Brandade Rampante

This is most definitely one to file under "Happy Accidents."  A piece of whitefish rubbed with salt and birch syrup, intended to cure for a day and be served like gravlax, is instead forgotten in the back of the fridge for a week.  Upon being unearthed it is found not to be spoiled or to have turned fishy, but instead is beautifully preserved, though much too salty to be eaten as is.  But a clever salvage operation then turns it into something extraordinary:  brandade rampante.  Which is to say: a mousse of salt fish, potato, butter, milk, and instead of the garlic traditional in this Provencal dish, lovely fresh ramps, among the first of the season. (Rampante, by the way, is indeed a French word, but it has nothing to do with ramps, the wild leeks; actually it means creeping, groveling, or obsequious, so my made-up usage is purely fanciful.)

This was just damned exquisite, a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts dish which I may never to able to replicate exactly, but I will try, and try to give you the best how-to I can.  This was a polish-the-plate meal--we practically scrubbed the finish off the gratin dishes with our toast trying to get the last rich, rampy molecule of flavor.  And then the next day, when we were out running some errands, driving in the car and not talking, out out of the blue Mary comes out with, "Man, that brandade last night was good."  And I looked over to see her gazing at some point in space, rapt in happy taste memory.

I've made brandade a couple of times before using store-bought salt cod, a product which is a staple in Provencal cooking--odd, considering that they've got this rather famous source of fresh seafood, i.e., the Mediterranean, right on their doorstep.  It's well loved in Spain, too, particularly among the Basque.  Salt cod is generally very salty and very dry, and requires at least a day's soaking, and several changes of water, to make it palatable.  While I have enjoyed my previous iterations of brandade, I have found that the salt cod itself, even after soaking, poaching, and puréeing, still has a somewhat fibrous texture and a slight bitterness.  Probably because my salted whitefish had the sugar and acidity of the birch syrup, and was not buried in salt, it retained a lot more moisture.  There was no fishiness, no bitterness, and the texture was excellent.  It could still be easily cut into thin slices, as seen here:

 I'm kind of winging it here, because I don't remember exactly how much salt and syrup I used, but I did glance at my recipe for maple-cured lake trout gravlax in the book, and that calls for an 8 to 12 ounce fillet, 2 tablespoons of maple syrup, and 3 tablespoons of salt.  I think I only had about 6 ounces of fish, the end of a big fillet, and I hit it with a generous tablespoon of birch syrup and a scant 2 tablespoons of salt. (I'll try to do a side-by-side taste test with my next piece of whitefish, one with maple, one with birch, and see if there's a difference; I realize birch syrup is not easy to come by.)

I did this on a piece of plastic wrap, snugged the fish up, set it flesh side down on a plate--and promptly forgot about it, for at least a week.  When I rediscovered it, all the syrup had dried up and the fish was encased in a salty crust.  I rinsed it off and dried it, tasted it and determined that it was still edible, then wrapped it loosely in parchment paper and put it back in the fridge--this is how I store my home-smoked bacon, too, and I believe the fish would have kept indefinitely in this state.

To make the brandade, I loosely followed Mireille Johnston's recipe from Cuisine of the Sun, my go-to book for southern French cooking.  But my recipe was heavier on the potato, lighter on the fish.  I subbed local sunflower oil (Smude) for olive oil, and of course, the ramps instead of garlic.  Here's my recipe:

Love my kitchen chalkboard.  That's just blackboard paint on a piece of plywood.  Now I'll translate:  I cut my fish into four pieces, and soaked it in water for a few hours, changing the water maybe three times.  It was still fairly salty at the end of this brief soaking, but I didn't add any additional salt to the dish, and when it all came together it was nicely seasoned.  After the fish soaked, I put it in a small saucepan of water and brought the water to a boil, turned it off, set it aside, and let it cool a bit.  Then I skinned the fish--you could remove the skin before boiling and/or soaking if you like.  It came off easily once the fish was cooked.

Previously I had quartered and boiled a small potato, a russet of about 5 ounces, I'd say.  I chopped my four small ramps, sautéed the bulb part in about a tablespoon of butter until just nicely wilted but not browned, then added the greens and removed it from the heat.

Then the puréeing:  this batch was small enough to do in my mini-chop, but you could use a regular food processor or a blender.  In goes the fish, peeled potato, the juice of 1/4 of a small lemon, milk, and sunflower oil.  In total I used 1/3 cup of whole milk and 2 tablespoons of oil--I added these a little at a time, so the whizzing didn't get too messy.  Once everything was in, I blended it very well, into a smooth, mousse-like texture.  Then I dumped it into a mixing bowl and added the sautéed ramps, 2 tablespoons more of soft butter, and a good grind of pepper.  Yes, it's rich, but the portion is not huge, and it was the main course for us.

I divided the mixture into two small gratin dishes, and topped them generously with homemade fresh breadcrumbs that I had moistened with a bit more butter.  Into a 425 oven for around 15 minutes, until the crumbs were toasty brown and the brandade was bubbling up around the edges.  And, serve it forth.

Nice toasts of a homemade sesame batard, a delightful white wine from the Loire, a chenin blanc (this wine was new to us; got it at Zipp's on Franklin in Minneapolis, and I would definitely get it again).  And a salad of Minnesota hydroponic frisée and Minnesota tomatoes--huh?  Minnesota tomatoes in May? Yes, Living Waters hydroponic tomatoes that we got at Seward Co-op, really remarkably good--and they come on the vine, with that gorgeous aroma of midsummer garden to them.  A surprise.

Brandade is not always served in a gratin like this.  Once you've whizzed it up, it's fully edible, and in Provence it might be served in a bowl along with a plate of crudités for dipping, or stuffed in a tomato, as we might do tuna salad (if we were ladies who lunched, that is...).  I hope I can recreate that wonderful salt whitefish on the next try, and if I do, this will go on the regular rotation.  One more use for our splendid local "seafood," Lake Superior whitefish, from Halvorson Fisheries in Corny on the South Shore, of course.


Text and photos copyright 2013 by Brett Laidlaw

Sapped Out

I'm doing the last boil of the sugaring season today, cooking about 10 gallons of birch sap down to what will probably be around a pint of syrup.  It has been a long, satisfying, at times grueling, few weeks--tapping the trees, awaiting the sap run, at first reluctant, then rising to a spate; checking the taps, hauling the sap, cutting firewood, and boiling, boiling, boiling.  All this in the midst of one of the most remarkable stretches of springtime weather...I was going to say "in memory," but I don't think anyone remembers such a season, as such a one has not occurred before, not in my time.

That's because water has been falling from the skies--mainly as snow--just as steadily as it has been pulsing up through the capillary systems of the maples and birches.  We thought that the April of storm after storm was remarkable, until we experienced a historic May weather event, a two day-plus storm that dropped around 16 inches at our house.  The Twin Cities record for a May snowfall was around three inches--and that record held, because the cities were on the rain side of the line.  Three inches is not a lot of snow, but then, May is supposed to be a spring month.  Well, so is April, for that matter. 

May 4, 2013, Ridgeland, Dunn County, Wisconsin

As the snow melts water flows down our hayfield hill, around the corner of the yard (and right across where I dug our garden last year, bad planning), and pools up in a low spot north of the garage.  From this holding area it then trickles out to form a perfect little brook past the lone pine tree behind the garage, and out into the pasture.  It's a good distance from there to the corner of our property at the crossroads of the county road and our town road, where tiny Hay Creek makes a hard southward turn, but some of those snowflakes from our hilltop surely make it to the creek, which meanders through some very pretty countryside about 15 miles, crow-wise, and who knows how many crooked stream miles, to the Red Cedar River.

The Red Cedar takes a more direct route south and empties into the Chippewa River south of Downsville (in summer we ride our bikes on the state trail that follows the Red Cedar down to this confluence).  The Chippewa in springtime is a mighty river, at some spots it can seem as broad as the Mississippi; until, of course, you see the Mississippi where the Chippewa enters, a shining, stirring inland sea--Lake Pepin--from which greening bluffs, grander than castles, rise on the western shore in Minnesota.

And the Mississippi, of course, it goes to the Gulf, where a warm wind picks up water molecules from the salty surface, and perhaps on some strange May day (or it could be March, December) a driven jolt of northbound air carries that laden breeze back up the course of the great river in an anomalous weather system that sets up a stationary line of torrential snow from Iowa into southeastern Minnesota, across west central Wisconsin, dropping nearly a foot-and-a-half of snow on a hilltop in northern Dunn County.  Did some of those snowflakes start here, years ago?  Seems crazy, but it's possible.  Clearly, I'd like to think that they did.

All this water coming down, water gushing down, the gathering of the streams, the boiling of the sap, it's had me thinking about accretion, and reduction.  All that water from the skies, gathering on our hilltops, in the woods, in our yards--in everybody's yards, forest, fields.  It comes down drop by drop, or flake by flake.  When you get down to where the Chippewa joins the Mississippi, you wouldn't have thought just a few snowflakes, a few raindrops, could amount to all that.  If all you see is the mighty flow, I think you're missing the bigger picture, which, oddly, only comes into focus when you start with a snowflake.

Accretion, it's kind of an odd word, but the one which, to me, sums it up (no pun intended).  Things gathering together, things piling up. "Any gradual increase in size, as through growth or external addition."  It's how every little bit helps, and every litter bit hurts, how the extra Christmas cookie, one more beer, or french fry, amounts in time to...self-loathing.  A garden is an accretion, created one seed at a time, then one leaf at a time until, there it is, a verdant expanse.  Since I've started cutting wood for next winter (and that wet, heavy snow has given me lots of broken limbs to cut up for the pile), I see the woodpile as an accretion, one split, one stick at a time until, by the time the frost returns (think not of that...), we'll have a winter's worth of heat, and cooking fuel, and dark nights' cheer stacked up to see us through.

A good novel is an accretion of detail and incident and image, all adding up to something marvelous, and all compiled one word at a time.  And running accretion backwards, in an abstract but very, very meaningful way, that's the phenomenon of moments slipping by, it seems to me, of time past and not to be regained--Proust can search all he wants.  More positively, what is life but an accretion of moments, experience, memory?  Whatever it is that's piling up, it's all happening in time, so a snowflake falling is a tick of the clock, and as the meltwater drips out of our ephemeral pond, it's a sort of liquid hourglass--though we won't be turning it over.

With the wet snow coming down, the saps coming up, we started to feel inundated from all sides.  When the snow stopped and the sun came out (it did, a couple of times in the last six weeks), things seemed better, but in another way it only sped the spate--the water flowed down the hill, the creek filled to the banks; the sap gushed from both maples and birches.  I couldn't keep up with it.  I dumped gallons and gallons of sap on the ground--I don't know why it felt wasteful, it was going to wind up there eventually, and the trees had all the sap they wanted.

Meantime, with all that accretion going on downstream, I was going against the tide, a few gallons at a time, engaged in the frantic race toward reduction--take 10 gallons of maple sap, 20 of birch, 80 or 160 pounds of liquid, turn it into something you can hold in your hand.  Pour on your pancakes, use to flavor a salad dressing.  Drop by drop, in wisps of steam, or through gentler evaporation in the final reduction on the woodstove overnight, as the fire gradually died down, I was sending all that water back into the air.  To harvest an essence, a distillation.  Some sweet stuff.  Here taking away everything extraneous, which is in fact all you could really see was there, the watery part, to leave something of which we only had the vaguest insinuation, that fleeting sweetness on the tongue.  An act of faith, in its modest way.

The pros at this business probably philosophize less and boil a lot more than I do, so in this bountiful year for sap I've seen syrup offered at $25 a half gallon, cheaper if you buy more and bring your own containers. 

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I recorded the first drops from our maple taps on March 25.  With the back-and-forth spring going mostly back, it was a couple of weeks before I had enough sap to boil.  Thanks to Twitter, I'm able to report with utter accuracy that our first boil was on April 5: "My half-assed homemade sap contraption did a fantastic job on its maiden boil."  Thus I tweeted.  It went pretty steadily from there, reaching full spate by mid-April, wearing out my willingness to spend the day bathed in wood smoke by about the third week of April.

At which time I drilled an inch into a big birch, and sap came pouring forth.  Here we go again.

It's pretty easy to see how people started making maple syrup.  Although maple sap is clear as water, still it tastes faintly sweet to the tongue.  To the squirrels the sap that dries on maple trees, naturally flowing out from cracks in the bark or broken branches, definitely has a sugary appeal, and perhaps that's how aboriginal people figured out that there was something good here, from observing how the squirrels lapped it up.  Then there were probably a few steps involved, and a lengthy evolution, before getting to maple syrup and maple sugar, but the end result was reliable and delicious.

It's much harder to understand how birch syrup came to be.  A birch tree in a good year can provide an astonishing amount of sap, but when you taste it, it doesn't seem sweet, containing only about half the sugar of maple sap.  Perhaps I should modify that:  It doesn't taste sweet to me.  It doesn't taste sweet to the contemporary American palate, bombarded with sweetness from every side, sugar hidden in just about every processed food from salad dressing to crackers.  But maybe to a purer palate, way back when, the sweetness of birch sap was detectable, and desirable.  It you had a lot of birch sap, and firewood, and time, it was probably worth it.

As my last batch of birch sap boils away, with a pint of finished syrup in the fridge, I'm asking myself if it was worth it, and mainly coming down on yes, now that it's nearly over.  It's a fascinating product, unlike anything I've tasted before.  It's dark, dark, dark--more like molasses or sorghum syrup than even grade B maple.  And I'm not sure what accounts for this, but it is quite acidic, too, with a spiciness dominated by a menthol or wintergreen note, and a smokiness that may literally be from wood smoke wafting across the surface of the pan as it cooks.  But also, perhaps because of that acidity, it has a fruitiness, almost a wininess, that maple syrup lacks.  At first taste, I must say, it's not immediately likeable--it takes you aback and sits you up straight.  But part of what I like about it is that sense of extremity--that it is difficult to make, not easy to like, and that it requires some thought to determine how best to use it.

Here's what I've done with it so far, and how these preparations turned out:

Birch-cured whitefish gravlax.  I followed the method I used for maple-cured lake trout gravlax (in the book), but:  then I forgot about it in the back of the fridge for over a week.  Oops.  I was afraid it would be spoiled; instead, it is just very, very salty.  But the flavor, other than the oversalting, is good, and the texture is excellent, which I attribute to the birch syrup.  So I'll use it as I would salt cod, probably make something like a brandade, the Provencal dish of salt cod pureed together with potatoes, lots of garlic, olive oil or butter.  Maybe I'll work in some other seasonal things like ramps and watercress.

Pork chops marinated in birch syrup, ramps, and Sichuan pepper.  A couple hours ahead of cooking I brushed the chops with a couple of tablespoons of birch syrup, added chopped ramps, salted and peppered liberally, also a good sprinkling of roasted, ground Sichuan pepper (hua jiao).  On the grill, medium coals, 10 to 12 minutes total--excellent, and the interesting thing was, the birch syrup didn't burn as another sweetener would.  I'll look into this phenomenon further.

As a salad dressing component, birch syrup (you don't know how many times I've typed bitch while writing this post, and had to correct...) is superb, especially with assertive greens like watercress.  Since it brings both sweetness and acidity, you don't need vinegar or lemon juice in the dressing.  I've simply been mixing the birch, some sunflower oil, a wee bit of mustard, salt and pepper--terrific.  Shown here as the base for pan-fried trout with sauteed ramps and lardons, duck fat potatoes.

You experience the land and the season in a different way when you take up sugaring, and I'm as glad to have done it as I am that it's over.  I probably won't make birch syrup every year, and with three gallons of maple syrup in the pantry, I likely won't have to do as much next year.

On the other hand, I recently saw a link on Twitter to an article about making syrup from black walnut sap.  Oh, why did I have to look...?

Text and photos copyright 2013 by Brett Laidlaw

The Sweetest Tree

It has snowed here nearly every day for the last week, interspersed with rain, freezing rain, and sleet, and the frigid precipitation has been accompanied at times by gale-force winds. We had a break from all that yesterday, a pleasant, sunny day when the temperature tiptoed into the 40s. The sun was strong—I got a bit of color on my winter-pale face, I noticed as I brushed my teeth last night—and our yard turned to slush by mid-afternoon.

But all good things must come to an end, they say, and that warm, bright idyll will seem as a dream today when snow and rain and snow again return, and the streams may flood and windchill makes it feel like February. Well, what the freakin’ ever…. Last spring, March in particular, was freakishly warm, so I guess this is just how we come by our historical average temperatures, or it’s evidence of global weather weirding, or something. There is not much we can do but piss and moan, and pretty much everyone I know has been doing plenty of that.

It’s true, this endless winter of a springtime is not good for much, but in attempting to look on the bright side, here are a few pluses amid all the grimness: We haven’t seen any ticks yet, where in a mild winter we sometimes encounter them in the midst of a February thaw. Likewise, no sign of mosquitoes. Small blessings, perhaps, but we must take what we can get.

Also, once the fruit trees bloom, they probably won’t be hit as bad by late frost as they were last year, when all our fruit—from apples to wild black cherry, nannyberries and hawthorn—took a hit. Only the blackberries produced a decent crop.

And then, with springtime so drastically deferred, once it does warm up we’ll likely see an amazing confluence of blooms as everything bursts into flower at once, to catch up with the season. That’s something to look forward to.

Finally, this reluctant spring has been ideal for a seasonal rite cherished across our part of the northland: maple sugaring. With freezing nights and daytime temperatures creeping at least a little bit above 32, the sap has been flowing for the last couple of weeks, and has really picked up in the last few days. Last year, the sudden March heat put an end to the sugaring season pretty much before it started. This year is looking like a banner year; I have ten trees tapped, and nearly two gallons of finished syrup made, the most I’ve ever done in three years of sugaring. I’ll probably stop collecting sap in a couple of days, cook down what I have stored, and look forward to many happy pancake breakfasts ahead. Then maybe I’ll tap a couple birch trees, to diversify our stock of sweeteners.

Collecting the sap and boiling it down has been easier (and thus, much more enjoyable) this year for a number of reasons: one, living here full-time makes it much easier to keep on top of the process, since I can manage things a little bit at a time. Also, whereas collecting sap at Bide-A-Wee meant hauling heavy containers quite a distance over bumpy terrain, and mostly uphill, the trees I’ve tapped here are just a couple hundred yards up the hill from the house. I pour the sap into five- to seven-gallon containers, put those in our beat-up but still serviceable black plastic sled, and it’s an easy cruise downhill to the house.

 Boiling down the sap was problematic in the past, as well. My method this year is not terribly sophisticated, but it’s a step up from previous years and shows a good deal of Yankee ingenuity, if I say so myself. What I did was, I took an old oil-burning heater that had been dumped in our woods, and I disemboweled it so I was left with a big metal box, about the size of a dehumidifier, open on one long and one short side, the other short side covered with venting slits. I bought a hotel pan, like the ones you see on buffet lines, to be my evaporating pan. To make it fit, I attached some strips of metal roofing material (left over from the garage we had built last year) to the sides of the larger opening. I placed a grate from our portable fire pit in the bottom, to elevate the wood a bit and provide good air circulation—it fit perfectly. Set this half-assed sap contraption up on cinder blocks, and I was ready to go.

The important feature of this contrivance, something I noticed looking at boilers built specifically for syrup making, is that the evaporating pan fits right down in the fire box. This way you’re getting heat not just on the bottom, but on the four sides, as well. It’s sort of the surround-sound concept applied to syrup making.

My boiler is not that efficient, and could be improved, I’m sure (for instance, I could line it with fire brick to retain more heat), but I’m a small-timer at this, and plan to remain so. I’ll make what small adjustments occur to me over time, but mostly I just hope my salvage operation of a boiler lasts me a couple of years. I know now that you can cobble something together from mostly found materials that really works quite well. I don’t cook the syrup all the way down in the boiler. I take the sap down to maybe one-tenth its original volume, bring it inside and strain it through a scrap of old dish towel into my 5-quart Le Creuset pot (aka “Big Blue”). That sits on the woodstove, and the sap reduces gently until it’s almost syrup. A final, closely supervised boiling, either on the woodstove or the electric range, finishes the syrup off. To determine when it’s done, I just go by feel and taste—I’ll dip in a spoon, pull it out and let it cool for a few moments, and taste. When it was the flavor and viscosity of syrup, well, I figure that’s syrup. I usually let it bubble for around five more minutes, then take it off the heat and bottle it.

If you’re interested in making maple syrup yourself, there’s still time, if you’re above 45-degrees north latitude, and you have access to some trees. Virtually any kind of maple, even box elders, can be tapped for sap. There are various on-line tutorials to show you how to get started, but a wonderful resource for maple fanciers has just been published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, the second title in the Northern Plate series (the first was Kim Ode’s Rhubarb Renaissance, which made a tart-sweet splash last spring).

The new title is by my friend Teresa Marrone, and it’s called Modern Maple. In it Teresa has compiled around 75 maple-inspired recipes, along with a brief history of maple syrup, and step-by-step instructions for DIY-ers. I know her method is sound because she’s the one who got me started, in 2009. I made a visit to her house in south Minneapolis where she had a couple of big silver maples tapped in her yard. Since then I’ve purchased a few commercially-made metal spiles, and those clever blue bag hanger devices for collecting the sap, but I started out with PVC tubing and repurposed plastic pickle buckets from the burger joint in our former Saint Paul neighborhood. (Here are my maple posts from 2009 and 2010; seems maybe we didn’t do any tapping in 2011, as I was feverishly working on finishing the book that spring, and then 2012, as mentioned, was a bust because of the weather.)

The recipes in Modern Maple beautifully illustrate the versatility of maple syrup in the kitchen. While the flavor of maple is beloved by many, I still think it’s underrated as an ingredient. Teresa’s book should help to correct that situation. Many of the recipes highlight maple’s unique sweetness, but there are also many great examples of how well it works in counterpoint with other flavors like vinegar and citrus, chile heat, and various spices, including a favorite of mine, Sichuan pepper (although I am mildly dismayed to see the outdated Szechuan used in Teresa’s book; unfortunately, many style books haven’t caught up with the times).

I like the sound of her Sweet and Spicy Chile-Maple Dipping Sauce, and I may have to make a batch of her Near-Beer Peanuts tonight for a happy hour snack. Other tasty sounding dishes that caught my eye: Red Cabbage and Berry Salad and Escarole and Radish Salad with Smoky Maple Dressing; Corn on the Cob with Spiced Maple Glaze; Pork Tenderloin with Rhubarb-Maple Sauce and Cheese Grits (though I’d probably use a humbler, tastier cut of pork, like cutlets from the shoulder, or country-style ribs); and Shortbread with Maple Caramel and Sea Salt.

Teresa recently started a blog, which will certainly be worth reading. All the recent interest in wild foods has been great in highlighting the qualities of these most local of foods, and Teresa’s involvement in the topic goes back way before foraging became trendy; she’s the real deal, indeed.

With all this sap boiling down around here, I’ve been using a lot of it in my cooking. When I’m making bread I’ll add a ladle of not-quite-syrup to the dough, to the obvious delight of the yeast in my starter. The other night I came up with a dandy topping for broiled fish, combining fresh bread crumbs from a flavorful sourdough loaf with butter (warm these together so the butter is integrated), toasted sesame seeds, ground roasted Sichuan pepper, and a moistening of maple syrup (I think there was something spicy in there, too, perhaps a couple of pinches of espelette or similar fragrant, not too hot chile).  Pat this mixture liberally on a skinless fish fillet--I used Lake Superior herring--get an oven-proof fry pan hot, and fire up the broiler, too.  Add a little oil to the pan and gently slide or lift the fish into the pan.  Then move it directly to the broiler, five or six inches away, and broil until the topping is nicely browned.  The syrup in the mixture sort of welds everything together into a crunchy caramelized crust, and the direct heat of the broiler really brings out the fragrance of the Sichuan pepper.

I get sort of fanatical about not wasting even a drop of syrup—I’m all too aware of the time and effort required to make it—and this has led me to some delightful treats. A couple of days ago I found a bit of tea left in the pot, and a recently emptied, not yet washed pan from reducing syrup. I deglazed that maple pot with the tea, added a generous portion of whole milk from a local farm, and warmed the mixture on the woodstove: Maple milk tea, the woodcutter’s delight.

I wouldn’t turn my nose up at any kind of maple syrup, and in the past couple of years most of what we’ve used has been purchased. The homemade stuff, though, that’s a different thing entirely. When the sap is reduced over a wood fire, it does pick up a hint of smokiness, which you don’t tend to find in the commercial syrup. And then, your own syrup expresses the terroir from which it sprung—no other syrup will taste quite the same. Also, you get to see how the syrup changes through the season, generally going from a lighter, more refined tasting syrup early in the run, when the sugar concentrations are highest, to darker syrup with more robust flavors as sugaring nears its end, and the sap requires longer boiling times.

It is, indeed, a hell of a lot of work, for what can sometimes seem meager results. And you simply must do it yourself to have any comprehension of what’s required to turn something between 30 to 40 gallons of sap into a gallon of syrup. But however much syrup you wind up with, it’s gold, it’s magic, it’s something more than food and more than sweetness. It’s the taste of the northern forest, distilled into amber genius.

Text and photos copyright 2013 by Brett Laidlaw

Smoking Basics (The Hay River Transition Initiative Class Handout, with Some Additional Notes)

At the third Hay River Transition Initiative's Traditional and Green Skills Day, this past Saturday, I led a seminar on basic home smoking--"Low-Stress, Small Batch Smoking," I think I called it.  There was no pre-registration for the classes this  year, so I had no idea how many people would be attending my session.  Well, there were way more people than I expected, and so I had nowhere near enough handouts to go around.  So I'm posting the notes here, and will be getting word out through the various email lists that serve this beautiful area of Near North Wisconsin.  I'm sure there's info here that the general Trout Caviar readership can benefit from, too, though much of it has appeared here before.  I've added some notes that occurred to me after I put the handout together, as well. 

                                                
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Smoking was once a common means of preserving food, and still is in many parts of the world. In modern America we smoke for flavor more than preservation, and we’ve mostly turned the job over to large, industrial producers. It’s worth relearning the basics of home smoking.

You will need:

      *  A covered barbecue grill (mine is a Meco, clamshell type, though a Weber is also fine)

     *   A smaller grill, preferably also covered, to hold hot coals to replenish the smoker

     *   Natural chunk charcoal, available at most larger grocery or hardware stores (& Menard’s)

     *   A chimney starter for the charcoal (no lighter fluid, please)

     *   Some fragrant wood, chips or chunks (I use oak and apple; in the past I’ve used maple and hickory bark)

     *   An instant-read meat thermometer, inserted in the top vent, is handy for monitoring temperature

This technique is hot smoking, as opposed to the cold smoking that produces lox and certain other delicacies. It involves cooking the pre-cured (salted or brined) meat or fish rather slowly with indirect heat in the presence of smoke.

Light a chimney starter full of charcoal. When it’s ready, dump half the charcoal in the main grill, half in the smaller. Move the coals in the main grill to one side. Add some fresh charcoal to the smaller grill, and put the lid on with the vents open just a tad, so those coals stay hot but don’t burn up too quickly.

Place some smoking wood—apple, oak, etc., a handful of chips or a chunk or two—on top of the coals in the main grill. Place the items to be smoked on the side of the grill grate away from the coals: it’s important that the food isn’t directly over the coals. Put the lid on with the vent about halfway closed. Place the instant-read thermometer in the vent opening. Adjust vent and coals to keep the temperature around 200 to 225 degrees. Replenish with coals from the smaller grill as needed. Add more smoking wood chips or chunks as needed.

Fish of up to a pound will be done in 1 ½ to 2 hours; bacon in chunks of 1 to 1 ½ pounds will be done in 2 to 3 hours. Turn the meat or fish over every 45 minutes or so. At temperatures this low (even though it’s called hot smoking), it’s hard to overcook the foods. If, after smoking for the times designated, you’re not sure the food is fully cooked, just place it in a 200-degree oven for another thirty minutes.

It’s as simple as that. Once you’re comfortable with the basics, there’s no end of resources—books, TV series, classes, etc.—to take you on myriad smoking adventures. (One book I really like is Peace, Love, and Barbecue by Mike Mills.)

Some notes:

     *   Many smoking recipes tell you to soak the smoking wood. I don’t. The point of the smoking wood is to produce smoke, not steam.

      *   Remove the lid from the smaller grill about ten minutes before you want to add fresh coals to the larger grill. This step allows air in to perk up those coals, which are merely smoldering.

     *   While the salting and smoking provide a certain amount of preservative qualities, the finished products of these recipes are not intended for long-term storage. The bacon can be frozen, but the fish should be eaten promptly.

Home-Smoked Trout

I usually smoke brown trout because that’s mostly what I catch. If you’re buying trout, it will probably be farmed rainbow trout. I’ve also used this brine and method on lake trout and herring.

In a medium saucepan, heat 4 cups water and add ½ cup salt and ½ cup brown sugar, stirring to dissolve.

Remove from heat and let cool. I have added cracked peppercorns and/or herbs to the brine.  Try different flavorings if you like.

A 12-to-14-inch fish is ideal for smoking, but smaller or larger ones can be smoked, too. Just brine and smoke for a longer or shorter time, depending on size.  Given those ideal 14-inch trout, brine them, refrigerated, overnight. Fish smaller than 12 inches can take up sufficient brine in 4 to 6 hours. A couple of hours before you plan to smoke, remove the fish from the brine, rinse in cold water, and set them on a wire rack set over a baking sheet. Using wooden picks—first snip off the sharp ends so they don’t go right through the flesh—prop open the body cavity of the fish to allow them to smoke and cook evenly. Smoke at 200–220 degrees for 2 hours.

[Note:  I almost always smoke bone-in fish, but for this class I could only get butterflied rainbow trout--well, if I had planned ahead I could have order whole fish from either Star Prairie or Bullfrog "Eat My Fish" Trout Farm, but you know how things go sometimes.  I took the same approach with the butterflied fish as I would with bone-in fish, and...the results were not good.  Because the flesh of the boneless fish was more accessible to the brine, and had been cut up a bit in the boning process, the fish turned out much too salty--also, I left them in the brine too long when a round of errands kept me away from home longer than expected.  Since the final product was both  unpalatable and unattractive, I didn't even bring the fish to class--but I should have, to show that 1) even an experienced smoker can make mistakes, and 2) it's okay; it's just a couple of fish.  And, since the theme this year is "Charge ahead, fall down, get up, repeat," I turned lemons into lemonade, as it were, by turning my raggedy, too-salty trout into:

Delicious Smoked Trout Spread

1 smoked rainbow trout (it's okay if it's a bit too salty to eat on its own...(!))
Cream cheese
Hellmann's mayonnaise
1 scallion, chopped
Freshly ground black pepper

Remove the skin and any remaining fins and bones from the trout, and flake the fish into a bowl.  Add a couple of tablespoons of cream cheese, and mash the fish and cheese together until incorporated.  Add a generous tablespoon of mayonnaise and mix well.  Stir in the chopped scallion and pepper to taste.  Serve on crackers.

Moral of the story:  You can indeed smoke butterflied fish or fillets, but adjust the brining time accordingly.  Those butterflied trout of mine spent a good six to eight hours in the brine, but an hour on two would have done the trick.  These were small, thin-fleshed fish.  Another option for small, boneless fish or fillets would be to reduce the amount of salt in the brine, say to 1/3 or even 1/4 cup per quart of water, instead of 1/2 cup.]

 Home-Smoked Bacon

2 pounds pork belly

1/4 cup maple syrup or brown sugar

3 tablespoons salt

Rub the pork belly with the maple syrup, sprinkle salt on all sides, and let cure in the refrigerator for 24 hours, turning occasionally.  For the brown sugar cure, mix the sugar and salt and pat it evenly on all sides of the meat.

The next day, rinse off excess salt, pat dry, and smoke at 200–225 degrees for 2 to 3 hours. The bacon will be both smoked and fully cooked. If you are unsure about whether the bacon is cooked at this point, you can set your mind at ease by placing the bacon in a 200-degree oven for 30 minutes.  A meat thermometer inserted into the bacon should read 160 degrees. 

            I refrigerate my bacon wrapped in parchment paper, then placed in a small cotton sack, rather than in a plastic bag.  This allows air circulation and prevents mold and spoilage. [Note:  If  your bacon is properly cured and smoked, it will slowly continue to dry-cure when stored this way, turning into something rather like prosciutto or guanciale, the dry-cured Italian pork jowls; a few slices of this intensely flavored meat adds great depth to soups or stews, or can be thinly sliced and eaten on its own]  For freezing, use plastic zip bags.

[Note:  When I do demos like this I usually bring in pork belly in three different states of preparation:  raw, so folks can just see what the raw ingredient looks like; cured, having spent a day in a maple sugar and salt bath, because you can often see a change in the color and texture of cured meat from raw; and then I'll have a cured piece already in the smoker/grill so they can see the set-up.

When I get home with all these various meats, I'll usually freeze the raw belly, and the smoked piece becomes our in-use bacon, and then there's the cured but un-smoked piece left over.  Since by this time I've spent plenty of time having my person soaked in smoke, I usually turn that cured belly into roasted, smoke-free bacon--it's really a treat.

Pan Roasted Bacon simply involves cooking that cured belly slowly so that it has time to render a lot of fat and become tender, without burning the sugars from the maple syrup in the cure.  So, you just place the belly, fat side down, in a casserole or gratin dish, and roast it in a 300-degree oven for two to three hours, maybe more.  Turn it a couple of times while it roasts.  You should see a lot of fat rendering off, and the belly will turn a beautiful burnish golden brown.  After 2 hours it will be cooked, but you can let it go longer--depends on how tender you like it; I tend to cook it at least 3 hours.

And yesterday, since I'm mad for cooking on our new woodstove, I did a stovetop version that turned out great.  I placed the belly in a cast-iron skillet and let it sit most of the day on top of the stove, turning it from time to time.  I covered it at times, so it steamed a bit, and when the stove was too hot I set the skillet on a trivet.  At the end of the day we made Asian-style noodle soup with a broth made from the carcass of a smoked chicken (see below), with a couple of slices of that roasted belly on top, and we felt we were slurping in the best noodle shop around.]

[Note 2:  Since home-smoked bacon contains no unpleasant chemical ingredients, preservatives or colorings, the fat that accumulates when you cook it will be a lovely pure, creamy white, and full of flavor.  It's a great ingredient for cooking eggs or sauteing vegetables, or for using in place of shortening or oil in things like tortillas or biscuits.]

Smoke-Roasting

This is my own term for the process of grilling and roasting meats at somewhat higher temperatures than the hot smoked method described above.  I generally use it for pork—shoulder or country-style ribs—or chicken.  I have no specific recipes for this, because I tend to do it a little differently each time.  The basic method is this:

A few hours before you’re going to cook (or the night before), season the meat generously.  Salt is necessary, pepper is almost obligatory; I love thyme, so I’ll toss in a few sprigs of it most of the time—other herbs can also be used.  I may add a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, some sliced onion or shallot, sliced fresh or crushed dried chilies.  I’ll sometimes add spices like cumin, allspice, or fennel.  A spice blend that the French call quatre épices (“four spices,” though it often contains five or six) is excellent with pork or fowl.  Use it sparingly, as it can be overpowering.  This makes enough to last a good while:

           

2 teaspoons ground coriander

2 teaspoons ground allspice

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon grated nutmeg

1/8 teaspoon ground cloves

           

 You can go for a dry rub, or more of a marinade, adding a bit of wine, beer, or cider, or just a little gloss of oil. 

            Prepare coals in your barbecue just as if you were going to grill, but spread the coals out over only half the grill.  Brown the meat well over direct heat, then move it to the area away from the coals.  Add some smoking wood to the coals, close the lid, and let the meat finish cooking in the smoky heat.  For either chicken pieces or country-style ribs, I’d give it at least 45 minutes, but a bit longer won’t hurt. 

            Sometimes at the end of the cooking I’ll boost the coals and crisp up the meat just prior to serving.  Smoke-roasted meats aren’t brined to the same extent as hot-smoked ones, and aren’t made for keeping.  Enjoy them hot from the grill, and use up any leftovers within a few days.

Smoked Venison “Pastrami”

2 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons maple sugar or brown sugar

7 juniper berries, crushed

1 dried red chile, crumbled

¼ teaspoon powdered ginger

½ teaspoon ground roasted Sichuan pepper

½ thyme, fresh or dried

¼ dry mustard

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 ½ - 2 pounds venison roast

Mix all the dry ingredients and rub them all over the roast.  Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 to 3 days, turning a couple of time per day.  Smoke at 225 for 2 to 2 ½ hours.  I used wild black cherry wood when I made this, but any aromatic hardwood will work—apple, oak, maple.

Smoked Pork Shoulder Roast

1 tablespoons salt

1 tablespoon white or brown sugar

½ teaspoon dried thyme

½ teaspoon paprika

½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 – 2 to 2 ½ pound pork shoulder roast, with or without bone

Mix all the dry ingredients and rub the mixture evenly over the pork.  Refrigerate for at least 12 and up to 24 hours.  Smoke at 225 for 3 to 4 hours.  The internal temperature should be at least 160; finish in a low (250-275) oven if need be.

[Note:  This is excellent sliced thin and tucked into warm tortillas or Chinese steamed buns, with a fresh slaw and a bit of sauce or sour cream, depending on which ethnic direction you want to take it.  It's also wonderful served on a nice fresh roll, with perhaps a slick of mayo and some slices of dill pickle.

I prepared a small roast like this teh day before the class, to show and sample; it was the last preparation of the day, and well after dark by the time I got it going.  I smoked it for about 2 1/2 hours, then put it in the oven at 260 for an hour or so.  It turned out great.  I wouldn't call this dual-fuel method cheating, but rather, taking advantage of technologies both ancient and modern....  ]
 

Sichuan-Spiced Smoked Chicken

3 to 4 pounds chicken—you can use a whole, butterflied, or quartered chicken

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon ground roasted Sichuan pepper

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon maple syrup

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 dried red chile, crumbled

½-inch piece fresh ginger root, peeled and minced

3 garlic cloves, minced

Mix all the seasonings and rub the mixture over the chicken.  Refrigerate for 24 hours, turning the chicken occasionally in the marinade.  Prior to smoking, remove the chicken from the marinade and let it drain on paper towels.  Smoke at 250 for 3 ½ to 4 hours, until a meat thermometer inserted at the thigh reads 165. (You can put it in a 250-275 oven for the final hour--in fact, until you gain some experience with smoking poultry, I would recommend this method.  Undercooked poultry is something to be strenuously avoided.)

[Note:  This turned out a wonderfully fragrant and succulent bird.  I love Asian flavors in smoked poultry, but you could use more neutral seasonings if you like--white or brown sugar or honey could be used instead of the maple syrup.  If you omit the soy, add another 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt.  In summer I'll grab handfuls of fresh herbs for the marinade.

We've used this as a filling for steamed Chinese buns, and in quesadillas.  Yesterday, while the pork belly pan-roasted on the woodstove (see above), I also simmered a pot of smoked chicken stock which made the basis for a delicious noodle soup supper.  The concept was a chicken broth with pho-style flavors.  I stripped the meat off the bones and set it aside.  In a 3-quart saucepan I placed the bones, wing-tips, and some of the skin that had fallen off, along with:

several slices of fresh ginger root,
a couple cloves of garlic, crushed,
half an onion, sliced,
half a carrot, chopped,
2 or 3 whole cloves,
3 points of a star anise,
a teaspoon of whole Sichuan peppercorns (hua jiao),
a dried red chile, broken in half,
a few black peppercorns,
8-10 dried black mushrooms

I covered all with 2 quarts of water (about).  It simmered very gently all day.  It was reducing too much at the start so I added a little more water and covered it with the pot lid just ajar.  At the end I poured the contents of the saucepan through a colander into a big mixing bowl to remove the large solids, washed my saucepan, and poured the broth back into the pan through a sieve lined with a piece of old dish towel--this makes an excellent cheesecloth substitute, a superior one, in fact.  From the solids in the colander I retrieved the mushrooms, sliced them and returned them to the broth.

We boiled up some thin Chinese noodles, blanched some sliced red cabbage and julienne carrots; warmed some of the smoked chicken meat and slices of pork belly in a skillet; divvied it all up and garnished with sliced scallions and ground roasted Sichuan pepper.  I made a dipping sauce for the meats from soy, Chinese dark vinegar, sugar, chile oil, a minced clove of garlic, more Sichuan pepper, and I thinned it with a little water.] 

Beef Jerky

1 pound lean beef, such as top round

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 tablespoon maple syrup

1 tablespoon canola oil

1 tablespoon water

1 teaspoon sambal oelek chile paste  (or sriracha, or a few shakes of Tabasco sauce)

1 clove garlic, minced

½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Slice the meat against the grain into ¼-inch slices.  In a large bowl combine all the other ingredients.  Add the beef and mix well.  Refrigerate for 6 to 8 hours, stirring occasionally.

Lay the beef slices out on a metal cooling rack with a 1/2-inch or smaller grate.  It’s okay if they overlap a bit at the beginning, since they’ll shrink as they smoke, and you can spread them out partway through.  Place the rack on the grill grate in your grill/smoker.  Smoke at 225 for 2 hours, or until the jerky is done to your taste. You can finish it in a low oven to your desired chewiness.

______________________________________

Some material in this handout is quoted from Trout Caviar: Recipes from a Northern Forager by Brett Laidlaw, copyright 2011, published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press

All material copyright 2013 by Brett Laidlaw

Smokey Deer

We’ve been on a steady venison diet here lately, thanks to one happy occurrence—the generous gift of a leg of venison from a friend—and one less fortunate one—the freezer dying on our spare fridge in the basement.  The venison had been in our freezer since it was passed along to me last fall, and as I was going to have to thaw it out all at once, I was waiting for the right moment.  But sometimes you choose your moment, and sometimes it is thrust upon you.  Hence, necessity being the mother of invention and all that, I got to work processing.  I was not a very experienced deer meat cook when I walked upstairs with that dripping, leg-shaped package; I’m a much more confident one now.

In the last three weeks I’ve prepared venison goulash, seared rye-crusted medallions, and that pan roast, which I’ve put to use in numerous ways.  But by far the most interesting and delectable preparation was this smoked venison “pastrami”.

I started by breaking the leg down into its component muscle groups.  Not all cuts of meat consist of a single muscle, of course—many are cross-sections of several groups.  But I don’t have a meat saw, and taking it apart at the seams, as it were, was the easiest, most logical thing to do.  I wound up with about a pound and a half of the dense meat from the shank, and several nice lean pieces from the upper leg, each around a pound and a half, also.  What looked at first like an enormous hunk of deer flesh yielded 8 or 9 pounds of usable meat—oh, and another pound-plus of trimmings, which the dogs greatly enjoyed.

To see what I was dealing with, I sliced off a small piece from each chunk and fried them briefly to assess the flavor and texture.  There were variations—this one a little more tender, this one a bit livery, etc.—but all were relatively tasty and tender.  They were, in effect, no different from something like the sirloin or top round cuts of beef.  The shank meat was destined for goulash.  From the other pieces I selected one to do the pan roast, and set a long, tenderloin-shaped cut aside to make medallions, and the last piece, more or less rectangular and about two-inches thick in the middle, I decided to smoke.

I cured it with a dry rub, and went for some fairly aggressive seasonings.  Here’s the recipe (chalkboard paint is fun…):

Hua jiao, once again, is Sichuan pepper, in this case the dry-roasted and ground up kind.  Ginger is the dry spice, chile a dried red one.  I used locally produced maple sugar, but you could substitute brown sugar in the same amount, or maple syrup, say 1 ½ tablespoons.  I massaged the meat with the seasonings and stuck it in the fridge for a couple of days, turning it several times.  Not a lot of liquid came off. 

Then I smoked it in my trusty Meco grill for about two hours at about 225, and I used wild black cherry as the main smoking wood, something I haven’t tried before. The end result was a delightful confluence of happenstance and experiment. I had no idea what the final product would look or taste like.  It smelled fantastic coming off the grill, and when I cut into it I was amazed at the color.  The taste is deep, layered, mysterious, and wild, but with a delicate texture that makes it seem refined, as well.  Really cool stuff.  What it reminded me of most was pastrami, which is smoked corned beef, so I guess that makes sense.

I have cooked slices to serve with eggs and polenta, and that was good, but I think it’s best straight up, on a slice of toasted country bread.  The sauce gribiche variation I came up with to accompany it doesn’t detract.  This is a really good time of year to dip into the pickle pantry for fresh and crunchy flavors.  The rhubarb pickles I made last summer have mellowed really nicely.  The sauce is composed of:

A grated hard-cooked egg

Dollop of Hellmann’s mayonnaise

A minced pickled ramp and a little of the pickling brine

Same amount minced pickled rhubarb

6 or 7 minced milkweed bud “capers”

A half teaspoon or so of sambal

I’ll run down the other preparations in another report.  All were worth recreating.

Text and photos copyright 2013 by Brett Laidlaw

Pan Roasting, Woodstove Style

Pan-roasted: it’s one of those menu descriptors that I always find appealing, like flame-broiled, wok-seared, fire-grilled. Maybe it has something to do with the muscular combination of noun and verb; maybe it’s the hyphen. The succinct combination is somehow far more appetizing than “roasted in a pan.” Whatever the source of that allure, if there’s a pan-roasted striped bass, pan-roasted duck breast, or pan-roasted double-cut pork chop on the menu, that’s what I’m ordering.

 Never mind that I’ve never been fully certain exactly what pan-roasted means, though I had an idea. So I looked it up, and found that the generally accepted definition involves starting a dish—usually a piece of meat—on the stovetop, searing it in a skillet or sauté pan, then finishing the cooking in a moderate oven. The idea is that the enveloping heat of the oven will finish the cooking more evenly than if you just left the pan on the burner. In some cases—that double-cut pork chop, for instance—I can see the logic. In others—the piece of fish—I think it’s probably more a case of menu puffery; once that fish fillet is browned on both sides, it’s practically done cooking. It really doesn’t require roasting. That doesn’t mean I’m not still a sucker for pan-roasted salmon with a ramp beurre blanc and nettle flan.

 All that being said, the kind of pan-roasting I’m talking about here is a method that doesn’t use the oven at all, but is ideal for woodstove or campfire cookery. And it elevates the importance of the pan, which should ideally be cast iron. The method evolved by happenstance, over years of cooking on the Bide-A-Wee woodstove, and really gelled in my mind with all the cooking we’ve been doing over the last few weeks on the new stove. It combines the qualities of the cast iron with the moderate, persistent heat of the woodstove. The results are savory, rustic, just the kind of thing you want to eat on a winter evening.

Now, I know some of the skeptics among you are going to say: You’re cooking stuff in fat in a fry pan on a stove top. How is this different from frying? Answer: It’s not. Except, when we talk about frying, I think it generally implies a fairly high heat, a larger amount of fat, a shorter cook time. You could call this low, slow frying, but in my mind the technique has more in common with pan-roasting, so I’m going with that. It’s a bit like the question of when something turns from a braise into a stew, from a stew into a soup.

Thelma Sanders Sweet Dumpling at harvest time

The two preparations I have here—acorn squash, a venison leg roast—are ideal examples of foods that respond well to this method. Both require a fairly long cooking time, and both benefit from long exposure to the hot—but not too hot!—pan. And in the case of the venison, there are beautiful drippings left to turn into a pan sauce (another of those simple yet supremely appetizing phrases).

The same squash, up from the root cellar a few months later; a wee bit wrinkled, still delicious

Given all that introduction, the method itself is pretty simple: for the squash, halve it, clean it, cut it into slices. With an acorn type, just go between the scallops, and with other kinds, make roughly 1-inch thick slices. What I used here was an acorn type called Thelma Sanders Sweet Dumpling—how charismatic is that? This has a fairly thin skin, which in fact is mostly edible by the end of cooking. The bottom, hollow part of a butternut also works well for this, and has nearly as tender a skin, once cooked. Delicata types would also work well. I would avoid drier types of squash with thicker rinds, such as buttercup.

So, you heat your cast iron skillet, and add some fat. Duck fat is beautiful, and my first choice for this. Rendered fat from excellent bacon is another good choice. Otherwise, the cooking oil of your choice, or clarified butter. You only need about a tablespoon. Add the squash slices and cook them on one side for 7 or 8 minutes. Turn them over and repeat. Keep turning at intervals until the squash is nicely brown all around and tender to taste. You could add a crushed garlic clove or a couple sprigs of thyme or rosemary along the way. At the end, season with coarse salt and freshly ground pepper. A dusting of paprika or espelette pepper would also be excellent, and ground Sichuan pepper (hua jiao) is a nice complement to sweet squash. Other possible finishes: a drizzle of pumpkin seed oil or melted butter, some chopped fresh herbs, finely minced garlic, or the the garlic, lemon zest, parsely combo called gremolata. Which makes me think that you could turn this into a vegetarian main course by serving the squash slices over pasta. In which case I imagine you’d want some excellent grated cheese to finish it off. I think I have a new dish to try out….

For the venison: this piece of leg was about a pound and a half, and nearly two inches thick, an excellent candidate for this kind of pan roasting. I salted and peppered it liberally. Heated a bit of sunflower oil in the pan, and added the meat. Let it cook 8 minutes per side, turning several times. It cooked a little more than 30 minutes, in the end. After the first turns I added a couple crushed cloves of garlic, a broken up dried red chile, and a couple sprigs of rosemary. As the meat browned and cooked very gently, and the aromatics released in the pan, the house came to smell amazing.

The meat came out a beautiful medium rare, and tender as can be.  We didn't eat it right away, but a couple of nights later I sliced it very thin and piled the slices on top of a piece of homemade grainy sourdough.  I then doused it with a sauce--a kind of jus--I had made by deglazing the pan with red wine and water.  I extended the jus with some chicken stock, and because it was quite spicy from the chile, I added a little maple syrup to balance the heat.  I also stirred some powdered cocoa into the syrup--a sudden inspiration--and the combination was terrific.

You don't necessarily need a woodstove for this kind of cooking.  The keys, I think, are the cast iron pan, the low and slow cooking time, and the appropriate ingredients.  It's a really mellow way of cooking, and foods prepared this way can often be made ahead and reheated--an ideal way to stockpile some made-ahead meals on a winter weekend afternoon.

Text and photos copyright 2013 by Brett Laidlaw