My Christmas present: an Avantco meat slicer

Losing one’s mind is never a good thing, and that was me back in mid-December. I was faced with too much to accomplish every day, so the pile of work waiting to be done just got larger and higher. Something had to be done!

Unfortunately, A Man for All Seasonings was one of the things I just had to take a pass on. Writing three blog postings a week (Type M for Murder, as well as Late Innings and this one) with occasional other guest blogs takes a lot of time and energy. Type M is more “work-related” which means it has to get done weekly, and with all the baseball trades and such, Late Innings needed my attention, too. So it was AMFAS that had to go into hibernation.

But now the days are getting longer, the sun is out (regardless that it’s cold as hell at the moment), and I find myself with some time to devote to the “neglected blog”. I hope you haven’t been pining too much during our absence!

Now this is going to seem like I’m reaching way back in time, but I got the most awesome Christmas gift ever. Here’s a photo of it:

Beautifully thin slices of our lonzino

That’s right. Your eyes are not deceiving you. My mother-in-law’s present to me this year is a real, honest-to-God deli meat slicer. Let me explain.

We buy and make a fair number of things that need slicing. Our home-cured lonzino (which we’re currently enjoying) needs to be sliced thinly, like prosciutto. That’s nearly impossible to do by hand, certainly well beyond my skills, and that’s what got me started on this search. But it’s silly to spend money to slice one of our home-cured meats. Now, however, we can also buy large chunks of salami, prosciutto, cheese, whatever (saving money) and be able to slice them easily and evenly. Since getting this machine, I find that we’re also slicing fruits and vegetables, too. It has proved to be much more of a help in the kitchen than I thought it would be.

I’m sure some of you are rolling your eyes at the thought of having an appliance that’s this big, merely for slicing. Yes, that is a problem, expecially since our kitchen is a small one, but we have a solution. In the far corner stands a small “bar fridge” we inherited from Vicki’s studio. Usually it’s top is just a handy repository for junk: bags of potatoes, things that have to go into the basement, platters and trays. They’ve all now disappeared to where they should have been in the first place, and the top of the fridge is a perfect size for the slicer. Best of all, there’s an electrical outlet close by. We can keep the slicer out and ready to be used. It was packaged in its carton with a heavy plastic bag around it, so we kept that and use it to keep dust and dirt off the machine.

When I began to investigate getting something like this, I looked at the usual home-kitchen type ones, and found none of them really have enough power. Sharpening was also an issue in that the blade had to be removed and sent out. It quickly became obvious that something of a more professional level was the only thing worth buying. Hobart is one of the big manufacturers of deli slicers, but even a used one would have set us back a cool $800 at least, far too expensive for our budget.

I widened my internet search and came across a site (http://www.webstaurantstore.com/) that caters more to the trade than the domestic cook. In their slicer selection, they stock mostly the top-end Berkel and Hobart units, but they also stocked something that caught my eye immediately: a 9" Manual Gravity Feed Meat Slicer by a company called Avantco.

Some of our lonzino, perfectly sliced thinly!

This unit had good power (1/4 hp) and from the photos seemed to be well-made. The customer reviews were all positive (for what those are worth) and the manufacturer stated right off the top that this slicer was not meant for heavy duty output (hours of use per day). It also came with what looked like a good, built-in sharpening system for its 9" blade.

Having worked in restaurants, I know what good, solid construction is, and this unit seemed to have it. Best of all was the price: $269.99. I had looked at and disregarded home units that ran as high as $300+, so this looked like a real possibility.

So when my mother-in-law, the formidable Loraine, asked what we wanted for Christmas, I was ready. We have not been disappointed with our choice. The construction is mostly aluminum, cast or stamped, allowing for the lower cost, but the power is excellent (with an extra belt supplied for the motor/blade hook-up), cleaning very easy, and it slices from paper-thin to almost half an inch, plenty good for what we need. I haven’t used the sharpener yet, but it looks like it will be quick and easy to do.

We try to only buy the best for cooking. A cheap home-version of a pot or utensil just doesn’t compare to a pro version. They don’t stand up over time and they can give frustratingly uneven results. When we’re in the market for something, we usually buy at restaurant supply stores. This is an even more important factor when buying appliances. Anyone who has ever cooked on a professional range or used a professional appliance will know what I mean. (I really wish we had a Garland cooktop!) The Avantco slicer is a good saw-off for us: professional power and design, but at a nice price. To answer the question some of you no doubt have: yes, it’s made in China, but its quality is really quite good.

Stop by the Blechta Test Kitchens some time and we’ll slice up some paper-thin lonzino or prosciutto for you!

Our homemade sauerkraut research project

I don’t post recipes that aren’t tried and true favorites. That really wouldn’t be fair to anyone who’s interested in making what I’m sharing. However, from time to time I thought it might be valuable to readers to share in the “research” aspect of cooking anything new.

I’ll start with sauerkraut. As mentioned in my previous post, we made this for the first time in October under the tutelage of friend Henry Gluch and his mother (participating over the phone). Since we like to do things using the right equipment, we bought a 3-gallon pottery crock designed for just such a use as stuffing it with shredded cabbage, salt and spices.

Several of us had a lovely afternoon and evening making about 12 gallons of kraut and Henry gladly donated his cantina to store our fermenting delicacy and also to skim it daily (something I understand is not very enjoyable because of the smell). After pounding the cabbage into submission (a very important step to start bringing out the water ), we sat down to a Polish meal washed down with wine and beer.

Then we sat back for several weeks to wait for the signal that the kraut was ready.

At the time of making it, I felt we were using way too much salt, and it turned out I was correct. The finished product tastes lovely (we used black peppercorns and bay leaf), but it was very salty. Luckily, correcting that is just a matter of rinsing the kraut thoroughly before cooking it, or soaking it in a few changes of water.

We rinsed it thoroughly before portioning it into freezer bags and chucking it into the basement to live with our stash of frozen stocks.

Last weekend when we cold-smoked a pork roast (reportage on that coming soon!), we decided we wanted some more flavors in the sauerkraut that was to accompany the pork, so Vicki went off and found a promising recipe on the Internet that used a bit of Reisling wine, juniper berries, onion, garlic and cloves. We left out the called-for duck or goose fat.

Notice something missing? We did, too – especially when we ate it. To our mind, sauerkraut needs a bit of a kick, something that usually comes in the form of vinegar. I suppose that was left out because of the wine. (Wine and vinegar don’t generally play well together, unless you’re talking about wine vinegar.) It’s a cardinal rule in the Blechta Test Kitchens here in Beautiful Midtown Toronto to never mess around with a recipe on its first try, so we went with the flow, used the wine and left out the vinegar.

Well, the kraut did taste lovely and delicate – but boring. To prove that point, we didn’t quite finish eating the portion we’d cooked up. Over the next few days, Vicki and I discussed the situation.

When it came time to clear leftovers from the fridge the other day, I heated up the bit of kraut remaining and added a couple of tablespoons of cider vinegar.

What a difference! The kraut just came alive. We felt we were on the right track at last.

So, rather than sharing this recipe now, I’m going to hold off until the next time we make baked sauerkraut and have an opportunity to mess about with the recipe. I think it could simply be a matter of adding the correct amount of cider vinegar, but we’ll see.

Any experienced sauerkraut lovers like to weigh in on this? We would welcome some guidance!

Getting ready for a weekend of cooking!

Our charcuterie just before the mouse invasion!

I just did a quick run down to Gasparro’s, our favorite butcher on Bloor Street here in Toronto. We always like to have a chicken on hand and our spare got used last week in an experiment with brining and smoking – which was a spectacular success (more about that in the future: we’re still in the research stage).

Nick Gasparro sold me a beautiful pork roast (why are all butchers suddenly “Frenching” the rib ends on their roasts?), six ribs-worth. Karel and I are going to cold smoke it on Sunday in another experiment, then hot smoke it to finish. We’ll use two different woods: maple and hickory.

Normally, Karel and I do our weekly food shopping on Saturday mornings, mostly at Toronto's fabulous St. Lawrence Market on Front Street. Today, though, I needed to get the brining of the pork roast started since it needs twelve hours in the liquid and then to rest in the fridge for several hours so the salt can spread evenly through the meat. Our goal is to have the roast lightly salted and with brining it’s pretty easy to overdo it. Since we’re using salt in this case more as a seasoning than to preserve the meat, it’s better to leave it in the brine for too little time than the opposite.

The brine recipe is from my current favorite cookbook (we have over 100), Charcuterie (link is live in case you wish to order it). It’s Brian Polcyn’s creation and he doesn’t smoke it after brining, he grills it, which does add some smoke flavor. But we’ve got a really good reason for branching off on our own: we’re going to serve smoked pork chops to enjoy with homemade sauerkraut we made in October under the expert guidance of the Gluch family – of great sauerkraut renown. Vicki has come up with what looks like a great recipe for baking raw sauerkraut (herbs, spices and riesling wine), and if it works out, we’ll be sharing that with all of you, too. As a teaser, the brine we’re using is flavored with dark brown sugar, juniper berries, fresh sage, garlic and black pepper. Right now it’s cooling on the back step and the roast will soon go in for twelve hours or so. It smells heavenly.

A CURING UPDATE: Currently, we have four hog jowls (guanciale) and two pounds of pork loin (lonzino) air-drying in our basement. It all smells heavenly. Only problem is, it also smelled heavenly to some deer mice that must have come into our house when the cold weather hit. Not having checked the two jowls finished at that time and hanging from our water pipe, I was shocked to see how much had been nibbled away. We’ve decided to let the damaged ones continue hanging after dispatching two of the little rodents (both female, thank heavens). Seeing no more of their little carcases in our traps for the past two days, I think we’re safe. We’ll just cut away the nibbled parts, and keep the remaining guanciale to be enjoyed “chez nous”, using the two we’ve cured and hung since to share with other people.

Fortunately, the little critters didn’t seem to care for lonzino (probably the fennel I used in the cure) or I would have been really put out. To combat further mice invasions on our larder, I’ve left the traps out, and moved everything to a place where they shouldn’t be able to get at it again. But the whole thing remains a huge bummer. For the future, I may need to make some sort of wire box since with our house’s foundation resembling Swiss cheese, we tend to get a few of the little buggers in every autumn.

To conclude, stay tuned for our report on the results of this weekend’s culinary adventures. We haven’t written much about German food on the blog so far, and what could be more Teutonic than Kassler Rippchen, boiled potatoes and sauerkraut?

Introducing Frank Baldock, our new wine consultant

Today, I’m very pleased and excited to welcome a new member to A Man for All Seasonings. Frank Baldock is a long-time friend and colleague who has forgotten more about wine than I will ever know.

The creator of Wine Express, an absorbing quarterly newsletter (and website!) for those looking to expand their knowledge of wine and be alerted to some incredible bargains at the same time, Frank will bring his expertise to bear on some of the recipes posted here, as well as sharing his views on relevant topics of his own. Additionally, he is an excellent writer with a terrific sense of humor. Please visit his website winexpress.ca for lots more information about some great new wines, as well as articles and stories about wine and the wine industry, even some recipes from his lovely wife, Lavell (who is a fantastic cook). With Frank’s help, you, too, can reach vino nirvana.

Welcome, Frank!

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Q: Okay, Frank, so you’re a molto experienced oenophile. Tell us, what was your first experience with fermented grape juice?

A: In English pubs as an under-age teen tippler/explorer. The house wines weren’t great but it was still a buzz! My Dad grew his own grapes in his greenhouse but no wine dynasty ever emerged from that!

Q: When someone is about to pour: red or white?

A: A light, unoaked white at first, probably, as most reds are best served with food, especially the savory, bone-dry and often tannic reds of Europe, where red wines AND food are joined at the hip and rarely served separately.

Q: Your newsletter, Wine Express (not to mention your website, winexpress.ca) is packed with wines that tend for the most part to be affordable. Why is that?

A: To me, wine is food. That is, a daily pleasure that’s deliciously affordable. Everybody (‘fess up, now!) is searching for bargain wines that taste great. I’m there as your advance scout, taste-testing 5,000-6,000 wines a year on your behalf, and reporting back on the best. Tough job but someone, etc., etc…

Q: Staying on the same topic, do you feel high-end wines are over-priced?

A: Winemaking is a huge commercial gamble. The variables for success/disaster include frost, hail, hungry birds, beasts and bugs, an army of plant diseases, and rain on the eve of harvest, to name just a few. The top producers tend to restrict the number of grapes per vine for better concentration and flavor – at the expense of volume. The artisan wineries have fewer products to sell and so they need to charge more per bottle.

Some high-falutin’ prices, however, are simply part of the marketing package, the cachet, along with tiny availability. There are always collectors with very deep pockets who pursue cult wines. Remember, scarcity is the opiate of the super-rich!

A $100 wine is not 10 times as good as a $10 wine. It becomes geometrically more difficult to improve wines the higher you go on the quality scale. I’ve been lucky enough to taste wines once owned by Napoleon, but only because I was able to share the purchase cost with a bunch of other like-minded wine freaks!

Q: What wines or wine regions should people be on the lookout for?

A: Wines are traditional products of their place of origin and good ones taste exactly of that place. Typicity is important. Regions do evolve over time, however: for example, currently in Australia there’s a laudable move to making finer wines in small batches from great (cool climate) locations, as opposed to the industrial-scale production of el cheapo plonk that competes mostly on price.

Q: What wines are very popular now but perhaps don’t deserve to be?

A: People talk dry but drink sweet (or at least off-dry). California (not alone) has chosen to lead the way in big, high-alcohol reds and whites that have a fair amount of residual sugar (at the discretion of the winemaker).

The subtle sweetness flatters the wine for the first few sips but it palls with food and fails to refresh your palate during a meal.

As drinkers mature, they tend to prefer truly dry wines that showcase great food rather than smother it.

Q: What has been your best ever wine experience?

A: Too many to count, but they would include the mind-blowing introduction to my first really great red Burgundy, a Grands Echezeaux; a Chateau d’Yquem vertical tasting with the winemaker; dinners with Marie de Maigret, the Countess of Champagne, and Christian Pol Roger in Epernay; and swapping wine anecdotes over lunch with Princess Takamado in Japan.

Q: Your worst?

A: Rescuing the bruised ego of an enormously corpulent writer. He was spread-eagled like a bug after crushing his flimsy chair at a solemn gathering of the most prestigious (and suddenly hushed) chateaux owners of Bordeaux.

Q: Is there one wine of which you wished you had purchased several more bottles?

A: I’m always on the lookout for any wines of 1943, my birth year, to share at an anniversary dinner each year with close friends. I figure that if I keep buying more and more ’43s I’ll live forever!

Q: What is your absolute favorite food/wine match?

A: Chateau d’Yquem (or any great Sauternes) and foie gras.

Thank you, Frank! I’m sure I echo everyone when I say we’re looking forward to seeing your byline and contributions in the future here at AMFAS.

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If you’re interested in receiving Wine Express four times a year at a very reasonable price, please click HERE for more information.

Smoking bacon

Has anyone been inspired by my previous post to try making their own bacon? I hope so, because it really is easy, takes very little actual “work time”, and the results are just incredibly good. Couple that with pork belly from first-rate pigs, raised and treated properly, and you have something that is quite out of the ordinary.

One thing I didn’t discuss is that bacon can also be savory. You still need to use some sugar in the cure, but the extra maple or birch syrup doesn’t need to be added. Instead you can use herbs or spices. Try crushed juniper berries, minced garlic, thyme, bay leaves, even cloves or allspice. The results can be amazing.

So, last post, I discussed how to cure pork belly. If you’ve done this, you now have some very flavorful bacon with no further work.

But you can also smoke bacon (or any meat for that matter) to add another whole layer of flavor. Since we like smoked foods (at the moment, I’m smoking some salmon with a cold-smoking gadget we recently bought), finishing our cured bacon with a few hours in the smoker is a must. If you smoke your home-cured bacon, I think you will agree.

First of all, you need a smoker. They don’t have to be large or fancy. The only requisites is that what you use must be able to keep the temperature steady at around 200-250 degrees (it can vary within the ideal range) and that the vessel used for smoking has a cover to contain the smoke – at least for awhile. You do want it to have a decent draft to keep it going. Never forget that you’re using a fire and fires need oxygen to burn or smolder.

Many people successfully use their barbecue as a smoker and while this does work, you have to remember that the heat needs to be indirect, otherwise your meat will do more cooking rather than being bathed in smoky heat. Direct heat will cook your meat too quickly, not giving it enough time exposed to the smoke. If you have a large enough barbecue to have the bacon well away from the source of heat (which, truthfully, shouldn’t be much), then go ahead and use it. Remember: you want indirect heat.

When we decided on purchasing a smoker, we went to look at the one suggested for home smoking in Charcuterie: one made by the Bradley firm in British Columbia. We ultimately decided to take a pass for two reasons: too expensive but we would also be captive to their special wafer chips called bisquettes (made with specially compressed sawdust). If we get really serious about this, we may one day invest in a Bradley. Certainly it seems to be well-made, has a lot of proponents and good reviews.

We saw the Bradley at nearby Bass Pro. It turned out they stocked a simple smoker made by a company called Brinkmann. It is very basic, a bit of a pain in some ways (pans can fall out at very inopportune times, but since we like to futz with things, and my son Karel (the master smoker of the family) enjoys nothing more than to tend the fire and watch the smoke rise, it’s worked out very well for us. Best of all, it cost $55 as opposed to $300+ for the bottom-of-the-line Bradley.

One modification we did make was to drill five 3/4" holes in the bottom of the fire pan to help with air cirulation to keep the charcoal and wood chip packages burning evenly. The only other thing we did was purchase a cheap oven thermometer so we could more closely monitor the temp in the smoking chamber.

For smoking meats (ribs, chicken, beef, pork,) you need to do what’s called a “hot smoke”. That means you’re also cooking the meat slowly as it smokes. Since we’re talking about bacon here, you want the temperature to be between 200-250 degrees, no higher. If you go lower, it will take much longer to cook your meat – and you’re heading into cold smoking territory (something we’ll cover in the future). Too hot and the meat cooks to its final temperature without being exposed to the smoke for enough time to give it the flavor you want.

What wood should you use? That depends. We’ve been trying different things. The first time out was apple, then hickory, then maple, and this last time was cherry. All gave very different results with hickory being the most assertive. Apple and cherry have many nice features, and the maple tasted a bit mild to my mind. But that’s the fun of doing this: you can experiment to your heart’s content.

We get our fire started with the fire pan at the bottom about 1/4 full of lump charcoal. We soak our wood chips in water for about 1/2 hour then wrap them in heavy-duty aluminum foil, punching several holes in the package.

The Brinkmann smoker has a water pan directly above the fire pan. We fill that about 2/3 full of water which easily lasts for the whole smoking period. This accomplishes two things: it adds moisture to the smoke (a great thing for cooking ribs and brisket) while keeping the heat from below reaching the meat directly.

Then we put on our bacon and sit back. Using an instant-read thermometer, we monitor how the bacon is cooking. Our results show that about three hours of cooking time is about right. The flavor of the smoke on the meat is optimal. You know when the bacon is done when the internal temperature reaches 150 degrees.

Now comes the payoff. Slice off a bit of your bacon and try it. We do this every time and every time it knocks our socks off. Before slicing (unless you’re serving right away), chill the bacon thoroughly.

While it’s still hot, though, is the time to slice off the rind (unless you like it on). Have the rind side of the bacon up. Just slip a sharp knife under it, keep it pointed slightly upward towards the rind as you gently slice it off, making the sharpness of the blade work for you. And don’t throw that rind away! We cut it into squares and freeze it. It gives fantastic flavor to stews and soups.

So to close off, anyone can enjoy some fantastic eating, avoid the “additions” that are put into store-bought, mass-produced bacon and not have to work very hard to do it. Since bacon freezes so well (we don’t eat it all that often), we just slice it and package it in air-tight bags, peeling off what we want, when we want. A few minutes in the frying pan or under the broiler and it’s ready.

I will say it one last time: you will be amazed how easy it is to do and how great it tastes.

Makin’ Bacon (Adventures in Home Curing)

The photo to the right is three pieces of bacon my son Karel and I just finished up yesterday. Looks great, doesn’t it? That was the response yesterday when I posted the shot on Facebook as a sort of a teaser for this post. The thing is, the bacon tastes as good as it looks, but the news is: it’s very easy to make your own bacon.

And you should. Here’s why:



Obviously, this rather scary video leaves out some important pieces of information, such as what exactly is in the “flavorings” they’re adding to your bacon. Look at a package of supermarket bacon and you’ll find out. Here’s what’s needed to make your own bacon at home: salt. That’s it. Cure the meat for several days and you’ve got bacon. I’m not saying that the taste will be the best ever, but if you only used salt, you’d have bacon and it would taste pretty good, especially if you purchased pork belly of superior quality (farm raised and pastured). The sugar (or whatever sweetening you use) is there to mitigate the harshness of the salt, as well as giving the cured meat a good flavor. So, I’m not advocating that you try bacon without some sort of sweetener, just that you could use just salt and cure the meat perfectly well. In other words, salt is the active ingredient in the curing process.

In the manufacturing process outlined in the video above another thing they don’t tell you is when they’re injecting all those flavorings, they’re also injecting water. Bacon manufacturers would tell you they need the water for the process. They do, but not for the reason you may think: water adds weight and weight means more profit with very little added cost. That’s why this kind of bacon shrinks and sputters in the frying pan. The water is evaporating away.

So have I convinced you that there are good reasons to make your own bacon? Don’t have time? Think it’s too complicated. Can’t do anything in the kitchen but boil water? I’m here to tell you that anyone can make bacon. It isn’t hard, doesn’t take many minutes of actual work, and the result can be (and will be, if you follow my directions) utterly fantastic. The only thing I haven’t worked out is how to make it safe for you to eat it large quantities – because you will want to. So if you value your waistline and your arteries, proceed with caution. There be sharks in the waters ahead…

As mentioned above, bacon can just be cured. It doesn’t need to be smoked. So if you don’t want to go there, you don’t need to. That being said, smoking your bacon makes it so utterly fantastic that you should seriously consider doing it. In any event, we’ll deal with this in two steps: the curing process followed by directions for smoking.

To cure any meat, it needs to have contact with salt, either a dry cure by rubbing salt on the outside of the meat and allowing it to soak in over a period of days and react with the meat at a cellular level, or salt in the form of brine in which you submerge the meat. For bacon you don’t want to expose it to more water; you want to draw water out of the meat, so you use a dry cure.

The cure for bacon usually involves sugar of some sort (although you can make savory bacon). For this recipe, we’re going to be using maple sugar as well as maple syrup for additional sweetness and flavor.

[Sidebar: Actually, this time out we used birch syrup which is quite delightful and different than maple syrup. First of all, it’s not as sweet, but it also has a more pungent flavor. We stumbled on this twist by accident. We were about to start curing the pork belly and discovered we were out of maple syrup! Since we’d already started the process and the stores were all closed, I dug through the fridge and happened on a small bottle of birch syrup I was given by friends. Some of the best things happen by accident. The resulting bacon tastes fabulous. Try it if you can get your hands on birch syrup. It’s not widely available and it is expensive since it takes 100 gallons of birch sap to make a single gallon of syrup (due to the lower sugar content than maple). Check on line to find where you can order it.]

Now we get to the sticky part. Most recipes also recommend using a bit of what’s known as curing salt to remove the risk of botulism, as well as other bacteria and fungus. Curing salt is salt mixed with a small amount of sodium nitrite or sodium nitrate. Both additions do the same thing. In the fantastic book, Charcuterie, authors Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn advocate also using curing salt for the flavor it adds to cured food. Here’s the rub, though: many people have adverse reaction to nitrates and/or nitrites. And in large quantities (way more than we’re using here), it can be dangerous.

If I were making cured/dried sausage like salami or csabai, it could be downright dangerous not to use curing salt do so, but some people (usually very experienced at curing) will even leave it out here.

Bacon, however, is less dodgy since it is a whole piece of meat, plus you will also be cooking it before eating. So unless you plan on eating your bacon raw, you can leave the curing salt out of the cure if you wish. But just use your head, okay?

This post is going to deal with curing your bacon. Later this week (after your bacon has had time to cure, I’ll lay out the smoking portion. And please note, you don’t need a fancy (read: expensive) smoker. In fact, you can probably do it right on your barbecue as long as it has a cover to contain the smoke.

Maple-Cured Bacon
(Makes as much as you want)

INGREDIENTS
Pork Belly (Bellies are generally about 10-12 pounds each. Get a smaller piece.)
10 gr Kosher Salt per pound of meat
2.5 gr Curing Salt per pound of meat
10 gr Maple Sugar (or you can use dark brown or demerara sugar) per pound of meat
12 ml Maple Syrup per pound of meat

METHOD
1. Mix the appropriate amount of dry cure (salt, curing salt, and sugar) for the weight of the pork belly you’re curing. This is why I suggest you don’t rely on volume measurements but use weight. It’s far more accurate. (A small kitchen scale can be gotten pretty cheaply.)

2. Coat the pork belly thoroughly with the dry cure, rubbing it well into the meat on all sides. Now place the belly in a plastic freezer bag. This is far easier than using a vessel of some sort to hold it (although you can, just make sure there isn’t a lot of excess room in it). Next, pour on the maple syrup and distribute it on all sides of the meat.

3. Refrigerate for up to a week, turning the meat every day and redistributing the cure on the meat, rubbing it in well. It will throw off water as the salt pulls it out of the meat. This is a good thing and you want to use that self-created brine to help cure the meat. Curing is finished when the meat portion of the belly feels nice and firm. Charcuterie (where this recipe originates) recommends curing for a week. We find this creates a bacon that’s a bit too salty for us. As we’ve gained experience, we know what fully-cured meat feels like, so we remove it at that point rather than waiting a full seven days. Remember: the thicker the pork belly, the longer it takes the salt to do its work. A one-and-a-half-inch thick belly generally takes between 4 and 5 days.

4. When you feel the meat is cured, take it out of the bag (or vessel) and rinse it thoroughly to remove the salt on the outside of the belly.

That’s it! Your bacon is ready to eat, if you wish. Fry up a bit and taste it. Lovely, yes? Now for that exceptional flavor, you’ll want to smoke it. The bacon you buy in supermarkets is generally only cured with maybe some liquid smoke added to give you a sort of smoky taste. I suppose you could add some if you don’t want to or can’t smoke your bacon.

A tip: get the meat nice and cold to firm it up before slicing. It will be a lot easier. If you don’t like rind on your bacon, now is the time to carefully slice it off by running a sharp carving knife just underneath it. If you’re going to smoke the bacon, wait to de-rind and slice until later. Before you slice, though, square up the piece of bacon by trimming any bits sticking out, but keep those trimmings for things like soups and stews. We also cut the rind into pieces and freeze those as well for flavoring soups and stews. Waste not, want not!

Next post, I’ll tell you how we smoke the bacon for maximum flavor. Stay tuned.

Note: The reason pork belly in the photo at the top was cut into thirds was so that Karel could use a slightly differently cure (he added a BBQ pork rub to the one on the right ) and because one end of the belly was thicker than the other and got an extra 12 hours of curing.

Protecting yourself from big agribusiness

I’m probably dating myself, but I remember a time when people didn’t die from eating a hamburger. The spinach in our salads didn’t send us to the hospital. We could use raw eggs in things like mayonnaise. You didn’t have to cross your fingers when you bought some sliced ham at the deli to make sandwiches for your kids’ school lunches.

Things have certainly changed, haven’t they?

Now I’m not saying that bad things didn’t happen back in in the “good old days”. I’m sure they did, but we didn’t have catastrophic food recalls like the recent one at Alberta’s XL foods where millions of pounds of meat were recalled and eventually destroyed.

What’s changed?

Almost every bit of your daily food, available at every supermarket, is now grown, harvested and processed by big business. In order to keep the price as low as possible, these businesses must work with large quantities and must produce them in the cheapest way possible. Margins are small and competition is fierce. Only the strong will survive and to be strong you must be big. Small producers just get swallowed up or are driven out of business.

Let’s focus on the recent XL debacle. It started at the US border around September first when some burger meat from XL failed a routine E. coli test. By the time things came to a head, millions of pounds of meat were involved and over 1,800 products were recalled across North America.

At first it looked to be just hamburger products, as usual, since in the grinding of the meat, E. coli bacteria which will be found on the surface of beef gets mixed in and spreads throughout the hamburger because of the grinding process. When you’re dealing in the quantities plants like XL does, a huge amount of product is then going to be suspect.

More surprising, though, was the fact that as the XL investigation proceeded, steak products also began to show up in positive tests. That is exceptionally disturbing. Here’s why:

The reason you generally are never offered rare burgers at restaurants anymore is that they get their ground beef from the large producers. Since that source is suspect, burgers must be well-cooked in order to assure any E. coli present has been killing. Well and good. Restaurants are just wisely covering their butts.

But what about steaks? Steaks are seldom served well-done. Since E. coli, if it’s present, is on the surface of the steak, it is killed in cooking even the rarest of steaks, thus neutralizing the danger. Now we find out that whole muscle cuts from XL have been found with E. coli present on the interior of the meat where it will not necessarily be killed during cooking.

What happened?

Needle tenderization appears to be the cause. This is a way for tougher cuts of beef to be tenderized and therefore more attractive to consumers. In other words, producers and retailers can sell cheaper cuts of meat to be cooked as steaks (the most popular way of cooking beef) and keep the price down.

The problem is that a needle tenderizer also drives any surface contaminants into the center of the cut, where, if it’s a steak, won't necessarily be cooked to a high enough temperature to kill things like E. coli.

Again, when you’re dealing in huge quantities and widespread distribution, something like this is a nightmare. As far as I’m aware (and I’ve looked), no one died from eating any contaminated XL beef, but many were made ill. It could have been far worse.

What I found almost laughable in the aftermath was the food industry, in order to better the public’s perception of what was happening, went after the “mom and pop abattoirs”, stating that their record was much better than the smaller operators. If you only take into account the quantity of meat processed, of course the big operators like XL foods will come out better. They process thousands of cattle every day. A smaller abattoir will handle just a fraction of that amount. However if something goes wrong at a small operation, the amount of damage will be less severe and probably more localized. We’re talking apples and oranges here, folks.

It’s also since come out that XL’s plant was not operating within its own safety guidelines, let alone the government’s. That’s never a good thing, regardless of the size of the operation.

To my mind, one’s best bet is to deal with meat that came from a smaller scale operator, preferably one your butcher knows and trusts so you can be more sure of what you’re buying – or at least as sure as humanly possible. You can’t do that in your local supermarket when your burger meat may be coming from another country and contain the meat of several thousand cows.

When I was a kid, we never thought as we bit into a juicy, rare burger at a backyard barbecue, “Gee, I sure hope this doesn’t wind up killing me.”

The Christmas Cake Conundrum

Fruit, nuts and spices ready to marinate in bourbon for 24 hours.

In early November every year we always make our special holiday fruit cake. (“Fruit cake? Oh please, dear God, he’s not going to go on and on about this abomination, is he?”)

I’m well aware that many people are ambivalent about this creation, if not downright hostile, and I can understand that. Many fruit cakes are rather nasty – especially store bought ones. The main reason is cheap ingredients. Since these are the only example many people have been exposed to, they have a poor basis on which to form an “informed opinion”. Another problem is candied citrus rind (lemon, lime, orange) is very tart and to my mind doesn’t have a terrific flavor.

Around twenty years ago now, our good friend Sandy Lasky sent us a postcard while visiting Ireland. Knowing that I’m partial to Bushmills Irish Whiskey, she picked up a card while visiting the distillery which had a recipe for their fruit cake flavored with whiskey. It piqued our interest, so we made one that Christmas. It was pretty good, too, but as Vicki and I made our way through it over the course of a month, we discussed the flavors, what we liked and didn’t like, and made plans to experiment the following year.

Experimentation went on for nearly ten years as the Blechta Test Kitchens staff carefully swapped ingredients in and out (keeping records of what had been done) in our search to find what flavors, textures and proportions really worked for us. Some years we made two cakes with subtle differences between so we could easily make an A/B comparison. (This is also where we discovered how many people “hate” Christmas cake when we solicited responses!) In fact, we’re still experimenting: this year we decided to leave the fruit, nuts and spices “marinating” in the whiskey for a full day. An update will be available around December first as to how this may or may not have changed this year’s cake.

Covered with pecans and ready to go into the oven.

Almost everything except the amount of eggs, butter and flour has now changed from the original. We changed the almonds for walnuts and then for pecans. We eventually changed the Irish for rum, then Scotch and finally settled on Bourbon since it works so well with pecans. The candied citrus rind disappeared after only a few years and was replaced by more glacé cherries (in red and green), candied pineapple and candied ginger (Vicki’s phenomenal idea). Spices were also swapped in and out in varying proportions. The only thing outside the batter that stayed consistent throughout was the inclusion of golden raisins.

Eventually, we came up with a cake that is moist, exceptionally flavorful and keeps extremely well. As a matter of fact, I was cleaning out the back recesses of our bread drawer in late summer, found the butt end of last year’s cake, still carefully wrapped in plastic. There wasn’t much, but after unwrapping and smelling it, I tried a tiny piece. It was still excellent, if a little dry. (Many people keep wedding fruit cakes for several years to enjoy on a significant anniversary.)

We got ours done on Tuesday this week, which is slightly late for us since we like our cake to “age” for 2-3 weeks after adding the final bit of bourbon. Aging does make the cake more moist and flavorful.

All we need to add is the rest of the bourbon – and then wait!

One last thing: we do know that Jack Daniels isn’t technically bourbon, it’s the Woolsey family tipple of choice (Vicki is a Woolsey), so we use that. It has a stronger, more pronounced flavor than your typical bourbon. In our cake, it is by far the best of the various liquors we tried.

So, it’s not too late to whip up one of these fruitcakes for your holiday festivities. We usually serve thin slices with a bit of confectioner’s sugar sifted over the top and an appropriate tipple. Jack works fine, but we’ll use whatever is on hand: Scotch, Irish, even a late-harvest Reisling that Creekside Winery sometimes makes (or used to).

Give it a try and see what a good fruitcake can taste like! You may become a convert. Also, please share your fruitcake ideas and variations with everyone by using our comment section. Anti-fruitcake rants are also welcome.

Fruitcake with Pecans and Bourbon
MAKES 1 LOAF-SIZE CAKE

INGREDIENTS
1 cup red glacé cherries
1 cup green glacé cherries
1 cup candied pineapple
1 cup ginger preserved in syrup (pieces cut in half if large)
½ cup golden raisins
1 cup whole pecans
1½ tsp cloves
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp mace
1 lemon, juiced and rind grated
1½ cups 
Bourbon (we suggest using 
Jack Daniels)
1 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar (light or dark)
4 eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted

METHOD
1. Combine all fruit, pecans, lemon juice and rind, spices and stir in half the whiskey. Cover tightly and soak overnight.

2. Preheat oven to 300° and line the long side of a 9" loaf pan with 2 thicknesses of parchment paper. (We use the ends of the parchment paper as a handle to lift the cooled cake out of the pan after loosening the ends with a knife.)

3. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

4. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Now beat in the flour little by little. (If the batter begins to separate while you’re adding in the eggs, don’t despair! Simply beat in a few tablespoons of the flour.)

5. Fold the prepared fruit and nuts into the batter. Make sure the cake batter is pushed into all corners of the pan. Smooth the top. If you want, cover the top with pecan halves. We do this some years, others not.

6. Bake for 1½-2 hours or until a skewer comes out clean perfectly clean. Cool in the loaf pan.

7. Using a skewer, poke a lot of holes in the cake. Using a teaspoon or an eyedropper (I also feed Vicki like a baby bird from the eyedropper), carefully drizzle the remaining whiskey over the cake, letting it soak in. (I sometimes take the cake out to do this on the top, bottom and all sides, but you have to be more careful because the precious liquid can run off. Keeping it in the loaf pan helps contain the liquor.)

8. Wrap the cake very tightly in plastic and set aside for at least 2 weeks to let the cake age. Don’t cheat on this!

Leaving France with a bang: a classic dish that is so worth the effort

We forgot to take a photo, so I “borrowed” this!

Sorry it’s taken me two weeks to get back to AMFAS, but I’ve been rather busy. This post was scheduled for last week to finish off our series on French cooking (done as a salute to the publication of my eighth crime fiction novel, The Fallen One, which takes place for the most part in Paris), but, well, life tends to get in the way sometimes, doesn’t it?

Anyway, to my mind, I’ve saved the best for last. Call it the showman in me, but I feel it’s always best to go out with a bang. I have two French cooking bangs in my repertoire, and for the past month I could not decide which one to present.

One is cassoulet, a dish that can best be easily described as “pork and beans on steroids”. It is something that takes a few days to prepare, but the result of that labor is so mind-bogglingly good, that one mouthful will erase all memory of the effort put in to create such heaven.

Two beautiful tournedos about to be cooked.

The other is Tournedos Rossini, classic French cooking, the kind you find only in the best French restaurants. You will also pay a lot of money for this dish. I went for it because, well, my novel is about opera and the composer for whom the dish is named was one of the most famous composers of opera.

So you get the Tournedos, but don’t worry, I’ll share the cassoulet recipe sometime soon since it’s the perfect winter dinner party meal.

Rossini’s operas made him a very wealthy man, so wealthy in fact, that he didn’t have to work. William Tell, which premiered in 1829 when the composer was 38, was his last opera, but he lived to his 76th year. What did he do during that time? He mostly ate, and ate very well. By all accounts, Rossini was an excellent cook, as well as a noted gourmand.

Today’s dish, Tournedos Rossini, was supposedly created for the composer by master chef Marie-Antoine Carême, and making it is not for the faint of heart – or faint of wallet , either, since it uses some pretty expensive ingredients. If you are up for it, though, the rewards are great. It will make a very spectacular meal.

One quart of meat stock cooked down to 1/2 cup – heaven!

In a nutshell, the recipe consists of a tournedo (the larger middle part of a beef tenderloin) cooked rare. This is placed on top of a toast round, then there’s a slice of fois gras followed by some slices of black truffle. The whole thing is then sauced with a very rich madiera sauce. Since the sauce along would make this recipe way too long, I’m going to point you to a couple of internet sites that show how to make it. Yes, it’s time-consuming and involved, but certainly worth the effort. If you are morally opposed to foie gras, just leave it out. The dish will be diminished but still plenty good.

[Sidebar: Complex sauces like the one used here are no big deal for the kitchen of a French restaurant, since they make stocks and demi-glacé sauces in large quantities almost daily. But even the most sophisticated home kitchen has to start sauces like this from scratch. Certainly, you can find easier ways to do a Madeira sauce, but if you’re a dedicated foodie, just once you should make the full-on, no shortcuts French version, so I’m giving that here. If you’re going to go out and buy expensive cuts of beef, foie gras and truffles, you might as well go for The Full Monty. The sauce starts off with a brown veal stock. If you’re wise, you’ll make a full recipe of that and freeze whatever you don’t use for later cooking projects.]

Tournedos Rossini
Serves 4

INGREDIENTS
4 beef tournedos, about 7 oz. each (you can also go smaller and use filets mignons)
salt and freshly-ground black pepper
3 Tbs butter
1 Tbs vegetable oil
8 oz foie gras (preferably fresh)
3/4 cup of veal demi-glace
1/4 cup Madeira
4 slices of bread (French bread works well)
1 medium black truffle
1 Tbs butter (for finishing the sauce)

METHOD
1. Two days before you’re going to serve this, make the veal stock from this recipe: www.reluctantgourmet.com/demi_glace.htm (It’s also a very interesting page with good background information from a very knowledgeable chef.) It would be wise to use veal bones instead of beef, or at least more veal than beef. Once your stock is finished, de-fat it by cooling it overnight in the fridge. (Letting the fat solidify in the fridge and then lifting it off is far easier than skimming it when warm.)

2. The next day, carry on with the recipe given in Step 1 and make a brown sauce (sauce Espagnole) out of some of your veal stock. The secret of a good brown sauce is to cook everything slowly and reduce the stock a good deal to concentrate the flavors. Cooking the roux carefully will get you a good golden color without burning it (easy to do). If it burns, chuck it and start over. (Trust me on this. I made a huge mistake once.)

3. Carry on and make the demi-glacé from the same recipe. Cook it way down to really concentrate the flavor. Don’t season it yet. Chill overnight.

4. On the day of your big meal, make sure you take the tournedos out of the fridge a good hour or two to bring it to room temperature. Otherwise, the outside will be cooked too much before the inside even gets warm. I suggest having someone help with the preparation of your dinner by handling the cooking of any accompanying vegetables and potatoes. That way you can give your full concentration to the tournedos. I like serving this with pommes parisienne and buttered French green beans.

5. Prepping everything is the key. first, season the tournedos with salt and pepper. Then, in a small saucepan combine the demi-glacé with about 2 teaspoons of chopped black truffle. Thinly slice the rest of the truffle. Slice the foie gras lengthwise into 4 equal portions. Trim the slices of bread to the shape and size of the tournedos. Measure out the Madeira.

6. Put the demi-glacé on to heat very gently. Over medium heat, melt 1 1/2 tablespoons of the butter with the vegetable oil in a skillet big enough to eventually hold all the meat and quickly fry the slices of bread until nicely browned on both sides. Remove and set aside.

7. Now add the other 1 1/2 Tbs of butter and sauté the tournedos over high heat for about 4 minutes per side for rare (my suggestion) or around 5 for medium-rare. Don’t go past this for meat this good! When they’re done, remove them from the pan and place in a warm oven (200°).

8. Place the foie gras into the skillet and sauté them for a generous minute on each side over high heat. They’re fragile, so handle them carefully. When they’re done, place one on each of the tournedos. Now is the time to heat the plates on which you’re going to serve this!

9. Discard all the fat from the skillet, and add the Madeira to the skillet (having reduced the heat to medium). Scrape up all the browned bits from the bottom of the pan as you stir. Add the demi-glacé and bring it to a boil quickly. Remove from the heat and melt in the last tablespoon of butter to finish the sauce. Now check the sauce for seasoning, adding salt and pepper to taste.

10. Working quickly, on the heated plates, place the vegetables and potatoes on one half, and one of the croutons in the middle of the other half. Top each crouton with a tournedo and its slice of foie gras, then garnish with a few slices of truffle and spoon an equal portion of sauce over each. Serve immediately and be prepared for the accolades.

If you’re cooking something this good, do yourself a favor and have an excellent bordeaux would be the perfect wine to serve with it.

Let someone else clear the table and do the dishes!

My favorite French dish

Apologies for the crummy photo. I'll take another next time!

From the first time she made it, I have adored my wife’s coq au vin – not that I don’t adore other things about her, too! Making it plays to her strengths, too. She’s great with “stew-like objects” where she can prep everything, put it all together and then step back. Ala minute cooking is not her forte.

This is provincial French cooking at its best. To be really faithful, you need a rooster, but that can be tough unless you know a farmer who raises poultry. Since this fowl will be on the elderly side, it needs slow cooking at a low temperature for a long period to come out tender. While that’s admirable (and well worth the effort of finding a stewing hen), most people don’t want to bother with that. I’ve done it, and it is fantastic, especially what the slow braising does to the sauce using my cast iron Dutch oven. The recipe given here is for using a good-size roasting chicken.

For me, the whole peppercorns make this dish with a bit of very nice heat when you bite into one. Vicki and one of our sons generally pony up with most of their peppercorns, which I don’t mind at all. We’re also blessed with our home-smoked bacon, which adds another whole layer of flavor.

Julia Child made this dish famous in the US, but our recipe is a bit easier and quicker to put together. Vicki generally takes the skin off the chicken pieces these days which keeps a good deal of extra fat out of the sauce, but it’s also not quite as tasty, in my opinion. A good suggesting might be to keep the skin on some of the pieces like the legs, wings and maybe one of the thighs.

It’s important to brown the chicken well. This also adds a lot of flavor. Once you’ve dismembered the chicken, wash it thoroughly and get it thoroughly dry so it browns well. If the two breasts are on the large side, I suggest cutting them in half. They’re easier to manage on the plate and if you have a hearty eater at table, he or she can just have both halves.

We’ve been serving spelt pasta with this lately and it stands up well to the rich sauce. You won’t need as much, either, because it’s more filling. Try it. Any Italian grocer will have it, as well as health food stores or supermarkets with a health food section.

One other thing: as with most stews, this is always better reheated. Keep that in mind for your next dinner party, although you want to be careful with overcooking it.

Bon appetit!

Coq au vin
Serves 4-6

INGREDIENTS
1 3 lb chicken cut into pieces or chicken parts, skinned if you want
3 Tbs olive oil
¼ lb thick-sliced smoked bacon, cut crosswise into 1/4-inch lardons
1 cup onions, chopped
½ cup carrots, grated
2 tsp garlic, minced or pressed
3 Tbs all purpose flour
2 Tbs fresh parsley, minced
2 Tbs fresh chervil, minced or 2 tsp dried chervil
3 fresh or dried bay leaves
1 Tbs fresh thyme, minced or 1 tsp dried thyme
1 Tbs black peppercorns
¾ tsp salt
1½ cups full-bodied red wine (burgundy is traditional)
1½ cups mushrooms, sliced
2 cups baby carrots

METHOD
1. Preheat the oven to 325°. Have all ingredients at room temperature. In a heavy pot such as a Dutch oven, sauté the bacon in 1 tablespoon of olive oil over low heat until the fat is rendered. Remove the bacon with a slotted spoon and set aside.

2. Add the onions, grated carrots and garlic to the fat, sauté over medium heat for 3 minutes. Remove from the pot with a slotted spoon and set aside.

3. Add the rest of the olive oil, and sauté the chicken pieces until they are lightly browned on all sides, taking care not to crowd them. Remove them from the pot and set aside. Drain any remaining fat from the pan and discard.

4. Return the vegetables to the pot, add the flour, parsley, chervil, salt and peppercorns. Sauté for 1 minute over medium heat, stirring frequently.

5. Add 1 cup of wine, stir well. Reduce the heat to low. Tuck the bay leaves into the mixture. Arrange the chicken parts on top of the vegetables, pour the remaining wine on top of the chicken. Cover tightly. Place in the oven.

6. After 30 minutes, stir everything thoroughly, making sure the chicken pieces are turned over in the sauce, then add the baby carrots to the pot.

7. Fifteen minutes later, add the sliced mushrooms and the bacon pieces to the pot, stirring them in as best as possible. Add more wine if necessary or it’s gotten too thick. Cook 15 minutes longer.