Snow Day Cassoulet

We had our first real snowfall of the season last weekend, a half a foot of light, fluffy splendor that transformed the landscape overnight.  And with that snow came the first serious cold of the winter, bringing a definitive end to what had been a long, lingering, quite lovely autumn.  We had the woodstove blazing 24/7, and thoughts immediately turned to warm, filling, savory comfort cooking.  For me, nothing epitomizes that more than a fragrant, crusty and rich cassoulet.

Whether in the iconic brown pot of New England baked beans crowned with a square of salt pork, a French cassoulet rich with pork rind and lard fume, or Cajun red beans and rice simmered with ham hocks and sausage, dried beans and pork products go together like, well, pork and beans.  It’s one of those elementally satisfying combinations.  I love almost all iterations of this classic partnership, from humble baked beans from a can up to an elaborately garnished, ceremoniously presented cassoulet.  But the cassoulet holds a special place in my heart, being so very…gallic, as well as delicious.

In my younger days I would happily spend two or three days making a cassoulet that called for pork, pork rind, pork fat, salt pork, and sausage, along with a couple pounds of lamb and a whole duck.  It was a mammoth production, incredibly rich, delicious, and festive—and I’ll probably never make it again.  In some ways, at least as far as the meats were concerned, that particular cassoulet favored quantity over quality, since with so many different proteins in play it’s extremely difficult to get everything to turn out right.  And frankly, at this point in my life, the thought of contending with lamb, duck, pork, and sausage, all on one plate, leaves me feeling slightly bilious, and exhausted.

The cassoulet I make nowadays—and I make it a few times from fall through early spring—is a streamlined version, well garnished with savory pork, perhaps a leg of duck confit, but much less meat-centric than many.  The thing is, I really like beans, and I consider it the mark of a really good and thoughtful cook to be able to produce a cassoulet in which the luxuriously coddled beans draw as much praise as the meats.  Though streamlined, this is not a recipe to throw together for a quickie weeknight dinner (for that, make a big batch and savor the leftovers).  But it can easily be accomplished in a single day—get the time-consuming pre-simmering of the beans started after breakfast, and you’ll not be rushed to pull the crusty, fragrant, unctuous final product out of the oven at dinner time.

One key element of the streamlining is that I don’t soak the beans overnight, as so many recipes for dried beans suggest.  The reason I’ve omitted this step is simple:  it is completely unnecessary.  What I do, instead, is to parboil the beans for 10 minutes, drain them, discarding the cooking liquid, and then begin cooking them again, more slowly, with lots of aromatics.  Parcooking the beans and dumping the first water also helps to minimize the digestive difficulties that beans, “the musical fruit,” can produce.  Now that we’ve saved 12 to 16 hours, as well as potential social embarrassment, let’s get on with it….

There are beans under there, ready to simmer.

The key to a great cassoulet, as with many bean dishes, and long-simmered or braised dishes in general, is to use loads of aromatic vegetables.  I tend to think that back in the day cassoulet was sustenance food in which relatively small amounts of very flavorful meats were used to garnish and enrich a dish predominantly composed of vegetables.  Lately cassoulet has become a standard winter addition to the menus of many gallic-inflected restaurants, and the dish there presented is often more of a meat-fest than an exaltation of the humble, but delicious, nourishing, and versatile haricot sec.  (There was a recipe for the cassoulet from St Paul’s Heartland restaurant going around last winter; it called for roughly nine pounds of meat to garnish one pound of dried beans, and I just thought, woof, that is not my idea of a cassoulet.)

Bacon and pork shoulder browning.

And anyway, cassoulet is not a restaurant dish.  It’s a dish you want to soak in all day, luxuriate in the aromas of simmering duck confit, fall into the warm embrace of vegetables turning soft and yielding in lovely bacon drippings.  On a snowy winter day you want to get your beans simmering and then go for a brisk walk—or shovel the first real snowfall, as we had the opportunity to do this past weekend.  Then when you come back in, oh, the smell!  The warmth of the house and kitchen!  The anticipation of tucking in, come dinner time, to such satisfying food!  Yes, cassoulet is not just a dish, but an experience.  It requires a few steps, but none of it is difficult.

Roast pork shoulder rests amid yummy drippings.

 As to the meats I use in my cassoulet:  bacon is essential.  I always have a hunk of home-smoked bacon in the fridge and/or freezer, but good quality slab bacon is widely available now.  Take the time to procure some good, naturally smoked bacon—it’s one of the flavor backbones of this dish.  I also often add a piece of pork shoulder that I’ve either smoked or roasted.  In either case, I set it to macerate overnight with a rub of salt, pepper, and maple syrup.  Details below.  And finally, for the last half hour of baking, I’ll nestle into the beans either 1) a couple of legs of duck confit that I have previously set in a skillet to crisp the skin and warm the meat, or 2) some good smoked sausage, also browned in a separate skillet before adding to the beans.  You could add both, but then things are getting a little meatier than I like.  But—you could skip the pork shoulder and do confit and sausage.  That would be delightful.  
 

