Duck Rillettes

Duck Rillettes is a delicious meaty, fatty spread. It's perfect on crostini or crackers. It can be served warm or cold, morning or night, and is a great thing to add to your culinary repertoire. If you dislike liver, rillettes are a friendly alternative to pates and some terrines.

The recipe, I copied nearly exactly from my favorite food blogger, Chef John:

I bought my duck from the local Asian market, Ranch 99. It cost under $25, which could be considered a lot, but I also used the liver to make a pate and the carcass to make stock, so all around, I feel like I got my money's worth.

The orange was very nice in this recipe, and I wouldn't consider it optional. I also could have used a cleaver because my duck came with the head and feet attached! Looking an animal that you will be eating in the eyes is strange for westerners, but while it can be a squeamish affair the first time, it will make you respect the origins of your food a lot more. 

Instead of duplicating the ingredients here, follow the link above to learn how to make this. Here are my pictures of the process.

Spanish Chorizo

Spanish Chorizo is known as a dry cured pork sausage. It's prominent flavors are paprika and garlic. It can exist in fresh forms and differently spiced Mexican forms, but to me, thinly sliced rounds of the dried smokey stuff are the most delicious. My inspiration came after having the salumi board at a restaurant in Berkeley called Corso. The meats were served at room temperature and this chorizo in particular had been kissed with some subtle smoke. Once I tried it, and savored its flavors, I began to obsess about how I could recreate it.

Chorizo and the technique of using animal intestines to preserve meat goes back to Roman times. The history is long and the types varied, but I have only one lesson to teach here: cure, ferment, smoke and dry. In that order. The process of fermenting sausages extends to the making of just about every type of salami out there.

For a long time, I've been fascinated by salami, soppresatta and the like. How some unassuming ground meat could be transformed into thin slices of tangy, well spiced deliciousness was akin to sorcery in my book. But, now that I have acquired the requisite tools, I've set out to relearn some of the wisdom known by our ancient ancestors. It doesn't take much to do these projects, in fact, this is my first attempt at a fermented sausage.

My goal was to do this project without purchasing anything off the internet, and I haven't (with the exception of Instacure #2 which I already had). Although I haven't tried the final product yet, I'm pretty confident in saying this was a success.

Here's a little background into how this all works. Similar to pickling, preserving sausages relies on lactic acid to work its preservation magic. In addition to salt, most recipes call for Bactoferm, which is a culture or collection of different types of bacteria including varieties of lactobacillus. These bacteria turn sugars into lactic acid and lower the pH rapidly, causing microorganisms that don't belong there to die off. As the meat sits in the acidic environment and ferments, flavors develop as well as a tangy zing.

For bacteria to work, they need food...sugar, and the most easily digestible of them all is dextrose (glucose). The faster the sugar is digested, the faster the pH drops, and the safer the meat can be without incubating harmful bacteria. I was about to use cane sugar (glucose + fructose) but I realized that the bacteria would have to work harder to digest the fructose, making it less effective. I went to my local beer brewing shop in search of answers and found corn sugar which is the same thing as dextrose, and it was $1. For the culture, I was advised to buy Bactoferm from a reliable source, but I opted instead to use what I had in the fridge which was Greek yogurt, and contained mostly all the same bacteria. I also bought about 20ft worth of hog casings from Whole Foods for $6 instead of buying them online. Overall, this was a pretty inexpensive project.

The ingredients:
3.5lbs Pork Shoulder
36g (2.3%) Salt
4g (0.25%) Instacure #2
6g (0.4%) Dextrose (glucose or corn sugar)
1 big Tbsp Yogurt
43g Smoked Paprika
7g Sweet Paprika
2 or 3 cloves of Garlic
30ml distilled water
30ml red wine
5ft 25mm hog casings

The equipment:
Meat grinder
Sausage stuffer
Cold Smoker (Janky homemade version is totally okay)
Aging Chamber

To get started weigh your meat and calculate your ingredients according to the percentages. Cube up the meat into 3/4" cubes and put in the freezer for 15 minutes. While the meat is chilling, add warm water to the yogurt and dextrose so they can wake up. Make sure the meat grinder and sausage stuffer parts have been chilled in the freezer in advance.

Grind the meat and add the salt, spices, culture and other ingredients. Mix well by hand for a few minutes. Use the sausage stuffer to fill the hog casings and tie them off around every 12 inches.

For the fermentation process, a high humidity and relatively high temperature environment is needed for the bacteria to do their best. The high humidity mostly protects against case hardening. To achieve this, I tied the sausages up to a towel rack in my bathroom, pricked them several times with a sterile pin and ran the shower on its hottest setting for a couple of minutes and kept the door shut. The humidity quickly rose to 90%. It stayed in this warm humid climate for 24 hours.

We cooked off some of the excess meat in the grinder to taste for seasoning. It tasted great, but we realized that the meat was already in its casings and too late to do anything about anyway.

I proceeded to build a cold smoker out of cardboard boxes. All that was needed was a heating element, a fan and a metal dryer duct to make this happen. I constructed a rack for the meat to hang from, and created large round holes in the two boxes for the dryer duct. One box was for generating the smoke and the other was for containing it. For cold smoking, you should keep the temperatures below 70°F at all times if possible.

Of course, smoking wood chips could be fraught with peril, especially if done in a cardboard box. Proceed at your own risk! At one point the wood chips caught flame and we had to reconsider how to perform the whole procedure a little more safely. In the end, we just realized that we had to babysit the setup the whole time while watching movies.

After being smoked for 5 hours, I recorded the initial weights, and placed the meat in the aging chamber with a tray filled with moistened sea salt. The humidity seems to be regulating around 80% with a temperature set to 60°F. In 3 weeks the meat should be ready to slice and taste.

Update 11/24/14: It's been 15 days and the Chorizo is done and looks amazing! I weighed each Chorizo after 1 week and they each had lost about 32% of their weight on average. I decided to crack into one to see if I liked it, or if I wanted to keep drying it. First of all the aroma was smokey and deep, color was brick red and there were discrete morsels of fat just the way I wanted there to be. The flavor was packed with paprika and garlic and smoke. It was delicious. If I was to change anything, next time I would adjust the garlic and smoke ratios. I would decrease the garlic to 1 clove instead of 3 and maybe up the smoke time to 7 hours from 5. Maybe dial back the paprika too, but I think the intent of this cured meat is to be flavor rich. In any case, I found that after only one week, the texture was a little more moist than I cared for so I put them back in the chamber for more drying time. Nine days later, they have lost an average of 43% and I suspect that the flavors will have mellowed out a bit too, but we'll see. 

Jambon - The best ham ever.

I have vivid memories of being a small child and getting handed a piece of buttered bread with Jambon on it. It was savory, sweet and had a texture that melted in your mouth. It obviously made a mark on me. It's a taste that I have longed for, but have long accepted could only be had in Europe. Until now.

Jambon is the French word for ham, and just like in the US, the word has many meanings. Ham used to refer to the hind leg of a pig, but it now can refer to many things. There are glazed hams like the kind abundant on holiday dinner tables, to the compressed and sliced stuff that comes in plastic deli pouches, to even stuff you can buy in a can. Eww!

The differences between a ham in the US and ham in Europe can be many. Factors include the origin and species of the animal and the environment that it feeds on, the spices and flavors used during preservation, and the care and respect with which the meat is treated all along the way. In the US, we can't do much about the first category other than by buying the best quality meat from honest and reputable sources. The other categories though, we can definitely affect.

What makes ham, ham, anyway? Ham is just pork that has been wet cured, dry cured, or smoked, and is usually cooked or air dried afterwards. The many varieties of ham play on combining these processes in different ways. I'm only going to talk about one type here...for now, the kind that is wet cured, then cooked. Simply. Magical. Stuff. Since I was only 5 at the time, I don't recall the official term for what we used to get, but if you Google around for "jambon blanc" or "jambon cuit" you can pretty much get the idea. The Italian version is called prosciutto cotto, which again just translates to cooked ham.

Deli ham in the US is synonymous with "processed ham," and rightfully so. Some of it is made the same way that hot dogs are—ground up with large amounts of fat, antibiotic ridden meat and meat glue, then pumped with salt water until the last bits of natural flavor have been evacuated. Of course, there are other slightly better options that are whole cuts of meat, but again, they may be slabs of questionable meat compressed together and doused in chemical preservatives to form a long lasting product that looks uniformly circular when sliced, but carries little to no flavor. I'm not sure how, or when the craft of these old world delicacies got lost and turned into its unfortunate present state. But, I'm glad to report, I have been able to reproduce flavors analogous to the memories of my childhood, at home.

Ham is pink. It get's its pink color from something called "pink salt," which is a curing salt that contains sodium nitrate. Sodium nitrate is cousin of the originally used potassium nitrate, which was also known as saltpeter and was an ingredient in making things like gunpowder, fireworks, and fertilizer, starting many centuries ago. Pink salt is dyed so as to to never be mistaken for regular salt. It goes by other names as well like Prague Powder and Instacure #2. This ingredient is essential for both the color and flavor of the Jambon that I'm about to tell you how to make. There are no substitutes.

Here's how the recipe goes:

Ingredients:
3.5-4 lbs of pork shoulder
4 liters of water
225g kosher or sea salt
125g cane sugar
30g Instacure #2
1 leek
1 or 2 ribs of celery
1 carrot
several sprigs of thyme
3 or 4 bay leaves
a little parsley
4 juniper berries
about 20 peppercorns

Equipment:
Meat Slicer (not optional)
Large container
Immersion circulator (optional)
Food Saver (optional)

Timing disclaimer: make on a Tuesday to serve on a Sunday.

Bring the salt, sugar and pink salt to a simmer in the water to dissolve. Turn heat off and cool. While it's cooling, coarsely chop the aromatics and add to your container. If there is a bone in your pork shoulder, it is highly advisable that it is removed before curing. I tied up the meat into a nice bundle with some butcher's twine so that it could keep its form. Don't trim any of the fat! Add the cooled down water to the container, and add the meat. A weight could also be placed on the meat to achieve a more flattened ham form for easier slicing.

Leave the meat in this wet cure for 36-48 hours depending on the weight of your pork. Flip it after the first 24 hours. Once the appropriate amount of time has passed, remove the meat from the container, rinse off the brine, and let air dry on a cooling rack in the fridge for 24 hours. Use a large pot filled with water to cook the ham. I did it very gently with an immersion circulator (I use this one). You can experiment, I've done it at 150°F for 24 hours and 160°F for 18 hours with good results both times. Otherwise simmer in a pot of water on the stove for about 3 hours or until the internal temp is at least 150°F. Once the meat is cooked, it needs to be refrigerated overnight before slicing and consuming. I seal the meat in a Food Saver bag before the cooking process and the meat cooks in its own juices making for a very moist and flavorful product.

The meat will be encased in gelatin when removed from the package, just wipe this off and you can start slicing. It is highly recommended to do this with a meat slicer, the kind with a circular blade. I'll go as far as to say that you shouldn't even attempt making this unless you have, or have access to said meat slicer. One of the very important factors that makes this so delicious is being able to cut amazing thin slices. You want to just shave it. It's the thinness that creates the buttery, melt in your mouth, mouthfeel. We keep all the fat on intentionally for this reason. It contributes considerably to both flavor and texture.

To get the full affect, do the following:
Slice the meat as thin as you possibly can without tearing the meat. Lay it out on a plate and let it come to room temperature for about 10 minutes. Take out some high quality butter to come to room temp at the same time. While the Jambon and butter are warming up, cut a fresh, crusty baguette into 1/2" thick slices. When soft, apply a generous amount of butter to the bread, sprinkle a very small pinch of kosher salt on top, and add a few slices of ham. Close your eyes, and enjoy the best tasting ham you could possibly consume, the quality of which no supermarket will ever let you know.

Tangy Giardiniera - Lacto-fermented Vegetables!

Giardiniera, or "from the garden" in Italian, is quite popular in places like Chicago, where it is an essential condiment on sandwiches. It consists of fresh vegetables, pickled in a brine usually with a bit of spicy heat. These delightfully pickled vegetables rely on Lactobacillus, rather than yeast to undergo fermentation. This bacteria and it's many strains is naturally found on vegetables grown close to the earth, and it readily eat sugars and convert them into lactic acid in the absence of oxygen. Lactic acid acts as a natural preservative, and harnessing its power has allowed people to preserve foods before the advent of canning and fridges came along.

I made my first batch a couple of months ago, and I'm ready for more, especially since a friend gave me some of the abundance of her tomato harvest. The only equipment needed here is a mason jar and an airlock. I supported a Kickstarter campaign to get mine, but you could get crafty and go about it a DIY way if you choose. 

I start by lining the bottom of my mason jar with a handful of basil leaves. I add cut up vegetables, garlic, and pour over a brine solution. The basic brine is 3 Tbsp salt (I use kosher) to 3 cups of water, ideally filtered or distilled. I love the way cauliflower comes out in this pickling, so I go heavy on it. I've never done tomatoes, so I decided to try. I also added a 1 Tbsp of cane sugar to the brine going into the tomato jar. My last pickling involved a batch of turnips with beets added for color. I added 50% white vinegar to the brine, but I found the addition of vinegar and lack of garlic made for vegetables that were less tasty than just using salt on its own. We'll see what the sugar addition does.

Add at least 3 peeled and whole garlic cloves to each jar, for a more complex flavor. A spicy element is really nice, so keep some of the seeds from the peppers in there. Once it's all put together and brine is added, put the cap and airlock on with a little water in the airlock. Keep in a cool dark place for a week before checking in. Do a taste test every few days to see how things are progressing. My last batch fermented for about 4 weeks and was super nutty, I will probably be keeping this batch going equally long. I'll share the results in a few weeks.

Stepping Up Our Cocktail Game

This weekend, we were requested to bring our cocktail robot Bartendro to our friend's wedding. Not only did we do that, but we decided to make a new menu tailored for the event. We wanted to make the drinks a little more seasonal and tailored to our friends who normally live in the woods. 

So, we decided to make some infusions to bring the freshness and classiness to new level. We made a sage simple syrup, a lavender simple syrup, a pumpkin liqueur and apple infused vodka. All this was done 5 days prior to the wedding for better flavor extraction. They all came out tasting incredible. 

We made earthy and floral variations of martinis, old fashioneds and gimlets, as well as invented our own cocktails. The simple syrup was easy to make, it was 1 part sugar to 2 parts water, and after the sugar was dissolved in hot water, it was added to the bottles, and the herbs added afterwards. I decided to stick a small sprig's worth of rosemary in with the sage for extra woodiness. The rosemary was prominent on the front while the sage lingered in the background quite nicely. 

The pumpkin liquor was very tasty, and was made following this recipe. We will definitely be making it again. With the extra simple syrup made, we decided to play with some other infusions. We made a clove/allspice/cassia/nutmeg syrup, a ginger syrup and a saffron syrup. We will be enjoying them for weeks to come. Go make some! It only takes 5 minutes once you have the ingredients.

Lonza Taste Testing

Tonight was taste testing time. I cut up the peppered and bay/thyme/juniper lonzas up into 3 pieces each. A piece of each lonza was kept out for near-term consumption while the rest were vacuum packed. Here's what they look like:

Lonza flavored with bay leaf, juniper, thyme and pepper.

Pepper Lonza

Bay/thyme/juniper/pepper Lonza

A delicious plate of both types. Bay on the left, pepper on the right.

Portioned out and sealed for later consumption.

Overall, the flavor wasn't overpowering on either lonza, and interestingly the pepper lonza was the crowd favorite. The salt content may have been slightly on the high side for my tastes, but paired with bread it goes quite well. The texture was the most noticeable thing that engendered comments. The meat was a bit more moist than expected, it wasn't bad, but could have stood an extra few more percentage points of weight loss. In the future 35-40% weight loss may be more desirable than 30%. Also, I noticed that in my setup, I kept the meat in the same orientation with respect to facing front or back of the wine fridge. The side facing the back was exposed to more air flow from the fan and therefore got a bit more dry. The asymmetry was noticeable from a gentle squeeze on the loin before it was cut. It was also somewhat noticeable on the sliced finished product. Rotating sides in the future would be desirable for more even drying. I also felt that the meat would have benefited from a slight bit of cold smoking, so I may attempt that in the near future. Overall, the product was definitely edible and quite delicious, and if/when I make it again, I will know which knobs to turn.