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.  

A Superior Supper

This was a sort of herring-inspired tapas supper, if you will, or perhaps smorgasbord would be more appropriate to northern provenance of the fish, and the Nordic twist I administered to a classic French preparation, fish quenelles.  Whatever you want to call it, a superior supper, indeed.

Quenelles de brochet, pike dumplings, is a standard in the cuisine of Burgundy and the northern Rhone.  Like most dumplings, it probably had humble origins--a way to use up bits of fish for the dumplings and the bones for the sauce.  But most of the quenelles recipes I'd encountered were from the haute cuisine end of things, exceedingly rich and fussy to make.  In these high-end versions, the fish was there to hold as much butter, cream, and eggs as possible.  The traditional lobster, shrimp, or crayfish sauce that anointed these ethereal pillows of poisson does not scrimp on the fat, either.  Which is okay with me, from time to time, but since we planned to sample a variety of dishes, I didn't want that much richness in the quenelles.

This was a preparation that had intimidated me for a long time--well, until last week, to be honest.  It seemed to have the potential to be phenomenally delicious, but the one time I tasted it in France, the dumplings were kind of rubbery, and fishy tasting, and the one time I tried to make it at home, following a New York Times recipe, was an expensive, extremely messy disaster--turned out the recipe in the paper was wrong, and my email prompted a correction, which was very small consolation, indeed.  I never made the corrected recipe.

I'm not sure what prompted me to try fish quenelles again--perhaps just to test the versatility of my splendidly fresh herring.  In one of Rick Stein's books I found the streamlined quenelle recipe I'd long been looking for.  This one used bread soaked in milk--a "panade"--to hold things together without too much butterfat.  Also, unlike every other quenelle recipe I had encountered, it did not ask you to push the fish paste through a sieve (how appetizing does that sound?!).  Before the days of the food processor, sieving the puree was probably necessary to achieve a smooth texture in the dumplings; modern technology has eliminated the need for that step, but a lot of French recipes have not caught up.  (Madeleine Kammen notes that she could never forget learning to make quenelles, pounding the fish in a mortar and pestle; she was always reminded by the painful bursitis in her shoulder....)

Although rich, most classic quenelle preparations make a dumpling that must be pretty bland.  There is rarely any seasoning besides salt and perhaps a bit of white pepper.  I wanted my dumplings to be flavorful independent of rich sauce, so I gave them strong, northern notes with apple cider vinegar, grain mustard, and shallot (and a nod to Mme Kammen with the pinch of quatre-épices, "confit spice," that I learned from one of her books; I have a tin of that in my spice drawer at all times).

Carrying on the Nordic theme, my chowder sauce is heavy on the hardy roots--rutabaga, parsnip, and celery root.  I toned down the smokiness of the bacon by first water-blanching the meat.  The sour cream and lemon added at the end of cooking gives this sauce a nice acid lift; it would be a bit flat without it.

Do not worry if you don't have herring caviar.  A garnish of chopped herbs would be nice, too--some snipped chives, perhaps, or a little dill.  I think thyme leaves would suit it, too.


While I was roasting my potato slices in duck fat for the caviar canapé, I added the "tails" of the parsnip and rutabaga, sliced in half the long way.  They made for a charismatic, savory garnish, and a very rustic-looking counterpoint to the elegant dumplings and roe.

For the other dishes in our Nordic tapas spread, Mary mixed leftover broiled herring with its homemade chile mayo accompaniment for a lovely canapé served on toast:

I combined smoked whitefish, apple, and roasted beets in a dressing of Smude sunflower oil, cider vinegar, some honey, about a quarter teaspoon of mustard seeds and a generous pinch each of caraway and cumin seeds, some shallot, I think.  A bit of a mess in the plate, but fresh and flavorful:

And then those luxurious rounds of duck-fat-roasted potatoes with sour cream and a liberal topping of the herring roe, home-cured:

I think we're going to start seeing more and more chefs exploring the possibilities of Lake Superior herring.  Anybody out there need a menu consultant?  I'm available....

Herring Quenelles with Nordic Chowder and Caviar

6 ounces skinless, boneless Lake Superior herring

1 tablespoon minced shallots

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

½ cup fresh bread crumbs

1/3 cup whole milk

1 teaspoon grain mustard

1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar

Pinch confit spice

1 egg

3/8 teaspoon salt

A few grinds of black pepper

2 tablespoons sour cream mixed with ¼ cup cream

Melt the butter in a small saucepan and add the shallots.  Just as the butter starts to sizzle, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the bread crumbs, then the milk.  Refrigerate until well chilled.

Cut or scrape away the line of brown-gray fat running down the herring fillets and discard.  Cut the fish into ½-inch cubes and place in the bowl of a food processer with the bread-shallot-milk mixture, the mustard, vinegar, confit spice, egg, salt, and pepper.  Process to a  very smooth puree, about 2 minutes.   Then, with the processor running, add the cream mixture and process just long enough to incorporate.  Refrigerate this mixture until you’re ready to make your quenelles.

Bring a saucepan of water to a simmer.

Using two kitchen tablespoons, shape quenelles, little football shapes, from the fish mixture.  They should be about 2 ½ inches long and just over an inch wide.  Poach the quenelles in the water, adjusting the heat to keep a gentle simmer, for 3 to 4 minutes, until they are firm.  Keep warm in a warm oven until ready to serve.

Root Vegetable Chowder

2 tablespoons each celery root, rutabaga, parsnip, and onion, in very small—less than ¼-inch—dice

1 ounce slab bacon, blanched in boiling water for 2 minutes, drained and minced

1 teaspoon butter or oil

2 teaspoons flour

½ cup fish, chicken, or vegetable stock

½ cup whole milk

Salt and pepper

2 tablespoons sour cream

Lemon juice

Herring caviar

Heat the bacon and butter in a small saucepan over medium heat, and as the bacon begins to render fat, add the vegetables.  Cook for about 3 minutes, until the onion becomes translucent.  Sprinkle the flour over the vegetables, stirring with a wooden spatula.  Combine the stock and milk and slowly add to the pan, scraping with the spatula to deglaze.  Add a couple of good pinches of salt and a few grinds of pepper.  Simmer for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. 

The chowder can be made two or three days ahead to this stage, and finished just before serving.  When you’re ready to serve, heat the chowder and stir in the sour cream and a squeeze or two of lemon juice, if you like.  Taste for salt and pepper and add more if needed.  Ladle some chowder into shallow soup bowls, place the warm quenelles atop the chowder.  Sprinkle herring caviar here and there on top of the chowder and the quenelles.  Serve.

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Fresh

Having stooped to the depths of writing about avocadoes in this journal supposedly devoted to northern foods, it was probably in everyone’s best interests that I took a little break. The hiatus was not planned, just happened, as each time I considered a possible topic for a post, my inner editor said, “Meh.” I needed some fresh inspiration, and I got it from a road trip that Mary and I took up to the South Shore of Lake Superior (aka “The Cheesehead Riviera”; I just made that up...), destination Halvorson’s Fisheries in Cornucopia, Wisconsin.

There we watched the herring boats come in on a chill but beautiful afternoon. They had to break through a couple of inches of ice in the harbor—the trip was a preview of things to come, too, as our northward drive took us from the dusting of Dunn County snow to nearly a foot along the shore. We loaded a cooler with fresh off the boat herring—including several whole fish that yielded a pile of roe—along with smoked lake trout and whitefish. 

Lake Superior herring is an under-appreciated, misunderstood fish.  Its reputation suffers, I think, from its being confused with other fish known as herring to which it is not, in fact, closely related. The Lake Superior herring, Coregonus artedii, is more closely related to trout and salmon than it is to the saltwater herrings so well known in northern Europe. It’s a reasonable surmise that Scandinavian and German immigrants in the northland mistook this freshwater fish that schools in vast numbers for the ocean fish they knew from home—there are, indeed, superficial resemblances in size and color. And when you consider that for many people, their main association with herring is with the pickled variety, perhaps of indifferent quality, there’s a general reluctance to embrace the lake herring as the superb and versatile food fish that it is.

 As for the name confusion, lake herring is variously known as cisco, bluefin, and, where it occurs in smaller lakes, tullibee. There have been efforts in some circles to “rebrand” lake herring as cisco, but I doubt that is likely to gain much momentum—especially since I’ve seen smoked herring and smoked cisco resting side by side in the cooler case in lakeside fish shops over the years. There’s little consensus on what to call what, it seems, at least at the local level.  So I don't think the term herring is going away.  We just need to work on spreading the word about what a delightful fish it is to cook with.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve prepared herring in a half dozen ways, and I’m still not tired of eating it. Last night a herring fillet went into a Sichuan-inspired dish with fermented vegetables and tofu in a hot bean sauce. On the our first night back from Corny, I simply fried fillets in a cornmeal dusting and served them with a crunchy, savory garnish of fried bacon, leek, and jalapeno, with a splash of apple cider beurre blanc. Other nights I fried chunks in a tempura-like batter for the best fish tacos I’ve ever eaten; broiled it and served it with a chile-laced mayonnaise; whizzed it up in the FP to make herring quenelles, fish dumplings that I served in a chowder-inspired sauce; and we snacked on the salted herring roe atop rounds of garden potatoes roasted in duck fat, with a dollop of sour cream.

That roe, by the way, is where the real money is for the Lake Superior commercial fisheries, Maureen Halvorson told me. Completing the ironic herring circle, it is shipped to Scandinavia, where it is considered a delicacy—even though it comes from a fish that does not exist anywhere near those northern European shores.

Here are a few more shots from our quick, fishy trip to Corny:

The beach at Corny, "The Cheesehead Riviera"

Cornmeal-dusted pan-fried lake herring with crunchy garnish, cider beurre blanc

It just occurred to me on this trip that they wear orange jumpsuits so they'll be easy to see if they fall overboard....

This was not the first time the three-hour drive to the South Shore was a time trip--that short distance often takes you to another season on the shore.

Waiting for the herring boats

Ice on the deck

The South Shore herring fishery is thriving; Halvorson's added another boat this year, bringing the fleet to four.

"...in the rooms of her icewater mansions...".

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Escabeche, A Pretty Little Pickle

We're safely past the midpoint of February, and the big thaw continues. I'm hoping to be able to pluck the first wild watercress of the year this weekend, and getting some seeds started--for leeks, head lettuces, cabbage--may be optimistic, but not out of the question.

The root cellar continues to provide carrots, squash, potatoes, parsnips, leeks; from the freezer, tomatoes, wild mushrooms, corn; the fruits of my fermentations still give us sauerkraut, red kale/kimchi/seaweed, and sour beets. It's all good, and a good variety, when you look at it. Nothing could tempt me to indulge in asparagus or green beans, from the grocery store. For one thing, it wouldn't be an indulgence--those spring and summer veg in winter always taste weird to me. (I'll confess a weakness for guacamole, though; the avocadoes have been really good lately.)

What I start to miss this time of year is the freshness, the brightness of vegetables straight from the garden or market. The braising pot is my dear friend, but now and then my teeth need a workout, my palate needs a jolt.

Enter the escabeche: I'm sure I use the term quite loosely. It's generally applied, I think, to fried fish added to a vinegary marinade, then cooled. Or it may mean the marinade, per se. Which may include vegetables, or not. For me it's a quick hot pickle, eaten immediately, though it will keep. (Something about the word itself makes me think of fast: Vite, vite! Pronto! Escabeche!) It is particulary good with fish, like this trout with springtime escabeche of ramps and asparagus.

And then the other night we were preparing to broil a couple of Lake Superior herring fillets that would be served with a mildy hot chili oil vinaigrette (I'm cravin' a lot of spice these days), and I wanted something fresh and crunchy and tart.

Down to the basement for a carrot and a parsnip. Cuisinart makes a rare appearance: into the tube, slicer attachment installed, a carrot, a small parsnip (both peeled), a large clove of garlic, a small red onion.

Dump all that into a small saucepan, add about three tablespoons of olive oil, half that of cider vinegar, and some chili--I'd been soaking some lovely chilies kept from the market last summer, Red Rocket, I believe, so I added one of those, chopped. You could crumble in any dried red chili, heat to suit, or add a teaspoon of sambal. A grind of black pepper, good pinch of sea salt.

I just brought that up to a boil, turned off the heat, covered the pot, let it sit until we were ready to eat. It was just the thing against the soft and flavorful fish napped in my piri-piri style sauce (I made that recipe with olive oil, using half the amount of oil called for).

The pickle will keep a few days, and it was good with a chicken sandwich. The vegetables can be whatever's on hand--celery or celery root, fennel (a fave), green beans sliced, and I imagine an apple wouldn't be bad in this, at all. The piri-piri sauce will keep a while, as well--it was originally made to dress the grilled chicken that wound up in the sandwich....

Keep 'er rollin'.




Text and photo copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

All Things Herring: Crudo, Pickled, Meunière, Smoked, Salted

I've been having a lot of fun with herring since I swung by Halvorson Fisheries in Cornucopia, Wisconsin, on the South Shore of Lake Superior, on the way home from Bide-A-Wee on Monday. Well, sort of on the way home. I mean, I did start out at Bide-A-Wee, and wind up home in Saint Paul--which is basically a home-to-home trip now--but the stop in Corny required a little detour, roughly five hours of driving. The roundaboutness of my route started to sink in as I crossed the towering bridge over the Saint Louis River from Superior to Duluth, and I thought, "Hmm, you know, when the quickest way back to Saint Paul is via Duluth, you've gone just a little out of your way...".

And then when the mild afternoon turned into a bit of a blizzardy evening and I was still just past Pine City, a good 60 miles to home, and the lane markers on I-35 disappeared, traffic was crawling along, the headlights showed a white-out, snowflakes the size of handkerchiefs, and I pondered, "If this doesn't let up I'm not going to make it home tonight, I'm going to have to find a place to stay, with two dogs, and a cooler full of fish...", and I looked at the trip odometer, which showed 160.2 miles, and then I looked at it again, what seemed like an hour later, and it read 163.4, well, at that point it didn't seem like such a swell idea, my little detour.

But as I continued on south I hit the rain/snow line, the white turned to wet, I could see the road again, and we made it home safe and sound. As I walked in the door I smelled this amazing smell, and there was Mary taking a tray of fresh, hot gouda gougères out of the oven, those fabulous little choux paste cheese puffs, and I'm thinking, "Shower, martini, gougères, fresh fish...", and I'm thinking, "My wife: I think I'll keep her."

That's all prologue to a week of much herring. Here we go:


Pickled herring, for which I adapted a recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage fame. I wasn't looking to pinch someone else's recipe, was just seeking a general method, but when I saw that he uses apple cider and cider vinegar, I wound up following the recipe pretty straight. It's still evolving, just two days in the jar, but it has a much more delicate texture and subtler flavor than any of the commercial versions I've had.


It was in the process of making the pickled herring that I came upon the inspiration for the dish above, herring crudo with cider mustard cream and frizzled leeks. See, the first step in preparing the pickled fish is brining it, soaking it in salt water for a couple of hours. Once I had done that (I lightened Hugh's brine, which seemed really salty), I tasted just a sliver of the raw fish, to see how salty it had become. What I tasted was this brilliantly fresh fish, just mildly salty, with a fantastic texture, yieldingly firm it was, to coin an oxymoron; it tasted, in brief, how I always hope the fish at sushi joints will, though it rarely does.

I knew I had to come up with a dish to show it off, and I thought of the honey-mustard sauces you often get with gravlax, and that thought led to this reduction of cream, sweet cider, cider vinegar, with some yellow mustard seeds and a little Dijon mustard. The frizzled leek looks pretty and adds a crisp contrast to the softness of the fish, the richness of the sauce. Crunchy gray sea salt brings more texture and...salt. This is rather a cheffy dish, to be sure, such as I rarely attempt anymore, but it's really not difficult. It all depends on the freshness of the fish, of course. You could make it with any "sashimi-grade" fish from a reputable fish monger. I've since learned (Thanks, Google!) that lightly salt-cured, essentially raw herring is practically a national dish in the Netherlands. (I undertook this research after the fact, to see if there were any health concerns to be aware of, like, Of course no one eats raw herring, because of the deadly herring worm that eats your intestines from one end to the other! If the Dutch thrive on raw herring, I'm much comforted. They've always seemed a particularly vigourous, ruddy sort of folk.)


That was our first course last night, and we followed it with herring milkweed à la meunière, skinless fillets lightly seasoned, dusted in flour, fried in an oil-butter mix. La meunière is the miller's wife; she brings the flour, I guess, a small but important contribution to the dish. For the sauce you cook good butter--maybe three tablespoons for two people--over a medium flame, and as it starts to brown--to turn noisette, hazelnut color--you toss in capers, traditionally, but I used my little pickled milkweed pods. I added also a couple teaspoons of the pickling brine, and a good squeeze of lemon juice, and you're good to go. Very, very good. Everyone tends to think of herring as an oily, rather heavy fish, but in a preparation like this, and with the freshest fish--and skinless, at that--that's the furthest thing from the case. This fish was notably light in texture--fluffy even came to mind--under the crisp flour jacket.


We drank some of our own cider, the 2009. Talk about a happy meal. Somewhere along the way it occured to me that the heart of this meal was wild foods. The milkweed, another small but vital component, I picked on our land this summer, and of course the herring swim free, and apparently still thrive, in Superior's "ice-water mansions." I mention this because, with all the attention paid these days to the trendy aspects of wild foods, we tend to forget that all food was originally wild. All of our cultivated vegetables and fruits and grains are manipulated versions of something Great Nature first made. My point here is a little fuzzy even to me, but I was just surprised to realize that herring with milkweed pickles was wild food--the herring came from a fish market (albeit one that sits on the shore of Lake Superior) and the milkweed pickles from a jar in my fridge. There are also jars of pickled ramps in there, and fiddleheads, and chanterelles, and jams and jellies from blackberries, wild plums, etc. In our house, wild food is not a separate category of food; it's just food. And I think that's good.



I bought some smoked lake trout and whitefish at Halvorson's, but I decided to try my hand at smoking my own herring. I used my standard brine, a half cup each of salt and brown sugar to a quart of water, brined it for around ten hours, and now I'm smoking it hot, trying to keep the temp around 220. That should take three hours or so. I have an idea about a dish that will involve the smoked herring and all things apple--some kind of reduction of sweet and hard cider, cider vinegar, fresh or perhaps dried apples. Of course I'm using apple wood to smoke it.



Finally, salted herring. I have no idea what I'll do with that--well, I have fleeting notions, a fish pie, pasty, empanada-type thing has occured to me. The fillets we used for the meunière dish were big, so I took off the tail ends and tossed them in salt, left them in the fridge overnight. Now I'm letting them dry a bit, and I'll probably freeze them. We will probably see them again some time in February....



I guess it could go without saying, at this point, that I find it inspiring to have ingredients of this quality to work with--and I also have frozen burbot (eelpout), and beautiful butterflied smelts in the freezer, brought back on this trip. But being by Superior at the end of November has a melancholy, elegaic quality to it, as well. Part of it was that marbled gray sky, the flat gray lake, and the out-of-season feeling of a summer place sliding into winter. Part of it is the sense that commercial fishing on Lake Superior is itself rather a marginal, vestigial activity, so few are left that ply this trade. Without descending into the maudlin, I still have to wonder, five years from now, ten, will I still have the chance to make an impetuous detour, load my cooler up with blindingly fresh herring, whitefish, or lake trout?

A few shots through the car window, traveling west on Wisconsin 13 from Cornucopia toward Superior:







Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw