Fried Chicken

Traditional fried chicken is not seen on very many fine dinning dinner menus, but it is so delicious. This recipe is designed to bring the everyday, crunchy, juicy wonder of fried chicken into a fork and knife environment.
Ingredients:
Chicken legs and thighs(still attached to each other)
Salt and Pepper
Eggs
Flour
Method:
Take the leg and thigh and lay it inner-thigh up. Make one slice, through the skin only, from the top joint to the base of the leg. Carefully press your knife through the joint, but not through the skin. Pull the leg meat and bone away from the skin leaving a thigh with skin from the leg still attached. For all of the steps, with pictures, check out my picasa page.
Take the leg meat off of the bone and grind it in a meat grinder. Season, whatever the resulting weight is, with 2% salt and as much pepper as you like. Stir well and place on top of the thigh meat. Sprinkle salt onto a rectangle of plastic wrap and place the outside of the skin on top of the salt. Roll the, now seasoned, skin around the sausage and thigh meat and then roll the plastic around that. Rolling stuff in plastic is covered in more detail in this post. Poach the roll in 167F water for 2 hours and then place in an ice bath to cool.
Once completely cooled, remove the plastic wrap and dust the roll in seasoned flour. Submerge in whipped whole eggs that have been seasoned and then place back into the flour. Now the roll should have a good, uniform, coating of flour and egg, but to get uneven nooks and crannies you need one more step. Hold the roll with some extra flour in your hand and drizzle some of the eggs over the roll. As the eggs flow over the flour coating, press more flour into the eggs, creating bumps of egg and flour paste. You do not want to cover the roll evenly with the egg and flour, that is why you are drizzling and not submerging in the egg. Fry immediately in 350F oil until brown and crunchy.
Plate it up!

Rolled chicken thigh, with chicken sausage, cabbage slaw, black truffle ranch, and koni roots.

Breading and then storing in the fridge overnight produces a bad crust, like that of a frozen product. You can make this roll, up until it is breaded, in advance.

Destructively,
Adam

Duck Rillette

There are a lot of different animals that make a good rillette. Duck, specifically it's legs, is one of these. Here is a version that maintains the texture and color of the meat.
For more pictures and comments about this recipe visit my Picasa page here.
Ingredients:
4 duck legs

20g salt
25 dark brown sugar
.5g tcm
1g fennel seed
8 all spice berries
2g elder flower, dried leaves
5 sprigs thyme
15 black peppercorn
5g garlic
50g pinot noir
50g pork lard
Around 2 tablespoons of Apple cider vinegar
Method:
Mix everything together except for the legs, lard, and vinegar, and stir to make the cure relatively uniform. It doesn't have to completely dissolve the salt and sugar. Place the legs into the bowl and cover them with the cure. Put everything into a vacuum bag being sure to get any little bits that try and stay in the bowl (I used a FoodSaver). Vacuum and seal the bag. Let cure for 48 hours under refrigeration. Remove the legs from the bag and rinse off the outside under cold water. Place into a clean vacuum bag with the lard and seal. Poach at 91F for 8 hours. Once poached place into an ice bath and cool to 40F. Open the bag and separate the legs and duck jelly from the fat. Pick the meat away from the bones, tendons, ligaments, and anything else you don't want in your rillette. Place the picked duck meat into a bowl. Gently heat the duck jelly with some of the fat in a pan until it just start to melt. Season the meat with this liquid and the apple cider vinegar to taste; you may not use all of the jelly and you definitely will not use all of the fat. Once the duck meat is succulent from the fat, acidic from the vinegar, and salty from the jelly, pack the rillette into a container for storage. Heat some of the remaining fat until it melts and pour it over the packed rillette. Store in the fridge until ready to serve.


Additional Comments:
Maintaining water bath temperatures over long periods of time can be tricky. Unless you have something that is specifically designed to do this for you, you are going to have to get creative. Gas or electric ranges are not designed for cooking like in this recipe, but I make mine work pretty well. I have played around with different pots, different amounts of water, lid or no lid, and the heat set at different levels. You are looking to find out a way to get the water to reach an equilibrium point. This means seeing what temperature the water stays at for extended periods of time. For this recipe I knew that if I brought a specific pot of water to a boil, turned down the heat as low as it could go, and dropped the legs in I could get the water to stay at 91F for as long as I wanted(or at least close). Once the water dropped to 91F I put a lid on the pot. After an hour my thermometer read 91F, when I checked on the legs 4 hours later to stir them, it was 90F. At 6 hours it was 92F and after 8 hours it was 91F. So this means I know what set-up(pot,flame,water,lid) I can use to hold something within a few degrees of 91F. I also know that this same set up, but without a lid, with sit around 61F. Now I know that 1 degree, or even 1/2 of a degree can make a big difference in some cooking applications, but until I see the need invest in something that can keep a water bath within .5 degrees of accuracy I will just have to avoid extremely sensitive recipes.
I like this technique so much because the integrity of the meat is maintained. It is not a mash of meat that is then covered in seasonings, it is heavily flavored and cured duck meat coated in some of it's own fat and jelly. You only need to add some acid at the end to make this rillette balanced.

Plate it up!

Duck rillette rolled in burdock dressed with beet juice, served with red sorrel, golden beet marmalade, and orange marmalade glaze.

I think that I could get away with calling this cooking method "confit". Which means that I am claiming that if you pick the meat from a confit and then add some of the fat and jelly to the meat you have a rillette. It tastes and looks right to me.

Swimmingly,

Adam

Lamb Flap Roulade

Making this roulade takes a lot of steps and time, and if you are into thinking about things a little romantically, you could say that the long process makes it taste even better... just to be clear though, it doesn't make it taste any better.

Start with two lamb flaps, or one, I went with two because why would you only make one roulade? 

Separate the skin from the rest of the flap. Start at one corner and work your blade between the skin and the fat, you do not want to mess up the skin, so if you are worried just stay away from the skin and slice through more of the fat and meat, it's going to get shredded later.

After getting the two separated, place everything into a pot and add just enough water to cover. Bring the pot to a boil, cover and turn down the flame as low as you can so that the pot stays below a simmer with the lid on. Let it go for 2.5 hour, and then check to see if the meat on the flap pulls apart easily. You want it to be soft and supple.

Pour everything into a pan, or large bowl so that it can cool down . Once everything is warm, not hot or room temperature, place it into the fridge for a few hours. This is what it should look like.

Separate the top layer of fat from the liquid below and all of the animal parts.  Reserve the fat that has solidified on top of the lamb broth, that is basically lard.  It is flavorful stuff and will keep a long time refrigerated, so you don't even have to use it right away.Then pick the meat out of the fat and the skin/meat/fat from each other. You are going to have five piles(rendered fat from the top of the liquid, the liquid, lamb skin, lamb meat, boiled lamb fat). Scrape off any fat below the skin, so that the skin is just that, only skin.

O.K. almost halfway done!

The filling:

130g onion

2 tbsp oilve oil

1 clove pickled garlic (naturally lacto-fermented at home)

200g lamb meat

150g maitake mushroom

Reduced braising liquid from cooking the flap

5g Parsely

2 tbsp Apple Cider Vin (natural mother stuff)

Finely dice the onion and add to a warm pan with the oil and some salt. In a separate pot, boil the braising liquid until it is almost dry, but still pour-able, you will yield only a few tablespoons. While that is reducing, cook the onion until it is translucent, soft, and slightly starting to brown. Add the finely chopped maitake and a little more salt.Cook over medium heat until quite brown, then add the chopped parsley, the vinegar, the garlic, the lamb meat, the braising liquid, and salt/pepper to taste.

Place the skin onto a sheet of plastic wrap, 1 inch from the edge nearest you, and fill it with as much filling as you think you can roll the skin around with a few millimeters of overlap.

Roll the skin around the filling and secure the middle with a piece of twine, tie a slip knot, but don't pull too tight or you will deform the skin too much, you want it to be securely round.

Continue to tie knots out from the middle on both ends until the whole of the skin is well sealed. On the very ends, when you pull the slip knot tight, this time you want to deform the roll so that it pinches off the sides, just be careful not to rip the skin or tear the whole roulade. Roll up the plastic wrap around your new roulade and tie the ends tight, I do this so it keeps it shape and doesn't dry out while it sits in the fridge waiting for me to cook it. Freezing it at this point will also work very well, it is self-contained when rolled in plastic tightly.

When you are ready to serve the roulade, take it out of the plastic and get a saute pan warm. Add two tablespoons of butter and one tablespoon of lamb fat to the pan and then the roulade. Fry the roulade on each side, if the pan isn't making a frying sound you should turn up the heat. You want the skin to sizzle and start to brown, along with the butter. The entire time you are frying the lamb, take a spoon and pour the extra fat in the pan over the top of the roulade. You want to keep a constant coating of butter and oil over the top of the roulade as you are frying the bottom.

Here is what it looks like when you cut into it. Lamb flap stuffed with lamb flap. You separate the parts, make them tasty, and then recombine them.

I served this with brown-butter-apple puree, homemade castagnaccio with golden raisins and pine nuts, a little olive oil and buckwheat sprouts. A lot of work for one bite?

Plate it up!

I had a lot of fun making this roulade, send me a picture if you make a meat roulade.

Be well,

Adam

Cotechino Sausage

I love pork skin, fat, meat, blood, bones, pretty much everything the pig has to offer.  So when I had a discussion with my roommate about a sausage that combined most of those, I was excited to try it out. I do think the addition of some blood to this sausage would be a good thing, but I believe that traditionally Cotechino sausage is simply pork meat, skin, fat, salt and spices.  I went with the traditional to start with, but maybe some boudin noir will be in my near future.
Recipe:
327g pork butt
94g pork skin boiled for 2 hours
94g pork fat
6 g salt                                                                                                        
1tsp pink peppercorn/fennel seed/black pepper
1tsp dextrose
1/16 tsp TCM(tinted curing mix)
4 tbsp water (2 of the tbsp in the form of ice cubes)

A quick aside, I mix measurements because that is how I think they are best interpreted. Some people may say that all of the measures in a recipe should agree (e.g. all grams, all metric, all U.S.), but I don't trust my scale in less than 1g intervals and a volume measure in that case works fine, also, in this particular recipe the water is in tablespoons not because I cannot accurately measure the water in grams but because that is how it is added, by the spoonful, while I am mixing the sausage. Anyway, probably not that important, but I wanted to get that off my chest.

IMPORTANT: When using TCM it is critical that you do not add too much. The stuff can kill you, a lot of things can kill you, but even a small amount of this stuff can be deadly. If you just take care and don't fool around with it, don't use it if you have no idea what it is, there is no reason why it cannot be a safe and useful ingredient in your culinary arsenal. For reference here is the demi-tasse spoon I used to add the, less than a gram, of TCM to my mix.

Method:

Cut all of the ingredients into small pieces that will easily fit into a meat grinder.  I diced the skin into very small cubes, smaller than the meat and fat, because I didn't trust the KitchenAid grinder I was using to handle it.  Mix all of the ingredients together, except for the water, so they look something like this.







I let this sit overnight, but I don't think that is necessary, however it does have to be very cold when you grind it, so just thoroughly chill it. Then grind that stuff, I did two passes, again because the kitchen aid grinder wasn't too powerful. After passing everything through the grinder, put in two ice cubes to get out the remainder of the mix and chill the mix in the bowl. Then mix the sausage with your hand vigorously, really trying to smash and smear it into a uniform mass.  While you are doing this add the last two tbsp of water in two additions. The mix should be sticky and dense, not oily or broken. Like this!








The next few photos show how to tightly and uniformly wrap a sausage mixture in plastic wrap. I am basically making "bulk" sausage here, cooking and serving it without a natural or synthetic casing.
To narrate these photos:
Spread the mixture, more or less, in a uniform log onto the plastic wrap 1 inch from the edge nearest to you.
Take the 1 inch of extra wrap and roll it away from you until it touches the other side of the sausage mix. Then, being careful to get a tight roll, roll the entire log up, until all of the wrap is used.
This is the hardest and most important part: grab the sides of the wrap and pinch the sausage in towards the middle, then grab as close as you can to the sausage you have just moved in and roll the whole log away from you, keeping it in contact with the table the whole time. If the log moves away from you and does not roll then you need to increase the friction between the surface of the table and the wrap. A very light smearing of water, applied by running your hand under water, shaking it off and then rubbing your hand over the table surface works well for me, and it is fast and always available. Even better, if you are going to be doing a lot of these, mix sugar and water in a 1 to 3 ratio and smear a little of that on your counter-top. Alternatively, you could also twist the two sides in alternating directions in mid-air, but this method never makes as uniform, or tight a roll.
Once you get the sides rolled tight, without any air pockets in the sausage, use the extra wrap to tie a square knot.
Poach this for 1 hour at 60°C. I did this in a pot, with a Pampered Chef digital thermometer. Place directly into an ice bath after the hour is up and let the sausage fully cool before using.

You can used this sausage for any number of applications, I will say that next time I am going to try doubling the amount of skin and fat in the sausage.  This version has a nice texture, but it is a little too brittle for my liking.

This is what it looks like fully cooked. Fairly lean. Look at the bits of skin!

I diced it and made ravioli filling. It was pretty good.

Now plate it up!

Sausage is fun and good to make at home.

All the best,
Adam