Fun with Fermentation 2014

I'm putting this up for those who attended my fermented vegetables session at the Hay River Transition Initiative's 2014 Green and Traditional Skills Day, or anyone else who's interested.

Here are some of my posts dealing with the topic:

Crock-fermented vegetables

Kimchi

Mixed vegetable ferment in a gallon jar

Sauerkraut in jars

Choucroute garnie


And here are the key books in my fermentation library:

The Art of Fermentation, Sandor Katz

Wild Fermentation, Sandor Katz

Wild Fermentation is more practical and recipe-oriented; The Art of Fermentation is encyclopedic.  I reach for Wild Fermentation far more often.

Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning, the Farmers and Gardeners of the Terre Vivante Collective

Fascinating traditional preservation techniques from the French countryside.

The Joy of Pickling, Linda Ziedrich

My go-to book for all sorts of pickles, relishes, chutneys, etc., fermented and otherwise.

That should keep you busy for a while. Go forth and ferment!

Crock Progress

It's been about a week and a half since I stocked my crock, and I went poking around in there this morning to see how the fermentation was coming along.  The brine had turned purple from the cabbage pigment; that happened almost right away.  There were whitish specks on the surface of the brine, quite unappetizing; I skimmed most of those off.  The brine had a great flavor, sour, chile hot, savory with garlic and onion.  The cabbage was on top, and it tasted like fermented cabbage, which is to say, very good, as homemade sauerkraut generally is, not mind-blowing.

The exciting stuff was down below, specifically the green tomatoes and summer squash, which I had not fermented before.  One of the strange things that happens when fermenting soft vegetables is that they actually become firmer, and somewhat shrunken and wrinkled in the process--that's water being drawn out and replaced with salt from the brine solution.  Reaching back to our high school science courses, we will recall that this is the result of the liquids within and without the vegetables striving for equilibrium of salinity through osmosis.  If I recall correctly.  The fact that the tomatoes and squash were actually firmer than when they went in surprised me, though it shouldn't have.  I have this sort of "common sense" assumption about fermentation, totally wrong as it happens, that tough vegetables will soften while fermenting.  They do not.  So don't put gnarly old vegetables into the crock expecting that they'll come out tender in a few weeks; more likely they will just get gnarlier.

Anyway, circling back to an earlier point:  the tomatoes and patty pans had firmed up nicely, soured delightfully, and taken up plenty of flavor--and color--from the brine.  The beans were nice and crisp and flavorful, the chiles piquant.  And the onions, the humble onions, they were absolutely delightful.  I'll put more onions into my next crock.

I moved the vegetables to a gallon jar--in truth I could have done it in the jar to start with, but I really like stocking my crock.  I mentioned previously that the main use I make of a mixed ferment like this is as a base for winter soups, but the freshness of the tomatoes, chiles, and squash in this one have me thinking of fermented salsas, or choucroute garnie variations.  I'm feeling good about my winter pantry.

Stocking the Crock

At around 6:00 last night, as the sun was slipping down behind the big cottonwoods, the temperature here at the farm had dropped to the upper 40s.  The sky was clear and the winds were calm.  I looked out at the gardens, and I thought, Ruh-roh.  I’d seen a forecasted low of 38, and down here in the valley you can usually subtract a few degrees from that.  Indeed, such are the microclimates in our hilly section of Dunn County, Wisconsin, that during the lovely cool weather of August, when we were seeing lows in the low 40s, our friend Tina, who lives two miles away, but at the top of a tall hill, reported overnight temps in the mid-50s.  And that is why Tina has apples this year, and we don’t.  So it goes.

I briefly considered a hurried harvest.  Then I said, Aw, skip it.  If it’s gonna freeze on September 13, it’s gonna freeze.  We’ve had frost at Bide-A-Wee as early as August 25, so it wasn’t out of the question by any means.  But as I made some dinner preparations and the sky grew darker, the thermometer’s needle stayed put.  Maybe it was stuck.  I gave it the benefit of the doubt, and decided that we would probably be all right.  I put on some wool socks, poured myself a drink, and went out to sit by the fire and listen for the barred owls and coyotes.

6:30 this morning I got up and peeked out at the basil in a planter on the deck.  It was green and perky.  Basil, cucumbers, and green beans are the tenderest of crops, in my experience, indicator species in that regard, if you will.  If the basil was okay, the rest would be fine.  There wasn’t even frost on the car tops, just a heavy dew.  Now the next few days look clear of frost danger, but it is the middle of September, and the end is near.  So as the sun warmed the yard on this splendid early fall morning, I made a tour of the gardens, picked a basketful of prime produce, and set about filling my crock.  A ferment like this is always a bit of an experiment: I have never fermented summer squash or green tomatoes, for instance, though  Sandor Katz says they work well in a mixed crock.  Chiles, beans, cabbage, and kale I have fermented many times with good results.

Rinse everything well, especially the kale:  all those attractive crenellations are custom-made for catching dust, and that stuff has been standing out there near the crossroads for months.

I stripped the kale from the stems, chopped it roughly, and massaged it with salt, mainly to get the volume down and make more room in the crock.

These little red cabbages were ones I thinned from my over-planted cabbage patch.  These too required careful cleaning, as it turns out some slugs were still in residence there.  Hate slugs, absolutely hate ‘em.  I cut these into quarters or sixths.  I’m not sure why the variation; just a whim.

Four kinds of chiles went in:  Anaheim, Serrano, jalapeno, and cayenne.  The Serrano were pretty hot, the cayenne slightly so, the anaheims and jalapenos, barely.  I took out the seeds, more for aesthetics than anything else, but left most of the veins for added heat.

For flavor I added a red onion and a few cloves of garlic—I’ll probably tuck in a few more cloves of garlic in a few days, but our kitchen supply was running low.

I placed a spongy bed of kale at the bottom, garlic, chilies, and onion on top of that, then built it up from smaller to larger pieces:  beans, green tomatoes, finally cabbage.  One of my secret talents in life is the ability to gauge volume with uncanny accuracy.  For example, when I go to the co-op for bulk goods, I nearly always buy just the right amount to fill the pantry jar to within a half-inch of the top.  So, were I a super hero, I would be Volu-Man, and I would be able to help humanity to, uh…tell how much stuff will fit in a certain container.  Okay, it’s not a cure for cancer, but it’s something….  Anyway, you see my extraordinary skill in evidence here:  

Working out in the yard on this absolutely splendid morning was pleasant duty, indeed.  The colors and textures of the vegetables in that clear northern light made a visual feast that has me anticipating the culinary feasts ahead even more.  

When the crock was well packed I took it inside and added brine consisting of 6 tablespoons (3/8 cup or about 90 grams) of sea salt dissolved in a half gallon of warm water.  I have a little plate that fits exactly inside the mouth of my crock, water-filled measuring cup atop that to weight it down.  In the next couple of days the contents should compact significantly, and then I can add a few more vegetables if I want to.

Fermented vegetables are delightful chopped as hot dog or sandwich garnish, for sure, but at our house their main role is as soup base.  The tangy, crunchy vegetables take up so much flavor in the process of fermentation, they add a remarkable freshness to our winter soups.  I think of these as borscht variations, though they may not contain beets.  And that reminds me that there are still plenty of beets out in the garden, and I should check on how my late planting of golden beets is coming along.

It is a bounteous time, to be sure, and while the end is near for the cold-sensitive crops, it’s only after a couple of good frosts that the hardier vegetables like kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and turnips really come into their prime.  Carrots are sweeter after a frost.  Lettuce can take a good bit of chill, too.  There is plenty of good eating ahead.

And now I'm curious to know, as I'm certain many of you reading this are avid fermenters:  What's in your crock?  What sorts of things have you had success fermenting, and which ones haven't work out as well?  Please do tell.  And happy fermenting to all.

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

My Beautiful Choucroute

(With some technical issues resolved, we carry on....  See bottom for details.)

Choucroute garnie, the classic Alsatian dish of simmered sauerkraut topped with smoked meats and sausages, is not the sort of thing I want to eat every week, or maybe even every month.  Though its name features the fermented vegetable base (choucroute is French for sauerkraut), it's a rich and meat-heavy meal, delectable when properly prepared with best ingredients, and ideal on a cold winter's evening, preferably after a few hours on the ski trails, or working in the woodlot.  We make it with great anticipation, and relish every tangy, porky bite, maybe two to three times each winter.  We make a big pot, even just for the two of us--the leftovers are even better than the first round.

Another thing I love about choucroute is that it's an ideal dish to simmer atop a woodstove. The gentle, even heat slowly renders the sauerkraut savory and tender, with still a bit of bite, and perfectly infuses the cabbage with the flavors of the meats that "garnish" it. There's some time involved in the prep, but once it's all assembled and bubbling quietly away, it's ready when you are.

If you've thought ahead to ferment your own 'kraut, choucroute garnie is a suitable reward for your forethought. You rinse the 'kraut in several changes of water to take away some of the sourness and salt, then you squeeze out as much water as you can so the cabbage is fairly dry. In a big heavy pot you've got some chopped leek, onion, and carrot sweating down in excellent bacon fat (best) or duck fat (just as good) or oil (acceptable). To this you add the squeezed-out 'kraut, then some dry white wine and chicken stock--perhaps a cup of each. I toss in a bay leaf, a couple of whole cloves, three or four crushed juniper berries, a few sprigs of thyme, a few grinds of coarse pepper. Nestle a small piece of excellent bacon in the middle of it, and let it cook, covered, for a good hour. That's the basis, and can be prepared days ahead.

Rillons marinating prior to cooking.

Then on choucroute night, I begin by browning my meats. I had a couple of chunks of our home-smoked bacon, of course, and another homemade meat item, rillons. Rillons are succulent cubes of pork belly that have been cooked a long while in pork fat and duck fat, wine and herbs, very much in the manner of rillettes, except that for rillons the belly cubes are browned first, and left whole at the end, rather than shredded as for rillettes. Both rillons and rillettes are particularly associated with the cochonailles of the Loire valley around the towns of Tours, Amboise, Saumur. Cochonailles means things made from pig; I'll have more to say about this in an upcoming post.

The golden porky loveliness of finished rillons .

The sausage components were purchased--really nice smoked sausage from Pastures A Plenty  via Seward co-op ; and kalberwurst from Louie's Finer Meats of Cumberland, Wisconsin, an institution in west central Badgerland.

After browning the meats I cleaned up the pan a bit--I like my choucroute to stay nice and light in color, and if there's too much brown stuff in the bottom of the pot it turns dark; tasty but aesthetically unappealing, to me. So the pre-simmered 'kraut goes back in the pan, perhaps with another slosh of wine, or just a bit of water to keep it moist. Then the meats are tucked in, and it cooks at a very gentle simmer for at least a half hour, or until you're ready to eat.  Oh, cook some potatoes ahead, and add them to warm in the last twenty minutes or so.

Crusty bread, a glass of riesling or pinot blanc. There it is, my beautiful choucroute:

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw
_____________________________


Re technical issues: When I went into Blogger yesterday to write this post, I found I was unable to type in the main text box. The little twirly daisy symbol, that doohickey that tells you the computer is "thinking", just kept going round and round, never stopped. I could type in the title box, the labels, see a preview--everything but actually type my post. Next day, today, same deal. Fortunately I have a computer genius in the house, and Mary resolved, or circumvented, the problem by installing Google Chrome as my browser. Now all is well, for the time being. Hopefully this will be helpful information if anyone else in blog world encounters this same problem.

2011 Highlights: My Crock

There's still time to get your entries in for the Trout Caviar book giveaway --leave a comment about one of your 2011 LOCAL! food highlights by January 1; be specific, be evocative, regale and entice us!

I'm finding that my 2011 food highlights consist more of things I did than of things I ate--though I'm sure I'll be able to dredge up a memorable taste sensation or two, as well.  Late last winter Mary and I took a drive south from Bide-A-Wee down Wisconsin highway 25 to the river town of Downsville.   There we met potter John Thomas and his wife Kathy Ruggles, shared a cup of tea and talked about the tumultuous political situation engulfing the Badger State (it's worth remembering that the whole occupy phenomenon started with anti-Walker protestors flocking to Madison and the state capitol building).  

We came home with my very first crock, an earthtone beauty that I filled with vegetables mid-summer; it's been fermenting ever since. Now it's filled with cabbage that has become sweet and sour, crunchy and salty--the basis for a wonderful choucroute garni dinner, on the elaborate end, or fabulous hot dog garnish, at its simplest.

Prior to acquiring this gorgeous vessel I'd always done my fermenting in quart jars, and that works just fine. I use the same recipe, either way: for each pound of shredded vegetables--cabbage, kale, beets, turnips, etc.--I add 2 teaspoons of salt. Rub the salt in well, pack the veg in quart jars, or into the crock with a weight on top. Into a cool dark place, and fermentation will start almost immediately. Your vegetables will be nicely sour in a few days, and will continute to gain character as time goes by. After a couple of weeks I usually refrigerate the jars, and there they will keep indefinitely. My crock is sitting on the kitchen counter, which is probably fine in a cool winter kitchen; but I oughta check on it, I guess.

Bonnie Dehn, the "Herb Lady" from the Minneapolis Farmers Market, mentioned the last time I was on the Fresh & Local Show  with her and host Susan Berkson that you can even ferment cabbage in a zip-top bag. Worth a try, though I wouldn't leave the 'kraut in the bag longer than needed to get it sour, for fear of chemicals leaching from the plastic.

Fermenting your own vegetables is one of those age-old means of food preservation that can seem daunting until you try it and see how simple it really is. Trust nature, and your nose. Acquiring a taste for fermented food opens a whole world of gorgeous, pungent variety--some of the most distinctive and delicious foods from around the globe are of the fermented variety.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Crock Art

When you mix up vegetables and salt, put a weight on top to extrude the juices, and tuck the lot away in a coolish spot for a few days, you expect a fresh and tangy batch of fermented goodness to result. But other tranformations can occur, as well. Fishing around in my most excellent Dunn County Pottery crock recently for veg to top a rice bowl lunch, I extracted this exquisite little morsel:  a quarter of a tiny eggplant that went into the brine with the first batch of vegetables.  It started out as a typical midnight-dark eggplant (though tiny), and faded in the brine--though faded doesn't quite seem the right word for this gorgeous change--to the lovely bit of vegetal jewelry you see here.  Almost too pretty to eat--and I must admit, it actually did look better than it tasted, a little on the tough side. 

But I still feel that it contributed more than its share to a weekday lunch. The fermented carrots, long beans, chile, and cabbage provided plenty of crunch and zip to help the rice go down very nicely.

The basic formula is 2 teaspoons of salt to a pound of vegetables. You don't need a crock to make fermented vegetables, either. A gallon glass jar will do, or a wide-mouth quart if you want to start small. Just about any good, fresh vegetables can be fermented this way. Though I warn you: If you put red beets in the mix, you'll get a color transformation far less sublte than my blanched eggplants. Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation is my guide in most things fermented.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Big Borscht

Big Borscht is in the "Grow Your Own" Round-Up hosted by House of Annie.




Here's something a little more seasonal, a root around the root cellar, clean out the crisper, "Eeww, what is that thing?", "Oh, that's okay, I can trim that off..." sort of soup. We're getting down there in terms of vegetables, but March is straight ahead, I've got some green things growing in flats, and a big, robustly flavored soup like this is just the thing to buck up one's spirits for that last push toward warmer days.



This is truly a one-pot meal with no fuss at all involved--as long as you like to chop. Who doesn't like to chop? Bung it all in the pot, simmer until you feel it's done. The key flavor ingredients are some decent stock to bring it all together, some pickled or fermented vegetables to add a sharpness that balances the earthy roots, and maple syrup and cider vinegar, because I love using the products of Bide-A-Wee's tree crops. Tree crops. I love saying tree crops.


For my stock I used a combination of vegetable stock, chicken stock, mushroom soaking water and plain water to reach eight cups for this large amount of vegetables. The mushrooms are optional but my dried chanterelles added a lot of flavor and fragrance. Dried porcini are another good choice, or sometimes you'll see packages of mixed dried "forest mushrooms." If you've got a stash of dried morels, those would more than do the job. Shitakes are a last resort, though the chopped mushrooms would add good texture; shitake broth won't add a lot of flavor here.

Here's a good illustration of why dried wild mushrooms cost so much. The chanterelles in this bowl weighed one ounce:



The vegetables are whatever you have on hand, mostly roots. You need beets to call it borscht, I think, but you don't have to call it borscht. Here's what I had:

From our garden: turnips, carrots, potatoes, beets. From the market: parsnips, onion, garlic. My pickled (fermented) vegetables jar yielded gardens beets, beans, carrots, and snow peas, market cauliflower, snap peas, and onion. And of course I foraged the chanterelles.



If you don't have a big jar of fermented vegetables at your house, perhaps you have some sauerkraut, or a jar of pickled beets, or can manage to purchase some. Check the refrigerated section of your co-op for naturally fermented or pickled products. Be prepared for a little sticker shock; in my experience the "artisan" versions of this sort of thing do not come cheap. The upside of that is that it may encourage you to do more of your own preserving, next fall.



You can make this with or without meat. I put in some roast pork shoulder I had in the freezer. Other meat options: ground beef or leftover roast, smoked sausage, cooked chicken. Sour cream or home-cultured "crème fraiche" really elevates the dish. Fresh herbs should you have them--dill, tarragon, parsley, thyme--would be nice, too.

When I first made this soup I thought it would need more syrup and vinegar to get the slight sweet and sour flavor I wanted, but after it sat overnight, then simmered a bit more, I found that the natural sweetness of the roots, the natural sourness of the fermented vegetables, had filled in the blanks perfectly.

Then a loaf of crusty bread, glass of wine, beer, cider or as you please.

More soup, please!

Big Borscht
serves six generously, or three humans and one wire-haired pointing griffon*

8 cups liquid--a combination of meat and/or vegetable stock, mushroom soaking liquid, and water
6 cups chopped fresh vegetables (beets, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, turnips, onion)
1 cup chopped fermented vegetables (or ‘kraut, or pickled beets)
12 ounces cooked pork shoulder, or smoked sausage, or ground beef, cooked chicken (optional)
3 large cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
1 ounce dried mushrooms, soaked, then chopped (optional)
1 tsp salt or to taste
1 small dried red chili, crumbled (optional)
2 T maple syrup (or to taste)
1 T cider vinegar (or to taste)
Sour cream or crème fraiche
Black pepper to taste
Fresh herbs of choice--dill, tarragon, parsley, thyme (optional)

Combine all except sour cream or crème fraiche in a big soup pot. Simmer a half hour or longer, to desired doneness. Best when it sits a day or two. Adjust sweet/sour balance to taste with additional syrup and vinegar before serving. Serve topped with crème fraiche or sour cream.



* This recipe is griffon tested and approved. As we were getting ready to head to the cabin for the weekend, I placed a warm, open container of borscht in the snow on our deck to cool. Forgetting the disposition of said soup, I let the dogs out before we put them in the car. When Mary went to look for the borscht to put it in the cooler, I heard her call, "Where did you say the soup was..."? We're pretty sure Annabel ate it all. She had a guilty--but satisfied-- look, and Lily's beard was clean.

Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

"Salvage" Kimchi

When the weather turns on you, as it did on us this past week, the best thing you can do is plunge in to some spicy fermentation--funky Korean ambrosia; kimchi, that is. There was frost on the cabbage leaves, what was left of them. I had planted some savoy cabbage rather late, but we got ten or twelve little heads, lovely they were, absolutely mignon. When I cut the petits choux from the plants, a lot of quite edible looking leaves remained, the ones that hadn't enrolled in the heading-up program. I felt I owed something to these hardy individualists. They seemed a little tough, but no more than, say, collards or big mustard greens. I thought a brining and a good dose of fermentation might turn them into something delicious.

The photo at right illustrates our current situation: the hot, and the not-so-hot. My chilies, which were hanging out to dry, are now pretty much freeze-dried.

I also had roots, all those carrots from my volunteer plot, and some turnips I'd forgotten about. With sub-zero temperatures on the way, it was all-ashore-that's-going-ashore and devil-take-the-hindmost, with a little bit of Katie-bar-the-door thrown in for good measure. Or something like that. The cold plays tricks on the mind.... I had to use warm water to dislodge some the turnips even before the real deep-freeze set in. Those roots and a few leaves of lacinato kale went into a mixed-vegetable ferment.


I got out my prized copy of Wild Fermentation , by Sandor Ellix Katz, aka "Sandorkraut." The Momofuku cookbook I recently bought also has kimchi recipes, and I may try David Chang's version in future (though I must admit Chang's kimchi scares me a little, calling for dried shrimp or dried scallops in the seasoning). When it comes to fermentation, I trust Sandor Katz.

I made a brine according to Katz's instructions: 1/4 cup salt to 1 quart water. Washed the cabbage leaves, cut out the thick rib, shredded them. The turnips I peeled, the carrots, not; I sliced them thin on my "Benriner."


The sliced roots, the kale, and a bit of leek went into a separate brine. After a few hours in their salty baths, I drained the vegetables, reserving the brine, and rinsed them in fresh water, as they tasted a bit too salty.


I chopped the flavorings: garlic, ginger, chili, a couple of small leeks. I tossed the vegetables with liberal doses of this extremely aromatic mixture, and put them into separate jars. The cabbage really compressed--what looked like it would barely fit into a quart jar came down to less than a pint. The cabbage smelled bracingly "kimchi-ish" right away--spicy, mustardy, garlicky.


That was two days ago. The jars have been sitting on my kitchen radiator cover. I check them each day and make sure the vegetables are covered in brine. They're just starting to ferment, the mixed vegetable version moreso, because of the sugar in the carrots, I would imagine. Within a week they should be taking on a distinctly fermented character, and when they're as funky as I want them, I'll put them in the fridge. There they will keep for as long as you like. I just recently tossed out the end of a jar I'd made two years ago.

I will report back on my kimchi's progress, and how we wind up using it, in future posts.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Pickled

It started with the 'kraut, the wonderfully simple and seemingly fool-proof sauerkraut made in quart jars from The Country Gourmet . Then I got my hands on Sandor Ellix Katz's excellent book, Wild Fermentation , and I got to fermenting turnips, beets, kimchi, apples, eggplant.... Any vegetable or fruit I had too much of, into a jar of brine it went. Not everything worked out equally well. Beets, kimchi, apples=great. Eggplant, turnips, overgrown radishes=compost.

I've since gotten my fermentation fever under control. Sauerkraut and sour dills are the must-haves. Sour beets produce an amazingly flavorful borscht. I'll do apples again because we have many, many apples on those dozens of old trees out at Bide-A-Wee, and they look so very beautiful in the jar, and are a unique treat, fizzy in the middle, turning into salty cider from the inside out. Hard to describe.

This week I found myself with excess produce as a result of that old eyes-bigger-than-stomach type phenomenon that overcomes many of us at the farmers market. Oh, and I'd apparently forgotten that I have a good-sized garden at home. So the cauliflower and beets that had been lingering in the crisper, the larger green beans from a market buy, a red onion, the last of the garden snow peas and baby carrots I recently thinned out, all went into a gallon jar along with a few cloves of garlic, a dozen or so peppercorns, some thyme and tarragon.

The brine consisted of one-half cup of sea salt or pickling salt to three quarts of water. I heat the water on the stove just to warm, so the salt dissolves easily. Toss the vegetables and herbs and garlic together in a big bowl, then put everything into the jar. Add brine to cover. The recipe I was using, from The Joy of Pickling (which I see has just come out in a new, revised edition, 250 flavor-packed recipes where before there were only 200!), called for two tablespoons of red wine vinegar added to the jar; I had champagne vinegar, so used that instead.

To hold the vegetables under the brine, you take a plastic zipper bag, fit it in the mouth of the jar, and add leftover brine so it settles in and seals.

I put up those pickles yesterday, and the beets, cut into chunks, started to color the brine immediately. Today the brine is dark as midnight, and you just see little starry glimmers of white cauliflower where the florets touch the glass. I'll leave that out at cool room temp (basement) for a week or so, at which point fermentation will be well underway. Then I'll move the jar to the fridge to slow things down. You can start eating the vegetables at any point, and they'll keep indefinitely--I'm just about through my last jar of sour dills from last year.

One other tip, from Russian master picklers: If you put a couple of oak, grape, or currant leaves in with your fermented pickles, they'll stay crisp, not go mushy. I'm not sure why that works, something to do with the tannins in those leaves, I guess. What I do know is that it works. I did an experiment a couple of years ago, made a jar of sour dills with currant leaves added, and one with nothing. The jar with currant leaves stayed nicely crisp;the jar without went mushy, and found the fate of all failed pickles, the compost pile.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Soup is Good Food

A couple of weeks ago Trout Caviar took an imaginary journey, following the 45th parallel across the Atlantic until we arrived (with a little northward jog) in Alsace. The idea was to find ways to keep the northern table interesting through these last lingering weeks of winter. That was fun, if a little bit porky, by the end. While there's no disguising a certain francophilia in this endeavor, French food isn't the only cuisine that interests me, nor the only place to find inspiration for local, seasonal delights.

If you follow the 45th parallel the other way, across the Great Plains, over the Rockies, right out to sea and across the Pacific, you'll just catch the tip of northern Japan, cruise through Russia just a tad north of North Korea, and on into China.

I was thinking about Japanese and Korean cuisines in this Asian-inspired hot pot soup. I don't know a lot about those styles of cooking, but I'm intrigued by what I do know. The two share certain techniques and ingredients that are particularly useful to northern cooks: Lots of root vegetables (radishes, burdock, sweet potato); noodles, especially buckwheat noodles ("soba" in Japanese); lots of preserved foods, dried, pickled, fermented (chief among these, Korea's fabulously pungent kimchi, fermented cabbage and other vegetables).

This soup is not authentically anything but Trout Caviar cooking, but it's fresh, light and savory, and it makes excellent use of what local vegetables remain available. I think it's worthwhile to parse the provenance of the ingredients, because I impressed myself with how many local products, especially vegetables, went into this:

The broth from Hill and Vale beef chuck; the beef in the soup, Hill and Vale top blade steak
Golden turnips, black radishes, Harmony Valley Farm, Wisconsin, purchased at Seward Co-op
Carrots and leeks, Our Garden
Butternut squash, Pflaum Farm, Midtown Farmers' Market
Mushrooms, Gourmet's Delight in Eden, WI. I had completely overlooked mushrooms as local, seasonal produce, but in fact they are grown in both Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The kimchi, house-fermented, Midtown Farmers' Market napa cabbage, vintage 2007 (a very good year!)
The homemade buckwheat noodles used flours from Whole Grain Milling, Welcome, MN

(Ironically, this whole thing started out as a quest to find a use for burdock root; ironic because, well, there's no burdock in the dish. That's still sitting in the crisper, waiting its turn....)


I'm not going to give a recipe, just a method: Cut your vegetables, whatever you have and like, into pieces that will cook quickly. Slice the meat as thin as you can--putting it in the freezer for about 20 minutes will make it easier to slice.

For two servings, take about four cups of flavorful stock (mine was a five-spice* beef stock, but you could use chicken, or vegetable, or fish for a seafood hot pot), bring it up to a simmer, and season to taste. Then add the vegetables according to cooking time (I put in leek shreds, carrot ribbons, and mushrooms to start, then squash and turnip squares a few minutes later). The very thinly sliced beef will cook in literally seconds. Just turn the heat off as soon as you've added it, and serve.

If you have one of those "Mongolian" hot pots , the ones with a chimney coming up through a moat holding the stock, kept hot with coals in the bottom, you can be very authentic and cook each piece of meat or veg as you want it. Otherwise, just serve it up in a big soup bowl, as at top. I drizzled a little sesame oil over it at the end, and a little chili oil on mine.

We accompanied the soup with a salad made from black radish (peel, cut into matchsticks, blanch in boiling water for 30 seconds, refresh; toss with a soy-sugar-chili oil-vinegar-sesame oil dressing) and some truly kickin' kimchi that has been aging in the back of the fridge for nearly two years. Wild Fermentation and The Joy of Pickling are two good guides for making kimchi and other fermented vegetables.


I went a bit over the top with this one and made my own "soba," buckwheat noodles. My soba technique could use some work--these noodles, made with half buckwheat flour and half whole wheat bread flour held together (just) through rolling, cutting, and cooking, but they fell apart as we ate them. Amazingly, I was unable to find good instructions for homemade soba anywhere on the almighty Internet. Several videos of Japanese guys making them, but no useful instruction in English. You can buy dry soba noodles at any Asian market, of course; you could also use egg noodles, or rice sticks, or bean threads.


Finally, we made a dipping sauce to serve along side:

1/4 chicken stock
1 tsp sugar
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
1 small clove garlic, minced
1 tsp rice wine or apple cider vinegar

Bring the chicken stock to a simmer in a small saucepan, stir in the sugar. Pour into a bowl and add the rest of the ingredients. Serve alongside the soup to dip meat, veg, and noodles, if you like.

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* Chinese five-spice generally consists of cinnamon, star anise, fennel seed, cloves, and Sichuan pepper. Simmering the whole (not ground) spices in stock imparts a subtle background spice market flavor.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Choucroute Salad

A fringe benefit from preparing the choucroute garnie in the previous post. We had some leftover bacon, sausage, and potatoes. There was a bit of sauerkraut left, too. I made a simple vinaigrette, stirring in the 'kraut, chopped fine, at the end:

2 tsp Leatherwood Vinegary apple wine vinegar
1 1/2 tsp grain mustard
2 Tbsp canola oil
pinch salt
several grinds black pepper
about 2 Tbsp finely chopped leftover sauerkraut

1 link sausage sliced, browned
2 thick slices bacon, cut into lardons, browned
2 boiled potatoes, chunked up, tossed in with the meats to warm
2 eggs, poached
1 small shallot, sliced, fried till crisp in a little butter--optional
Hearty salad greens like frisée

Our co-op had some local, hydoponic salad greens from LaBore Farms,near Faribault, mostly frisée with some purple mustard, tatsoi, that sort of thing. Wash, spin, and dress the greens, saving back a little dressing. Top the greens with the meats and potatoes, drizzle the rest of the dressing around. Top with a poached egg, and give it the gratuitous gourmet garnish of fried shallots, if you please.

I love this kind of bistro dinner salad, topped with a poached egg. Very local, very simple, very delicious.

The local products involved: LaBore Farms greens, home-smoked bacon, homemade sausage from Hidden Stream pork, home-fermented sauerkraut from Midtown Farmers' Market cabbage, Leatherwood vinegar, Schultz organic eggs, Midtown market shallots (still have a few left!), MFM potatoes, homemade bread from all organic Minnesota flours, Hope Creamery butter.

How're we doing?


Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Choucroute

This really is an interesting moment in American culinary history. You have, on the one hand, an explosion of sushi, Thai restaurants taking over as the neighborhood café, fish tacos in fresh warm torillas with mango salsa as commonplace to our young people as the seasoned ground beef in crunchy Old El Paso shells kind were in my youth*.

And then, there are those of us who rhapsodize over sausage and bacon served atop fermented cabbage. Choucroute garnie, simmered sauerkraut served with pork in its several guises--smoked, cured, as sausage--is one of the best known Alsatian dishes. If the 'kraut is treated well, thoroughly rinsed, squeezed dry, gently simmered with good wine and aromatics, and if the meats are best quality, the potatoes good and sweet, it can be transcendent, humble as its individual parts may be--Franco-Teutonic synergy on a plate.

But if the 'kraut is indifferent, too sour, salty, or mushy, the sausage and bacon dull industrial products, it can be an utter gut-bomb, not to put too fine a point on it. It's all in the preparation, and the ingredients.

So let's aim for the former version, the transcendent one. If you can start with homemade sauerkraut, that's half the battle. If you don't have that, you can still make something wonderful. Some German or eastern-european markets make their own and sell it in bulk. Failing that, you may find good quality "artisan" 'kraut in jars in the refrigerated section of the grocery store (near the fresh pickles); and then, the stuff in plastic bags will do, too, if the rest of your ingredients are top-notch. If all you can find is canned 'kraut, though, I would choose a different dish for dinner tonight.

(And here's a little tip: You can help your 'kraut along by adding some finely shredded fresh cabbage. In fact, this is good even if you start with excellent 'kraut.)

When I say "transcendent" in describing choucroute, I mean transcendent in a hearty but surprisingly light way, a reassuring, comforting, but also intriguing sort of way. The cabbage will keep a mild crunch and sourness, but will be enriched by the wine, stock, and bacon, and made aromatic by spices that might surprise you in so Germanic a dish--juniper, cumin, coriander, clove. All that plays off against the meats, rich, salty, and smoky. It really is a wonderful dish, just the thing to buck up one's spirits in these waning (we hope) days of a very long winter.

Which is not to say I would turn up my nose at a nice plate of sushi....


In Alsace this dish is often served with a veritable mountain of meat atop the cabbage, an absurd sort of lollapalooza sundae of fresh and cured sausages, ham, smoked pork shoulder, bacon fresh and smoked. I used just homemade bacon and sausage in this more manageable version for two. Use whatever top quality pork products you can find. A piece of good bacon for simmering in the choucroute is the one thing I wouldn't omit or substitute.

(A confession: The choucroute pictured in this post is not the most beautiful I have ever made. After I browned the sausages and bacon, I thought it would be a good idea to deglaze the pan with a little water and add that juice to the 'kraut. The result tasted fine, but it turned the cabbage dark brown, when what you want is nice whitish 'kraut. A word to the wise....)

Choucroute Garnie
serves two, generously
8 ounces sauerkraut
1/2 medium onion, chopped
1 tsp butter
1 tsp oil (grapeseed or canola)
1/3 cup + 1/2 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup chicken stock
1/4 cup water
3 or 4 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
4 whole coriander seeds, or a good pinch ground
1/8 tsp whole cumin seeds
2 juniper berries, crushed
1 whole clove
1/4 tsp coarsely ground black pepper

6 to 8 ounces smoked slab bacon
2 to 4 sausages, fresh or smoked, as you prefer (I used fresh in this version)

Rinse the sauerkraut thoroughly in two or three changes of water. Drain well and then squeeze it to remove most of the moisture. Taste the 'kraut. If it still tastes very sour, or too salty to your taste, rinse it again. It should be just a bit sour, and then more of the sourness will dissipate in the cooking.

In a 10-inch skillet with a lid (or similar size saucepan), melt the butter and add the oil. Add the onions and sweat them over medium heat for a few minutes. Add the sauerkraut and the spices, the 1/3 cup wine, stock and water. Nestle the piece of bacon into the center. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a slow simmer, cover, and let cook for about an hour, checking occasionally to make sure there's still a bit of liquid in the pan. Add a bit of water if necessary.

After an hour, remove the bacon and cut in into four thick slices. In a separate pan lightly brown the bacon on both sides, and brown the sausage, too, if you like. Return bacon and sausage to the sauerkraut, along with 1/2 cup of wine. Cover again and simmer another 20 minutes.

Serve with boiled potatoes, crusty sourdough bread, grain mustard, and a glass of cold riesling.

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* Actually, that was pretty exotic fare, back in the day, on North Eden Drive in paradisiacal Eden Prairie. Homemade tacos and those Appian Way pizzas in a box were what we had for international flare. I must have been destined for a life full of fermentation--I am transported as I write this, remembering the smell of the pizza yeast reviving, liberated from its tiny foil envelope. Well, Proust had his madeleine, and to each his own!

And as far as the fish tacos go, I'm going to take it up as a challenge to come up with a Trout Caviar/Bide-A-Wee rendition once the trout season opens; all local, no ahi or mangos need apply.


Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Culture Club

I've cued up Glenn Gould's 1981 recording of J.S. Bach's The Goldberg Variations on the stereo, and I've got the opening lines of Shakespeare's sonnet 116--"Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments. Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds,/ Or bends with the remover to remove..."--in my head, just to, you know, bring a little culture to the proceedings. *

Now I'm going to get out the buttermilk, yogurt, and sour cream, the Cedar Summit Farm cream and whole milk, and mix up some home-cultured delicious dairy products. (Our friends Dave and Florence Minar and family run Cedar Summit; they are local food heroes of the first order.)

What we're doing here is introducing beneficial bacteria into a conducive medium. Sounds a bit dry (or maybe a bit scary), but that's how we get some of the world's most cherished foods--parmigiano reggiano, roquefort, camembert. These kitchen-cultured efforts don't produce anything that remarkable, but they're nice things to have in the fridge, just the same: crème fraîche, and whole-milk organic yogurt.

One of my culinary heroes, Madeleine Kamman, has this to say about home-made "crème fraîche":

"I am totally aware that 'making' crème fraîche is a favorite sport of the American cook; all I can say is if cooks enjoy themselves making crème fraîche, they might as well go ahead and do it. The taste of any of those products, however, has nothing at all to do with true crème fraîche; sometimes the texture is right, but the taste is never in the least reminiscent of the French or European unpasteurized products." (In Madeleine's Kitchen)

Ever the tactful Frenchwoman, it's awfully difficult to discern Mme Kamman's true opinion; but I get the impression she's not that big a fan of American kitchen sports. Nonetheless: let us carry on.**

In my previous post, the recipe for Crepes aux Poireaux called for crème fraîche to be added to the leeks at the end of softening. You can buy crème fraîche at better grocery stores now, but it's easy to "make" at home. And you know what? I do enjoy it. Furthermore, I feel that, using excellent dairy products as raw materials, I get a pretty good result at the end. I'm sure Madeleine is correct that the crème fraîche that comes from French alpine dairies is better than mine; we just don't happen to have a lot of those in my neighorhood of Saint Paul.

Other uses for crème fraîche: it gives cream sauces a tangy, silky finish; a dollop into vinaigrette produces a tangy, silky dressing; mixed with chopped fresh herbs, spread on a slice of rye bread and topped with smoked salmon, it makes a canapé or brunch dish of uncommon tangy silkiness. It can be used as a topping for fresh fruit, with or without a little added sugar, honey, or maple syrup. It's the basis for the Alsatian tarte flambée, or flammekuche, a sort of pizza topped with onions and bacon.

Anywhere you would use heavy cream or sour cream, crème fraîche could probably stand in, lending the recipe, how should I put it?: I think "a silky tang" says it best.

I don't make crème fraîche every week, or even every month, but when I do make it, I try to make more than I'll need for one use. Having it around--it keeps for at least a couple of weeks--lets me think of more uses for it.

For this experiment, I cultured crème fraîche using both sour cream and buttermilk. Into one cup of cream I added about two tablespoons of buttermilk, into the other, two tablespoons of sour cream.

The other thing I set a-culturing this day was a jar of yogurt. I used about two cups of Cedar Summit organic whole milk, and two tablespoons of cultured plain yogurt. This way, I get organic whole-milk yogurt cheap, and I know it's made from great, local milk. Skim, one- or two-percent milk will yogurt up just the same way. I put all three containers in my oven with the light on, door closed. I had put the heat on for just a few seconds, to get it warm (it's February in Minnesota; the house is at 65 degrees, the kitchen extremities colder). Then the light alone kept it at near 90 F.

I left them in there overnight, and here are the results:

Left to right: yogurt; the sour cream crème fraîche; buttermilk crème fraîche. Both kinds of crème fraîche turned out well. The sour cream version was a bit thicker, the buttermilk job just a wee bit creamier. There were subtle differences in the taste, but not so much that I'd say I prefer one over the other.

The real surprise, to me, was how compulsively eatable the warm, fresh-from-the-incubator yogurt was. They make wonderful whole-milk yogurt in France, and I particularly remember the sumptuous yaourt served with brunch at our beloved Pen Roc Hotel near Rennes in Brittany. While not as rich or creamy as the French product, I think mine was better, for being fresh as can be, and made with that superb Cedar Summit Farm milk (take that, Mme Kamman!).

It was so good it inspired me to whip up a breakfast dish, Apple-Maple-Yogurt Toast, which will be my next entry.

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*Gould originally recorded The Goldberg Variations in 1955, a tour de force performance that launched his career. I generally prefer the later recording--a calmer, more tempered and meditative rendering. On a related note (but not very), I have in a drawer somewhere here a manuscript of personal essays loosely united around the topics of trout streams and fly fishing, entitled The Girdle Bug Variations, named for a fly consisting of black chenille body and white rubber legs--cunningly echoing the black and white keys of a piano. As presently comprised, these essays contain no mention of Glenn Gould. It occurs to me now that maybe they ought to. (Some purists say The Goldberg Variations should only be played on the instrument for which they were originally written, the harpsichord; I say if the piano is good enough for Gould, it's good enough for me.)

On the Shakespeare: Those lines are printed as found in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. I remembered them correctly except for two words: I had us instead of me, and that where Will has which. I've fixed it up so as not to spread misinformation on the Internet. "That" sounds better to my inner grammarian than "which" in this context, but I can never remember the rational. In this case, I guess I'll concede that a tie goes to The Bard.

**I really am a huge fan of Madeleine Kamman; she is a brilliant cook and a wonderful writer. Her memoir-with-recipes, When French Women Cook is one of my favorite books...though it always makes me think that the French make better crème fraîche than they do book titles. (I've just noticed that in this book, she tempers her opinions somewhat, noting mildly that "...trying to make crème fraîche is a ridiculous waste of time..." [p. 6]. Apparently you can read the whole dang book at that linked site.)


Text (except the Kamman and The Bard) and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw