you are waiting for the stock to boil, pull out about 12 oz of dry lentils. I used green lentils, but I suppose you could use other varities if you like. Rinse them in a china cap or fine colander, and pick through them to make sure there are no rocks, clumps of dirt, etc. (you chould always do this with dry legumes). Once the stock comes to a boil, add the lentils and some salt. Turn the flame to low and cover the pot. Let it simmer for about 40 mins, until the lentils are tender.

NOTE: Starches (including legumes, potatoes, corn, rice, etc) will absorb salt with the water that they cook in. Once they are cooked, it is very difficult, if not impossible to get them to absorb more salt. If you do not salt the water that they are cooking in, you will end up with a very bland end product, regardless of how much salt you try to add afterwards.

Once the lentils are cooked, the soup should be somewhat thick. You may need to add more water to get the soup to the consistency you desire. Add herbs (I used thyme), salt, and pepper to taste.

Voila! Savory duck soup made from homemade stock. You can eat it right out of the pot. You should have enough so that you can pack a couple portions in some plastic containers and put them in the freezer. During the week you can stop at the store for some crusty French bread on you way home, plop the frozen soup in a pot with a cover, and enjoy your homemade soup in about 15-20 mins. Yum!

In the next post (the confit post), I'll show you how to turn this soup into a heavenly cassoulet that is the perfect winter dish. Mmmmm, duck fat, bacon and sausage! Does it get better!

Duck Day Afternoon (Part I)

After an incredibly busy week, I'm back with the much anticipated duckfest post.

Here is the dissection process. It's pretty much the same as any poultry, but the by-products are a bit more interesting. The difference is with the duck, you should use every savory bit. Don't throw anything away!! I'll tell you what I do with it later.

The first step to a successful quartering is to use the right tools. The best knife for the job is a stiff boning knife. I know it should go without saying, but the knife must be SHARP. Go out and buy some decent knives, and either invest in a oil stone or take them in to have a new edge put on them every once in a while (how often depends on how much you use them, of course).

If you buy a commercially packaged duck (like mine) it will come with the neck and a package of innards inside the body cavity. Pull these out and set them aside (we will use later them in our soup). Arrange your duck on a cutting board breasts up, with the legs pointing down toward you. Cut away as much of the fat as you can from around the cavity opening and from around the neck hole. Keep this fat for later.

Begin the carving process by spreading the legs away from the body and locating the edge of the thigh meat. There will be a thick layer of fat between the thigh and the body. Make an incision through this layer of fat so that the legs droop away from the body. DO NOT CUT ALL THE WAY THROUGH YET! We are doing this now because having the legs drooping away from the body helps to stabilize the carcass while you carve away the breasts.

Now move on to the breasts. Locate the breast bone and make an incision in the fat right down the center of it. Do not cut into the meat yet. After you make the incision, you will be able to slide the fat away from the middle of the body to see where each breast attaches to the breast bone. Carefully make a deep incision along the breast bone to cut the meat away.

At the top of the breast, you will see where the wishbone attaches to the breast. Slide the knife blade under the bone, and separate the breast at the top. This can be a little tricky, but if you move the meat around to see how it is attached to the wishbone before you cut, it will be easier to see how it has to be cut to remove it.

One the breast is free at the breastbone and at the wishbone, use one hand to hold the breast meat away from the bone, and from the center breastbone, gently slide the knife under the breast horizontally. Then, slice the breast away from the ribs as you pull the breast meat away from the bird. You should end up with the whole breast in your hand. Now repeat on the other side. This may be tricky since most of us are not ambidextrous, but get yourself a pile of ducks and practice. You'll get the hang of it.

On to the legs.

If you hold the leg quarter away from the body of the duck, you will see the pointy hip-bone down near the original cavity opening. As you pull the leg down toward the cutting board, slice down the spine behind this pointy bone. As you do this, you should be able to lay the quarter all the way down on the board. Also, as you cut, you will see the hip joint appear behind the pointy bone. Repeat this process on both sides so that you end up with a duck body with the two quarters laying flat on either side attached at the hip.

Now, pick up the carcass by the legs and bend the hip joints backwards until you pop both thigh bones out of the hip socket. Put the duck back on the board. Take your knife and slide the tip between the hip socket and thigh bone. It may take a little pressure, but you should be able to push the knife all the way to the board. Now, carefully cut along the hip bone to separate the bottom of the quarter from the body. You should now have a flap of flesh holding the leg to the body. Cut this flap as closely to the spine as possible. Repeat on the other side, and you have a pair of leg quarters.

Pull the wings away from the body and cut through the shoulder joints to remove the wings.

Voila! You have a pair of breasts, a pair of leg quarters, a pair of wings, some innards, and a pile of fat.

Pack up the carcass, wings, and innards for soup.

Wrap the breasts together in a piece of foil, put them in a freezer bag; do the same with the legs; pop them both in the freezer, and you have dinner portions for during the week. (We'll deal with them later).

Put the fat in a sauce pot with a thick bottom over low heat. After the fat begins to melt, you can turn the heat up a little, but still keep it pretty low. The idea is to keep the fat around 300 F, so that it melts but does not reach the flash point (The flash point for duck fat is around 500 F).

After 40 mins or so, the duck skin will begin to look like pork rinds. Once the rinds stop sizzling, strain the hot fat through some cheesecloth or a fine sieve. Let it cool and put it in the freezer or refrigerator. It should last about a month in the refrigerator, and I have kept it for up to a year in the freezer. We will use it to make confit later.

I even like the crispy duck rinds after you strain them out of the fat. Okay, this is a little overboard. My wife thinks it is gross, but they are really tasty! Crispy fatty duck goodness! Yum!

You now have the tools for several tasty meals, duck soup, confit, and breasts, each of which will be explained in subsequent parts of this series. You're on the edge of your seat, I can tell.

Schedules

I think I'm going to try for weekly postings here. I'm not sure I'll be able to swing more than that with work and all. Otherwise, every one of my weekdays will look like this: Wake-Work-Cook-Blog-Sleep. Yeah, yeah, I know sometimes I could write while I'm at work, but I don't want to make that a regular practice until I host my own site and the advertising money starts rolling in. That way if they fire me for wasting company resoources, I'll have a fall-back.

I finally disected that duck last night. I'll post details over the weekend, provided the pictures came out. I'll be making stock (or perhaps soup) and rendering the fat for confit, too. Hell, maybe I'll even make confit. Stay tuned!

Stocking up

Last night, the tribe warmed its collective belly to a steamy, cheese-topped crock of the finest chili in the land (the "land" being our apartment, which admittedly narrows the pack of competitors a bit). We were able to savor such a time and prep-intensive dish on a school night due to the wonders of modern refrigeration.

The plan was actually to have duck, freshly carved from the whole bird we got from Fresh Direct earlier in the week, but alas, the quacker was still frozen solid. However, my resourcefulness and forethought saved the day.

Here is the tip o' the day: Spend your free time cooking, and freeze the excess. In fact, cook in excess, so that you will have it to freeze.

Here is the situation. My wife and I (collectively "the tribe") both work in offices. We work long hours and we don't have time, usually, to spend a lot of time making dinner. However, we do not like to eat processed, pre-packaged crap, and we can not afford to eat out every night. So, since I am the first to get home, I do the cooking.

This past weekend, wifey and I went to this market in Rego Park to hunt out provisions for the week. A few months ago, we were on the hunt for an allusive Pio Pio roast chicken joint (only a legend to me, but my wife has described the savory bliss), when we stumbled across an Asian grocer and fishmonger. Now, NYers are no strangers to these kinds of places. We used to live in Brooklyn, and would make the quick trek to Chinatown on the weekends to pick up a stock of seafood and produce, but since our move to Queens, we haven't had such pleasures.

I know, I know, Flushing is the largest Chinatown outside of Chinatown, but it just isn't that easy from where we are.

Anyways, we ran across this shop, and decided to go in because the only words on the sign that were in English were "fish" and "shrimp." (We love seafood, BTW). Inside we discovered paradise.

Now, I've been to places with better selection, but this stuff was about as fresh as it comes. The first thing I noticed as we walked through the doors was the smell. Not the standard fishy, Chinatown-fishmonger-in-the-afternoon-sun smell, but instead, the smell that one normally associates with the aquarium or a pet store that specializes in tropical fish. In fact, that was quite the same impression that an initial glance around the store would convey. When we walked in the store, we were immediately faced with a stack of tanks holding the most exciting of Neptune's bounty, Dungeness Crabs!! Also, Lobster (2.5 pounders, no little crayfish here), live striped bass, tilapia, and eel. The stack of tanks seemed an appropriate introduction to the display that lay beyond. First, fillets (the standards, salmon, cod, snapper; then whole fish (pompano, kingfish, fluke); shellfish (sea scallops, shrimp, clams); the list goes on, but as I said, it was not the selection that was impressive, it was the quality. When I came out of my blissful stupor long enough to look around a bit, I noticed that the entire monger table was set above another tank, packed to capacity with giant carp (I'm not a fan of the fish, but the sheer quantity of carp present in the store was impressive). This is only the start. There are groceries and a meat counter, too. More about this later. For now, I'll try to get to the point.

To top the discovery, we found this impressive produce market, right next door to the fish place!! One stop shopping! This beats the hell out of Trader Joe's any day!! (not to mention that that the shelves weren't crowded with prepackaged crap, and the aisles weren't crowded with useless slobs who couldn't cook their way out of a wet paper bag -- try a little, people. More on this later, too)

What the hell does any of this have to do with chili, you ask? Well, the point of the story is that, last weekend, we walked down to those Rego Park markets to pick up provisions, with the thought in mind that we would cook a load of food so we wouldn't have to spend every day after work cooking until 10pm. (As I said, we have day jobs, usually work until 7, and still have to commute home to Queens). Soooo, we picked up all the fixin's to make a cozy-warm pot o' chili.

My chili is pretty basic. I don't measure anything. The real trick to good chili is to give it some depth. I do this by making sure the beef is browned before adding the onion and garlic, and by browning the garlic and onions before adding the other veggies. I also use the juice from the canned beans, which I've seen some people throw this out - what a waste. No real recipe here. Just toss it all in the pot and cook it reeeaallly sllloowwlly until it falls apart. I don't mind if it starts to brown on the bottom of the pot a bit. It gives the chili a nice smoky flavor (I'm not saying to go away for the weekend with chili on the stove, but you don't have to stir it constantly). I add chili powder, cumin, paprika, cayenne, and S&P to season it. That's it.

The real point here is to make enough to be able to freeze some for later. I make enough so that I can freeze about three meals-worth. I come home from work, throw the frozen chili in a pot to heat it up, shred some cheese, and we are ready for action. My wife likes rice with her chili, so I always make a pot of rice, too. Total cooking time after work is about 20 mins.

So, to sum it up, I spend time when I have it so the tribe stays happy all week.

The Point.

No, it's not about guns and bows and Bowie knives.

Mankind's beastly instinct to hunt for survival is left to languish in the modern world. No longer is it necessary to risk peril to overpower the deadly Bos taurus so that your family can survive the winter. Modern processors can reduce the beast to a pile of frozen 4 oz. coasters in a matter of seconds without a fight. No longer is the tribe satisfied if you drag home a bloody buffalo carcass (unless it is smoked and slathered in BBQ sauce). We are forced to refine those primal compulsions to assist us in seeking out cullinary delights that will satisfy the advanced tastes of our modern tribe. In contribution to that end, I post my exploits here.