Pheasant Back, Ramp & Wood Nettle Pâté

I’m usually pretty confident when I start to put together a new dish, because I’ve been cooking for a long time, and because, let’s face it, most “new” dishes are usually just a tweak or two on an old dish.  You swap out an unusual ingredient for a familiar one, turn an exotic dish local or wild, that sort of thing.  You have a basic template and play around with the elements within it.  The last time I recall coming up with something truly, stunningly original was when Iaccidentally burned some honey, and then decided to throw some rhubarb juice in the pot.  The result was something remarkable, delicious, and unlike anything I’ve ever tasted.

And, I’ve never made it again.  I should.  I think even I’m a little afraid of bringing honey to the burning point, though really the worst thing that could happen is that I would burn a little honey.  Well, maybe ruin a pan, fill the house with smoke.... Maybe my reluctance is wise.

Pheasant back mushrooms tops.  They also go by the fanciful name "Dryad's Saddle."  Dryads are not as common in our woods as they once were, so I haven't had a chance to examine their saddles lately....

Anyway:  the story of this pâté was this:  I had a mess of pheasant back mushrooms, which have been abundant this spring (they grow on dead trees, including elms, so you’ll often find them while not finding morels…).  These mushrooms are a polypore, like boletes, the family that includes porcini, but their flavor is very mild, just sort of vaguely mushroomy.  When young and tender, their texture can be excellent, and then they’re fine just sliced and sautéed.  I like to do them in butter, add a little garlic and a splash of soy sauce when they’re about done.  

Tops and bottoms; note the tiny pores of this fungus whose Latin name is polyporous squamosus.

But as they mature, they become chewy, then inedibly tough.  Sometimes you can trim the outer rim of a larger one and find it sufficiently tender.  The thing I’ve learned is that if my pocket knife blade doesn’t slide through the flesh almost effortlessly, don’t bother.  Move along, keep looking, you’ll find more.  On this evening most of my pheasant backs could have been eaten simply sautéed, but that wasn’t working for me as a topping for smorrebrod, those Danish-inspired open face sandwiches, which was the dinner plan.  Pâté came to mind, a sort of ersatz chopped liver. 

I chopped the mushrooms pretty small, threw them in a pan with some butter.  As they released moisture and started to shrink, I added chopped ramps.  Then as cooking neared completion, I splashed in some soy, for umami depth, and to make it more pâté-like, a glug of red wine (I considered cognac or sherry, but thought that would be gilding the lily).  It was smelling pretty good at this point—I had added dried thyme, and a pinch of chile flakes—but there wasn’t a lot of it, and I also was dubious about what the texture of ground-up pheasant backs alone would be like.

For both bulk and texture, wood nettles came to the rescue.  They’d just started coming up in our woods, so they were in prime condition, edible and tender pretty much from bottom to top.  I roughly chopped a cup or so, added them to the pan with a little water, steamed briefly.

After removing the lid from the pan and letting most the liquid evaporate, I let the mixture cool, then transferred it to a mini-chop food processor.  From here I took the chopped liver approach of working in as much butter as conscience would allow.  Tasting along the way, adding some salt and a good bit of black pepper, I was more and more impressed.

Smorrebrod dinner leftovers make a lovely lunch.  Closewise from top: smoked trout with goat yogurt cheese and chives; wood nettle-ramp pesto with local goat feta; the pâté; wild asparagus and homemade mayonnaise.

I’ll spare you the suspense and simply say that it was excellent, and distinctive, though built on a familiar chassis.  I will definitely make this again.  Most other shrooms—button, oyster, hen of the woods—could be used in it, and other greens, wild or not.  WARNING: the recipe below is my best estimate of the quantities of ingredients used.  Since I considered it quite possible that the resulting dish would be going in the trash rather than on the dinner table, I wasn’t writing things down as I went along.   But this is in the ballpark, and y’all are clever; you’ll figure it out.

Pheasant Back, Ramp & Wood Nettle Pâté

Makes about a cup

1 generous cup chopped pheasant back mushrooms

3 plump ramp bulbs, chopped

1 generous cup (loosely packed) wood nettles, young leaves and tender stems, roughly chopped

4 tablespoons butter, divided

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1/4 cup dry red wine

1/4 cup water

1/2 teaspoon dried thyme or a couple good sprigs of fresh, leaves stripped off
Pinch red chile flakes, optional
Salt and pepper

Melt 1 1/2 tablespoons of butter in a skillet and add the mushrooms and a pinch of salt. Cook over medium heat for 4 to 5 minutes, until they start to give up some liquid and shrink a bit, then add the ramps. Sauté another 2-3 minutes, until the ramps are translucent and soft. Add the soy sauce, wine, thyme, and chile. Cook, stirring, until the liquid is mostly gone. Add the wood nettles and 1/4 cup water, cover, and simmer for 2 minutes.

Remove the lid and continue cooking until most of the liquid is evaporated. Remove the pan from the heat and set it aside to cool.

When the mixture is no longer hot, transfer it to a mini food processor or blender. Taste for salt and add if needed. Add a few grinds of black pepper. Add a couple of teaspoons of butter and begin to process. After a few seconds, stop the machine, scrape down the sides, and add a bit more butter. Repeat this process until all the butter is incorporated, then process for another 15-20 seconds. We're looking for a fairly smooth texture to the pâté.

Taste again for seasoning, adding more salt or pepper if you like. I like a pâté to be well seasoned. Transfer the pâté to a ramekin or small jar, and serve as you would chopped chicken livers and the like--lovely on crackers or toast rounds as a cocktail nosh or first course, or as one element in a buffet or smorrebrod-type meal.

 
Text and photos copyright 2016 by Brett Laidlaw

Back With More Sandwiches

Where would this blog be without smorrebrod?  This year, at least, it would be pretty sparse.  Pretty sparser.

The open-face sandwich idea intrigues and delights me for three main reasons:

As a baker, I love pretty much any meal based on bread, and I enjoy the challenge of coming up with breads that work particularly well with this kind of dish.  In this case the bread was a sourdough rye to which I added some part-fermented apple cider and some Wisconsin sorghum syrup.  I used some starter I had sitting around on the kitchen counter for a while, not very well refreshed, so the dough was very, very slow to rise, especially now that the temperature in our kitchen is generally in the low 60s.  I decided to embrace the idea of slow bread.  I let the dough proof for over 24 hours, then put it in loaf pans where it rose at a glacial pace for several hours more.  And then I baked it in quite a slow oven, 350 if I recall correctly, adding steam both in the form of ice cubes tossed in at the beginning and middle of baking, along with a pan of water set on a rack under the stone.  It baked for around an hour, and the end result was a notable success, though I say so myself.  It just begged to be presented in an elegant Nordic fashion, so here we are.

As a cook, I find smorrebrod gratifying because of the way the bread canvas invites creativity in the toppings, which are not hidden as the filling in a regular sandwich would be.  Pretty much anything can serve as smorrebrod topping--vegetable salads, smoked or pickled fish, eggs, cheese, various sorts of charcuterie.  There's really no wrong topping except maybe PB&J, and someone could probably find a clever way to make that work, too.  This versatility makes smorrebrod ideally suited to local, seasonal eating, from early spring's first flush of wild foods through the garden glut of summer, harvest abundance, root cellar and pickle cabinet foraging.  The three sandwiches on the plate here all are based on meat:  a rustic paté of pork with chicken livers, bacon, and hickory nuts; a silky, rich chicken liver mousse; and wonderful venison backstrap roasted to medium rare in a salt dough.

And last, as an inveterate garnisher, I love the opportunity that smorrebrod provides to come up with finishing touches that complete the dish in both pretty and appetizing ways.  We have a joky saying here, "It's all about the garnish!"  And while plate prettifying can quickly turn precious, I think there's a serious point there.  In some ways it's the care taken in finishing touches that make the difference between a bowl of grub to be scarfed down and a plate of food that delights at many levels.  Garnishing, to me, really is an important part of cooking, and something quite different from slapping a sprig of parsley and a slice of lemon on every plate that leaves the kitchen.

For the venison, I more or less followed this recipe for venison baked in a salt-dough crust.  I didn't bother with searing the meat, and I skipped the sauce--though I did preserve the juices that gathered at the bottom of the crust, which I thinned with a bit of chicken stock to make a little jus in which I bathed my meat prior to placing it on the bread.  Before I wrapped the meat up in the salt dough, I rubbed it with a paste composed of garlic, thyme, parsley, black pepper, some home-ground chile powder, and sunflower oil.  I baked it at 375 for about 25 minutes, let it rest in the crust for 30 minutes or so after baking.  It was superb, and I would definitely do it again.  The salt from the crust permeated the meat without making it overly salty, and seemed to carry the other flavors from the rub deep into the meat.  The garnish here is a pesto of flat leaf parsley from our garden--the last fresh harvest before the brutal cold came down a couple of weeks ago--garlic, of course, lemon, Minnesota sunflower oil, and toasted hickory nuts.

The nuts were a delightful, surprising find, picked up at the little market in Ridgeland, the town nearest to us.  As we were checking out one day I noticed this plastic zip bag on the counter near the cash register and, ever-curious forager that I am, I took a closer look.  Turned out the bag was full of beautiful hickory nut halves, harvested from the market owner's in-laws' tree near Tomah, WI.  The bag held a pound of nuts for the amazing low price of $9.99.  Sold.  We've been enjoying these rich, sweet nuts in lots of different ways.  The flavor is like pecans but better, to my taste.

The chicken liver mousse I prepared following (again, more or less; I almost always stray from a recipe somewhere along the way) a recipe from Madeleine Kamman's In Madeleine's Kitchen.  It's an unctuous concoction of livers, a good bit of butter, shallots, onions, a splash of scotch whisky (my substitute for the called-for brandy), finished with some cream and sour cream that have been whipped together.  For seasoning I added thyme, a pinch of that home-ground chile powder mentioned above, Sichuan pepper (hua jiao), and a pinch or two of cumin.  The garnish here is all about our tree crops:  I combined chopped dried apple with apple cider vinegar and our maple syrup, set it on the warming ledge at the back of our woodstove for the apples to soften and take up the sweet and sour flavors.  Then I added chopped fresh apple and a pinch of two of salt, and a little more of that chile powder (it's so wonderfully sweet and fragrant, with a definite but not overpowering heat, I find myself putting it in everything).  It's a simple sort of relish or chutney, which cuts the richness of the mousse and complements its flavor wonderfully.  Big win.

The pork paté is a variation on this one I made a couple of years ago.  I used more of the hickory nuts in this one, in lieu of the chestnuts.  I skipped the breadcrumbs, used a bit more chicken liver, an additional egg yolk.  I put all the meats through the coarse grinder on my KitchenAid twice, then through the fine blade once; the texture of the paté is excellent, just what I'm looking for, and nothing that anyone would dare to call meatloaf.  The garnish here was a pre-made one, pickled cabbage and peppers from The Joy of Pickling.  It's kind of a sweet and sour pickle, made pretty much the same way as bread & butters.  With the rich and savory paté it was a nice change from the traditional cornichons.

We've been enjoying this little frenzy of charcuterie making for a week or so now, and at lunch today we inaugurated the freshly painted upstairs room where we had skylights installed last summer.  We just recently got trim put on the skylights, everything primed, then painted, including the very rustic floor.  We've done a lot to this house since we moved in, nearly two years ago now, but this room has probably seen the greatest transformation, from a veritable cave of a room to this light-filled space, cheering even on a dull gray day like today.  There's never an end to the projects with an old house like this, but it's gratifying to put on own stamp on our home.  In many ways it's already unrecognizable from the house we bought in early 2012; and yet, so much more to do....  Well, one thing at a time.

Text and photos copyright 2013 by Brett Laidlaw

A Rustic Pork Terrine with Chestnuts and Dried Apples

In writing about a stew of grilled lamb meatballs with grilled and coal-roasted vegetables in the 2011 highlights round-up, I rather surprised myself by spontaneously asserting  that "the possibilities of ground meat are vast and enticing."  Right up to the moment I wrote that, I wouldn't have considered myself the biggest fan of decentralized animal flesh, but it didn't take much thought to come up with an impressive list of dishes both down-home and haute-monde that feature that humble ingredient.

My mother made a great meat loaf when I was a kid, nothing fancy (and I shudder to think that it might have involved cream of mushroom soup...), but entirely delectable under its lacquered exterior of well browned ketchup.  Recalling autumn or winter evenings, coming in from the woods, the soccer field, the hockey rink, to a supper of Mom's meat loaf, baked potato, and baked squash--plenty of butter on the last two--still brings me an upwelling of warmth, emotion, and a deep, primal satisfaction.  And then fried meat loaf sandwiches from the leftovers, the edges crisped in the fry pan, on bakery bread with butter and ketchup, my god!, I still can't think of anything I'd rather eat.

The hamburger can be regrettable fast food, or the platform for cheffish excursions into wretched excess, but I think it achieves its ideal form in the homemade burger sculpted from freshly ground chuck, liberally seasoned, cooked medium rare over the coals on in a heavy skillet, parked on a quality bun and garnished to taste.  This is a classic American sandwich, and the French chefs, bless their hearts, just don't get it.  A great burger doesn't require foie gras, truffles, or other "luxury" adulterations.

One of my all-time favorite meals is based on chopped beef, that isn't even cooked:  steak tartare with grilled sourdough, a stack of crisp, salty frites, a glass of bordeaux--excuse me, I'm getting a little drooly....  That's been my birthday dinner the last two years, lest anyone suspect that I overstate my enthusiasm for it.

And now, if the French don't quite comprehend the essence of le hamburger, that's not to say that they're total slackers when it comes to working with cooked ground or chopped meat. You take pretty much anyone who has traveled in France, and say the word paté or terrine, and then just wait for that groan of remembered ecstasy to start, as their eyes roll back in their heads as they recall that slice of paté de campagne from the unassuming traiteur in that little village, unwrapped on a roadside bench beside a vineyard in, let's say, Beaujolais, smeared on a piece of baguette and with the first unctuous, savory, melting taste--sacré bleu! how did they do that?



Cold cut supper: homemade chicken liver mousse, store-bought La Quercia speck, Spanish chorizo

A good paté doesn't seem like it should be so hard to make, but it requires a balance of richness, meatiness, texture, salt, and spice that can be extremely difficult to achieve. I suspect that many home cooks have balked at the amount of fat frequently called for in paté recipes, and so cut back, and regretted it. In addition to the fat mixed in to the forcemeat, the baking dish is often lined with fatback or caul fat--you can practically hear your arteries clanking like rusty heating pipes just reading the recipes. The fortunate corollary (not coronary) to that fact is that you don't need half a pound of paté per person to have a satisfying meal, rounded out with bread, salad, a glass of wine.

I haven't made an exhaustive study of this branch of charcuterie, but I've dabbled in it over the years, and I recently came up with a really nice version, one that I'll use as a template for future patés. This one was based on pork, three kinds: shoulder, belly, and bacon. I added chicken livers for that distinctly paté-like texture. Good bread crumbs soaked in reduced cider also contributed to texture and flavor. Chestnuts and dried apples made up the seasonal garnish. Last time I checked, those excellent Iowa chestnuts were still available at Seward Co-op.

This is best made a couple of days to a week ahead. Weighting the paté after the baking changes the texture in a desirably Gallic way. I made this in a 750 ml (about 3-cup) Pyrex rectangular baking dish; the mixture filled it pretty much to the top, which turned out okay, but you might want to use a slightly larger vessel.

Pork Paté with Chestnuts and Dried Apples

1/4 cup applejack or calvados (apple brandy)

8 rounds of dried apple, about 1/8-inch thick

3/4 cup sweet apple cider reduced to 1/4 cup

1/3 cup dried breadcrumbs from an excellent loaf, sourdough whole wheat or the like

12 chestnuts, roasted and peeled

1 large or 2 small shallots minced, about 1/2 cup

1 large clove garlic, minced

1 ounce bacon, chopped fine

Soak the apples in the brandy, covered, for several hours or overnight. Soak the breadcrumbs in the reduced cider. Cook the bacon in a medium skillet over medium low heat until some fat starts to render; add the shallot and cook gently till translucent; add the garlic, remove the pan from the heat, and add the contents to the soaked breadcrumbs. Add any unabsorbed brandy from the dried apples to the pan, swirl around to rinse, and add this to the bread, etc.

8 ounces pork shoulder
4 ounces pork belly (or very fatty shoulder)
4 ounces chicken livers.

2 egg yolks
1/2 teaspoon salt
Ground black pepper
2 pinches quatre-épices

I use the meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid mixer: Grind the shoulder and belly twice through the coarse blade. Then grind one-third of the meat again through the fine blade; also grind the chicken livers with the fine blade. Add the egg yolks, salt and a few grinds of pepper, quatre-épices, along with the bread mixture, to the meat and mix very well.

Let this mixture macerate for 4 to 6 hours, or overnight. Butter a mold. Place a one-inch layer of meat in the bottom, and lay half the apple slices on top. Cover with a thin layer of meat, and add the chestnuts, pressing them into the meat. Add another thin layer of meat, the rest of the apples, then the rest of the meat. Place two bay leaves on top, and a few sprigs of thyme, if you like.

Bake in a bain marie (water bath), covered, at 325 for 45 to 60 minutes, until liquid is bubbling vigorously in the baking dish and the meat is quite firm to the touch. Carefully remove the bain marie from the oven, and let the paté cool in it for about 30 minutes. Placing a weight on the paté will give it a denser texture, like the classic French version. A piece of heavy cardboard cut to fit just inside your baking dish, wrapped in plastic wrap, with a couple cans of soup for weight, will work fine. Refrigerate unde weight for a day or two before serving.

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw