Zombie Apocalypse survival tips: opening a can using no tools

I’ve tried it. Guess what? It works!

Now I’ve just got to come up with something to make with the three cans of tuna I opened…

Okay, we’re back in business, now what?

So much water has gone over the dam since July, I hardly know where to begin. Do I talk about the harvest season in August and the 148 liters of tomato sauce we made with our usual crew? Or how about the fact that we actually got a decent harvest from our apple tree this year – without using chemical sprays. There was some smoking, too, that went on as well, although none of it was cold. We made some marvelous al fresco meals, too. There was baking being done and some fantastic desserts, and now that winter has finally gotten us in its grasp, our basement is finally the perfect temperature and humidity for us to start curing and dry aging some of our favorite salumeri.

Maybe I should talk about it all over the next few posts. Good idea, Blechta. Make a note of that.

Let’s start by updating something a bit more topical: our Christmas Fruit Cake. I shared this recipe in a post last year. It’s a worthy cake, but something we have tweaked over the years in an attempt to make it perfect (at least to our tastes). By now, we probably tweaking the tweaks. This year’s version was no exception.

Normally, we use a loaf pan such as the original recipe on the back of a Bushmills postcard called for. Problem was, as we added more fruit, it was difficult to get the cake to cook evenly because it was so dense. Vicki had a solution which we tried this year. It involved adding a half teaspoon of baking powder for a bit of lift, but also cooking the cake in a 9-inch round springform pan. The results were much improved. The cake cooked more thoroughly in the center (because it wasn’t as thick in the round pan) and the powder helped it rise just a bit, making it less dense.

But already we’ve spotted next year’s tweak: insulating strips for the outside of the pan to keep its sides cooler so the outside edge of the cake (nearer this heat) doesn’t cook markedly quicker than the center where it’s farthest away from a heat source. Bake-Even Strips (made by Wilton) are insulated pieces of fabric that wrap around baking pans to keep the sides. I bought them at a kitchen supply store a number of years ago and the results from using them have been uniformly excellent. Simply soak them in water for about a half hour, then wrap them around your baking pan(s) and pin them tight. By the time the cake is done in the center, the outer edge are nearly as high and the cake is much more evenly cooked. If you bake cakes, I highly recommend them. We bought two sets (for 4 strips), so we’re ready for any eventuality depending on pan sizes.

Why I didn’t think of using them with our Fruit Cake this year is a question for another day.

So our 2013 Fruit Cake is lovely except for the outer edge being slightly dry. This has been mitigated nicely as the Jack Daniels we poured over it after baking has soaked into all corners of the cake, but I know using the strips next year will solve this year’s problem. And help the cake rise a bit more.

Next post: our winter curing season begins. Right now we’ve got a half dozen hog jowls hanging in our basement. In three weeks, our guanciale will be ready! And guess what? We’ve tweaked that recipe, too.

Hey Blechta! Where have you been?

Pheasant, mushroom & leek pie for a very special dinner.

That’s a question I’ve been forced to face in several email inquiries over the past four months. The last time I did an entry here, it was the middle of summer. The weather was hot and fine and my wife and I were celebrating a milestone wedding anniversary. (Has it really been that long?) Now we’ve had our first snow (a dusting) and it’s darned cold outside. Time has a habit of marching on if you don’t pay attention.

Unfortunately, postings to this blog have to be done when I have time – and a willing spirit – and the former has been in very short supply since I last wrote here. I fully intended to start posting regularly again, but well, my three other jobs kept getting in the way. During that time, I completed two novels and began sketching on another, completed a fair bit of design work, and started a band. There was also about fourteen days-worth of vacation in there as well.

I have been doing a lot of cooking during the interim and collecting press clippings (can one call them that when all the clippings are electronic?) on various topics upon which I’d like to prognosticate and invite comments.

We cured and smoked a twenty-pound ham for (Canadian) Thanksgiving. We hot-smoked bacon once or twice. I cold-smoked some cheese when it was a bit to hot to do that. (The odd shapes this produced garnered some “interesting” remarks when we served it to guests.) We smoked ribs a few times, as well. (I am still not satisfied with the results we’re getting which will be a topic for a future post.) And of course the smoker was often busy, filled with almonds for my son Karel’s gourmet nut business.

In the kitchen, we’ve been developing a few recipes that I will enlarge on over the coming months. Since most are totally appropriate for the colder weather we’re now enjoying, I hopeful they’ll be welcome.

Speaking of which, with our basement finally cool enough to hang some meat for dry aging, I’ve started in on my usual curing endeavors. Right now we have eleven pounds of hog jowls curing in the bottom of our fridge. I decided that this year I’m going to do our guanciale all at once rather than in groups of two or three. I’m hoping to get a commercial grade, light-duty vacuum sealer as my big Christmas present next month and that will be right on time to seal up our guanciale for freezing and use later in the year. We’re also going to make some pancetta for the first time and of course there will be lonzino, a particular family favorite.

Karel and Jan have been clamoring for some more bacon, so once the guanciale is done curing, I’ll cure a few pork bellies and we’ll double smoke a whack of our birch beer-flavored bacon for everyone.

With Christmas on the way, we’ve also made our usual fruit cake, and while it’s a bit late to share this – since this sort of thing should have been started by November first at the latest – we made two small changes to our tried and true recipe and based on a first tasting the other night, they are definitely for the better. This year’s cake is our best ever.

So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I should have fewer problems standing in the way of posting more regularly moving forward, so watch out for updates. There is some good food and stimulating food topics coming down the pike for everyone.

One last major thing: there will be talk of homemade baby food on the horizon since we’re going to be dusting off our recipes, now over thirty years old, since our other son Jan and his lady Rena produced our first grandchild six days ago. Welcome Jackson Reno Blechta. Expect some good food in your future!

Curing your own ham – and then smoking it: a match made in heaven

My red-haired bride: beautiful Vicki

Today is a very special day in my life – as well as in my wife’s (that’s Vicki I’m speaking of). Forty years ago today, we got married.

It was not your typical marriage ceremony.

We were living in Montreal, attending university. We’d also been living together for two years (that’s living together as in “living in sin”, which was not cool in those days. In 1973, we’d been in love for three years and talk of marriage had certainly come up a few times before. Problem was, I was getting a bit of support money from the US government because my dad was deceased, and we really needed it to get by because we weren’t allowed to work in Canada. If we’d gotten married, it seemed the government thought I wouldn’t need the support anymore, so it was an easy (though unpopular) decision to not get married.

In June of 1973, though, I graduated from McGill and that was when Vicki and I seriously discussed “making an honest woman of her”, as we joked. Marriage in Quebec at that time did not appeal to us, so we decided to cross the border into New York State. One trip was to Plattsburg to get blood tests for our marriage license (why could you possibly need a license to get hitched?), and to make our trip second shorter, we found a justice of the peace in Champlain, NY, just over the border from Lacolle, QC. So one day, my best friend since 6th grade, Ray MacDonald (sorely missed), and his wife Mary Ann came up from Vermont, and together with our next door neighbour Yusuf Emed (official photographer) and his then girlfriend Marcia Segal, we piled into our panel van and headed south.

Turns out our JP of choice, Romeo Filion was more Quebecois than American, way more nervous than us since he was as much a newbie to this marriage gig as we were. His English was also not great, but Vicki (in French) assured him we’d all do fine.

Partially smoked. Looks great, doesn’t it?

His office was part of the storeroom of his small store (complete with old-fashioned soda fountain), and we got married surrounded by jars of ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise. Romeo was so nervous he read the entire ceremony, and I mean the entire ceremony – including our responses. Neither Vicki nor I said anything about promising to do this or that. (Perhaps this explains why she’s never been good at obeying me.) At the end, though, we each signed the marriage license and we were officially hitched.

There was lots more to our adventures that day. At our “wedding picnic”, we had a shotgun pulled on us as we sat under some trees overlooking Lake Champlain. Seems we were trespassing and the farmer’s wife took exception to that. Yusuf, being Turkish and knowing what would make it all better, went over to her. A quiet conversation ensued, some money changed hands, and we were then welcome to use our picnic spot for the rest of the afternoon. So you can say Vicki and I had a shotgun wedding, can’t you?

So now you have the background. Today, we’re having a garden party in our backyard to celebrate our 40 years. The weather is going to be lovely and Vicki has the gardens looking magnificent. Everyone invited is bringing something for the meal. We’re supplying the meat: 2 smoked chickens and a home-cured and smoked ham. And that’s what I’m writing about today: how easy and delicious a home-cured ham is.

Since I didn’t ask Nick Gasparro, our butcher, early enough, we had to buy part of a pork shoulder for this enterprise instead of part of a leg. It’s 9 pounds, has a bit of fat on one side and is a primo piece of pork.

Ready to be sliced and served. Boy, that was easy!

Curing it was simplicity itself. I made the brine, cooled it down and in went the pork for about 80 hours in the fridge. What came out was a beautiful, firm ham. At this point, it only needed to be heated to around 150° and it would be ready to eat. Of course, that wouldn’t do, so yesterday Karel and I hot-smoked it yesterday. I had used star anise, whole allspice, lemon, and red peppercorns to flavor the brine and they added their distinctive and lovely fragrances to the finished ham. Around the middle of the smoking, I glazed it all over with a mixture of dark brown sugar and Dijon mustard.

Tired of store bought salty and flabby ham (since they inject the brine solution into the hams to speed up curing, but equally importantly to increase the weight)? Go to your butcher, get a prime piece of pork from the leg or shoulder and make your own. No chemicals you don’t want, not overly salty and far more lovely-tasting. You will be shocked how easy it is.

Home-cured Smoked, Glazed Ham
for a 10 to 20-pound ham

(This recipe is from Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn)

Brine Ingredients
1 gallon of water
1 1/2 cups (350 grams) of kosher salt
2 packed cups (360 grams) dark brown sugar
1-1/2 oz (42 grams) of curing salt (8 teaspoons)
our additions were four star anise, 12 whole allspice, 3 tablespoons red peppercorns, and one lemon
1 10- to 20-pound piece of pork, skin and aitch-bone removed (if it’s a leg)

Method
1. Quarter the lemon then mix the water, salts and brown sugar in a large, non-reactive pot (stainless steel) or crock, stirring until everything is dissolved. Squeeze each lemon quarter into the brine and throw in the rinds. (I heated the brine up a bit so the spices and lemon rinds would release their flavors a bit better. If you do this, you have to cool down, then chill the brine before you put the pork into it.)

2. Add the pork to the brine, weight it down so it’s completely submerged and soak it for 12 hours to the pound (my clarification). We like our pork a bit on the unsalty side so we brined it for 10 hours to the pound. Also, it was very hot this week, so to be on the safe side, I refrigerated everything.

3. When the brining is done, remove the pork and rinse it in cool water, then pat it dry. Place it on a rack for circulation all-round and chill it in your fridge for at least 12 hours (preferably 24).

4. Hot-smoke the ham using apple or hickory (cherry is nice, as well) for two hours.

5. Now glaze the ham all over with a mixture of 1 1/2 cups of dark brown sugar and 3/4 cup of Dijon mustard. Charcuterie recommends adding 1 tablespoon of minced garlic, but we left that out.

6. Continue smoking until the meat registers 155° at its thickest point.

7. Remove the ham from the smoker and brush on any remaining glaze. Let it cool. Now refrigerate it if you’re not serving it immediately. If you are serving it immediately, make sure to let your ham rest for at least 30 minutes to draw the juices back to the center.

8. If serving later, take the ham from the fridge and place it in a 275° oven until the center is warm (test it with a skewer). Slice and serve.

9. Be amazed at the number of compliments for something so easy!

Oh, and Happy Anniversary to my dear wife, Vicki Ann Woolsey, who has been the best companion imaginable for more years than I feel comfortable acknowledging. She is amazingly beautiful, vibrant, and I still love her dearly.

Our Sunday Tradition

Vicki and I fell in love with croissants as students while we were attending McGill University in Montreal. Living in the student ghetto just to the east of campus, we had ready access to La Pâtisserie Belge, which at that time was on Sherbrooke Street, just west of Park Avenue (this was in the days before the PQ came to power so some street names were still in English). Many Sundays, I’d crawl out of bed early and take a run down there to pick up a bag of hot-out-of-the-oven croissants. They were unlike anything I’d ever tasted. The owner made them himself and they were crisp on the outside, tender and buttery on the inside. With a cup of fresh-brewed coffee, we felt like sophisticated Parisiennes as we read the Sunday paper and listened to classical music.

After we moved to Toronto, I kept my eye out for croissants as good as I was used to, and was always disappointed. Memory is seldom accurate. Bad things seem to get worse in our minds as time moves on, and good things get better. I began to suspect this was the case with my croissant memories from university. Then I went to Montreal for a TV appearance, went looking for Belgian Pastry and came upon a furniture store where they’d once been located. I asked a friend, and he told me they had moved up Avenue Parc (as it was now called) and were still open, although the old baker was long gone. His family now ran the place. I went there, bought a croissant and bit into it. It was all right, but when I asked, I found it had been made the day before. With no oven handy, I couldn’t get it heated up, so I couldn’t be certain, but it was sort of close to my university memory of croissants.

In 2008, we went to Paris for nine days to research a novel I was writing (The Fallen One) and I was looking forward to finding really great croissants again. Ultimately, though, I was disappointed. We did have some very good ones, but none could meet the bar which had been set in my memory very high indeed.

You see, a truly perfect croissant has to be very flaky and somewhat crisp on the outside. The “horns” should be more crisp at the ends with a satisfying crunch when you bite into them. The center should be yeasty, flaky and light, with a real buttery taste. Spread with a bit of apricot jam, I am in heaven when I have one.

I left Paris somewhat frustrated. If I couldn’t get one here, where could I possibly expect to find The Perfect Croissant?

A bit of a detour here. Let me start with this statement which I’m certain most Frenchmen would argue vociferously with me on: Croissants are not French. They were invented by the other master bakers of Europe, the Viennese (who are also responsible for Danishes, believe it or not). The story goes that when Austria broke the siege of Vienna in 1683, and the Ottoman Turks were routed, Vienna’s bakers stayed up all night making crescent-shaped pastries to celebrate the victory (it was a reference to the crescent on the Turkish flag). These early croissants were called Kipferi. Obviously superb, the recipe quickly spread all over Europe. Whether the story is true or not, it’s lovely and the first baked goods of this type are certainly traceable back to Vienna, regardless.

We were in Vienna twice for novel research (Cemetery of the Nameless), and sadly, I didn’t find what I was looking for there, either.

So for many years, we didn’t eat croissants. Why be disappointed? Almost every supermarket and doughnut shop sells them now, and those a generally truly bad, even when “refreshed” in the oven before serving them.

The first thing is: you can’t make a croissant worth the name by using machinery. All the authorities agree on this. They must be made by hand, layering the dough with sweet creamery butter, rolling it out several times to distribute the butter, then cutting and shaping them by hand. They are best served fresh out of the oven, so our experience of buying a bag on Sunday mornings just after they’d been removed from the oven, was fortuitous and goes a long way to explaining my lust for the best. If you buy ones made by machine, the texture won’t be properly flaky, you probably won’t have real butter in them, and ultimately you’ll find yourself saying, “Why bother?” if you know what a true croissant tastes like

Success in an unexpected place

Toronto has an excellent small bakery, Frangipane, on Dupont Street. The owner makes lovely cakes and pastries, is a superb chocolatier, and also has croissants. We bought some on a whim, put them into a 350° oven for about 8 minutes to crisp them up while the coffee brewed, and wonder of wonders, they were, in a word, perfection. Every time we were in the area for a chiropractic appointment, I’d make sure to stop by to pick some up. Then the owner changed the hours and they were never open when we had an appointment. Horrors!

In talking to her once and saying that we missed having our regular croissant fix, she revealed that she didn’t make them. “Too much work!” She bought them from another Toronto bakery/restaurant, Patachou. They’re located on Yonge Street and were once part of what is affectionately known as “The Five Thieves” (an explanation of that will come some time in the future) just below the Canadian Pacific rail line that bisects Yonge Street south of St. Clair. They’re now a bit further down the road at the corner of Yonge and Macpherson.

Of course, I immediately went over there and bought some fresh from the source. I was in heaven again!

Now, every Saturday, on our way to St. Lawrence Market for our weekly shopping, my son Karel and I stop at Patachou for croissants. I like the plain, he prefers the cheese ones, and they also make ones with almond paste or chocolate (pain aux chocolate which is a square of croissant dough with semi-sweet chocolate on the inside).

On Sunday morning when Vicki finally stirs, I start the coffee maker, turn on the oven to 350° and pop the croissants (stored overnight in a seal plastic bag to keep them fresh) into the oven to reheat and crisp up. Eight minutes later they’re ready when I remove them from the oven sizzling slightly. My favourite apricot jam is made by St. Dalfour in France: Tartinade De Luxe Abricot Extra. I like it because it’s not too sweet, and still tastes wonderfully apricot-y. Most jams have too much sugar, so that’s the first thing you taste. I want to taste fruit! This jam is sweetened with concentrated grape juice, and is perfect in my opinion. It’s also not too hard to find, but probably not in your local supermarket (although it is in our small one across the street, luckily).

If you’re in Toronto and desire the perfect croissant, head on over to Patachou. I guarantee you will not be disappointed. Heat them up, though! This is critical if you want to experience croissant perfection.

If you’re not in Toronto, I wish you luck in finding what you seek. Let me know if you have your own source for the perfect croissant where you live.

The Best Brownies

Again, I’ve been sidetracked by writing and design work. I’m hoping that over the next few months I’ll have everything wrestled to the ground enough that I can get back to regular posts here.

By way of making amends, I have a tasty little post today for a basic, simple and very good dessert that most people adore – especially if they love chocolate.

This was supposed to be a large pile, but, well…they're
that good. This is the “less-chocolate” version.

I first had brownies from this recipe forty-three years ago (gulp!) when I first began going out with the soon-to-be love of my life. Vicki’s mom went way up in my estimation when, right after the first meal I’d ever had with the family, she brought out a plate stacked high with her homemade brownies. It was love at first bite, and we’ve gone on to devour many more such plates as the years have passed.

The recipe shortly found its way into our small box filled with index cards of treasured family recipes. After my own mother died, taking away with her a number of my favorite dishes that she had never written down and I’d never bothered to ask about, I decided that I didn’t want this to happen to our kids, so I digitized everything we had. This turned out to be the basis of Blechta’s in the Kitchen, our legendary family cookbook, of which we’ve produced in two editions for special Christmas gifts to give family and friends.

Today, I’m presenting to all of you out there Florence Woolsey’s recipe for what we fondly call The Best Brownies. Generally, when we serve these to guests, they want the recipe. Being the lazy sod I am, I can now send them here for it. They’re generally more cakey than some brownie recipes, but I’ll pass on a few secrets to make these come out any way you’d like.

And that brings me to a very curious thing. The original recipe calls for Bakers Brand chocolate squares and gives a number (2) but also a weight (4 oz). I decided to make these a year or so back using some Ghirardelli chocolate I had on hand. Out comes the scale and I weighed out 4 oz of chocolate. Wait a minute! This looks like a lot more chocolate than I’d get out of two squares of Bakers. After a quick research trip to the grocery store, I discovered that Bakers squares have dropped in weight over the years or something, because they now weigh only 1 ounce!

I made the brownies going by the weight of the chocolate to see how much of a difference it made. (The chemistry would obviously still work so I knew I wasn’t risking some rather expensive ingredients.) The difference was quite amazing. Wanting to be fully researched on this, I then made a batch going by the number of squares called for (which is what my mother-in-law does) and the results were identical to hers, and obviously less chocolatey – but still quite good.

So here’s the deal: if you want a more cakey, slightly less chocolately sort of brownie, use 2 squares (2 oz) of semi-sweet chocolate. If you want a super chocolatey brownie, double that amount (4 squares or 4 oz), but be prepared for your brownies to have a more fudgey sort of texture. Cooking these ones a bit more will dry them out to the point where they’re nearly cakey, but not as much as the version with the smaller amount of chocolate.

Clear? If it’s not, drop me a line, and I’ll connect you to our Brownie Expert. Which do I prefer, you might ask? I can’t quite decided, but I’ll have a scoop of vanilla ice cream with mine, please!

The Best Brownies
Makes an 8"x 8" pan (but nearly everyone doubles the recipe)

INGREDIENTS
2 squares Bakers semi-sweet chocolate (2 oz) for the Flo Woolsey version
or
4 squares (4oz) for the super chocolately one
½ cup butter or margarine
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
¾ cup sifted flour
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup walnuts, chopped

METHOD
1. Preheat oven to 350°.
2. Melt chocolate and butter together in a double boiler. Cool and transfer to a mixing bowl.
3. Add sugar, then add eggs and beat until fluffy. Stir in vanilla.
4. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt, then add to wet mixture and mix gently until blended.
5. Fold in nuts.
6. Cut out a square of parchment paper to line the bottom of your baking pan and pour in the mixture, evening it out with a spatula.
7. Bake on a high shelf in the oven for about 30 minutes or until a cake tester or knife comes out clean. Be careful! It can overcook easily. Turn them out onto a cooling rack once they’ve been out of the oven for 10 minutes or so.

Cucumber Salad: an easy and delicious accompaniment for summer meals

First off, allow me to apologize for being silent for so long. I have a very good excuse: a deadline for one of my crime novels (The Boom Room) has been staring me in the face, and it was time to chain myself to the computer or disappear upstairs with my journal in order to get the damn thing written. It’s now nearly there, so I’m sparing a few moments to share a recipe with you, something I’m sure you’ll enjoy when the summer heat starts bearing down on you.

Who wants to spend days in a hot kitchen when the outside weather is hot and fine? I sure don’t, especially since ours isn’t air conditioned. Around May and June every year, we spend a lot of time thinking about no fuss, quick and tasty dishes to make when the weather makes indoor cooking seem rather unattractive. Today I’m going to share one of our best in this category with readers of AMFAS.

Cucumbers are a cooling vegetable to eat, but they’ve got two drawbacks to my mind. First, they contain a lot of water which they tend to shed copiously when there’s salt anywhere nearby. Second, unless you have very fresh cukes, they don’t have a heck of a lot of flavor on their own. You need some other tasty ingredients to help out.

On the plus side, cukes are very low in calories. If you’re the gardening type, they also have another benefit, since they’re dirt simple to grow – assuming they’re not attacked by cucumber beetles.

So, to my mind, if you can combine great taste with low calories, you have the best of two worlds. And since cucumbers really aren’t the sort of things you cook, they can be really lovely to prepare during the summer when they’re especially fresh and inexpensive.

We looked high and low for a good recipe. Certainly there’s no lack of cucumber salad recipes in our cookbooks and out there on the internet. A lot of them can be struck off because they just pile on the fat with lots of sour cream or mayonnaise, two traditional dressing ingredients. Including fresh dill was a must for us, and something more than the usual white vinegar was definitely wanted.

Here’s what Vicki and I came up with. If you have a mandolin (the cooking kind, not the playing kind), this recipe is a snap to make. The actual work can be accomplished in under ten minutes, and the time involved for our recipe is to let the ingredients sit and do their thing.

Try it and be sure to let me know how you like it!

By the way, if you like schnitzel (in all its forms) as much as we do, cucumber salad is a traditional accompaniment for it and this recipe is perfect.

Summer Cucumber Salad
Serves 4

INGREDIENTS
4 cups English cucumber (the really long ones), peeled and very thinly sliced
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups red onion, very thinly sliced
2 Tbs white balsamic vinegar (highly recommended), white wine vinegar or fresh lemon juice
4 Tbs low-fat sour cream
1/4 tsp sugar (a bit more if you don’t use white balsamic vinegar
1/4 tsp Tabasco sauce
1-2 Tbs dill, freshly chopped
salt and freshly-ground black pepper to taste

METHOD
1. Place sliced cucumbers in a colander and sprinkle with the salt. Toss a bit and let drain for 1/2 hour. (The cukes will throw off water and make the salad less runny.) Use a tea towel to pat the slices thoroughly dry.

2. Place the cucumbers in a bowl with the red onion.

3. In a small bowl whisk together the vinegar or lemon juice, sour cream, sugar, Tabasco, and dill, then toss the dressing with the salad.

4. Chill the salad (covered) in the fridge for at least an hour before serving. Check for salt and season with lots of pepper.

This salad is best served the day it’s made.

The most useful tool for your kitchen*

Several years ago now, I decided that many recipes from even impeccable sources are very inaccurate. You know the ones I mean. “Finely dice one carrot,” or “Slice one medium onion”. When I first started cooking, I would really agonize over exactly what that meant. Exactly how big is a “medium onion”? I’d fake it, using my judgement and sometimes get wildly differing results from one time to the next.

Then I had a conversation with my friend Chef Paul Lasky, an experienced and very talented man in the kitchen (who, sadly, has given up professional cooking). Paul told me the problems was due in large part by inexact recipes. All good cooking operations – whether restaurants or caterers – have a “bible” for their standard dishes. This way, if the chef is unavailable, whoever takes his/her place can jump in and do the cooking. This is especially important for house specialties. You don’t want to disappoint patrons when certain standards on the menu are not available because chef isn’t.

That’s where the bible comes in. It has a list of ingredients, using accurate measurements that allows anyone with the necessary technique and knowledge to recreate the dish accurately. What separates the great cook from the merely good ones is the ability to turn out exactly the same dish every time. The possibility of achieving this begins with having accurate ingredient measurements.

Since being told this, I’ve been weeding out favorite recipes that have “fuzzy” ingredient lists. If it says something like “1 medium onion, chopped”, I either chuck the recipe or if I want to retain it, I figure out exactly what that means for best results. So “1 medium onion chopped” turned into “3/4 cup onions, diced”. However, lately I’ve been getting even more fanatical about measurements. Here’s why: depending on what the size of the dice is, you might get more or less onion than you counted on. Larger dice = less onion because of the space left in between.

So I got more precise and wanted to specify the size of the dice, ie “3/4 cup onion, 1/4" dice”.

Then about three years ago I started messing around with home curing. Researching that, it became clear that the only way to accurately measure the ingredients was by weight. In measuring salt, especially curing salt, it’s really critical.

I’ve had a kitchen scale for years, but it wasn’t all that accurate and it couldn’t deal with even medium amounts of things. It was only good up to about half a pound. Forget weighing a large piece of meat. Yes, for a large roast, I could use the bathroom scale, but I knew it was never really accurate.

So I cruised the internet for a solution. My parameters were (in descending order of importance):

1. accuracy
2. ability to weigh adequate amounts (up to 20 pounds, if possible)
3. ability to weigh either in imperial (ounces) or metric (grams)
4. electronic rather than spring-loaded (for accuracy over a longer period because springs wear out)
5. easy to use and clean
6. not too expensive
7. compact for storage

The first thing I found is that there are a lot of scales out there, at wildly differing prices. Most for sale in kitchen stores (for home use) didn’t have a very large capacity. Others looked like they’d be a pain in the butt to clean.

My eventual choice was the Salter 3013 Stainless Steel Aquatronic Scale. It features:

• a 22-lb capacity
• a stainless steel bed for easy cleaning
• it measures dry or wet ingredients
• it automatically compensates for the weight of a bowl, plate or dish in which you might place what you are weighing or measuring
• handles imperial or metric values at the push of a button
• it’s very compact and lightweight
• it’s accurate as all get out

I got mine for $49.95 (Canadian) from a site that’s sadly now out of business.

The only drawback I’ve found is that when you’re weighing in grams, it goes up only by twos. So if you want, say, 5 grams of something, you have to fake between 4 and 6. These are generally minute amounts (unless what you’re weighing is very light by volume, ie something like saffron). But all in all, I can live with that. If it could measure milligrams, this scale would be perfect for my needs.

Regardless of what you decide to buy, I highly recommend purchasing a kitchen scale. Mine is now in use nearly daily, and I cannot imagine doing any curing without it. The real problem is transferring all my recipes to weight measurements of ingredients wherever that’s possible (and that often means making a particular recipe a few times to get it accurate).

The results? All of my more finicky recipes that have been converted to measurement by weight now come out absolutely identically every time – (especially baking). For portioning, it is absolutely essential. For some ingredients (like spaghetti), it is absolutely indispensable. And obviously, if an ingredient list for a recipe does list something by weight, you’re all set if you’ve got a scale. (How many times in the past did I run to the supermarket across the street to surreptitiously weigh an ingredient?)

I cannot recommend strongly enough the inclusion of this very powerful cooking tool in your kitchen arsenal. If you want to home cure, you simply must have one.

Trust me…
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*Well, at least I think it is!

The Bacon Report

And believe me, this tastes as good as it looks!

I am constantly surprised by people’s response when I tell them that we make our own bacon. It’s as if they think it is some arcane art, or subject best left to professionals who have dedicated their whole lives  to the study of bacon production.

Nothing is further from the truth.

Here are links to some previous posts on the subject of bacon here on AMFAS (Home curing: “The Smoked Bacon Report, Makin’ bacon: Adventures-in-home-curing & Smoking bacon). If you haven’t read them, please take the time to do so. I’ll go cook up some bacon while you’re reading…

There. Now does anything about making bacon seem particularly difficult or onerous? Yet probably not one in 10,000 people here in North America has ever tasted homemade bacon, let alone done some up themselves.

I wonder why that is? Yes, it does take several days for it to cure, but the actual production time can be measured in minutes. Karel and I made up a beautiful six-pound piece last week, and I’ll bet in actual “work time” we spent all of ten minutes on the job – not counting the smoking, and that was only a bit time-consuming because we like to do it over a charcoal fire. If we used an electric burner assembly that’s readily available for our little smoker, we probably would have spent a total of twenty minutes to finish the job.

If you don’t want to, or can’t smoke foods (if you live an apartment, that will be the case), you can still cure bacon that will taste fantastic. All you need is a pork belly, some salt, sugar and that’s it. The rest is all fancy stuff to jazz it up. Rub the dry cure (salt and sugar) into the meat, seal it in a plastic bag, throw it in the fridge, and in a matter of days, you will have bacon that will knock your socks off. When you cook it, it won’t spatter because you haven’t injected it with water (under the industry’s guise of “getting the flavor right into the heart of the bacon”). For the same reason, it also won’t shrink very much when you cook it. Hell, if you can’t smoke your bacon but demand that smoke flavor, throw some liquid smoke in with the cure, and voila! Your bacon will have a reasonable approximation of having spent several hours in a smoker. That’s what’s been done to that “Genuine Old-Fashioned Hickory Flavor Bacon” you bought at the MegaMarket last weekend.

The biggest problem you’re going to face in making your bacon is sourcing a really good pork belly. In these days of factory farming, nothing is more factory-farmed than pork. The conditions in which the pigs you generally eat have to live in is really quite horrendous. Go online and do a little research, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. We don’t purchase that pork anymore – ever. I’d rather go hungry than support that industry. Sure, we have to pay more for meat from pastured pigs, but so what? The pigs led a good life that hopefully ended humanely. The meat is of far better quality and flavor. We simply eat less of it.

Once you’ve found a good source of pork, all the other ingredients are readily available.

The rewards of making your own bacon are more than well worth the effort. You’ll have bacon with superior flavor and texture, no chemicals, and it will be cheaper than most supermarket bacon. Ours, all-in, cost about $7 a pound.

If you’re thinking, How could anyone eat six pounds of bacon before it goes bad? the answer is simple: bacon freezes very well and keeps for a very long time. What we now do is wrap a meal’s worth of bacon in plastic wrap, bundle all the portions into a freezer bag, suck out the air and throw it in the freezer. Even if you take it out at the last moment, ten minutes in hot water will thaw it more than well enough to allow you to separate the rashers and cook them. We also freeze chunks of bacon so that they can be cut up as lardons or for other uses. Try doing that with thinly sliced, supermarket bacon! Lastly, you have the rind. We cut it into four-inch squares and freeze those. Whenever we’re making a stew, we throw one or two of those square in for added flavor. In a crock of homemade baked beans or in cassoulet the results are amazing.

So what’s stopping you?

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Our bacon made this weekend was the best yet. Karel and I have been experimenting with double smoking. In the case of bacon, this means cold smoking it for a number of hours (we like the results of eight hours of this), then hot smoking the bacon for probably an additional four hours (the temp internal temperature of the bacon needs to get to around 155°). We cook low and slow so that the bacon gets the maximum time in the smoke, but then we like things really smoky.

This piece of bacon was cured using kosher salt, maple sugar, birch syrup and a bit of ground black pepper (Karel’s brainstorm). Since the belly we purchased from Ben Gundy at the Sausage King was on the thin side and very lean, the curing took only four days, followed by a day of drying in the fridge. For the cold smoke, we used applewood pellets in our A-Maze-N Pellet Smoker and doubled up in the smoker with some medium cheddar for four of the hours, followed by two pounds of almonds for the remaining four hours. Next day, Karel hot smoked the bacon for three-and-a-half hours over a combination of apple and maple chips.

The results are absolutely spectacular: not too salty, wonderful round smoky aroma and flavor and just the perfect amount of sweetness (the maple sugar coupled with the birch syrup is a knockout combination). I honestly don’t see how we could improve on it. Sadly, both of us forgot all about taking photos. Sorry ’bout that!

At last! A recipe I’ve long coveted: smoked trout spread

Two summers ago, we were in Vermont, but Vicki was in Montpelier helping the widow of one of her flute teachers, while I got to spend a few days in Shelburne visiting a high school friend, Ellen Gurwitz. I occupied my days doing some design projects while she was at work and we spent the evenings catching up. I also had the pleasure of watching Ellen do her weekly internet radio show, Stone Soup, on WBKM. (It will be back on the air in just a few weeks. You should check it out!)

When we hit Saturday, the weather was beautiful and really warm, so a picnic was called for. Ellen had a perfect spot not too far south, right on the shore of Lake Champlain.

Since it was a spur of the moment decision, we decided to buy the food for our picnic. There’s a small store, the Shelburne Supermarket, very close by, so off we went. At the store we grabbed a nice bottle of wine, some bread, cheese, veggies, and fruit. I caught Ellen looking rather fondly at a small container in one of the coolers.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a smoked trout spread they make here that I really like, but it’s pretty pricy, so I don’t buy it very often.”

Well, of course, I had to grab some of that. Once we got settled in our picnic spot with a spectacular view right across the lake to the far-distant Adirondacks in New York State, I was very glad I insisted on purchasing the trout spread. In a word, it tasted absolutely fantastic, the best I’ve had. When Vicki arrived the next day to pick me up, I rattled on and on about it and have been ever since. It was that good.

A few weeks ago, I had been talking to Ellen about the trout spread (again), and she said she’d drop by Shelburne Supermarket to see if by some chance they would share the recipe. Lo and behold, they did! I was over the moon when she emailed it to me.

I trotted down to Dominick’s at the St. Lawrence Market bought to two fresh trout filets. (You didn’t actually expect me to buy smoked trout, did you?) After a four-hour cure in salt and brown sugar with some added lemon zest and freshly ground pepper, followed by overnight drying in the fridge, Karel and I cold smoked them (applewood pellets) the next day for 4 hours, and I was ready to make my special treat.

The recipe, from Doug in the meat department at Shelburne Supermarket who developed the recipe, makes about eight pounds of the stuff, so it obviously required some cutting down for home use, but that proved pretty simple to reduce to one-tenth (about 2 cups-worth).

Even better is to be able to share it here with all of you, so I’d like to conclude with a special shout-out to Doug. If you’re ever in the Burlington area of Vermont, just drive a little south of the city on Highway 7 and stop in at this great, small, local supermarket to try some of the original trout spread. I know I certainly will next time we visit Ellen. The store has an excellent selection of fruits, vegetables and meat, plus any number of gourmet delicacies, many made in-house or locally.

An extra-special thank you to Ellen for doing the leg-work to get me the recipe!

As for the recipe, it’s simplicity itself to put together and quick, with a fantastic flavor. And it keeps for several days. What more could you ask for? It’s a perfect “make-ahead” choice for a before-dinner appetizer. Both times I’ve made it now, we’ve served it with our homemade crostini. The satisfying crunch of that provides the perfect foil for the smooth texture of the spread. For simple directions to make crostini, click HERE.

Shelburne Supermarket Smoked Trout Spread
Makes about 2 cups

INGREDIENTS
1/2 lb smoked trout
1 Tbs minced shallot
4 tsp freshly-squeezed lemon juice
2 tsp Worchestershire sauce
2 tsp Frank’s RedHot sauce
5 oz whipped cream cheese
2 Tbs chopped fresh parsley

METHOD
1. Skin trout filet (if needed) and break it into as fine pieces as you can by hand.

2. Add the remaining ingredients and mix thoroughly.

Notes: The spread benefits from “resting” a bit to let the flavors develop, so I suggest, if you’re not serving it for a few hours, covering the spread with plastic wrap, and chilling it in the fridge until close to serving time. Take it out and let it warm up for a half-hour or so. If you’re making it reasonably close to serving it, just let the spread sit at room temperature for a half hour.

I also came up with an even faster method for making it without changing the requisite texture very much. After removing the skin from the trout, break it into smallish pieces by hand, throw everything into your mixer (not a food processor or blender!) and mix the spread on the lowest setting until everything is just blended and homogenized.