Burnt Honey, Smoky Pork

This plate of smoked-grilled pork shoulder with burnt honey-rhubarb gastrique came about through an intriguing convergence, or maybe more accurately, a collision, of trains of thought and happy (mostly) accidents that fortunately did not result in a train wreck.

I had been thinking about bitter flavors as I tasted my way around our yard, where the dandelions are having a hell of a springtime.  These country dandelions often have leaves a good foot long, and through most of the spring they've been quite mild, with a rich green flavor and only a hint of bitterness.  As the flower stalks begin to emerge, and the flowers to open, the bitterness becomes more pronounced, to the point where, eventually, they are unpalatably bitter.  At least to me they are, and I imagine most American eaters would agree.  But there are cultures, notably Asian ones, where bitter flavors are more prized.  Bitter greens are common in Asian cooking, and then there's bitter melon, the apotheosis of gastronomic bitterness.  I've tried bitter melon a couple of times; I do not find myself craving it.

We like bitter in a cup of espresso, in hoppy beers; and in very dark chocolate, or dark caramel, where the bitterness is tempered with sweetness.  In a frisée salad we can enjoy the bitter greens when that flavor is played off fatty, salty bacon lardons and unctuous egg yolk.  Bitterness can really wake up the palate, open the taste buds for other sensations.  It's a matter of balance, then, of point and counterpoint.  Any single flavor is likely to be either boring or offensive when tasted out of context.  This point has really been brought home to me through my recent explorations with rhubarb juice.  This stuff tastes absolutely awful on its own--I mean, really, you can barely stand the tiniest sip--but when added to a dressing, a marinade, or in today's example, a type of sweet and sour sauce called a gastrique, it adds a fascinating complexity and an exotic edge.

Rhubarb juice. Pretty.

You'd think that that extremely sour and astringent rhubarb juice would only become more intolerable when paired with a bitter flavor, but that's where the happy accident comes in.  Or maybe, as some philosophers contend, there's no such thing as accidents.

I had a jar with about a half-inch of crystallized honey in the bottom.  Thrifty Scot that I am, I didn't want to let it go to waste, so I set the jar in a saucepan with a couple inches of water in it, and put that on the stove on medium heat.  Then I went off and became engrossed in something--I think I was reading about extreme couponers in the New York Times Magazine, weird world, that is.  I started to notice, half-consciously, an appealing aroma, sweet, but with an acidic edge, and I even remember wondering where that might be coming from.  But sometimes scents from last night's dinner waft out of the kitchen--maybe there was a deglazed pan sitting on the stove, whose scent molecules were mixing with those from that morning's tea and honey.

First foam.

Well, the smell grew stronger, and became more and more appetizing--until there entered into that scent a sharp, harsh, edge, and that's when I got off my butt and dashed to the kitchen to find, yes, the water in the saucepan all boiled away, and the bit o' honey in the bottom of the jar bubbling and quite dark.  I moved it off the burner (we've got this electric range at the new house that needs replacing, soon) and just left it to cool.  I felt fortunate that the jar had not exploded and sent daggers of hot glass flying all over the house.

Nearly there.

When I went back to look at it again, the jar was cool enough to handle, but the dark honey in it was still a bit molten.  I became intrigued.  I took a wooden spatula and scraped out what I could.  It was black honey candy at this point, hardening as it cooled.  I added a bit of water to dissolve it.  I tasted this burnt honey jus.   It was bitter, all right, but also sweet and complex.  Something else entered my mind at that point, something a friend had mentioned in response to my first blog post on rhubarb juice.  This friend (actually Bide-A-Wee Nomenclature Tsarina Lulu) used to be a pastry chef at fancy restaurants, and she recalled a caramel sauce she had made with rhubarb juice.  I'd been meaning to try it, but I rarely cook desserts; now I had an inspiration on how to turn that concept to a savory use.  I decided to try burning honey under more controlled conditions, then stop the cooking with rhubarb juice.

Juice added.

I won't drag out the drama any longer:  the result was excellent, and a compelling example of how combining extreme flavors can result in something unexpected and wonderful.  There was a delightful and surprising fruity quality that emerged, in spite of all the other strong flavors.  And I want to be clear:  This sauce is not for the timid of palate.  Also, it requires a suitably forceful companion on the plate, like my smoke-grilled pork shoulder.  It might be good with grilled chicken thighs, with their crisp, smoky skin and dark savory meat.  Or duck, yes--it could be excellent with magret or confit.  I'm also thinking it might be good tossed with ripe strawberries or other berries, à la reduced balsamic vinegar.  Or it could be, as in Lulu's original, a striking sauce for panna cotta, or ice cream.  It's worth exploring the possibilities. [Update:  I grilled chicken paillards (that's boneless thighs bashed flat with a meat mallet, bottom of a small saucepan, or the side of a cleaver) and finished them with a glaze of the straight honey-rhubarb gastrique, and they were excellent.]

The fantastic thing about the honey in a sauce like this is that honey, while obviously among the sweetest things in the kitchen, also has a good deal of acidity (average pH 3.9, thank you Great Google!), and good honey has many complex flavors beyond the sweet and acidic.  Then, when you cook it to this point, the various browning reactions and, finally, caramelization, create a whole new set of flavors and aromas.  It's almost a bit psychedelic, what all those swirling scents do to your brain as it tries to sort out the good, the bad, the weird, the alluring, and the scary.

Mostly, I stay within my cooking comfort zone these days, and am happy there.  I think I have a fairly wide zone.  Sometimes it's fun to try pushing the boundaries.  Regarding gastriques:  they are sweet and sour sauces usually made with a base of caramelized sugar to which vinegar is added, then perhaps other flavors, in the form of fresh fruit, booze, herbs and spices.  The addition of some stock rounds out the flavors; I finished mine with butter and the drippings from my pork as it rested. This Serious Eats post has a good rundown on this fascinating sauce.

How I made my

Burnt Honey Rhubarb Gastrique
Makes 1/2 cup


1/4 cup honey
1 tablespoon water
1/4 cup rhubarb juice
pinch salt

To make the rhubarb juice, combine one chopped stalk rhubarb and couple tablespoons of water in a blender or mini-food processor and blend until a uniform slurry is formed.  Dump this into a strainer and gently press with the back of a spoon to extract the juice.  You'll get about 1/3 cup from one good stalk of rhubarb.

In a small saucepan combine the honey and water.  Cook over medium heat, and NEVER LEAVE THE STOVE!  I have left the stove when reducing maple syrup in the past, and let me tell you, friends, you do not want to see the kind of mess that makes.  The honey will start to bubble and foam.  Cook, stirring occasionally with a wooden spatula, until the honey starts to darken.  Use both your eyes and your nose to tell you when it's done.  It's hard to see the color of the honey with all the foaming--take the pan off the heat and the bubbles will subside, allowing you to judge the color better.  Your nose will tell you when caramelization is starting, and you want it go to the point where bitter notes emerge.  When the honey has reached the color of dark maple syrup, and the bubbles look like the crema atop a nice espresso, you're there.  Remove the pan from the heat and add the rhubarb juice all at once--be prepared for a good deal of foaming and sizzling.  Stir in a pinch of salt.  If you like, you can now reduce this sauce gently to further concentrate the flavors, but I don't think that will be necessary.

As we were getting ready to serve, I heated the gastrique, added a bit more salt, a good tablespoon of butter, grind of pepper, and the juices that accumulated near the resting pork.


Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

The Time of First Green Things; Toward a More Intimate Seasonal Understanding

There was an item in the New York Times recently about a new David Bouley venture, a Japanese restaurant featuring the food of Kyoto, which noted that in the Kyoto region they recognize not only the typical four seasons, nor our common six (add in Indian Summer and Mud Season), but twenty seasons in all. The instant I read it I was completely taken with the idea. Never mind that here in Minne’Sconsin we’ve flipped back and forth through easily twenty-plus seasons in just the last month and a half—what really intrigued me about the idea was its implication of detailed observation, a notion of seasonal change not based on the months of the year, dates on a calendar, or even astronomical observations, but of intimate phenology, determining the season by what is actually occurring in nature, not what usually does, nor what you wish would. It’s a way of thinking that might help relieve the seasonal anxiety that descends in a year like this, when “spring” is so exceedingly reluctant to commit herself. If we just did away with the very notion of Spring, with all its unfulfillable expectations, it might set our minds and hearts more at ease.