Ready for the oven.

Whatever meaty things you choose to garnish your cassoulet is up to you.  The main thing is the beans, unctuous, savory, yielding. You could do without added meat altogether, frankly—the basic beans with some crusty warm bread, a glass of red wine, a salad, this would make a lovely repast.  It could, I dare say, even be made vegetarian, with the addition of some extra vegetables into the mix, and perhaps something like dried porcini mushrooms or morels to give it added depth and umami.  I tasted a very good vegetarian cassoulet once, prepared by my friend, the chef Roger Payne.  

But hey, you know, those beans aren’t going to cook themselves.  Allons-y…

While not the most photogenic of dishes, cassoulet is soul-satisfying fare.

A Snow Day Cassoulet

Serves at least six

For the pork shoulder:

1 pound pork shoulder

2 teaspoons salt

1 ½ tablespoons maple syrup

Black pepper from the mill

2 tablespoons oil, bacon fat, or fat from duck confit

You need to start this at least the night before you plan to make your cassoulet, but it can be made several days in advance.  Rub the pork with the maple syrup and then sprinkle on the salt on all sides.  Give all surfaces a generous grinding of black pepper.  Cover and let stand in the fridge overnight, or longer.  Turn it a couple times during this time if you think of it.

The next day, heat your oven to 325 degrees.  Blot the meat off with paper towels and discard any liquid that has gathered.  Put the pork in a small baking dish (I use an oval ceramic gratin to both macerate and roast) along with the oil or fat.  Roast the pork for 2 hours, or until it is nicely browned.  Turn every 30 minutes or so to promote even browning.  Remove from the oven and set aside.  Be sure to keep the fat and drippings remaining in the baking dish.  We’ll add these to the cassoulet later.

1 pound great northern beans (I've also made cassoulet with cranberry beans; many dried beans would work. I think navy beans are too small.)

¾ cup chopped light green leek tops

1 small shallot, chopped (or use a bit of onion)

1 small carrot, chopped

1 clove garlic, crushed

1 small dried red chile, optional

2 whole cloves

½ teaspoon whole black peppercorns

1 or 2 bay leaves

3-4 sprigs fresh thyme, or ½ teaspoon dried

¾ teaspoon salt

Rinse the beans well and sort through them to remove any debris or stones (nothing ruins a lovely meal like biting into a rock).  In a large saucepan, add the beans and water to cover by at last an inch.  Bring to a boil, turn down to a simmer, and simmer for 10 minutes.  Turn off the heat, cover the pan, and let the beans sit for another 10 minutes.  Drain the beans, discarding the first cooking liquid.  Return the beans to the saucepan along with all the vegetables, spices, herbs above EXCEPT THE SALT.  Again add water to cover by an inch or so, bring to a boil, then simmer for 30 minutes.  Now add the salt and simmer for 30 minutes more.  Check the doneness—you want the beans to be cooked through.  Some may be even falling apart, a few may be al dente still, but overall you want the beans to be DONE at this point.

Set the beans aside when they’re cooked to your preference.  DO NOT DRAIN.

For the final assembly:

4 to 5 ounces good slab bacon, in ¾-inch squares, more or less

1 tablespoon oil or confit fat

1 small leek—about 1” in diameter—chopped

1 small onion, chopped

1 small carrot, chopped

3 cloves garlic, crushed and chopped

½ cup canned tomatoes, chopped

3 to 4 sprigs fresh thyme or ½ teaspoon dried

Salt and freshly ground pepper

¾ cup fresh breadcrumbs

Duck confit or smoked sausage, optional—I would allow one confit portion, thigh or drumstick, or about three ounces of sausage per person

Heat your oven to 325.  Cut the pork shoulder you previously roasted into 4 pieces.  Heat a large dutch oven (enameled cast iron is ideal) over medium-low heat and add the bacon.  As it starts to render its fat, add the pork shoulder, and get it nice and brown while the bacon cooks.  When the bacon and pork shoulder are nicely brown, remove from the pan.  Remove excess fat from the pan, leaving about 2 tablespoons.  Add the leek, onion, and carrot, and cook these over medium heat until they are well wilted.  Add the garlic and cook for another minute, stirring, then add the tomatoes.  Cook, stirring constantly, until the tomatoes have given up all their moisture and even begun to brown a bit.  Then return the beans and their cooking liquid to the pan (if you happen to notice the whole cloves or the now leafless thyme twigs, take those out).  The liquid should cover the beans by a half-inch or so.  If it does not, add water or stock to that level.  

Add the bacon and pork shoulder to the pan, along with a couple more sprigs of thyme and a few grinds of black pepper.  Taste the liquid for salt and add a bit of salt if it seems under-seasoned, but note that it will take up some of the salt from the bacon and pork as it bakes, so go easy.  If you’ve saved the drippings from roasting the pork shoulder, scrape these into the beans, as well.  Bake uncovered for 1 ½ hours, stirring every half hour or so.  Cooking time varies a lot from one batch of dried beans to the next, so when the cassoulet is done is a bit of a judgment call.  They’re done when they have taken up most of the liquid and are very tender, but still holding their shape—well, a good part of them, anyway; some will certainly have collapsed, and that’s fine.  You want the beans to be a little bit liquid when you declare them done, as they’ll thicken as they cool.  You can take the cassoulet to this nearly done stage a few hours to a few days before you want to serve it—it reheats very nicely.

About 30 minutes before you want to serve the cassoulet, tuck the duck confit or sausage that you’ve crisped/browned into the beans.  Then toss the breadcrumbs with a tablespoon or so of fat or oil, and stir well to moisten them evenly.  Sprinkle the crumbs evenly over the top of the cassoulet and bake for 20 to 30 minutes, until the crumbs are brown.  If you have convection in your oven, this is a good use for it.

Serve hot from the oven.  Make sure everyone gets a portion of the various meats.  Serve with crunchy, warm country bread and a deep red wine—I would go for a Bordeaux, Cahors, Cotes de Rhone, or Rioja.

 

Text and photos copyright 2016 by Brett Laidlaw

Season of the Ramp

It’s always a lovely thing to make that first foray to southeastern Minnesota trout waters in mid-April, for many reasons.  The drive south is exhilarating, as I cross tiny Hay Creek at the corner of our property and then trace the southward route of its flow that begins in springs just up the valley from us.  It finds its way to the Red Cedar River, and that pours into the broad, meandering Chippewa, a mighty waterway of this region.  The Chipp is wide, and in springtime often muddy and roiling, when it reaches the Mississippi; impressive as the Chippewa can be, it is shown its place by the Father of Waters, moving majestically, escorted by swans, gulls, and eagles, through the grand castellations of limestone bluffs.

Once across the Mighty One and into Minnesota, I now proceed against the flow, up the Whitewater and tributaries thereof, to fish more intimate water.  This modest journey is a compelling reminder of how hydrology and geology shape our lives in these parts, and the circular nature of a raindrop’s path from northern Dunn County to the sea, perhaps one day to be deposited back where it started, is appropriate to the beginning of another cycle of seasons—the beginning as we think of it here, as winter’s cold static grip is broken, and things again begin to flow, and grow.

And then, of course, it is delightful to get the wading boots wet again, string up the rod, tie on a fly, try to catch a fish.  Early season fishing is usually good, except when it’s not.  Or better to say:  the fishing is always good, but the catching may vary.

Something more certain than whether there will be fish in the creel on the homeward trip is the likelihood of taking home tasty greens.  Watercress springs are a pretty sure bet, and even when winter has been annoyingly persistent I’ve always managed to bring home at least a few decent sized ramps on that first outing, usually a few days past tax time.  It will be another couple of weeks, at least, before they’ve reached picking size in my local woods; that hour-plus drive south is a fast-forward through the season, as well.

I first became aware of ramps along a Wisconsin river maybe 20 years ago, and I’ve harvested them every year since.  Some years I’ve become tired of eating them before their season is out; some years I’ve grown jaded by the hype that has come to surround them in foodie circles.  This year, perhaps more than any other, I’ve simply embraced ramps for the seasonal delight that they are, and I’ve been eating them pretty much every day.  I haven’t really come up with any stunning new preparations of what is, really, just a wild onion, but I’ve explored its versatility by treating it as a commonplace, rather than an exotic, ingredient.

Rice bowl with brook trout, ramps, asparagus, pheasant back mushroom.

I’ve put ramps on pizza, into salad dressings, chopped into a soy-based sauce that anointed a rice bowl meal, and stir-fried for the same.  I made my chile-cheddar spread with ramps instead of onion, and slapped my head when it occurred to me I could have done that with the recipe in my book.  The ramp-infused version of that pimiento cheese variation is outstanding.  I’ve added them to a potato soufflé also   laced with chopped wood nettles, and used them to flavor a birch syrup cure for duck breast that I smoked using wild black cherry wood.

Cherry wood smoked duck magret, cured in birch syrup & ramps; bracken fiddleheads.

I made a bearnasie sauce where ramps stood in for the usual shallots, and ramp-roasted brown trout served with schupfnudeln fried with ramps and bacon, and the ramped up remoulade I wrote about recently.  Whole lotta rampin’ goin’ on….

Grilled herring with "rampearnaise;" the sauce was second-day salvage & broke a bit. Still delicious.

And still, I just want to keep eating ramps.  Maybe with age my taste buds are dulling.  I would prefer to think that the great variety of ways I’ve used them is keeping the flavor fresh and intriguing.  I’ve got a bunch in the fridge still, getting a little wilted in the greens, so I think I will pickle the bulbs of those ones.  With the weather having cooled off a bit, their season in our parts should last until the end of May, at least.  We’ll see if my rampish appetite can keep up.  

Anniversary Duck

Mary and I were married on September 21, 1991, a decidedly autumnal day,  in the front yard of her mom and step-dad's house on the east river road in Minneapolis.  So our 21st anniversary--which is, what?, sort of a numerological golden anniversary?--came around this past Friday.  Contingencies of our schedules and a hurried harvest to get three wheelbarrows-full of squash out of the cold before a really hard frost meant that we didn't sit down to a properly celebratory dinner until last night.  We grilled a duck, and served it with celery root-potato purée, and chanterelles and greens (turnip and kale) cooked down in the duck's pan juices; and it was splendid.

The duck was from Bar 5 at the Minneapolis Farmers Market, and it was the perfect size for two avid duck eaters.  I cut the duck up, yep, cut the duck up into leg-thigh portions and the whole breast on the bone.  Wings and carcass were chopped and went to making duck stock.  The excess skin I sliced and put in a baking dish with water to cover, and that went into the oven to render out fat while I was cooking down a roaster pan full of oven tomatoes to freeze.

About grilling duck:  Duck being among the fattiest of meats, to grill it with that luscious skin on presents certain challenges.  Basically, you have to act as a human rotisserie:  you can never leave the grill, and as The Byrds implored us, you must turn, turn, turn.  Just a few seconds' inattention can result in a vicious flare-up that will ruin your beautiful bird.  You want a medium-hot fire for this, a good deal cooler than you would use to cook a steak or chop that only needs four or five minutes on a side, but you need a good bed of coals, too, for the duck is going to be on there for, oh, a good 15 to 20 minutes, I'd say.  I wasn't timing it; meat cookery is all about looking, touching, smelling, very little about numbers, especially when grilling.

Use the duck to prop itself up in the various postures required to brown it evenly and deeply, all around.  It won't be quite done at this point, so we use the "iron on the fire" trick of bunging it in a cast-iron skillet to finish cooking.  As I've said before, this has the added benefit of creating pan juices in which to cook the mushrooms and greens (this was such a marvelous meal, I'm getting nostalgic thinking about it, even though we ate it just last night...).

And now about those chanterelles:  I've had them in the spare fridge downstairs for two months!  I had practically forgotten about them, and then when I remembered them, I was afraid to look, fearing they would be a deliquescent pool of fungal glop.  No, indeed!  I was stunned to see what excellent condition they were in.  You could have shipped them off to market, and no one would have been the wiser (which makes me think that the chanterelles I've seen in markets in France and the Pacific northwest might indeed have been around the block a few times).  Once they warmed up they even recovered a good deal of their haunting aroma.  Fabulous.

I had two fires going to facilitate the start and the finish cooking, but by the time the duck was well browned, dark had come down, and with it a piercing chill, so we moved operations inside.  All that good, smoky grill flavor came in with the duck, anyway.  In a low oven (275, I think) we cooked the duck and chanterelles together for a while, and then removed the 'shrooms and breast, added a mess of kale and turnip greens, a ladle of rich duck stock.  The greens and legs cooked together for around 15 minutes.  Then I cranked the heat up to 425, returned the breast and chanterelles to the pan, and roasted it until the duck skin was sizzling again, and the pan juices had reduced.  After serving it all out onto plates I deglazed the pan with more stock, a splash of the wine ('08 Gigondas) we were drinking with dinner, and a wee pat of butter.

The duck was superb, and I give most of the credit for that to the bird itself, though I did do a good job cooking it.  The leg meat came off the bone almost like confit; the breast, though cooked well past the rosé stage I would look for in a magret, was also tender and flavorful.  The skin was a treat, crisp and a bit chewy, well rendered of fat.  A lot of fancy French chefs say that their philosophy of cooking is based on how their mothers and grandmothers cooked--cuisine de maman--though if you looked at their elaborate plates, you'd be hard pressed to guess that.  This dinner reminded us of that approach (it's not that we only have one mind between us, but we both expressed the same thought).  While this was not a meal of Michelin-level fussiness, it did represent a preparation that elevated humble ingredients to an ethereal height.

Duck, chanterelles, humble ingredients?  Well, yes.  In many parts of the world duck is more common, and much cheaper, than chicken, and the chanterelles, well, they're just some grubby fungi I found on the dirty forest floor.  Pot greens?  Doesn't get much humbler than that.  Many people would turn their noses up at food like this; yes, I know, you're not those people, not at all.

So, it was a happy anniversary to us.  And that celery root-potato purée?  Every time I make it, we swoon.  The recipe may be here in the blog somewhere, but it's definitely in the book, and worth the $27.95 all on its own.


Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

A Sweet Disorder

"A sweet disorder in the dress/ Kindles in clothes a wantonness" were lines that came to mind as I put together this not very composed salade composée.  It's more of a strewn salad, I suppose, though one deliberately strewn.  An artful disorder was what I was after, an arrangement of disparate bits in atypical combination, but expressing a sense of the season, what we see around us now in the meadows at Bide-A-Wee, at the market.

The poem, by the way, is by Robert Herrick, full text click here. At first I wrote "pome," an appropriate typo as there's a pome on the plate, slices of our first ripe-ish apples (whether they are crabapples or merely stunted, we can't be sure). Also blackberries, challenging to harvest, so redolent of August meadows. The taste of blackberries brings along with it the smell of crushed monarda, the hum of bumblebees.

Some meat is nice in a composed salad, and here it's smoked duck left over from that magret I smoked last weekend, sliced as thin as I could. Then beautiful little haricots verts (blanched about three minutes) from the Dallas, Wisconsin farmers market. We visited two Wisconsin countryside farmers markets last week, the Dallas market, and one in Boyceville. One had two vendors, the other just one. Dallas was the big one. And yet we came away with those beautiful beans, a bucket of tiny cucumbers that I'm turning into cornichons and sweet gherkins, ground cherries, lovely tomatoes, corn, a red cabbage, sweet onions.

We made a mellow vinaigrette for the salad, olive oil, just a splash of cider vinegar, pinch of salt, dash of honey, and I muddled a few berries into the dressing. While I'm not a fan of seeds in blackberry or raspberry jam, I actually enjoyed the crunch of the seeds in the whole berries on the salad. The apples were still quite tart but aromatic and flavorful, and combined with a bite of the smoky duck, perfect.

It's a salad that invites you to visit different parts of the plate, try different combinations--there's no prescribed way to eat it. A messy composed salad is art imitating life which imitates art, a studied disarray which "Do more bewitch me, than when art/ Is too precise in every part."

Text (except the Herrick) and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Smokey the Duck

I've been on a mission to demystify smoking since the very beginning of Trout Caviar.  I'm evangelical about it, in fact, ever since my lighbulbahaeurekacometojesus moment when I realized: "Hey, cavemen did this.  Maybe I can, too."  Now, it's nothing against cavemen (I gather they're sort of sensitive), and I'm quite certain I'd not survive an attempt to bring down a mastodon with crude weapons.  I give them lots of credit for that. I can, however, salt meat and expose it to moderate heat and smoke.  That's all home smoking entails, and it need not be an involved or mass-production type of undertaking.

Case in point, this hot-smoked duck breast I prepared out at Bide-A-Wee last weekend.  While packing food for the cabin I took my duck breast and salted it generously, at least twice the salt I would use if I were cooking it right away.  I added pepper, and sprinkled on some quatre épices. Then I rubbed a bit of maple syrup lovingly over both sides, and let the meat sit in a plastic bag for two days.

When I was ready to smoke it, I readied the elaborate smoking system we use out at the cabin. Built a fire so there were nice coals going, moved the coals to one side of the grill and added a piece of apple for aromatic smoke.

I laid the breast on the grate away from the heat.

Covered it with the custom-made "Bide-A-Wee Deluxe Smoke Catcher" (aka, the lid of a small portable grill).

Let it smoke a while. Maybe an hour.

You can imagine that we don't exactly have pinpoint control over the temperature in a set-up like this, and in fact this breast smoke-roasted a little hotter and faster than I would have hoped. But because of the cure of salt and maple syrup, the meat remained moist. It was also rich and smoky, nicely chewy, slightly gamy, exactly what I like about duck, maybe my favorite meat. At the end of the smoking/cooking, I cooked it skin-side-down over direct heat, to render some fat and crisp the skin a bit.

It did not hurt at all that the duck was served alongside a pile of very tasty rice mush: risotto with chanterelles and hedgehog mushrooms. The hedgehogs, hydnum repandum, are interesting fungi, less common than chanterelles but fruiting at the same time (obviously). They are in fact related to chanterelles in realms of fungal classification, and have a similarly enchanting aroma, sweet, so they're sometimes called "sweet tooth" mushrooms. In either case, the common name refers to the spiky spore-producing structure this mushroom has where others have gills, which resemble the spines on those twee, beloved denizens of English hedgerows.

If you're fortunate enough to find hedgehogs, remember the spot. They come back quite reliably year to year.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Why We Eat In

It is not that I am not interested in restaurants.  As with most other areas of the contemporary food scene, I take a keen interest in ambitious restaurants near and far.  I keep up on local restaurant news via the food sections of our local newspapers, and particularly through the excellent local food website, The Heavy Table.  I'm even well informed about New York restaurants--reading Sam Sifton's reviews in the  New York Times is a Wednesday happy hour ritual for me.  I follow some chefs on Twitter (David Chang of Momofuku, Rene Redzepi of Copenhagen's Noma, as well as top local, local-foods champions like Scott Pampuch ), and I admire like hell the dedication and artistry of other local chefs, like Mike Phillips--late of the Craftsman, now maitre charcutier at Green Ox Meat Co.-- and Alex Roberts of Restaurant Alma , who possesses the subtle skill and intuition to make the best of any ingredient that comes before him.

Having said all that, I must admit that I rarely eat in restaurants these days, and at the high-end gastronomic ones, hardly at all.  The photos here should help explain why.  This was a Bide-A-Wee dinner of homemade buckwheat pasta with fresh-foraged chanterelles in Cedar Summit cream , Au Bon Canard magret (the breast of fattened duck, via Clancey's) with a sauce of foraged black cap raspberries, red wine, and home-smoked bacon.  Farmers market green beans shriveled in the rendered duck fat. 

Now, I really enjoy cooking, and I think I've picked up some skill and a few bits of knowledge over the years that have made me both a more imaginative and more capable cook (which you wouldn't know from the big bandage on my left thumb right now, where I sliced off the thumb-tip with a Global chef's knife a couple of weeks ago...).  But I want to make it very clear that I do not consider my abilities to be anywhere near the level of the professionals who work the line every night.  I am very certain that if I tried to match that intense pace of cooking for even one night, I would have my sad ass handed back to me in a Cambro and run off crying for my mommy.  (Furthermore, I'm sure that my sense of food today has been formed in part by excellent restaurant meals in years past.)

What it is, it's the ingredients, the stuff we can get now, that hasn't always been available to us.  I could not have prepared this meal ten years ago--Au Bon Canard did not exist, nor did Clancey's.  The buckwheat and whole wheat bread flour in my pantry, from Whole Grain Milling, allowed me to create a pasta both rustic and elegant (and the dough skills I picked up during our Real Bread years gave me the confidence to whip up a batch of fresh noodles on short notice). 

Ten years ago I was still figuring out the fungal schedule in my local woods, and I'm sure that the whole foraging-friendly zeitgeist that has developed since then has had something to do with my continuing enthusiasm for wild foods (indeed, I don't think that Trout Caviar, Recipes from a Northern Forager would have come together in that earlier time; you can order it now at Amazon, by the way...!). 

Come to think of it, I'm not sure that Cedar Summit products were easily available ten years ago--Dave and Florence Minar were just starting to sell their superb organic dairy products at farmers markets in 2003, the same year we started Real Bread.  When they showed up for the first time at the tiny St. Luke's market where we were selling, we fell down before them in adject adulation, and cried, "We are not worthy!" 

Times have indeed changed for the better for those of  us who care what's on our plates.

I'll take some credit here for coming up with a really good buckwheat pasta formula, and an excellent sauce for the duck from a short pantry.

For the pasta I combined:

2 tablespoons buckwheat flour
1/4 cup whole wheat bread flour
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons unbleached all-purpose flour
good pinch salt
1 egg
water, about 2 tablespoons

Mix all the dry ingredients in a large bowl.  Crack the egg into the center and add a tablespoon of water.  Mix with your hand or a fork to combine.  Add additional water a tablespoon at a time if needed, but careful not to over-wet the dough; it should be fairly stiff.  Knead the dough for a couple of minutes, then let it rest, covered, for 20 to 30 minutes.  Knead again to achieve a smooth, stiff dough, then let it rest again, covered, for 20 to 30 minutes.  Divide the dough into four pieces and roll each portion out in a pasta machine, working down to the second-thinnest setting.  Let the sheets of dough dry for around an hour--I drape them on a chair back.  Then cut them into fettucini (or thickness of your choice--but I wouldn't go too thin, as the buckwheat makes them somewhat fragile) with the pasta cutter attachment.  Cook immediately, or drape them on your chair back to dry, and use within a couple of days.  Fresh or dry, the pasta will only take a minute or two to cook to al dente.

For the chanterelle cream sauce, I sautéed chanterelles in some of the duck fat left from searing the magret.  As they started to brown I added salt, pepper, and some chopped shallot and fresh thyme.  Another minute or so, then I sloshed in cream--about a half-cup--then I added the just-cooked pasta and tossed to coat.  Serve it up.

The sauce, black cap raspberry, red wine, bacon:  I was about out of chicken stock, usually the basis of my "fancy" sauces.  I had maybe a quarter-cup, two ice cubes worth, in the freezer.  But I had  bacon, the excellent home-smoked stuff .  I diced a thick slice very small, started rendering it in a small saucepan.  Add shallot, garlic, and a small not-too-hot chile, chopped fine.  As all became wilted I added my bit of stock, a slosh of red wine, and black raspberry juice, which I had made by simply  combining a generous cup of berries with water not quite to cover, bringing it to a simmer, then passing the berries through a food mill.  I reduced the sauce by half, then added salt and pepper.  I probably swirled a bit of butter in at the end, can't recall for sure.  All the flavors came together really well, and I liked the texture from the bits of bacon and vegetables.  It didn't taste like bacon--the smoky pork melded into the other flavors, and echoed the rich duck (which is practically like poultry bacon, on its own).

Just a beautiful meal, elaborate compared to how we tend to cook at Bide-A-Wee.  And while the result did show the the maker's care and imagination, I find it impossible to look at that table without recognizing that such a spread would not have been possible without the superb raw ingredients available to us now, with thanks to the people who bring them to us, not forgetting to mention the contributions of Great Nature, the great provider.  Salut.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Duck Buns, Nouveau Roots, Steamed Greens

I am very pleased with myself. This meal was one of my first attempts at Momofuku-izing my kitchen, and it turned out very, very well. Call it fusion cooking if you like. But it's not that I'm not trying to cross one thing with another; rather, I'm drawing from all my favorite influences and the best that the place and the season have to offer, all the while taking dead aim at utter appetizingness.

No, really, it was damned tasty.

Smoked duck with homemade spicy "hoisin" sauce and steamed buns.

Roasted garden carrots with mustard-maple glaze.


Roasted garden baby beets with fish sauce vinaigrette, steamed beet greens.


The smoked duck was from the charming Wemeier clan, otherwise known as Bar 5 Meat and Poultry ("Everything from feet to feathers!"). They sell at the Minneapolis and Hopkins farmers markets in the summer and fall, and at the Saint Paul Farmers market year-round. All their products are great, but the smoked duck is in a league of its own. This was actually our third meal from this bird: we had the legs and a few breast slices with braised red cabbage and spaetzle, sandwiches of sliced breast meat topped with leftover cabbage, and I picked the carcass clean for this dinner.

The steamed buns: I used a standard "flower bun" recipe like this one, omitting the scallions and the fancy shaping. Here's the Momofuku version. This whole Internet-Google deal is just amazing....


The sauce: I was going to thin some hoisin sauce from a jar, but found I was out of hoisin sauce. In a mini food processor I combined some broad bean chili paste, some dark soy sauce, some maple syrup, and a splash of water. Whizzed till it was all puréed and a bit emulsified--who needs hoisin?

The beets were "baby" red and gold beets from our garden. In reality they were full-season, stunted beets; I'm not so good at thinning my vegetable garden. But no matter, they were sweet and tender after enduring many a frost. I roasted them, covered, in a Pyrex dish at 375 for about 40 minutes.


The tender tiny beet "greens"--really reds and golds--I placed in a bowl and steamed in my bamboo steamer, since I had it out for the buns.

I tossed both the beets and greens with Momofuku's fish sauce vinaigrette. (This recipe writing is a snap when you can just cop someone else's stuff. And by "cop" I of course mean, "pay homage to.")

Well, I do take credit for the carrots, which were made this way:

Roast Baby Carrots with Maple-Mustard Glaze

2 cups baby carrots, scrubbed (mine weighed 9 ounces)
1 1/2 Tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp canola or grapeseed oil
pinch of salt, grind of pepper

Combine all the above in a gratin dish or small baking dish. Roast, uncovered, at 375 for 45 minutes, until they become a little brown and glazy. Stir them every 15 minutes during this time.

Remove from the oven and add:

1 rounded tsp grain mustard
1/8 tsp piment d'espelette, or a good pinch of cayenne (optional)
1 tsp red wine vinegar

Add another grind of pepper, taste for salt. Serve warm or at room temp.

I don't think I ever saw a beet when I was in China, and though there were carrots, they were never served roasted, as most Chinese homes lack an oven. But the beets took nicely to that Asian "vinaigrette," (Momofuku chef Tien Ho refers to it as "Vietnamese ketchup"), and the carrots glazed with maple syrup, punched up with mustard and vinegar, had a subtle, earthy, sweet & sour quality.

We opened a bottle of Viking Brewing Company's "mjod,", a sort of malted mead, made by our Wisconsin neighbors Randy and Ann Lee in Dallas, WI. Skol, gan bei, bottom's up, and bon appetit.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Two Birds at Bide-A-Wee (Part One: Duck Breast, Haw Sauce, Celery Root Fries)

As much as I love cooking over an open fire--grilling over hardwood coals, smoking or smoke-roasting with apple and oak--it is also extremely pleasant to move indoors as the weather cools, fire the woodstove, heat the cast iron skillet, and listen to dinner softly sizzle or simmer while we sip an apertif by candlelight (which is both wonderfully romantic and entirely necessary, as we have no electricity at Bide-A-Wee). With all the gadgetry in the modern kitchen, and the widespread misconception that more expensive equipment will make you a better cook (and your life, therefore, complete), it's a particular pleasure to be able to turn out wonderful seasonal meals from a hunk of black iron sitting on a hot metal box. This time out, it's duck breast with haw sauce served on fried polenta with celery root fries and fillet beans. Next time, pan-roasted grouse with cider cream sauce, fingerling pototoes, red cabbage.

I've mentioned my fascination with the hawthorn tree, and with its fruit, the haw or hawberry. Hawthorn grow wild and profusely on our land in Wisconsin. Here above you see the haw, and the thorn. Wicked thorns. You want to be careful if you find yourself in the midst of a hawthorn thicket. The shrike, the only carnivorous songbird, sometimes impales its prey, small rodents and other birds, on the thorns of hawthorn. A perching bird, it doesn't have the raptor's claws to hold and tear apart its meal, so uses the thorn like a fork, its beak the steak knife. It has earned the nickname "Butcher Bird." (We saw a northern shrike take a vole from under our bird feeder last winter; a remarkable thing to see.)

There are lots of types of hawthorns. Some seem to make little or no fruit, and some bear pomes no bigger than a blueberry, and the best for eating that we have found carry bright red fruit that closely resemble rosehips, and indeed roses and hawthorns both belong to the botanical family rosaceae--apples are in there, too. Hawthorn trees are disctintive in the landscape, small and gnarled, the trunks and branches often colored with lichen. Those thorns set them apart from small, wild, seedling apple trees or wild plums. In late fall and into winter, they often hold their bright red fruit, and the contrast between those cheery berries and the tortured shapes of the trees is striking--a tormented artist who paints serene and beautiful canvasses.

That's our 3 3/4-year-old griffon Lily giving scale to a hawthorn tree with nice fruit. You have to taste around to find nice hawthorn fruit, and you have to use your imagination. Even the nice, plump haws that we have found are mostly skin and seeds, and what flesh there is is rather pulpy and dry. These are not for eating out of hand, though you could probably survive on them if you had to.


But when you cook them in water for a rather long time they soften, and then you can push the mash through a seive, and you wind up with a good amount of fragrant mush, slightly sweet, with an aroma that's somewhere in the midst of vegetable, fruit, and roses. You can sweeten that to make a simple jam. In Britain hawthorn jelly is well known.

Those are nannyberries with haws, above. I sometimes fall into the lazy shorthand of describing the flavor of a wild food as "wild," and while that characterization is no doubt literally true, it also strikes me as close to meaningless. A mushroom, a berry, a game bird, a trout, all are wild, and may be said to taste "wild," but what does that mean, for each type of food, and do they share anything in common, all being wild? And then, on further consideration, I think that there is something valid there, as long as it is further qualified. In fact, all those things do taste wild, in that they have a flavor very different from their domestic counterparts. If you've ever picked wild blueberries from the top of a lichen-covered rock in northern Minnesota, Canada, or wherever those wild wonders grow, and compare their sun-warmed flavor with the bloated, bland, watery farmed type, I think you'll see what I mean.

When a wild food is domesticated, it is bred to emphasize certain characteristics, to eliminate others. Sometimes the favored characteristics are good ones--like sweetness or juiciness in fruit--and sometimes they are merely convenient--pickability, shipability, shelf life. And sometimes the characteristics that are selected out--well, rightfully so, one might say. There's often a slight or even a pronounced astringency to wild fruit that we rarely find in farmed fruit today. There is also, I would say, a much broader range of flavors than we are accustomed too, and it may take a bit of tasting to become so. Some will find it not worth it, but if you're a regular reader of these pages, I imagine you would want to try.

Start tasting haws in mid-September, and when you find they've acquired some flavor--some sweetness, some perfume--pick a good cup or so. They seem to improve with a frost, and the fruits stay on the trees long after the leaves have fallen.

Rinse the haws and remove any stems. Add three cups water, bring to a boil, slowly simmer, covered, for about 45 minutes. The haws may still look quite intact at this point, but if you press them they should yield, skin splitting, pulp emerging. Keep some of the water, which has quite a bit of flavor, and will help as you sieve the pulp. Just dump the berries and some water into a wire mesh sieve, and press with the back of a spoon. The juicy stuff with come right out, and with a little more pushing, the pulpy stuff will follow. Soon you'll have nothing but dry seeds and skin in the sieve. Be sure to scrape the last of the pulp from the outside of the sieve.

Now I realize this has been more about the berries than the bird, but everyone knows what a duck breast is, and how many have tried haws? But, on with the bird: You've got a nice fat magret de canard. That's the breast of a fattened duck raised for foie gras--ours from Au Bon Canard and Clancey's. These things usually weigh 12 ounces or better, so for us, one feeds two. You may have to look around, or use both breasts from a regular-size duck.

I have heated my cast iron skillet on the Haggis (our pet name for our woodstove; I know...), and I've cross-hatched the skin of the duck with a sharp knife or razor--just cut a titch down into the fat, not reaching the meat--to let the fat flow forth as it cooks. I cook it slowly, skin side down most of the time. As the fat flows forth I add to the pan about a half a celery root trimmed and cut into french fry shape, and also a handful of fillet beans, last of the season from the market, and absolutely wonderful. Now everything sizzles away in duck fat. Meanwhile:

On the propane camp stove my sauce is making. It's a generous half-cup each of chicken stock and dry red wine, which I reduce by half, to which I then add about three tablespoons of haw purée and a tablespoon of maple syrup, a grind or two of pepper, couple pinches salt, taste for seasoning. Simmer very quietly as the duck rests.

I have pan-fried some slices of set-up polenta. I finish my sauce with a knob of butter (I would call that a tablespoon and a half...). We find the magret properly rosé. We find in the celery root and beans a splendid counterplay of late-fall flavors. We find that haw sauce is something unique and delicious, and an excellent partner to the rich, savory duck in all ways--in its mild sweetness, its fragrance, and even in that lingering astringency. We find that we are happy campers, delighted to have made the acquantance of the haw.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw