The Legend Lives On... (2009 Food Highlights)

( Trout Caviar Sweepstakes, 2009 Local Food Highlights now in progress. Tell us about one of your 2009 local food highlights in the comments section to enter our book drawing.

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The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down,
Of the big lake they call "Gitche Gumee"....


"Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings, in the rooms of her ice-water mansions...". I can't think of that song without getting goosebumps: "The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay if they'd put fifteen more miles behind her...".

But let us not dwell on past tragedy. Let's think happier thoughts: Let's think about fish. Of which Superior has plenty, and excellent fish, at that. But our own inland sea is an underappreciated resource, it seems. We splash out big bucks for Alaskan salmon and halibut, Atlantic striped bass, what-have-you, while we seriously underrate some of the best and freshest fish around--Lake Superior whitefish, herring, and lake trout.


It's not entirely our fault. From the Twin Cities we can crest the Superior height of land to gaze down on Lake Superior and the port of Duluth in about two hours' driving, but it's generally easier to find Norwegian cod than a fresh bluefin herring in our local fish markets. Things are getting a little better. We find Superior herring pretty regularly at Coastal Seafoods and the Seward Co-op during the season; Whole Foods often has wild whitefish. Smoked fish from theDockside Fish Market in Grand Marais, MN is sold at Coastal; Seward carries product from Northern Waters Smokehaus in Duluth; and smoked fish from Everett Fisheries in Port Wing, WI is available here, too. By the time it gets to the metro retail outlets, Lake Superior fish is not quite the bargain that it is when you purchase it from the source on "the shore," whether north or south, but it's still relatively cheap, worth looking for.

Still, there's nothing like getting it at the source. We've made a trip each of the past two summers from Bide-A-Wee up to Cornucopia, WI, for a meal at The Village Inn and a stop at Halvorson Fisheries for fresh and smoked fish. We stroll the long beautiful beach in "Corny," take a swim, wander the backroads, mosey home to grill a piece of lake trout over the fire, or put together an utterly satisfying, totally local fish chowder.



As much as I love the rugged North Shore on the Minnesota side, I've really come to appreciate the more pastoral, mellow feeling of Wisconsin's South Shore. It has a laid-back, relaxing vibe, and the scenery, though less dramatic than the North Shore's, is no less beautiful. And there are orchards, berry farms, wineries, whitefish livers....

While the general feeling along the South Shore is relaxed, that wasn't the case at Halvorson's when we stopped in last August. The next day was Cornucopia Day, which meant fish boils galore, and the whole crew was hard at work at the fishery, filleting whitefish and herring, fresh off the boat, as fast as ever they could. Which was pretty fast, believe me. Quite a scene.



Our experiences with Lake Superior fish in 2009 made me appreciate that resource all the more, and made me want to do more with these wonderfully flavorful, versatile fish in 2010. I'm resolving to get up to the South Shore more often. And one day we might just strike out east from Bide-A-Wee, follow highway 64 all the way to its end, and see what Lake Michigan has to offer.

Back at the cabin from our Corny visit last summer, I made a grilled fish chowder, coloring the fish and vegetables over the coals before combining them in the soup pot. Here's a stovetop version that we made recently at Bide-A-Wee using Superior fish--fresh herring, smoked lake trout--that we purchased in the cities.

Lake Superior Fish Chowder
serves two

1 thick slice bacon cut into 1/4-inch lardons
2 tsp butter
1 small leek, white and light green parts, slit, rinsed, sliced
1 small carrot sliced thin
1/2 a small onion, sliced thin
1/2 a small celery root in small dice (about 1/2 cup), or one rib celery, chopped
2 small potatoes, peeled and sliced
1 1/2 cups chicken, fish or vegetable stock
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup cream
1/4 cup dry white wine (optional)
2 tsp flour
salt and pepper
couple sprigs fresh thyme
2 bluefin herring filets, about 1/2 pound total
1/4 pound smoked lake trout, skin and bones removed, broken into chunks

Render off the bacon over medium heat, remove from pan, reserve. Add butter, onion, leek, celery root or celery, pinch of salt; cook slowly until the onion is translucent. Sprinkle the flour over the vegetables and stir with a wooden spatula to mix the flour into the fat. Cook for about 30 seconds.

Add a bit of the stock while stirring with the wooden spatula to deglaze and dissolve the flour into the stock. Add half the remaining stock, stirring. Add the rest of the stock. Combine the milk and cream, and ladle some of the now hot stock into that mixture. Slowly pour the stock-milk-cream mixture back into the pan. Add the carrots, potatoes, thyme, and a pinch or two of salt, couple grinds of pepper. Bring to a simmer and cook partially covered for 20 minutes.

Add the white wine if using, the fish, and the reserved bacon. Simmer for 10 minutes. Serve.



Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Cocktail Hour

Trout Caviar Sweepstakes, 2009 Local Food Highlights now in progress.

After a hard day toiling in the orchard or the sugar bush, a man needs a drink. A woman, too. I mean, yes, a man might need a woman, it's true, and a woman might need a drink. And a man. Or a fish. And a bicycle....as that old saying used to go, as you might remember.

Anyway, sometimes a man or a woman might need a drink, and fortunately, the land provides. I haven't quite settled on a name for this drink, but I'm leaning toward "Highway 64 Revisited." Wisconsin state highway 64 runs east and west across the state, from Hudson to Green Bay. According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources's reckoning, it divides the state into northern and southern sectors (according to my sense of things, too). It takes me to some of my favorite hunting grounds, and a number of fine trout waters.

More significantly, for our purposes here, it runs just south of Bide-A-Wee, which produces the maple syrup and apple cider that flavor the drink, and through New Richmond, where is made the 45th Parallel vodka that gives it its guts. This is good stuff, this Badger State vodka. I used to be of the opinion that "vodka is vodka," but I've had to admit that that was a benighted view. Now, I don't think vodkas are ever going to have the character or variety of single malt scotch, but I've come to recognize that there are significant differences in vodkas, and to my taste 45th Parallel is among the best. It's clean, crisp, and slightly sweet, slightly viscous on the tongue even when not iced. Just as important as what qualities it has is the one it lacks--that sinus-scorching cleaning fluid aroma often found in lesser vodkas. I don't mean to seem to damn with faint praise, not at all--when I want to sip iced vodka neat with my trout caviar on Tata's rye rounds, this will be the one.

Enough exposition, here's the drink:

Highway 64 Revisited
for each drink

2 ounces 45th Parallel vodka
2 Tbsp unfiltered fresh apple cider
1 tsp pure maple syrup
1 capful dry vermouth (I like Martini & Rossi)
1 sprig fresh thyme (optional but very nice)

Put some cracked ice in a martini shaker. Add all above. Shake or stir? Well, I kind of swirl, let sit a few seconds, swirl again. That's more like stirred, I reckon. I should try it shaken. Maybe tonight. Strain into a martini glass. I like to let a few shards of ice drift into the drink. Garnish superfluously with a slice of pickled crab apple, if you have it, or a wedge of fresh apple, or a maple leaf, whatever makes you happy. Sip and savor.

For added enjoyment and sophistication put on our friend Will Agar's wonderful classical guitar CD, Suenos Ibericos, definitely one of our musical highlights of 2009. Contact Will at willagar4@msn.com if you'd like to purchase a copy. Highly recommended.

Cheers.


Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Amour de Pommes (2009 Food Highlights)

Time for another Trout Caviar Sweepstakes: I've got an extra copy of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma to give away. Also up for grabs, The Angry Trout Café Notebook, the story of that popular Grand Marais restaurant with profiles of the fishermen and -women, farmers, and foragers who provide their raw materials; with recipes for many of their best-known dishes. And finally, a copy of Jacques Pepin's memoir, The Apprentice (this one's a paperback and a little dinged up). Share a notable local food experience from last year in the comments section, and we'll make a random drawing of the entrants at the end of this month.

You may note, just off to right side of the page here, a new section that shows Trout Caviar's "followers." Click on the "Follow" button to become one. You probably know better than I do what that actually means. In my mind, it means you've joined the Trout Caviar Righteous Eaters' Army*--a prestigious distinction, indeed!

Happy New Year, everyone. May your gardens grow abundantly, your farmers' markets thrive, your foragers' baskets overflow with bounty, this year and throughout the new decade.

I've been slow getting on to the 2009 Food Highlights. The new decade sort of took me by surprise, I guess. But it was a remarkable year in food for us, and I want to note a few of the more memorable experiences from last year over the next couple of weeks.

Last year was our first full year with Bide-A-Wee, and we spent a lot more time in that cheesy state just east of the Saint Croix and Mississippi Rivers. We added the term "tree crops" to our vocabulary, and then we added our own tree crops to our pantry and table.

We tapped maple trees for syrup for the first time last spring. That was tree crop number one. That was really good fun, and it was amazing to see how much sap a tree could produce on a good day, and to taste it straight from the tree--cold, clear, slightly sweet, a touch woody. Absolutely delicious, a spring tonic. And it was a challenge to figure out how to reduce that sap by a factor of 40 to turn it into syrup. Lot of boiling. More boiling. Boil it some more. We'll get us some better equipment for the task this year. We got a decent amount of syrup, but it wasn't a great year for sugaring--it turned too warm too soon, breaking the freeze and thaw cycle that really gets the sap flowing. We also tapped some of our birches, for you can make birch syrup too (it takes even more boiling!), but we never got enough sap to even begin.


Through the spring and summer we harvested many kinds of wild fruit, some of which we’d never tasted before—nannyberries, highbush cranberries, haws. We picked all the blackberries we wanted for a good five weeks, a remarkable run. Wild plums, black cherries, elderberries, wild grapes—it was indeed a very fruitful year.


But really, 2009 was the year of the apple at Bide-A-Wee. We didn’t know it at the time, but last spring provided perfect pollinating conditions for fruit trees of all kinds. We were kind of disappointed when the blossoms didn’t last as long as the previous year, but now I think that they blew away early because, once the flower had been pollinated, the blossoms weren’t needed anymore. And then we watched as the trees started to fruit, and were amazed at the difference from the previous year.

Many apple trees have a biennial habit; 2008 had provided a fairly meager crop, but in 2009 almost all of our trees were “on”, and how. We started picking apples in August, and I foraged the last basket at the end of November. I was surprised at how much frost the apples were able to withstand. Several times temperatures dropped into the ‘teens overnight, and in the morning the frost-covered fruit appeared frozen solid. But as long as the temperature rose above freezing in the course of the day, the apples recovered with no lasting damage.


Nor was a coating of snow a problem. An October surprise turned the valley white. Annabel strikes a call-of-the-wildish pose:


There was no way we could pick even a small fraction of the apples that bowed the branches of the trees by early autumn. We’ve been doing “triage pruning” for two winters, just getting a start on rehabilitating some of these several dozen long-neglected trees, but many of them are still untouched. Picking apples is difficult on the steep, brambly hills where most of our trees grow. Some trees were completely inaccessible within thickets of blackberry canes. Some trees made repulsively scabby apples. A few trees, heavily laden with beautiful fruit during one of our weekend visits, had suddenly dropped almost all their apples by the next weekend.


In spite of that we had a bountiful harvest, and we’ve been exploring all the many aspects of the apple, a remarkably versatile food crop. We’ve made apple jam and jelly, apple sauce and butter, apple cider and syrup, apple relish, ketchup, and pickles. We’ve eaten apples at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all times in between. We braise meats in apple cider, and sauté apples to serve with meat and fowl, fish and game. We grate apples into pancakes and breads. We have apple cider fermenting in carboys and bottles, and I’m experimenting with apple cider vinegar, too. We use dried apples to pep up granola, to sprinkle over salads, or just for snacks. Since we discovered that Annabel and Lily gobble dried apple slices enthusiastically, I haven’t bothered to bake dog biscuits. Apple salad, apple salsa, apple "kimchi", what the hell?

We invested in a cider press, the Happy Valley Ranch "Homesteader." Thoroughly old-fashioned technology, still quite effective. The press produces apple juice, or sweet cider. That juice we ferment to "hard," alcoholic cider, reduce by boiling to make versatile apple syrup (more tart than sweet; better in salad dressings than over pancakes), or freeze for drinking fresh through the winter. We haven’t bought orange juice in more than a year, start the day with a glass of apple cider, just like Thomas Jefferson did.


Of all the various uses to which we have put the versatile pome, I can recommend a few with particular enthusiasm.

--Braising in cider: There are classic preparations using cider in cooking, a lot of them from the French regions of Normandy and Brittany, where apple trees grow more readily than grapevines. In these dishes the cider, sweet or hard, serves the same purpose as the wine in a coq au vin, boeuf bourguignon, etc., a flavorful, tenderizing (because acidic) liquid that mellows in the cooking and the mixing with the meat juices and melting fat to create…man, really, really tasty food. Game birds, chicken, and pork are particularly suited to this kind of cooking. When it’s cooked for a long time, the fruitiness and tartness of the cider recede into the background. The end flavor is distinctive, but not necessarily apple-y. That's country-style pork ribs braised in cider, with apples and chestnuts, above. Here’s a chicken dish with cider and cabbage, and here’s grouse in cider cream. But you can adapt a lot of recipes that call for wine, stock, or even beer as a braising liquid, subbing cider in their place. Give it a try.

--Pickled crab apples. I’ve been absolutely tickled with these pickles, which are pictured at the top of the post. Whole crab apples cooked in a wonderfully fragrant-spiced sweet and sour syrup. Serve these with roast pork or game, chop them to add to dressing for a winter cabbage salad, garnish a cheese plate with them. I tinkered a bit with a recipe from Linda Ziedrich’s excellent The Joy of Pickling, adding some star anise, black peppercorns, and a good deal of fresh ginger slices, to the original recipe’s cinnamon, cloves and allspice:

Pickled Crab Apples
Makes two pints

1 ½ pounds crab apples, stems on
One 2-inch stick cinnamon
1 tsp allspice berries
½ tsp whole cloves
1 whole star anise
6 slices fresh ginger, 1/8-inch thick
½ tsp black peppercorns
1 cup sugar
¾ cup water
1 cup cider vinegar

In a large, non-reactive (stainless or enameled) sauce pan, combine the water, sugar, vinegar, and spices. Bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Remove from the heat and let cool.

Pierce each apple in a couple of spots with a metal or bamboo skewer (this is supposed to keep the apples from exploding, though a lot of mine cracked anyway; no matter).

Add the apples to the syrup and bring the syrup to a simmer over medium-low heat. Simmer the apples until they start to look translucent, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat, cover, and let stand overnight.

Next day, use a slotted spoon to transfer the apples to sterilized canning jars--one quart or two pint jars. Strain the syrup to remove the spices, then return the syrup to the sauce pan. Bring it to a boil, then pour the hot syrup over the apples in the jars to cover. Seal with sterilized two-part lids. Process in a hot water bath for ten minutes (or just whack the lids on and refrigerate; they will keep indefinitely in the fridge).

Save any leftover syrup in a jar in the fridge. It’s great used in dressing for beet or cabbage salads. Likewise, use the liquid from the canned apples this same way.


--India relish: I acquired three new cookbooks this past fall—used, but new to me: Hollyhocks & Radishes, Joy of Cooking**, and…a compilation of recipes from The Country Journal magazine, can’t recall the exact title. Weirdly, each one practically fell open to a recipe for “India relish” the first time I picked it up. I had never heard of India relish; India relish calls for a lot of apples; I was intrigued, nay, compelled to try it. It’s great—delightful on a hot dog, a cheese sandwich. Last weekend at Bide-A-Wee we had a lunch of grilled ham (Grass Run Farm, purchased at Seward Co-op) and cheese (Roth Kase "gruyère”) on homemade natural leaven brioche with India relish. Yay, lunch!

I’m not going to give the recipe because, well, it’s in pretty much every old-timey cookbook out there, apparently. In Joy (the old one, mine was printed in 1964)it’s called Indian relish, and it’s on page 785. This is one for next fall, as it also calls for green tomatoes. So if you have a garden, and access to an apple tree, it’s basically free. I always cut back the sugar in traditional recipes like this by 20 or 25 percent. (Also in Joy I’ve just come across a recipe for sweet and sour baked beets and apples, page 264. I have beets and apples! I’m gonna try it.)

So there you go, that’s my exultation of the apple. I think we tend to take the apple for granted, consign it to the obligatory role of the piece of fruit in the lunch bag, or the plop of apple sauce beside the pork chop. But in fact it is an extremely important food crop, and a cook’s delight in the range of its uses. And then, of course, there’s all that cider bubbling in the basement. Will report when we open the first bottle.

Duck confit with crabs and cabbage.

Cider sipper Mary.

_______________________________________________

*--I was originally calling this the TC Toxic Zombie Cult, because I've noticed that zombies and cults seem to be really hot these days, and the "toxic" part just made it super extra edgy, which people also go for. But it was suggested to me that the whole concept didn't really fit the Trout Caviar zeitgeist, and upon further reflection, I had to agree. But if you'd like to be part of the TC Toxic Zombie Cult, I could probably still manage to make up some membership cards.

**--That is the correct title, Joy of Cooking, no "the" to be seen. Never noticed that before....

Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Season's Soupage

This is sort of a shaggy soup story:

I had a housemate back in college in Connecticut in the early '80s, an engaging but frenetic guy whose name was...well, I won't give his actual name, but it was along the lines of "Langston Birdswell Beaseley III", that sort of thing. But you couldn't call someone that, so he was called Chip. Chip came from a long line of prep school, Ivy League Beaseleys. His family had all been Andover and Yale (we'll just say), but Chip had paled at the thought of walking to classes under the august oil portraits of his forebears that lined the halls of the family's traditional alma maters, so he'd wound up at Choate (for sake of argument), and Wesleyan (for real). Chip was outgoing, upbeat, and charming--in an off-kilter way--when he wasn't sullen, withdrawn and snappish. His manic manner wasn't much abated by his frequent and copious ingestion of a variety of not very nutritional products through a variety of orifices.


When he was in the sullen, withdrawn phase, Chip didn't communicate very much at all, thankfully, but when his mood was on the upswing he jabbered pretty constantly, and the language he employed, though it bore close resemblance to conversational English, was distinctive enough that we, his four housemates, deemed it worthy of unique designation: Chippanese. Chippanese was, well, it was Chippanese. All these years later I find it difficult to produce exact examples. It was a sort of rapid-fire hipster-preppy semi-aggressive pseudo-pseudo generally confused but occasionally brilliant quasi-Kerouacian stream of consciousness, fully comprehensible--if comprehensible at all--only to Chip himself.

And the reason I bring it up here is that now, coming on 30 years since I last laid eyes on Chip (though I heard tell of him here and there in the interim), the one indelible utterance in Chippanese that stays with me these decades later, well, it has to do with soup.

We lived in a sort of townhouse just off campus, five separate bedrooms and we shared a kitchen and a common room. Young idealists that we were, some budding gourmands among us, and some strapped for cash, we decided to try sharing grocery shopping and cooking duties. Now another memory of Chip springs to mind: He owned the only car among us, an old Volvo wagon, and so we had agreed to give him a break in the cooking and clean-up duties in exchange for his driving the shopping crew back from the Waldbaum's Foodmart (Foodbaum's) in downtown Middletown, over the college hill to our house on the oaky verge of town. But Chip's attention to schedules, or to anything else, really, tended to be pretty sketchy, and we were often left waiting, as if for a manic, preppy Godot in a Volvo, in the dim autumnal New England drizzle, in the Foodbaum's parking lot as November dusk dropped down, and still no Chip, and still no Chip....

Needless to say, our experiment in communal dining did not last the year, but while it did, there was that night of the soup. I won't go on about auld lang syne much longer--though I have to admit, I'm enjoying this little bit of time travel. Let's get to the soup--or rather, "soupage." My friend Melinda (now Bide-A-Wee's Nomenclature Tsarina, among other more shining distinctions...) was one of those housemates. She was the best and most knowledgable cook among us, by far, had even run a catering business with a friend up in Maine a couple summers before. She could make things like chicken breasts in cream sauce, and knew what to do with exotic fish I'd never seen before, like mackerel and bluefish. There was nothing so exotic on the menu this fall night. It was soup, lentil soup, and I seem to recall that everyone was in a really good mood as we came in from classes or a bike ride under the brilliant autumn leaves, on a chilly damp afternoon turning to evening, assembled in the narrow kitchen and the common room lively with talk and laughter. The soup had something to do with the jovial atmosphere--the simmering pot filled the air with savory, appetizing smells; the moist warmth from the kitchen steamed the windows.

Some of us set the table, brought out bread and butter, salt and pepper. Everyone got what he or she wanted to drink. And then the soup pot came out, and Melinda started to ladle it out and pass bowls down the table. We were so hungry, the soup smelled so good, such anticipation! We were a bunch of sissy college students, but we were as hungry as farmhands. Once all the bowls were filled the talk quieted down; there was no saying of grace--this was Wesleyan!, we were intellectuals, atheists, communists, Jews, or all of the above!--but there was a moment's acknowledgment, a giving of thanks. And we dug in.

No one spoke for a minute or so. All you could hear was slurping, spoon clinking bowl, satisfied yummy sounds. Chip was the first to raise his head, set down his spoon. He took a drink from his glass, wiped his lips, and then he solemnly intoned, "Wow, Macey. That is some crazy bad soupage."


Crazy bad soupage. "Crazy bad" was, of course, the highest superlative in the Chippanese lexicon, and about all I can remember of it now. Somehow I think that's a fitting legacy. I'm going to resolve to eat more soup in 2010, and every time I do, I'm sure I'll think of Chip, Wesleyan, and Melinda's lentil soupage. Crazy bad, but wicked good.

No lentil soupage this time; I don't think we can grow lentils here. But this parsnip-leek-apple soup brings Minnesota/Wisconsin and New England together in its own way. The stuff is all ours--market parsnip and onion, garden leek, Bide-A-Wee apple, homemade stock and Cedar Summit cream--but the recipe is adapted from one by Sam Hayward of the Fore Street restaurant in Portland, Maine. Hayward was a pioneer of local, seasonal cooking in his part of the country. The restaurant has been described as one big applewood-fired grill and oven. Everything I've heard about the place inspires me, though I've never been there. I'll get there one day, maybe via Middletown, Connecticut. I found this recipe in a back issue of Saveur.


Parsnip, Leek, and Apple Soup (à la Fore Street)
Serves four to six as a generous starter or light dinner or lunch with a salad, piece of cheese....

1 Tbsp butter
1 large onion, sliced thin
1 medium leek, white and light green part, sliced thin
1/4 cup water
5 or 6 parsnips (about 12 ounces) peeled and sliced into 1/4-inch rounds
1/2 a medium celery root (about 6 ounces) peeled and diced smallish
1 medium apple, peeled, cored, quartered
5 cups chicken or vegtable stock
a bay leaf and a couple sprigs of fresh thyme, or pinch of dried
1/2 cup heavy cream
salt and pepper to taste

In a heavy-bottomed saucepan melt the butter over medium heat. Add the sliced onion and cook for 10 minutes, stirring often, until it is soft and translucent but not browned. Add the leek, a pinch of salt, and 1/4 cup water. Cover and cook for five minutes over low heat. Remove the lid, raise the heat to medium, and cook for another 8 to 10 minutes, until the onion and leek become quite brown, start to get jammy.

Add the parsnips, celery root, apple, thyme and bay leaf, and four cups of stock, and a couple of good pinches of salt to the pot. Bring to a boil, turn down to a simmer, and cook partly covered until the vegetables are very soft, about 30 minutes.

Remove the thyme branches and bay leaf. Allow the soup to cool somewhat, then purée it in a blender in two batches until it is very smooth. Return the soup to the pot to reheat when you are ready to serve. It can be made at least a couple of days ahead. When you reheat it, thin it to your desired consistency with the additional stock or water. It's a thick soup, but it should flow, a little, shouldn't be like porridge. Add a few grinds of black pepper, taste for salt.

To serve, ladle out the soup and drop a pat of butter into the center of the soup. Drizzle a couple teaspoons of cream over the top, if you like. Some little rye croutons provide a nice textural contrast to the creamy soupage. Crazy bad.

(Note: Sam Hayward's recipe asks for a cup of tender sorrel or baby spinach leaves to be stirred into the soup before serving.)



Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Happy Solstice from Bide-A-Wee

Light a candle, stay warm, eat good.


Welcome, winter. Happy solstice, all.

Brett, Mary, Annabel, and Lily

The Bread Board: Cider Polenta Levain

This is one of those "mutt" breads, a thrown-together, inspiration-of-the-moment dough. No-Knead breads are all the rage, but how many have ventured into the land of "No-Measure"? Well, the recipe below will show that I did eventually measure, so that I could provide a recipe, measurements being traditional in recipes. The original version was a couple ladles starter, slosh slosh of water, couple handfuls cracked wheat, that looks like enough salt let's taste no a little more, etc.


We get this beautiful organic polenta from Whole Grain Milling Company. That's what inspired this bread. I've long made a yeasted loaf with cornmeal, milk, and honey. I'm moving toward all organic, natural leaven breads, very rustic and pure, so the coarse polenta spoke to me. When I poured some of our home-pressed cider over it, I knew I would have something good.


The quality of ingredients is often, oddly, overlooked in discussions of bread making, where technique is a topic of endless debate. Yet even in a complicated bread, like brioche, for example, the list of ingredients is very short and basic, compared to even a simple cooked dish, like soup. So to me it makes sense to pay attention to each and every ingredient. Use filtered water, because I doubt that yeast likes chlorine very much. And if you're lucky enough to live in America's grain belt, seek out the best local flours from small organic producers.

I have absolute reverence for the work and products and mission of Whole Grain Milling in Welcome, Minnesota. Their whole wheat bread flour is the magic ingredient that goes into nearly all of our breads. Their organic whole rye gives a round, sweet northern flavor to our rye doughs. That's the stuff to use if you can get it. Whole Grain Milling doesn't make an all-purpose white flour (probably something about that "whole grain" in their name...), so we round out a lot of doughs with Gold 'N White from Natural Way Mills.


So anyway, here's my cider polenta mutt. You can clearly see the grains of polenta in the finished dough (and you can see that I have discovered the "Super Macro" function on my camera). The crust is crackly crisp, unlike any other bread I have made. It has slightly hard little nubbins of polenta on the outside of the crust, which I find very appealing. In the process of photographing the finished bread, I ate nearly half a loaf thickly smeared with Hope Creamery butter.



Cider Polenta Levain
Makes four one-pound batards

1 cup coarse polenta
1 cup sweet (not hard) apple cider
1 1/2 cups (375 grams) well-refreshed liquid levain (sourdough starter)
1 1/2 cups water
1 Tbsp salt
2 cups whole wheat bread flour
1/2 cup cracked wheat
3+ cups organic unbleached white flour (I use Gold 'N White from Natural Way Mills)

Mix the polenta and cider and let sit for at least two hours. Combine starter and water in a large (I use eight-quart) mixing bowl, and stir in the soaked polenta, the salt, whole wheat bread flour, and cracked wheat. Add two cups of the unbleached white flour. The dough should be quite thick at this point, but still pretty wet. Add additional flour a bit at a time until you can't stir it any more, then dump your dough out onto a floured work surface. Knead for just a couple of minutes, adding additional white flour as needed. This will make a dense, relatively wet dough. Once you have what looks like a dough, put it back in the mixing bowl, sprinkle with a little flour, and leave it alone for at least 15 minutes. DO NOT overknead the dough; you will get a dull, dry final product if you work too much flour into the dough at this point.

After the dough has rested, knead it again for about three minutes, again adding small amounts of flour to your board to keep the dough from sticking. When it's nice and springy put it back in the bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let it proof. Note: When I say "nice and springy," I mean relatively nice and springy--with all the whole grains in this bread, and the coarse polenta and cracked wheat, this is not going to feel like a yeasted baguette dough.

Proofing: In a cool house such as one tends to have in Minnesota in the winter, I just leave the dough on the kitchen counter overnight, shape, proof and bake it in the morning. In warmer conditions, I'll let the dough proof at room temperature for an hour or so, refrigerate for two or three hours, take it out knead it down, and then let it sit out at room temp overnight. Overall, a dough like this wants to proof for at least 12 hours, though proofing longer, especially in cool conditions, certainly won't hurt it.

I bake this bread in batards of a little over a pound of dough. This batch makes four such loaves. You can make larger loaves if you like. Shape the loaves to suit your fancy and place them on a cornmeal-dusted wooden peel. Let the loaves proof in a warmish place (if possible) for at least an hour and a half, two hours, better. They should look noticeably risen, though not necessarily doubled.

Forty minutes before baking, preheat your oven with baking stone in place to 450. When your loaves are ready to bake, slash them with a razor blade or very sharp knife. Slide the loaves from the peel onto your stone. Add steam in whatever manner is convenient: we have small cast iron skillets permanently sitting on the floor of our ovens, and I toss four ice cubes into the skillet and close the door. Some prefer to mist with a spray bottle, or have a baking dish with water in it on another oven rack, heating as the oven preheats.

Bake at 450 for 15 minutes. Turn the heat down to 425 and bake for another 12 minutes. Allow to cool at least 30 minutes on a wire rack before slicing. But do catch it while it's still a bit warm, and have some great unsalted butter on hand. There's your breakfast, or lunch, or a snack beyond compare.



Bon pain pour tous!

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Solstice Solace: Autumn Vegetable, Chicken and Sausage Hot Pot

At Bide-A-Wee as we enter solstice week the sun touches the distant southwest hilltops by a quarter past four in the afternoon. We take a walk around our own hilltop circuit to catch the last of the daylight. We turn to take in the whole horizon, we peer down into the shadowed, snowy valleys, as if to fix it all in memory, to capture it in case this sunset should fail to resolve itself, come morning, into the dawn of another day, as if this fading glow might be the last of light to grace the world--the immemorial fear of northern peoples facing down the shortest days, the longest nights.

The sunsets have been beautiful, but we can't look at them without a sense of longing, almost of regret. You almost want to reach out and try to pull it back, though the descending sun now seems a universe away. You want to implore, with Faustian gravitas: "Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!"

Good luck with that. We watch the light fade, and feel with its departure a deepening chill. We finish our walk and crunch and squeak down the snow-covered gravel driveway. By five o'clock it is completely dark, and we are in for the night.

In places where the winter nights are this long, or longer, and vodka is cheap, you can see how folks get into trouble. Rather than pouring out tumblers of cheap hootch, we go through our evening rituals: bringing in wood and stoking the fire in the Haggis, replacing and lighting of candles, fluffing up of dog bed, general tidying (in a 12-by-16-foot cabin everything must have a place), assembling of reading material (and scrounging of reading glasses), tuning in the radio to WOJB--"Woodland Community Radio, 88.9"--from the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe reservation in Reserve, Wisconsin.

And of course, dinner preparation. In general we try to keep our Bide-A-Wee cooking simple, ever so much moreso in winter. With a pot gently simmering on the woodstove we can sit down with a drink (make mine Balvenie Double-Wood), a glass of wine, and eat when we and the pot agree we're ready. I've written about a Bide-A-Wee hot pot dinner before, and I do so again here without shame. It's the sort of simple, satisfying food that really highlights the flavors of local produce--sweet onions, carrots, leek, potato, cabbage, parsnips, turnips. The fact that it's December, not late February, is relevant: we haven't been eating roots and cabbage for three months straight; we can still regard them as "fresh vegetables."

Fresh vegetables, each with a story: It occured to me as we peeled and washed and cut up the vegetables for this hot pot that I could connect people and places with every one of them. The turnips were those I rescued from the garden just before the Big Freeze, carrots and leeks garden produce, too; the cabbage, onions, and parsnips I purchased from market vendors, the families of Va Vang and Tim Vang, specifically, at our last markets in November. Peeling a parsnip, I recall the last cold, wet hour of our Thanksgiving market; the rain swept in to erase our Real Bread sign, bringing an emphatic close to the 2009 season, but we were cheered by the comradeship of the vendors who stuck it out, the devotion of the customers who came out--even on foot, even on bikes!--in such dismal weather for one last market shopping.

And in the midst of making that meaningful mise en place, laying out that comfortingly monotone still life, I was reminded that the pleasures of cooking, especially cooking with local ingredients, go far beyond the satisfaction of eating good food. Eating, well, it's eating: you make food, you eat it, you're done. You extend the pleasure, and the meaningfulness, when you take time to think about your meal, to grow your own food or buy it from people you know (or forage, catch, or shoot it...), when you prepare it carefully, appreciatively, and share it at table with others who see as much in it as you do.

Then some humble roots and simple meats simmered together become all you might desire, a steamy feast, homely but delicious.


Hot pot, huo guo, pot au feu, boiled dinner. Grilling over an open flame may have been the first form of cooking; once mankind got a pot, the water-cooked meal probably superceded it in popularity. The simplest way to make a meal like this is to just put all your ingredients in a pot of water, bring it to a boil, simmer it until it's done. In this case I rendered the fat from some home-smoked bacon rind, browned the chicken and sausage to give it a little more depth of flavor, and added the vegetables in two stages, according to how long they needed to cook.

Leftovers can be served cold with a vinaigrette dressing, the pot au feu salad, a French classic. If you chop the leftovers, add some well-reduced chicken stock, and pour it all into a mold, you get an aspic-bound terrine, quite elegant as a first course with a dab of dijon mustard, some cornichons and crusty bread. We turned our leftovers into soup, chopping the leftover meat and vegetables into bite-sized pieces, adding a bit of stock and a few more veg; finish with a slug of red wine and a tablespoon of butter. You won't feel like you're eating leftovers.



Autumn Vegetable, Chicken and Sausage Hot Pot
Serves three, or two with lots of leftovers--it just happened we had three knockwurst in the freezer, and the packet of chicken thighs contained three. Vary the vegetables according to what you have, adding them to the pot according to their respective cooking times--squash, rutabagas, kholrabi, chard, other cooking greens, etc.

A couple of pieces of good bacon rind or a slice of bacon, optional, but highly recommended
3 chicken thighs (we like Kadejan, available at most co-ops here)
3 sausages, like knockwurst or bratwurst
1 parsnip, peeled, cut into 2-inch pieces
1 medium carrot, peeled or scrubbed, cut into 2-inch pieces
1 small leek, white and light green part, cleaned, cut into 2-inch pieces
2 small onions, peeled, halved through the root end so they stay together
1/4 of a smallish green cabbage
2 small potatoes, peeled or scrubbed, as you prefer
1 large clove garlic
1 small turnip, peeled and quartered
1 small dried or fresh chili, seeds removed, optional
a couple sprigs fresh thyme or a pinch dried
salt and pepper

In a large dutch oven slowly render the bacon fat from the rind or the bacon slice--if you don't use bacon or rind, just put a little oil or butter in the pot. Salt the chicken on both sides, and brown it alongside the bacon, starting starting skin side down. Brown the sausages, too; they shouldn't take quite as long as the chicken.

Add four cups of water to the dutch oven, along with the carrot, leek, onions, garlic, thyme and chili if desired. Bring to a boil and simmer very gently for 30 minutes. Add the potatoes, turnip, and cabbage, and simmer for another 30 minutes, at least.

As long as you keep it at a bare simmer--le fait frémir, as the French say, make it shiver--it's pretty hard to overcook it. Before serving taste for salt. Serve with dijon mustard, crusty bread or croutons, some cornichons or a freshly made vinaigrette, or all of the above, as you prefer.


Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw