The Bounty of Troy: Part 1, Elk Stew with Cassis Lambic

So today pretty much bit the big one. I had to go back and fourth to Syracuse for work and I lost my keys somewhere on the way. Luckily my lovely wife saved my life and bullywagged the car dealership into towing my car and making a new key/fob by tomorrow night. Anyhow, I got home, got some Guinness in me and felt a little better and decided to write up the first thing I made with my Troy Farmer's Market purchases.

I had that nice elk stew meat and I wanted to make a hearty fall stew with a nod to the classic combination of game meat and fruit flavors. Here are the tasty ingredients involved in the meaty brew.



We have some salt pork, crazy looking purple spring onions, purple tatties, normal tiny tatties, garlic, onion, carrot, fresh thyme, and elk meat. One of the carrots gets some special photographic attention, I will say no more, ahem ahem.



For the fruity component of the dish I decided to use a bottle of Cassis Lambic as part of the stewing liquid. This is a very tasty Belgian black currant beer. It is a deep purple color and is very fruity tasting, almost like a sparkling wine.



I began by sauteing up some small chunks of salted pork belly until they gave up much of their precious fat and were left brown and crisp. These tiny lardons were removed and saved for later. Into the fat went the seasoned and whole wheat floured chunks of elk meat (in shifts).



When the meat was deeply browned in went the aromatic veg. I reserved the tatties to put in later so they don't turn to mush.



I put some nice color on the veg mixture.



At this point in went the meat, the Cassis Lambic, and some nice homemade browned bone stock. The following picture does not do the dark purple hue justice, it came out looking quite brown and dishwater-esque.



Into a 325 degree oven went the covered pot for around 2 hours. After about an hour I threw in the potatoes and the reserved lardons. I thought the purple tatties would go nicely with the color of the beer and the red onions. The purple potatoes kind of scared me though, they looked like some weird, rotting, cubes of zombie meat.



When it was done the broth was little thin. I could have tightened it up with a little beurre marnie, but I wanted to preserve the color of the Lambic. I removed all solid meat/veg matter with a slotted spoon and reduced the remaining liquid by half. This left a shining, syrupy, glaze redolent of fruit and meat. I spooned this over a serving of the solids.



Verdict: This was good stuff. The meat picked up a nice tangy, fruit flavor and the vegetables were nice and tender. This was good early fall fair. It is funny though, elk and the purple tatties come out tasting much like beef and normal potatoes. You would probably not know the difference if you closed your eyes. It is funny when atypical ingredients turn out tasting so ordinary. It gives me courage to try other funny looking foods. A high point of this dish was the flavor the Cassis brew lent to the dish. I see using this as more of a reduction sauce component, as opposed to a braising/stewing liquid in the future. It has a delicate flavor, and at 7 bucks a bottle I would prefer to drink the lions share and only use a little for cooking.

Troy Farmer's Market Haul

OK, so apparently I am the last one in the entire area to jump on the whole Troy Farmer's Market bus. Growing up in the Capital Region (especially in the Suburban Council, go Dutchmen) you tend to cast some dispersions on the Collar City (Troylet). But since I started working not far from Hoosick street, I have really started to give Troy some credit. River Street, and Downtown Troy in general, really have some nice character. I am a born again Trojan.

But anyways, bright and early Saturday morning me and the wife decided to go check out the Farmer's Market for the first time despite the misty weather. We got there and were pretty surprised by the amount of vendors. I was only expecting a couple vegetable stands and maybe some stalls selling locally prepared cheese spread or something else random. I definitely did not expect the variety and quantity of available goods, especially the nice local meats and quality baked goods. I grabbed the wife a fresh bagel to munch on and we preceded to wander around and buy a bunch of stuff. It was a pretty good time actually.

Here is the entire haul of meat, cheese, and veg we brought home.



We got a lot of good stuff. I met the lady who runs the elk farm who supplies Eats where I got the ground elk to make those Chelo Kebabs a while ago. It is called the Creek's Edge Elk Farm located in Fort Plain. I bought a nice pound of elk stew meat. I also got a nice hunk of Grace cheese which I have never had. I was won over by a sample and had to get some. The veg quality was high at most of the stands and I got some of the nicest looking chili peppers that I have seen in a while. Here is an itemized list of what I brought home to give you an idea of the generally economical prices to be found.

3 x bunches of spring onions= 3.00$
1 x pound of purple tatties= 2.50$
1 x bunch fresh thyme= 1.00$
1 x bunch of carrots= 2.50$
1 x pound tomatoes= 3.50$
1 x pound mixed onions= 2.75$
1 x bunch parsley= 2.00$
10 x assorted chilis= 2.00$
1 x chunk Grace cheese= 3.52$
1 x pound Elk meat= 8.95$

The following items were consumed by my lovely (and hungry), baby incubating wife and the cats so hence, not pictured.

1 x apple cutie pie= 1.50$
1 x chocolate chip cookie= 1.00$
1 x fresh bagel=1.00$
1 x small bag organic kitty treats = 1.00$

For a grand total of 36.22$ which is not bad for the large amount of stuff we got. Now I am of the opinion that many people go to the farmers market for the experience and never really use a lot of the stuff they buy. I have an awful feeling that a lot of those heirloom tomatoes that are so trendy these days are moldering in crisper drawers around the Capital Region. This is a frankly a damn shame. So, I am going to do another series of posts (I am sure you are excited) about the stuff I did with what I bought. I am going to try to use as much of the goods as humanly possible and see what kind of dishes I can come up with.

Everything But the Quack: Part 4, Rillettes and Agnolotti

At last I have come to the last tasty bits of the beautiful duck I started with in Part 1. With the one last confit leg I decided to do a couple things. First I made the exceedingly simple and tasty meat "jam" called rillettes and then I utilized some of the rillettes to make Agnolotti. Before I go into the details on how I made the stuff I wanted to do a little cost/benefit analysis. I think a lot of people believe that duck is an expensive luxury meat, not really economical enough to eat on a regular basis. This is not necessarily true, I got several hearty dishes out of the 1 duck carcass along with some pantry items and vegetables. Here is a list and approximate price for what I used.

1 x Duck =9.95$
1 x Carrot bunch=2.50$
2 x Onion=2.00$
1 x Celery bunch= 2.00$
1 x Lard (lb)=1.79$
1 x Bag o'Beans=1.50$
1 x Salt Pork (lb)=2.00$
1 x Weisswurst=5.00$
1 x Can Tomatoes=.99$
1 x Shallot=.25$
1 x Mushroom=.50$
1 x Glass wine=1.00$
1 x Potato bunch=2.50$
1 x Butter Stick=.50$

Assorted seasonings, flours, herbs, etc...=2.50$

All of this adds up to less than 35 dollars. That is pretty cheap for a nice amount of confit, duck fat for cooking, duck stock, a cassoulet (I ate this for like 3 days), a nice duck breast dinner, rillettes, and a bunch of ravioli. You could easily feed yourself and another for a week with the one duck and some extras.

Anyways, on to the rillettes. Rillettes are another variation of the meat spread group, not unlike what I made in my Potted Meat post.First you want to scoop out as much of the gelatinous, yellow, duck flavored goo that coagulates at the bottom of your confit jar. This is flavorful stuff and will add to the succulent nature of the final product.



I had one nice confit leg/thigh left over. This produced a little less than a cup of duck meat.



The jelly, duck meat and about a tablespoon of fat from my confit jar went into my mini-food processor gadget that I rarely if ever use. It suited this purpose well though, you want to lightly pulse the duck meat. You do not want to puree it, you are going for more of a fine shred. Throw this in your fridge for a few hours to set and you are left with a delicious, fatty, duck spread to go on your toasted baguette.



Duck confit is a fairly common ravioli filler. I decided to see how the rillettes would work in another ravioli-esque stuffed Italian pasta called Agnolotti. Agnolotti are a rich northern Italian dish made with a dough somewhat richer in egg yolks than most. I used around 2 cups of flour, 1 whole egg, plus 4 additional egg yolks. I put this through my pasta maker until fairly thin. I used about a marble sized portion of rillettes for each piece of pasta.



I cut the agnolotti into about 1 inch squares.



These went into some boiling stock (the last of the duck stock I originally made) until they floated to the top. I put the agnolotti in a bowl and slathered with some sage infused butter, topped with some parmesan, parsley, and to gild the lily I garnished with a couple fresh lardons.



I love the way sliced salt pork looks, its almost like peppermint candy or something. The final dish came out looking pretty good.



Verdict: It goes without saying that the rillettes were delicious. You can't really go wrong with duck fat and confit. The agnolotti were pretty good, but the rillettes filling got kind of liquidy after being boiled. If I made this again I might throw some sauteed mushrooms, maybe with some bread crumbs, to hold everything together.

All in all, I enjoyed the dishes that I managed to extract from the one lonely duck. The highlight was definitely the cassoulet, I have been getting the itch to make this again even now. But you can't have too much of a good thing, I think I will wait a couple weeks before I wrangle up another duck.

Mr.Dave's Red Wine and Pistachio Sausage (How to Gross Out Your Pregnant Spouse)

I thought that I would take a break from my recent canard-centric posts (Everything But the Quack: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) and do something about one of my favorite culinary endeavors which is homemaking sausage. I got hold of a nice, cheap, 8 pound pork shoulder (bone in, skin on), woot! I also just happened to have a couple nice hunks of fatty salt pork.



To me these ingredients spell out sausage making time. Homemaking sausage is an inexpensive way of turning some less expensive cuts of meat into delicious tubes of succulence. I probably only paid 8-9 bucks for the pork shoulder and another 3 for the salt pork, the rest of the ingredients were pantry items that I had already. You can probably get 3 feet worth of good sausage out of this amount of meat.

I got some nice natural casings from the Syracuse Casing Co. located a couple hours west of me. They are about an inch in diameter, bigger than a hot dog, but not overhuge.



I was able to get about 5-6 pounds of nice pork chunks off after boning and skinning the shoulder.



This was ready to be ground along with the salt pork/fat cubes. How am I going to grind this you ask? Well, let me introduce you to my friend Lurlene.



Ain't she pretty? Lurlene is truly the work horse of my kitchen. No piece of pseudo-foodie, yuppie, kitchen ornamentation or piece of counter-jewelry is she. I literally use this beautiful red machine on a near daily basis. I am an avid whole wheat baker, and I just don't trust ground meat from stores, even my trusty butcher, and I rarely buy bread products (except for naan and pitas). So I do a lot of dough kneading and meat grinding myself. Here is Lurlene in action.



This is invariably the point in the evening when my pretty, pregnant wife ambles into the kitchen for some cookies or cheese. I am usually either jamming meat cubes into the grinder or rinsing the salt off of a nice, long piece of intestines. I can never understand why she does not find the ritual of sausage making as primal and spiritual as I do. Here is the ground up meat.



Into this I threw about a cup of good red wine (drinking stuff), a handful of salt, lots of cracked black pepper, 5 crushed cloves of garlic, a handful of demerera sugar, and about a cup of ground pistachios. I think you will find that these ingredients complement the pork very well. The mixture makes enough wurst to choke a Bavarian goat herd.



As I had to jet off to the city for work for a few days, I chose to freeze these bad boys. I am going dedicate a post (after my next and last installment of Everything But the Quack) to uses of the sausage, as well as uses for the lovely pork bone and skin that were left over (I'm thinking a bean dish and cracklins).



I am finishing this post up in my hotel room in the city. Here is the view from my 12th floor hotel room looking out over Queens. I'm right next to JFK Airport. Have a good night!

Everything But the Quack: Part 3, Duck Breasts with Red Wine Reduction

Tonight the worthy duck that I started with gave up yet more delicious culinary tidbits. I had two small and nicely trimmed duck breasts waiting to be eaten, freshly defrosted in the fridge. Now normally I would not have frozen something like a duck breast, but I am the only one in my household who will eat duck meat. It would not have been easy for me to devour 3 or 4 duck dishes within the day or two that the raw poultry would have stayed fresh in the fridge. In any event, I decided to make a very simple dish of pan-seared duck breast with a red wine/duck stock reduction and some mushrooms and shallots.



I started by scoring the surface fat on the breasts with a sharp knife. This helps some of the fat to render off and lets the skin crisp up nicely. You want to kind of slowly brown the skin and fat over medium high heat. If the heat is too high you will overcook the meat and leave a layer of mushy fat under the seared skin. I threw them in the pan with a nice amount of butter and left them undisturbed until I felt the skin was at a certain level of crispy perfection.



After reaching this point I flipped the little guys over and continued cooking for a couple minutes. I like duck breast just pink in the center, not over rare like you sometimes see it served.



Next, I poured off the excess duck fat/butter from the pan onto a bunch of nice, tiny yellow potatoes, gave them a shake and threw them into a 400 degree oven to roast. Tiny potatoes, browned in duck fat, with a nice amount of coarse salt and cracked pepper are truly one of the finest things that you can eat.



I threw in some chopped mushrooms and shallot into the skillet with the small amount of remaining fat and kind of used the vegetable matter to deglaze the pan.



When the vegetables had taken some color I threw in about a cup of heavily reduced duck stock (from the batch I made earlier and then froze) and a cup of nice red wine. I let this reduce until it was a nice syrupy glaze, removed from the heat, and threw in a knob of cold butter then stirred well.



I put some slices of the duck breast on a plate, spooned over some of the sauce, and served myself some of the roasted potatoes on the side.




Verdict: There is not too much to say about this dish, it is simple and good and does not involve much technique or fancy ingredients. It is simply a nice, simple way to treat a couple quality pieces of poultry. I enjoyed it very much (especially the potatoes) and the sauce was especially nice. But to tell you the truth, I have never been a huge duck breast fan. I will drool over confit or the crispy skin from a peking duck, but the fairly bland breast has never knocked my socks off. I am the same way with other poultry. Give me a nice chicken thigh or a turkey leg and I am pleased as punch, I think that I am a dark meat kind of guy (my wife is going to raise an eyebrow when she reads this last line, sorry honey!).

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Everything But the Quack: Part 2, Mr.Dave's Cassoulet

For the past 2 days the beautiful jar of fat ensconced duck parts has been tempting me from within my fridge. I originally intended to do the second post in this series on a preparation involving the duck breasts, but the confit that I made in my last post inspired me to go in a different direction. Tonight I made the ageless classic of rustic French farmhouse cooking, the Cassoulet. Cassoulet comes in hundreds of different variations of varying complexity depending on the region and household in which it is made. In my version I strive to highlight the flavor of the duck in keeping with the focus of this series of posts. I have included all the vital ingredients of the cassoulet which in my mind include; white beans, pork belly, and duck confit. I have taken some departures from what would be considered the platonic ideal of a cassoulet in order to keep the focus on the beautiful duck flavors, I hope you will excuse me.

I started on Wednesday by preparing a good amount of duck stock. I utilized the carcass and giblets of a duck minus the liver.



Note- I intended to highlight the preparation of every single part of the duck, but I forgot to take pictures of what I did with the liver, I was in a culinary coma. I sauted the small livery lobes in some butter, seasoned them, mashed them with a fork, and ate them on some club crackers. Nothing anyone would really want to see on film, but very delicious.

I threw the duck parts in my small casserole with a half onion, some celery, carrot, and thyme, seasoned it well and brought to a simmer for about 3 hours.



I was left with about 5-6 cups of good, strong duck stock which I strained threw some cheese cloth and put in the fridge.



Next, I put some nice great northern white beans in some cool water to soak overnight.



The next day I drained the beans and set them to boil with some carrot, celery, onion, pepper, and a nice chunk of meaty salt pork. I omit the boquet garnis, I have never been much of a fan. I think the floralness of the herbs and spices competes against the meaty, rich flavors that I enjoy. I find a little thyme is the only herbage needed for this version of the dish. Some people also use bacon or unsalted pork belly, I find that beans and salt pork are a match made in heaven.



Bring this up to a nice boil for about an hour, then drain, throw out vegetable matter, and reserve the piece of salted pork. The next step is to fish out some duck confit from its jar. For this cassoulet I used 1 leg/thigh and two wings worth. I removed and reserved the bones (to make another stock), chunked the meat, and removed the skin. Here is a picture of the duck confit reduced to its component parts.



I chopped the duck skin up into small pieces and cooked it down in my Le Creuset until it became brown and crisp like cracklins. I removed these from the pot and reserved. Into the duck fat I threw 4 nice, high quality weisswursts that I bought at Eats. Usually, garlicky french sausages are used in cassoulet but I don't like the way the sausage flavor overwhelms the entire dish. Weisswursts are a mellow, mild flavor which I thought would complement the cassoulet without being too assertive.



I put a little color on these bad boys and then removed. Here is a picture of these chubby little guys with the duck skin cracklins. I could not resist whipping out the tiny beer stein full of Dusseldorf style mustard from my fridge and indulging in one or two of these guys.



Into the remaining duck fat I threw some onion, carrot, celery, garlic, parsley, and the now cubed reserved salt pork.



You don't have to be too disciplined with your dice here. I stole an idea from a cassoulet recipe I saw on the internet, I pureed this mixture in my food processor along with a can of drained, stewed tomatoes. Most people leave the veg chunky. However, you want to get some nice brown color on the veggies and pork before doing this.



The next step is to prepare the bread crumb topping. I used about half of a day old baguette, salt, pepper, parsley, and the duck skin cracklins. These went into the food processor until roughly ground.



Back into the Le Creuset went alternating layers of beans, the vegetable puree, duck confit, and weisswurst. When these ingredients were used up I poured enough of the duck stock on to just cover the beans. On top of this I sprinkled half of the bread crumb mixture and then moistened it with some more duck stock. This went into a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes. Next I mixed the remaining bread crumbs with 3 tablespoons of butter and packed these in on top. The whole thing goes back in the oven for another half hour. This is the result.



This cassoulet looked and smelled absolutely amazing. It was with great will power that I put it aside to cool for about half of an hour. This is essential, it lets the dish rest and congeal a little. When the half hour passed I broke the buttery, browned crust and scooped a portion into a bowl.



Verdict: There are very few times in my life where I have actually truly impressed myself with my own cooking. I stood in the kitchen with this bowl of cassoulet and a fork and devoured it in disbelief that I, Mr. Dave, had generated something so delicious. I wanted to cry out to my wife to come and dig in, but she disagrees with duck, weisswurst, and salt pork on principle. I was left to savor it alone. I was glad that I did not use any strong flavorings that would disrupt the flavor of the copious amount of precious and rich duck fat/confit involved. The crisp, butter infused flavor of the thick bread crumb crust went perfectly with the tender beans and melting duck meat. The broth had thickened into a rich tomato/pork/duck amalgam that was in perfect harmony with the rest of the components of the dish. I would honestly recommend that anyone reading this hurry to my house with a spoon and an empty belly.

Everything But the Quack: Part 1, Duck Confit

I have been thinking for a while now how sad it is that duck has never really caught on as a staple poultry in this country. It has always been one of my favorite fowls and I never fail to order it if I see it on a menu. So, when I had the opportunity to pick up a nice New York duck for a reasonable price I jumped at the opportunity. I am not really too big of a fan of roast duck and that is a kind of a boring preparation anyways, so I decided to do a series of posts dedicated to the many delicious dishes that can be prepared from a single duck. As I hate wasting precious protein I am going to utilize pretty much the entire carcass, hence the title of this series, "Everything but the Quack." The first thing I decided to do is to make the indomitable delicacy that is Duck Confit. Here is the beautiful bird that I began with.



I began by dissecting the duck into breasts, legs with thighs attached, and wings. I will be using the legs and wings to make the confit. The delicious looking duck breasts will be reserved for a future posting.




After removing those pretty restaurant portions of the duck we are left with the "fifth quarter." That is to say the neck, giblets, bones and fat. I perish at the thought that there are people populating this earth who would dump this stuff in the garbage. All of these beautiful morsels will be appearing in the near future once I think of something delicious to do with them. By the way, no chortling about the duck neck, I know it looks sort of obscene.



The first thing you want to do for a duck confit is salt the legs and wings with some good coarse salt and leave to cure in the fridge for 24-36 hours. This aids in drawing out some of the moisture from the meat. This will allow the meat to keep for a relatively long time once prepared.



The next step is to trim all visible fat from the remaining duck parts. You will be left with a nice size pile of quivering, milky white duck fat.



From the fat of one duck one can render out about a cup of the unrivaled king of culinary lipids- pure duck fat. Duck fat adds a delicious richness to anything you put it in and I personally love the flavor. To render the fat I cooked it along with a cup of water for about 3 hours.



Eventually, all of the water will evaporate and you will be left with just the liquid fat. Drain this through some cheese cloth and you are left with about 8 ounces of pure amber liquid.



If you are not familiar with Duck Confit, than let me explain. Confit simply means "preserved" in French. As we discussed in my last post (the one about potted meat), sealing up meat under a layer of fat is an effective way of preserving it. Confit is simply meat poached in fat, transferred to a vessel, and then submerged in fat which then solidifies allowing the meat to keep for several months in a cool environment. Besides being a way to preserve surplus meats, meat cooked in fat has an unrivaled flavor.

Traditionally for this dish you would use only duck fat to cook and preserve the duck pieces. But since you are only going to get about 1 cup of fat from 1 duck, and you probably need about 3 cups of fat to make this work, I substituted good ol' lard to make up the balance.



Lard is a perfect supplement to the duck fat. It has a neutral flavor which will not interfere with the ducky essence of the real stuff. Not to mention that at 1.39$ for 16 onces it is much more economical than purchasing ready made duck fat. At your local gourmet store you are talking at least 20 bucks for 16 onces. I melted the lard in a small pan with the duck fat, it looked like a melting lard-sicle.



After giving the duck legs and wings a good rinse to remove the salt I patted them dry and put in a shallow oven safe dish. Over this went the rendered fat. You want the fat to completely submerge the meat.



This goes into a low oven (225 degrees) for 4-5 hours, until the meat is meltingly tender. I then carefully transferred the duck pieces into a jar and poured the fat over. You want to make sure to cover the meat completely with fat, a good inch on top of it will do the trick.



When cooled, you can fish out a portion. A duck leg confit is one of the nicest and most satisfying things that you can hope to prepare, just look at it.



If you were to buy the amount of confit that I made from this single duckling you are looking at maybe 10-15 dollars. Seeing as I only paid 10 dollars for the entire duck this is a bargain. Duck Confit is a nice, gourmet luxury item that is fairly simple and economical to prepare at home. It will keep for a couple of months in the fridge and there are myriad good uses. You can simply saute a piece and eat as is, throw it in a cassoulet, or make one of my personal favorites rillettes (probably will make this in a future post, it is fairly similar to making potted meat).

Well, this is a good start. I hope to get 3 or 4 more posts before I am done consuming this worthy bird so if you are interested, stay tuned.