So I’m eager to start working up a natural and empirical calendar for our region, one based on what the weather’s up to, what the plants and animals are doing, and what there is to eat, fresh from nature. Unless conditions permit a January grouse hunt, the first wild food I’m likely to harvest comes from the trees, but of course it’s not fruit, it's maple syrup. This year we added another unique taste to the palate: birch syrup. I was kind of tapped out (pun intended) on the sugaring by the time we’d processed a few pints of maple syrup, so I did not go whole hog on the birch, which runs later. I distilled only about a cup, but since my aim was simply to have a taste of it, I’m happy. What a taste of it tastes like: It’s sweet in a maply way, but that’s not the first flavor I detect; a pleasant, tangy bitterness is the first note, like caramel that’s been perfectly cooked just past sweet. There’s also a savory quality to it, deep and woodsy…charcoal-y, is what I’m thinking. I thought of woodcock when I tasted the finished syrup. I imagined it brushed on a grilled whole bird then served with a rough paté of the liver and giblets, maybe with roasted celery root. We’ll have to wait a few months, and implore the game gods, to try that.

Now we’re into the season of the first green things, and the first green things from the wild are: stinging nettles, earlier than wood nettles; dandelion greens, plentiful and just pleasantly bitter now; and sheep sorrel. I've dug some ramps this spring, too, and have been eating loads of them; but they are so assertive, they almost demand a season unto themselves.   They’ll be plump and prime later in May, when nettles and dandies are becoming old hat. They can share the limelight with fiddlehead ferns.

My enthusiasm for the earliest wild spring greens has never been as great as it is this year--maybe something to do with the fact that the snow came in mid-November and stayed until mid-April.  I went on a forage in late March and set my fingers a-tingling picking wee nettles sprouts from the sandy banks of a pretty trout stream just south of the Cities.  I gathered watercress on that outing, too, and made a pesto of cress and pickled ramps that I spread on a butterflied rainbow trout (Star Prairie); I stuck that under the broiler until it bubbled and browned.  The nettles tips, they were rinsed (many times, they were loaded with sand) and simply steamed atop the rice in a pilaf for a few minutes at the end of cooking.  That meal tasted of spring in an immensely satisfying way.

We've also eaten nettles blanched, mashed with boiled potatoes and some ramps--nettles ramp champ.  Some sour cream and butter rounded out that combo.  Wild salads, too, have made regular appearances on our table--cress, dandelion greens, sheep sorrel, sometimes all wild, sometimes mixed with the first local spinach of the season.  I have felt compelled to eat green and wild every chance I get.

About the sheep sorrel, those darling little eared leaves pictured above:  It's a close relative of garden sorrel, and both are related to rhubarb and buckwheat, as well as to the family of wild plants called dock--curly dock, burdock, etc.--many of which are edible in various parts, various stages of growth.  It's not always the case that wild plants and domestic crops with the same name are closely related.  High-bush cranberry, for example, isn't related taxonomically to the common Thanksgiving cranberry (which also grows in the wild, by the way), and wild chervil has nothing to do with the feathery, anise-scented garden herb.  Autumn olives?  Don't try making tapenade from those, and ground cherries have a cultivated relative, but it's the tomatillo, not the fruit of cherry trees.  

But the wild (rumex acetosella) and cultivated (rumex acetosa) sorrels clearly have a lot in common, and the "aceto-" part of both their names is descriptive of that distinctive tart flavor that runs through the rumex clan.  I'd been looking for sheep sorrel on our land for quite some time, and had been frustrated in my search; this was galling, as I had read that it was one of our most common wild edibles, considered an undesirable invasive in some agricultural areas.  Turns out I had been looking at the wrong time of the year, mid-summer, when the low rosettes are hidden by taller growth.  Once I did identify it, I started seeing it everywhere, and this spring it's one of the most prominent of the early spring wild edibles.  The leaves are tiny now, maybe and inch-and-a-half long, but their flavor is great.

When some friends—Tim and Melinda—came out to Bide-A-Wee for walks and lunch this past Saturday, I mosied part of the morning away picking nettles, dandelion greens, and sheep sorrel, which I mixed into eggs and some supporting players (red bell pepper, shallot, potato) for a wild greens frittata. (Melinda, aka Lulu, Nomenclature Tsarina, brought a wicked tasty bean and sweet potato mush--I use that term with full admiration.)  Everyone cleaned their plates, and asked for seconds.

So that's how we've been observing the time of first green things, and I'm eager to start cataloging a more refined way of noting the seasons as the year goes on--apple blossom time will surely figure prominently in our calendar; fly fishermen and -women are keenly aware of the time of the spring mayfly hatches, late May into mid-June. 

I'd be delighted to hear about how others observe the seasons in fine, rather than in those clunky three-month blocks that really don't do justice to the complexities of nature, weather, and sensibility that comprise a year.

Wild Greens Frittata

1 1/2 cups packed nettles
¾ cup dandelion greens
1/2 cup sheep sorrel leaves
1 small potato, peeled and diced small--about 1/3 inch; rinsed, drained, patted dry
1/2 red bell pepper, chopped small
1 shallot, chopped
1 large clove garlic, minced
A few chives, chopped
5 eggs
1/4 cup milk
olive oil
Salt and pepper
Grated cheese--swiss, gruyere, gouda, or as you please

Rinse all the greens well.  Bring a pot of water to the boil and blanch the nettles and dandelion greens together for 1 minute.  Drain and coarsely chop.  The sorrel doesn't need blanching.

In a good heavy skillet, preferably non-stick or well-seasoned cast iron, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil.  Add the potatoes and cook over medium heat until they just begin to brown, then add the red bell pepper and shallot.  Cook for a couple of minutes, until the shallot is translucent.  Add the garlic, all the greens, a couple good pinches of salt and a few grinds of pepper. Remove the pan from the heat.

Beat the eggs together with the milk in a mixing bowl.  Add the chives, a pinch of salt, some pepper.  Add the cooked vegetables to the egg mixture.  Wipe out the pan and return it to the stove.  Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and heat it over medium-high until the oil shimmers.  Stir the egg-veg mixture and pour it into the pan, turning to distribute it evenly--push the solids around, too, if they seem clumped in one area.

Turn the heat down to medium-low, cover, and cook for 10 to 15 minutes, until the eggs are pretty well set.  To finish:  Our Haggis woodstove is great for gently cooking a dish like this, not so good for broiling.  What I did, I cut the frittata into quarters in the pan, then flipped each piece over, so the former top--now bottom--could brown.  I sprinkled grated cheese on the former bottom--now top--and put the lid back on for a couple of minutes to melt the cheese.  In a civilized kitchen, you can skip the flipping and finish the frittata under the broiler or in a hot oven--cook until the top is a bit brown, the cheese melted and bubbly.

We ate ours hot from the pan, but this is the sort of dish that is often made ahead and either rewarmed or served at room temp.  Without too much cheese on top, it travels well for a fisherman's or forager's lunch.
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If you’re just getting in to foraging, the greens here deployed—stinging nettles, dandelion greens, and sheep sorrel—are among the most easily found and indentified in our region, especially this time of year, when they stand out among the sparse early spring greenings. I’ve mentioned before the books by Teresa Marrone and Sam Thayer, local wild foods writers of great integrity and knowledge; I mention them again. Their books are essential reading for wild foods enthusiasts in our region, and their expert descriptions will allow you to identify these wild plants with ease and assurance.  Their websites are linked at right.



Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Meet Pippi

Please welcome the new arrival in the Bide-A-Wee family, Pippi Ulriksdotter. Pippi, as you can see, is an axe, a large splitting axe, to be precise, from the Granfors Bruks forge in Bergsjo, Sweden. Pippi was a birthday present from my dear wife, came my way about a month ago. Mary presented me with a long, flattish, ill-wrapped box that day, and as I opened it I wondered if maybe she'd gotten me the Fender Stratocaster that I have long yearned for. Instead, inside, another sort of axe, the literal sort.... I was not disappointed. (And anyway, with no electricity at Bide-A-Wee, an electric guitar wouldn't be much good out there; maybe next year we'll have power in the country, and I'll be able to plug in and wail some "Smoke on the Water" down the valley, like in that great scene from Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven ...if I get a Strat next year, that is, hint, hint....)



On how the axe came to have the name Pippi Ulriksdotter: We have a Nomenclature Tsarina at Bide-A-Wee, that being Lulu. Tsarina Lulu (aka our "daughter" Melinda, another story...) works remotely, though she visits Bide-A-Wee frequently. 'Twas she who came up with the name Bide-A-Wee for the cabin, and she also named the woodstove Haggis. That's how she got to be the Tsarina. And, uh, those are the only things we've given names to, fortunately--oh, except for the outhouse that holds our composting toilet, and which we call the Tardis, after the Doctor Who spaceship that looks like an English phonebooth from the outside, which the outhouse somewhat resembles, though, come to mention it, the Tsarina pointed out recently that our Tardis is actually sort of an anti-Tardis, as ours looks bigger from the outside than it seems once you get inside, which is true, it's kind of cramped...anyway.... But Tardis is more generic than a specific proper name.



Well, I got the axe, and I tried it out, and man, was I impressed. I've gone through a couple of Menard's axes in the last couple of years. I thought maybe I was doing something wrong in approach or technique, or that our wood was just particularly gnarly, too young, too dry, too cross-grained, something. No: I just didn't have the proper tool. With little ado this axe can knock apart dense oak logs, twisty apple trunks. Maple, birch? Fuggedaboutit. And it does so with style, with attitude. It was clearly an axe with personality, so we decided it should have a name, and so we called the Tsarina, and the Tsarina said she would give it some thought. And then the Tsarina called back, and said she had the perfect name: Pippi Longstocking.

I scoffed. You shouldn't scoff at a Tsarina, but I did. Like I was going to name my magnificent, manly axe after a freckle-faced, red-headed pigtailed girl in striped stockings! The Tsarina was a little miffed with the scoffing, but she continued to make her case: Pippi was Swedish, like the axe; Pippi possessed super-human strength, "the strength of ten policemen"; Pippi for sure had style and attitude.

I was not convinced. I was leaning toward Sigurd. We sort of let the matter drop. Another issue I had, Pippi Longstocking is a name that's already taken--my axe should have its own distinctive handle(!). But the more time I spent with the axe--and I took every opportunity to make my way to the woods where I had chain-sawed some small oaks into sections, to experience that deep satisfaction that comes from efficient wood-splitting--the more my inclination drifted back to Pippi. It wasn't really size, weight, or dint of brute force that made the axe such an estimable tool. It was the design, the thoughtfulness, the Swedishness of it. And, now, I'm not going to go down some weird road to explore the sex roles of wood-cutting tools, but there came a day when I realized, Well, why can't my axe be a girl? A really awesome girl, named in honor of one of the coolest Tomboys in all of kiddie lit? I read all those Pippi Longstocking books when I was a kid, and I had admired Pippi then, but I hadn't thought about those books in a long time. Tsarina Lulu had.

The final piece was hitting upon Pippi's surname. Along with the axe came a booklet, "The Axe Book." It tells you all about where and how the Gransfors Bruks axes are made, and it even tells you who makes them. There's sort of a class picture of the axe-making team, and each axe is stamped with the initials of its maker. Mine was made by Ulrik Nilsson. He looks like an unassuming, tall and thinnish man with a crewcut and a prominent Adam's-apple, standing at the back of the back row.



I called the Tsarina, and told her what I was thinking, and she agreed: Pippi Ulriksdotter would be an excellent name for the Bide-A-Wee large splitting axe, that has already become a cherished, albeit taciturn, member of the family.

Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw