Pork Scratchings, A Version Of

What do you do with leftover pig skin?

I recently decided to make my own lardo, salt-cured fatback, using a large piece of pig that my friend Bonnie got for me. Misremembering the details of lardo, I asked for a piece of fat with the skin on.

Bad idea. You want only the fat for lardo, and so I spent hours cutting the creamy white fat away from the pink, leathery skin: I understand now why they used to make footballs from this stuff. With the fat tucked away under weights in the refrigerator, I turned my attention to the square foot or so of skin I had left.

By chance, I had been flipping through Fergus Henderson’s Beyond Nose to Tail. (Also by chance, shuna had been, too.) If you have not yet discovered Henderson, run to the nearest independent bookstore to fix this gap. It’s not just that he writes recipes for offal, the “off cuts” of an animal: He writes those recipes in a warm, humorous, thoughtful voice that is as charming as it is knowledgeable. Of the snails you need for a nettle and snail soup, he writes, “24 fresh English snails, picked by your fair hands (you will need to put them in a bucket and let them poo all their poo out for a few days before cooking …); or there is Tony the Snail Man, who breeds snails.”

One of the first recipes in Beyond Nose to Tail is “Pork Scratchings, A Version Of,” which Henderson describes as “A most steadying nibble.” I describe it as pig skin confit. Pluck stray hairs from the skin; salt it; let it sit for five days; soak overnight in cold water; cook, covered, in duck fat for 2½ hours; and store in duck fat until you need it.

No one considers me shy about serving odd food to guests, but even I might hesitate before serving pig skin confit on toast to most diners. Fortunately, David Lebovitz was in town, and a few food bloggers gathered in San Francisco to pay homage to the master of chocolate and ice cream.

Most food bloggers will put anything edible into their mouths. And sure enough, the guests reached out without hesitation for my crostini, which held reheated, crisped, and chopped pig skin — a gummy, gluey texture — along with an apple-onion marmalade. I watched tentatively as the bloggers’ teeth sank in: I was prepared for disaster. Instead, I heard mmmms and saw eyes rolling back. The pig skin confit was a hit.

I still had some left a week later when I decided to make a variant of the classic French salad of frisée, lardons, and poached egg. Instead of lardons, I reheated the pig skin and chopped it into bits. Instead of frisée, I used Little Gems lettuce tossed in a bacon grease/red wine vinegar vinaigrette. The pig skin bits ranged in texture from teeth-shattering crunchy to teeth-gluing chewy. But they were still delicious. My one regret was that the chunks, even when chopped, glommed together: I wanted them to spread through the salad more.

Peanut Butter Truffles

I have been on a peanut-butter-and-chocolate kick.

Sitting near our office vending machine hasn’t helped. It is always stocked with at least one Reese’s product: Sticks, Cups, or — for one heavenly week — Pieces. I know these are crap foods, except for Reese’s Pieces, which are wonderful, but they’re close and cheap when I need a snack at work.

But as I chewed my way through these unsatisfying bites, I remembered a peanut-butter-and-chocolate recipe in my cookbook collection: the Peanut Butter Truffles in the back of The French Laundry Cookbook.

As French Laundry recipes go, this one is fairly easy: Make a ganache by puréeing peanut butter, butter, sugar, and melted chocolate; chill; coat in melted chocolate; chill; dust in cocoa powder. It’s also astonishingly delicious. I brought them into work for a “pollinated pairing, ” our team’s occasional Friday celebration of food and drink, and my coworkers slurped them down. Our community manager asked, with hand poised over the plate, if she could take some home and then asked, on Monday, if any were left in the refrigerator. Our group’s designer left early, but I slipped her a truffle before she headed out: She said on the Monday after that it didn’t even make it to the car.

So consider us fans.

I’m not, however, a fan of the truffle dipping fork. I decided to give one of these delicate little forks a try, and I am far from a natural with it. I put the ganache ball into the room temperature chocolate, and then plucked it out with the fork. But the chocolate formed an uneven coat, and if I missed or the fork turned while buried in the chocolate, I ended up plunging the fork into the ganache and turning it into a malformed mess. Only at the end, when I switched to using my fingers, did I get the coating I wanted. I’ve made lots of truffles, but the dipping fork added nothing to the process except frustration.

The Genius Of Zuni's Bread Salad

On a recent rare day-off — a short calm before the twin storms of Spore’s launch and the re-release of spore.com — I decided to make a dinner of roast chicken and bread salad. I thought it a spontaneous idea, but any Bay Area foodie knows that it is Zuni Cafe’s most famous dish. And, like many of the restaurant’s biggest hits, the recipe appears in the must-have Zuni Cafe Cookbook.

Judy Rodgers’ detailed bread salad recipe, modified to embrace seasonal ingredients, makes a delicious dish. But that’s not what struck me about it.

The bread salad pairs so well with the chicken because of the texture contrast. Even a good roast chicken has only two textures: tender flesh and crispy skin. The bread salad covers the whole spectrum between soft and crunchy. Her technique has you toast a few big chunks of bread and then tear them into pieces from bite-size to bread crumbs. Then she has you toss your 4 cups of bread with 1/4 cup vinaigrette: a scant amount. The result, as she says, is “a mixture of soft, moist wads, crispy-on-the-outside-but-moist-in-the-middle wads, and a few downright crispy ones.”

Cooking with texture seems like graduate-level cooking technique, but in fact we all know texture combinations that work well: crispy cones with smooth ice cream, crunchy cole slaw with tender barbecue, and crackling crust around creamy risotto in a rice cake. By triggering different sensations, these pairings keep our mouths interested in each bite. Still, it’s one thing to follow established traditions and another to pursue and explore this interplay. I wouldn’t say that I had incorporated texture at a conscious level, but now I plan to and see where it takes me.

Spore has shipped! Our new website is live. That means I may be able to return to life as a writer: I spent today researching an Art of Eating article, and I hope to get back into the blogging habit. Thanks for hanging on.

Learning To Grill

I remember the first time I tried to grill. I was just learning to cook well — about 13 years ago — and I decided to make a grilled something-or-other as dinner for a friend. I thought I knew the basics of grilling — it’s called cooking over fire, right? — but the flame on my charcoal kept going out. I kept adding lighter fluid.

When you find yourself battling with your girlfriend about whether the food tastes too much like lighter fluid, you’ve already lost the war.

Since then, I’ve learned more about grilling theory: You want an ambient heat, not roaring flames. But I have almost no grilling practice under my belt. Melissa and I have always lived in apartments, and a potential grill has faced the same problem as our smoker: No outdoor space. Not even a tiny deck because, believe me, I’d have used it.

But now we have a modest backyard, and on Memorial Day weekend we took advantage of my one day off and signed ourselves up for Americana 101 by buying our very own grill. I asked meriko what I should buy, and she told me all the things she loved about her large Weber kettle-style grill with the ashcan below, the vent above, and the liftable wings on the grill itself. Other foodies have confirmed that it’s the one to get.

But many have asked why I didn’t get a gas grill. I have a gas stove. If I wanted to cook over gas I would use that. No, I want the experience of hot charcoal, the taste of fire and smoke, and the variable temperature.

Plus, a gas grill is too easy.

If you’ve never learned to grill, how do you give yourself a crash course? I started with Cook’s Illustrated’s How to Grill. (As an aside, of the magazine’s many attempts at repackaging their recipes, I have always liked their first, the diminutive How Tos, the best.) It gave me pointers on fuel (hardwood charcoal), fire starting (use a chimney), getting the heat up, and setting up a grilling environment (high stack of coals on one side for high heat, one layer on the other side for lower heat). Within half an hour, my grill was fired up.

I am by no means a grilling master — our thin, lean porterhouse steaks came out medium instead of the more flavorful rare — but the grill is a permanent fixture now, and, assuming I’ll have a less hectic schedule this summer, we plan to use it often.

Remember me? I used to blog here. I’ve missed writing for OWF, but I’ve been very busy at work. I wasn’t joking about having one day off Memorial Day weekend. If you haven’t done so yet, visit spore.com and see what I’ve been up to. And while I didn’t work on Creature Creator, you should check out the trial version of this truly fascinating toy. You can find my creatures by looking for MaxisPuzzle in our “Sporepedia”.

Two-Part Hominy

As I cleaned out my pantry at the apartment, I rediscovered a small bag of large, dried corn kernels, brown at the tips and expanding into dusky yellow balloons. Melissa quickly spotted their resemblance to Corn Nuts.

But the label on the Rancho Gordo bag said hominy. I had bought it one Saturday on a lark; it beckoned to me, challenging me to discover its charms and challenges. I brought it home, put it in our pantry, stacked some pasta boxes in front of it, and forgot about it. Its rediscovery seven or eight months later prompted a slight frenzy of research as I tried to remind myself what it was and how to cook it.

Hominy is corn that’s been de-hulled by being cooked or soaked in an alkaline solution, a process called nixtamalization. It is the precursor to grits and masa, staples of Southern cuisine and Central American cuisine, respectively.

But I would not be grinding my hominy into grain: I wanted to cook the kernels whole for posole, a stew or soup that showcases the yellow nuggets. You can find posole recipes on the Rancho Gordo site, and from them you can extract a simple cooking technique: Soak the kernels overnight or don’t, but simmer for 3 hours.

First Attempt
The first time I cooked my corn, I skipped the pre-soaking step, though perhaps, “I forgot about it” is more correct. I opened a can of diced tomatoes, sautéed sliced shallots, added the kernels to the pot, and then poured in the liquid from the tomatoes plus enough water to cover the hominy by about an inch. I brought the water to a boil, then reduced it to a simmer for 3 hours. Every half hour or so, I checked the hominy and added water as needed. About 2 hours in, I added the tomatoes and some fresh oregano from our yard. (You can use dried oregano — indeed I rummaged through boxes in vain looking for my bag of Sonoran oregano — in which case you should add it at the beginning of the cooking time.)

Harold McGee, in On Food and Cooking, describes hominy as having a “dense, chewy consistency.” Certainly this first batch did: We exercised our jaws and worked the kernels to the pulpish state we needed before we could swallow. It wasn’t bad, just a lot of work. I imagined adding crispy bits of fried tortilla to create a texture beyond tough.

Second Chance
A week later, I decided to give hominy another try. This time, I remembered chose to soak the kernels for 6 hours before they went into the pot. I used a similar recipe, substituting green garlic for shallots, adding Spanish-style chorizo, and soaking sun-dried tomatoes in boiling water to create both ingredients and cooking liquid.

Melissa and I tentatively took bites, prepared for another chew-a-thon. But the soaking time had softened the kernels and reduced the chewiness to simply pleasant.

Like dried beans, hominy can handle a wide range of stew-y ingredients. You can probably slow-cooker it — I haven’t tried yet — but even without a slow cooker you can leave it simmering gently on your stove as you attend to other things. Just check it periodically in case the water has evaporated. It reheated well the next day for lunch.

Both times I made this, we drank beer with it. Both times, in fact, we drank Cantillon: once the gueuze and once the Rose de Gambrinus. I like the beer, and I figured its body was comparable to the dish’s weight. The acidity would carry the flavor despite the high-acid tomatoes in the dish, and the beer’s strong flavor would still be present despite the chorizo.

What We Had For Dinner This Week

Since my meal-planning post struck a chord with a lot of you, I thought it might be fun to post one of these lists. Let me know what you think; this is how I structure the list now, and this is how it looked this week, with lunch, dinner, shopping, and prep steps for each day.

As I’ve said before, you’ll have to do without pictures for the time being. Melissa is pouring all her energy into the house renovation, and has none left for nighttime camera work. Once we’re settled, I hope to offer more of her gorgeous photos.

Saturday

• General Strategy: Saturdays are our main market days: Our three favorite markets — Berkeley, Grand Lake, and Ferry Plaza — all occur on Saturdays. Weekends are also our main house days. (Melissa does it during the week as well.) That means that I can include dinners that require a bit more work, but not a lot. It also means that I can’t yet cook tons of food on the weekend for use later in the week.
• Lunch: Bakesale Betty’s Fried Chicken Sandwiches - Melissa’s mom brought us lunch as a treat. If you live in this area, try this sandwich, which features fried chicken and cole slaw on a deli roll. The slaw is spicy, but this sandwich is a stroke of genius. She told us in advance she’d bring them, so I noted it for lunch.
• Dinner: Dopo - My friend Amy gave me a gift certificate to Dopo, an Italian restaurant in Oakland. While I had decided on Friday to use it for Saturday night, the timing ended up being fortuitous. We had a rough day, and delicious food — cooked by someone else — was the remedy. Dopo used to annoy me because they charged standard restaurant markups for wine, but then served it in crappy little tumblers. If you’re going to double or triple the price of a bottle of wine, at least serve it in decent glasses. If you want to be a casual trattoria, don’t double or triple your wine prices. I’m happy to say that they now have real wine glasses, and they still have fantastic food.
• Shopping: Shallots, sausage, greens, lentils(?), arugula, mirepoix, deli rolls, radishes, orange, turnips, potatoes, cabbage, pears - When I’m writing my lists, I’m in one room surrounded by books, and the kitchen is in another. So I put ? next to ingredients that I may already have. It reminds me to look in the kitchen before I head to the market. I write “mirepoix” when I want equal amounts of carrot, celery, and onion for stock or stews. It doesn’t save much space, but I like the word: It is my nom de plume in the National Puzzlers’ League.
• Prep: Hard-cook eggs, make bagna cauda, (a.m.) soak anchovies

Sunday

• Lunch: Bagna cauda sandwiches (hard-boiled eggs, radish, arugula) - This sounds very exotic, but in truth I made a small amount of bagna cauda (a warm bath of oil, garlic, and anchovies) and used it as a spread on sandwich rolls. I added all the ingredients to the sandwich. We told my mom, who helped me strip paint that day, that it was a good thing her husband was out of town: The sandwich was pungent.
• Dinner: Lentils braised in red wine with sausage, and greens - The lentil technique came from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, and it’s one I’ll use again. She has you cook the lentils sort of like risotto, keeping minimal liquid in the pot with the beans. I seared the Fatted Calf sausage, but I daydreamed about grilling them in the future.
• Shopping: baguette, kale/chard from house - Even with just a few pots in the backyard, we’re reaping the benefits of a garden. Bonnie gave us some potted greens, and they have persevered — flourished, even — despite sharing the yard with a substantial amount of construction effluvia.
• Prep: soak beans for minestrone

Monday

• General Strategy: On weekdays, I can shop at Rainbow Grocery, a natural-foods, vegetarian co-op near my work. Oddly, they have a weak produce section, but I dare you to find a better bulk section. I decided to try Heidi’s Do-It-Yourself Power Bars, and Rainbow had all the exotic ingredients I needed.
• Dinner: Minestrone - But with cabbage, turnips, and potatoes instead of the normal ingredients.
• Lunch: honey, pear, goat cheese sandwich
• Shopping: Bread for mussels, dried fava beans, cumin?, lemon, dried figs, bay leaves, 1 ¼ c. rolled oats 1 ¼ c. hazelnuts, ½ c. oat bran, 1 ½ c. crisped brown rice cereal, dried cranberries, crystallized ginger, brown rice syrup, ¼ c. natural cane sugar
• Prep: Soak dried figs in leftover wine,(a.m.) beans,power bars - Having used half a bottle of wine for the lentils the night before, I used the other half to rehydrate some figs for Friday (another Zuni technique).

Tuesday

• Dinner: library night - I had to do some research at the library, so I left each of us to our own devices for the night. In the end, we both ate leftover minestrone.
• Lunch: On our own. I fell down a bit on planning lunches this week, but usually we had good leftovers from the night before.

Wednesday

• Dinner: Mussels - Few things are worse than waking up the morning you plan to make moules marinières and realizing that you didn’t make plans for french fries. The way I make them, they require a fair amount of prep, and without potatoes on hand I couldn’t include them.
• Shopping: mussels - One of the best parts of the house is its proximity to lots of our favorite food stores. Monterey Fish Market, one of the Bay Area’s best seafood sources, is just up the road a bit, so Melissa went and bought us mussels.

Thursday

• Dinner: Ful sandwiches - This isn’t the full name of the fava bean salad from Mediterranean Street Food, but it’s how I abbreviated it. I decided to cook the dried fava beans in a slow cooker I’m reviewing, and they came out well, though they could have used a bit more time, I think. I cooked them for almost 3 hours, but I think in the future I would cook them for 3 ½.
• Shopping: scallions, parsley, persimmons?, pita bread - Rainbow didn’t have persimmons — the original recipe calls for way-out-of-season tomatoes — so I used avocado instead.

Friday

• Dinner: cheese course with condiments (dried figs with red wine) - This revived an old tradition of ours. When we wanted to learn about cheese, we would buy three cheeses each week and eat them (with bread and salami and whatnot) and read about them. I thought it might be a fun treat to bring that back from time to time. We got to the cheese counter and asked the vendor which cheeses she liked at the moment. We bought Brebiou, Cone de Port Aubry, and Cabot’s bandage-wrapped cheddar.

Yuck

I lifted the spoon, with its drab, brown pile, into my mouth, and I bit down. Well, no. I didn’t bite down. My teeth squished through a mouthful of cotton balls. My tongue curled away from the sticky, coating mass, which tasted and felt like soggy, slightly toasted cardboard.

Melissa labored through her bowl for a dozen bites or so, but she dodged the wretched part and instead dug for the edamame and carrots, which emerged covered in a brown, felty pelt. I threw mine out after just two bites.

The dinner seemed like a good idea. I had an open-for-interpretation “grain salad” on the evening’s menu, a way to mesh spontaneity and meal planning. I stood in the bulk grain section at Rainbow Grocery and spied toasted buckwheat, which I had never made before. I didn’t read the instructions too carefully, but I thought it said to combine 1 cup of buckwheat with 2 1/2 cups of water and simmer for 20 minutes.

On the stove, the buckwheat expanded into a thick sludge as soon as the water hit it. It kept expanding, like some horror-movie blob, as I added more water. And the texture skipped past fluffy straight to furry.

I’m sure I did something wrong: Lots of people like buckwheat, and no one would if they tasted what I made. If you have suggestions for cooking it, let me know, but I won’t be touching that grain for a while.

Food blogs provide us with a fantasy life. I would like to have time to make all the gorgeous dishes I see on other sites, and I hope that some of my pretty plates have inspired you.

But, you know, sometimes things just don’t work. And it’s good to remember that even simple fantasies sometimes smack against hard reality.

Got any culinary disasters of your own you want to share? Add a comment or write a post on your own blog and send me the link. Help me feel better after making such a wretched dish.

Meal Planning

When I was a child, my family planned out our meals for the coming week. I was involved in this to varying degrees: For a stretch of my youth, each of us made breakfast for the other family members on a rotating schedule; at other times, I just had to take the chicken out of the freezer when I got home from school. But big shopping trips and weekly menus were a part of our lives.

I continued this in college. My first year out of the dorms, and well before I became the obsessive cook I am today, my roommate and I would pick recipes from the Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book (“new” despite being published in 1930), go to Safeway on the weekends, and cook dinner on weeknights.

But as time went on, I lost the habit. I lived further from the bone, with enough income to go out for lunch and decide on a whim what I would make for dinner. And who wants to meal-plan on Friday night when movies and take-out beckon?

Then we bought a house.

As we adjust to our new budget, meal planning has re-entered my life. On Friday nights, I curl up on the couch with a stack of cookbooks — old favorites, new favorites, and books sent to me for review — and plot out my strategy for the week. What sounds good? What will make use of a seasonal ingredient? What will use up the rest of an ingredient I buy for a different dish?

It became a pleasure rather than a chore when I realized that meal planning is just the same as dinner party planning. Instead of five or six courses over a few hours — our normal dinner party — I’m serving 13 or 14 courses — lunch and dinner — over one week. I figure out what will work and what won’t. I figure out how the meals will fit into the week’s work schedule. I even make a list, with daily shopping and prep tasks, analogous to the one I use for parties. Yesterday, for instance, I had to buy polenta, ricotta, and Parmiggiano for a few dishes: I grouped the ingredients based on our ability to go to Oakland’s Market Hall, a small collection of gourmet stores. Tonight, I have to soak beans for tomorrow’s dinner and roast vegetables for tomorrow’s lunch.

I worried about losing spontaneity. There is no more, “What do I feel like making tonight?” though I leave slots on Saturday nights for “market inspiration.” In fact, I have more flexibility now, not less. It’s hard to decide at 6:00 pm that you’d like to make a stew for dinner. But if you plan for it over the weekend, you can set up the stew in the morning. A whole range of dishes has become available, including every fifteen-part recipe in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook.

I’ve also come to realize that planning out meals creates anticipation for each one. This weekend I bought a petit jambon from Fatted Calf, and Melissa keeps wanting to know when I’m using it (tonight, in part, for the polenta). She says that I should have a chalkboard and write out, brasserie-style, the week’s meals.

Finally, meal planning has put me back in touch with old cookbook favorites. I’ve rediscovered new sources of inspiration in the cookbooks that have been on my shelf for years. Some that I had lost interest in, such as Nancy Silverton’s Sandwich Book, are now frequent guests in my pile of books. Others that I had forgotten about, such as Anissa Helou’s Mediterranean Street Food, have come back onto my radar.

I’m sure, at some point, that we’ll adjust to our new budget and return to our former lives. But I think that now I’ll keep meal planning, even when I don’t have to.

Smoked Pork Shoulder

We realized a small dream the other day.

Longtime readers may remember that I own a smoker, which I dubbed the Battle Droid for its black, tall, cylindrical body and its three squat legs. It was a wedding present from our friends Tom and Carol, but our friends Tim and Mitch have baby-sat it for the 4 ½ years since then. We lack any sort of outdoor area where we can set up a device that streams out clouds of smoke.

At least we did.

A few weeks back, we moved the smoker to the house. The other day, I practically skipped home with a pork shoulder. I cured it overnight with a dry rub of salt, dried oregano, pepper, and caraway, and smoked it the next day on our back deck. As we stripped bright blue paint from our kitchen walls, the Battle Droid puffed away, slow-cooking the meat in a cloud of light gray applewood smoke.

That night, I carved slices from the tender shoulder. Each had a deep pork flavor infused with a hearty smokiness. I served it simply, placing braised Brussels sprouts and carrots to the side. With a glass of wine in my hand (Dover Canyon’s “Alto Pomar,” a Rhône blend), I daydreamed about all the food our smoker will produce. (This week, I’ll be putting the shoulder on sandwiches with a persillade spread: parsley, lemon, and garlic.)

“No pictures?” you ask. My photographer is currently the general contractor on a major house renovation, so we’ll have to make do with me flying solo for a bit.

White Bean Hummus Crostini

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

This last summer, when we first entered negotiations for the house, I envisioned us hosting Thanksgiving in our new dining room. I pictured our friends and family warmed by our new-owner glow and an abundance of good food and wine.

Have I mentioned that our house needs some work? Or that the negotiations took longer than we expected? Scrap my vision of dinner, and picture instead the two of us driving to my mom’s house. (This is no hardship: I inherit my love of cooking from my parents.)

But I did cook for Thanksgiving. My mom asked me to bring an appetizer, and the result was one of those lucky combinations of simple ingredients and creativity that can produce memorable dishes.

I started with “white bean hummus,” which I've been pondering as a way to use leftover beans. I cooked cannelini beans until they were very tender and then scooped them into a food processor. I drizzled in olive oil as the high-speed blade pulverized the beans, which went from chunky and coarse to smooth and fluffy. (Though not as much so as regular hummus. I suspect the difference comes from garbanzo beans’ oil content — twice the amount of other legumes, according to On Food And Cooking.)

I seasoned the bean purée with salt and coarsely chopped sage from our “garden” — a few pots squatting in the new backyard. Salt gave the beans depth and sage balanced the earthy beans with a zingy, vegetal spice.

I thought that the salt-packed capers in my pantry, once desalted in a bowl of water for an hour, would add a complementary flavor, a visual focus, and a punchy little morsel to each serving. It just wouldn’t change the palette of the dish: an olive green caper on a beige bean paste that was flecked with gray-green sage, all sitting atop a brown slice of toasted baguette. The dish needed color.

It also needed acid, a mouthwatering component that would bring the eater back for more. I weighed the idea of pomegranate seeds sitting next to the caper, but then I discovered the last of the red onion quick pickles I made for our last dinner party.

At my mom’s house, I toasted the baguette slices — in small amounts in the toaster when I should have used the already-running oven — spread a bit of bean purée on them, fished thin onions from their sweet-and-sour brine, lay them on top in a rough circle, and finally dropped a succulent caper into the middle.

In a way, it’s probably a good thing that I took the slow approach to toasting the baguette. We scarfed down the bites so quickly that, had I made more at once, we would have had no appetite left for turkey.

Chard Stem Pickles

When I cook chard, I take out the stems and cut across the leaf. I braise the dark greens, but I’m left with naked stems. The other night, I decided to transform chard stems into quick pickles, otherwise known as refrigerator pickles because that’s where you have to store them. I turned to Quick Pickles for inspiration, and though there are photos of chard in the book, that particular item never appears in the index. Odd.

But a bit of leafing through the book gave me enough examples to develop my own recipe: 1 part salt, 2 parts sugar and 4 parts vinegar. Bring to a boil, pour over chopped chard stems, and add dried chile and thin slices of lime. Let cool to room temperature; cover and chill. The chard stems taste mostly of their brine, but they do have a satisfying crunch and a pleasant vegetable flavor.

Tips From Art Culinaire

I’m always of two minds about Art Culinaire, the quarterly hardback food porn publication aimed at chefs. On one hand, the editing is slipshod and the recipes are unreliable. On the other, the photos are gorgeous and the ideas are inspiring.

A couple of ideas from the current issue grabbed me as I plotted out the menu for our most recent dinner party, probably the last one in our apartment. I tried them out, and I’ll definitely use them again.

Pine Nut Brittle
Swapping peanuts with pine nuts in crunchy caramel creates an odd candy. When you bite into it, there’s an explosion of pine nut flavor, but the nuts themselves disappear. You can see them, but you don’t feel them as your teeth slide through the sugar: I compared them to Rice Krispies. I didn’t bother looking at the Art Culinaire recipe; I just followed the peanut brittle recipe in David’s The Perfect Scoop, which is in turn our mutual friend Mary Jo’s recipe.

Extracting Marrow
Want to get marrow out of a beef bone to use as an ingredient? One recipe in this issue suggested putting the bones in a double boiler, but I don’t own a double boiler that can fit four big bones. Instead, I made a bain-mairie — which I view as a double boiler in different proportions — by placing the bones into an 8x8 glass baking dish, which I then put into a roasting pan. I added enough water to the roasting pan to come halfway up the side of the baking dish and covered the baking dish with foil. I cooked the whole thing in a 350° oven for 10 minutes. Then I scooped out the softened marrow with ease. (I put it into a dumpling and fried it; more on that later.)

New, Out-There Cooking Tip

I’ve written about some bold cooking experiments here on OWF, but the other night I struck into new territory, even for me. As I thought about the cooking times and techniques for my fresh cranberry beans, diced ham, diced butternut squash and chopped escarole, I realized that I could toss them into one pot and cook them all together.

Crazy, I know. I’m sure that you assume, as I do, that even simple dishes require two pots. And the more the better, right?

But bear with me, because it worked. Simmered for about half an hour in just enough water to cover the ingredients, the fresh beans had a creamy texture and a beany taste; the firm squash had softened into tender, nutty cubes; the salty ham had rendered a bit of fat into the liquid, retaining a meaty texture; the fluffy escarole had wilted into gentle streamers of greenery.

I think I’ve created a new genre of cooking — certainly I’ve never encountered such a practice before — but I’m struggling to name it. Given that I used just one pot, I’m thinking of calling it “one stop” cooking. Catchy, eh? Go forth and spread the word about this revolutionary new idea.

Chicken Cycle

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

One of the easiest of my “cycles,” the cascades of dinners I make from leftovers, is the one I do with chicken. Roast a chicken at the beginning of the week, or take a raw one apart, and you've got a few meals for two at the ready.

I started on Monday with a roast chicken, purchased at Berkeley’s farmers’ market. I rubbed it down on Sunday night with salt and dried oregano so that it would be flavorful when I cooked it. I pulled the chicken out of the oven and chopped off the rear legs to serve with steamed carrots, mashed potatoes that I had speckled with carrot greens, and a gravy made from chicken broth and beer, the leftover cooking liquid from a nettle soup I had made the night before. I wrapped the rest of the bird and left it in the refrigerator.

Tuesday I carved off one of the breasts, chopped it into pieces, reheated those in a sauté pan, and served them on top of a salad of mixed greens, persimmon slices, carrots, and dried figs. Wednesday I carved the other breast away from the skeleton and added it to pasta with braised kale. Friday — I teach on Thursday nights — I made chicken pot pie with the wing meat and other scraps still on the carcass, store-bought puff pastry (even I use it when I don’t have time to make my own), peas, carrots, corn, and bacon; I served the pie with broccoli and garnished Melissa’s pot pie with a little puff pastry heart that I cut from the leftover dough. Everyone together: Awwww. (If you find yourself with leftover puff pastry dough in general, keep the scraps in the freezer and use them to make palmiers at some later date.)

We’re getting used to eating less meat now that we’re “house poor.” We’re not going vegetarian, but the kind of meat we support tends to be more expensive: We can’t afford a $12 roast chicken every night.

But a thrifty cook can use meat as an accent to add texture and flavor to a dish without using a big blob of protein as a crutch for delivering good food. Add a bit of meat at a time, and you can stretch expensive ingredients longer. That $12 chicken cost us, on average, $3 a night. And I haven’t even made stock with it yet. Some meats work better than others for this — you don’t need much ham or bacon to flavor a dish — but I think a little thought can stretch just about anything.

Bacon And Egg Risotto

photo by Melissa Schneider

Two years ago, Melissa and I attended “The Second Most Momentous Meeting of Food Bloggers EVER.” We had dinner with the Amateur Gourmet himself, Adam Roberts. You can read the details on his blog, and that dinner makes a cameo in his book.

Two dishes stood out among the many we tried at New York’s Craft restaurant: crunchy, sweet caramel corn and creamy, rich bacon and egg risotto. Melissa told me to take note and make them at home.

But for whatever reason, neither found their way to my stove. Craft even sent us a Christmas card with the caramel corn recipe, and I have yet to make it. But that risotto popped into our heads this weekend, and I gave it a go last night.

Risotto is a snap to make — you can read my technique on SFist — but I thought over this version as I looked at Adam’s picture. How should I incorporate the bacon? How would I get an intact egg yolk onto the rice?

The bacon was easy: I cooked four chopped slices in the bottom of a pot and used the rendered fat to sautée one cup of carnaroli rice. After that, I followed my normal technique, moistening the rice with white wine and broth and finishing the dish with half-and-half and a pat of butter. The chunks of bacon softened without breaking down as they cooked with the rice.

The Egg
For the golden garnish, I decided to separate the yolk and poach it on its own, without the protective sheath of egg whites that I normally rely on to keep the egg together. As the risotto cooked, I filled a large saucepan with water and brought it to poaching temperature: to the point when visible puffs of steam escape from the pot but well before it boils. I chose a large saucepan so that the egg yolk would have time to cook on its way down. I worried about it breaking as it hit bottom.

I didn’t bother swirling the water or adding vinegar as I normally do for poached eggs. These techniques help the ghost-like billow of egg whites condense into a pretty envelope around the yolk. No egg whites? No need for tricks to make them look nice.

I held my breath as I dropped my two egg yolks, each from its own bowl, into the water. The yolks morphed into spheres and settled onto the bottom of the pot without breaking. I let out my breath.

Then I realized I had a problem. I cook poached eggs based on sight. When the whites look a certain way, the egg’s ready to come out. Oops.

In the end, I just took a guess about when to scoop out the yolks. I gently slid a slotted spoon into the water and under the yolk, slowly lifting it out. The yellow sphere flattened into a golden dome as buoyancy no longer held out against gravity, at first making me think that the entire yolk was about to whoosh through the slots. I wiggled the spoon to dislodge any water, and tipped the yolk onto a waiting bowl of piping hot risotto.

At the table, Melissa and I touched our forks to the yolks and watched them break open, sending yellow-orange liquid all through the bowl. She mixed hers in; I let mine pool and flow over the rice. It was a hearty, rich dish, but we each slurped down our portions. (I saved a little for mini risotto cakes.)

Maybe I should make that caramel corn soon.

The Rice And Beans Cycle

It’s been a while since I’ve had to think about a tight cooking budget. Five years ago, my company shut down and I hadn’t yet been hired by another one. I saved up money as I saw the gleaming axe hanging over my old company, but I didn’t know how long my savings would need to last (only two months in the collapsed economy of the time, it turned out). As the family cook, I spent my days figuring out ways to cut culinary costs.

I had whole systems that I called “cycles,” though “waterfalls” might be a better term. I wouldn’t just pop leftovers into a microwave; I’d use them as ingredients for new dishes. A chicken cycle might start with a roast chicken. I’d shred the meat we didn’t eat and put it in pasta or in a pot pie. Then the bones would become stock. I’d use the stock for risotto. If we had leftover risotto, I’d shape it into cakes and pan fry those. And on and on.

Last week, I tried to step back into that mindset. What better place to start, I thought, then the dish we’ll come to know and love so well: rice and beans. Boo hoo for us, right? Don’t worry: the beans were from Rancho Gordo and the rice was from Massa. We’re not so impoverished that I can’t afford good ingredients.

The Dishes
On Tuesday, I cooked the rice and beans separately and combined a portion of each for dinner, adding in rehydrated dried cherry tomatoes to make a single, colorful dish but keeping the leftovers separate. When I tried this cycle before, I spent a long time picking beans out of the rice; I’ll pass on that task, thank you.

The next night I made rice cakes. I’ve perfected this dish with risotto, where the starch that leaches into the cooking liquid glues the grains together. With less starchy rice, I had to find an alternate method. I puréed about a cup of leftover rice with 1/3 cup half-and-half — breaking up the whole grains and releasing the starch within — and shaped the mix into patties. (If you use a cookie cutter to shape them, you can pack in the rice and it will stick better.) I left them in the refrigerator for two hours and then fried them in a stick of butter, flipping them to crisp each side. To go with these healthy snacks, I tossed mixed greens with a red wine vinaigrette and added chopped dried figs and a poached egg. Never underestimate the value of a poached egg in a salad.

On the third day, I transformed the leftover beans into a cold salad by adding feta, red onion, and lime juice.

If I were all the way back in my cheap eating game, I’d have saved the bean cooking liquid and the hot water I used to rehydrate the tomatoes. Both are flavorful broths that I could add to braising liquid or a pan sauce. But the rice and bean cycle was a good step back into that old life. With leftovers like this, who needs new food?

Early Trials With Gelatin Filtration

Harold McGee’s recent New York Times piece on gelatin filtration, where you clarify liquid with a molecular sieve, latched onto my imagination with a steely grip. I liked the idea of a fail-safe way to make consommes — I don’t make them often enough to be very good at the technique — and gelatin filtration suggests a world in which anything can be made into a clear, intensely flavored liquid. Besides, food science is neat.

After I drained the black water from a pot of cooked beans, I decided to give the technique a try. I dissolved a sheet of gelatin in the hot liquid, froze it, and thawed the block in the refrigerator the next day.

Actually, I tried to thaw it. I had added too much gelatin, I think, and I got not one drop of consomme.

A few days later, I made rabbit broth. I looked at the sloshy soup, gray from my lazy scum-skimming but still liquid in the refrigerator, and nominated it for my next experiment. I placed the frozen, quart-sized cube onto a tamis lined with cheesecloth, and then I put that assembly over a bowl in the refrigerator.

Then I waited. And waited. Though the article suggests 24 to 48 hours of thaw time, my stock had barely dripped a drop by then. I turned my refrigerator down a notch and waited some more. Six days later, I had a dirty, ugly ice block on top, and rabbit consomme on the bottom. (Midway through the process,I brought what I did have to a boil to sterilize it.)

How was it? The gold broth was the clearest consomme I’ve ever made. It may be the clearest one I’ve ever seen, though the chicken consomme at 2nd Avenue Deli in New York City came close. I could have reduced the result a bit for more flavor — my stocks tend to start out watery — but it made a delicious lake for ravioli, sautéed carrots, and minced carrot greens.

So I’m convinced. I’ve got some interesting liquid in the freezer that I’m going to thaw soon: This time, I kept the gelatin proportions consistent with the recipe in the article. I hope it won’t take six days to melt.

Egg + Olives = Eggola

“I’d like an eggola martini, dirty.”
Photo by Melissa Schneider

Last December, Melissa and I went to a holiday party/potluck at Jack and Joanne’s house. Among many great dishes, two struck my “reproduce at home” nerve: the bacon toffee that captivated the crowd, and the pickled eggs that cookiecrumb brought. As our teeth and lips slurped off pieces of succulent, earthy eggs — the result of a 3-day soak in Kalamata olive brine — Melissa and I thought of the large jar of home-cured olives in our refrigerator. As soon as we emptied that jar, we thought, we would salvage the brine.

There was only one problem: I made a lot of olives. We ate the last one only two weeks ago. But we hadn’t forgotten about cookiecrumb’s eggs. Indeed, every few weeks, Melissa would ask me how many olives were left, by which she really meant, when could we make the eggs? We fidgeted in anticipation as I prepared the brine for the eggs, straining it through cheesecloth to get rid of the vegetal debris that fennel, garlic, and olives had left in the orange-brown liquid.

There’s no real recipe here. Make hard-cooked eggs by whichever technique you prefer. (Mine, lifted from Cook’s Illustrated: Put eggs in pot and cover with an inch of water. Bring just to a boil. Remove from heat and cover. Let sit for 10 minutes. Ice bath the eggs.) Plop the cooked and peeled eggs into the olive brine and leave the jar in the refrigerator for a few days. (Forgot to make olives last year? No problem: Just follow cookiecrumb's lead and use the brine from a can of olives.) The salt toughens the whites, so you might want to snatch the eggs from their hot water a little earlier.

My eggs — Melissa dubbed them “eggolas” — lacked the deep flavor of cookiecrumb’s, but they combined a delicate green-olive taste with rich egginess and a snack-food saltiness. Top half a pickled egg with a dollop of homemade rabbit rillettes, however, and you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven. (Given the fat-to-volume ratio of each bite, you just might.) We only lacked a glass of zingy Bandol Blanc to wash it down.

I made a second batch of eggs, but now I’m thinking of other uses for the salty, flavorful liquid. I've added a couple of mozzarella balls to see what happens, I could brine meat in it (once), and I might add acid to make a quick-pickle liquid. I just have to decide which route to go.

Chicken Feet Make Me Dance For Joy

Photo by Melissa Schneider

When I saw that Marin Sun Farms had chickens with the feet attached, I plunged into their farmers’ market stand to buy one. Imagine how delighted I was when I got home and discovered the head as well.

But I don’t know quite what to do with it. I could toss it in the stockpot along with the gelatin-rich feet that caught my eye, but there must be some more creative use. Pim suggested Chinese five-spice soup, but I thought I’d ask if anyone out there in OWF land has other ideas.

Superflavored Liquids

Please take a moment to fill out the OWF 5-Year Anniversary Reader Survey.

Harold McGee's latest New York Times article teaches the reader how to do gelatin filtration at home. I hadn’t heard the term until I saw the article, though the technique seems to be all over the avant-garde cooking scene. It’s a way to create high-flavor consommes without the finicky and time-consuming stovetop clarification. You add a little gelatin to the liquid, freeze it, and then thaw it in the refrigerator. The gelatin becomes a molecular sieve, and the melting water washes small flavor compounds through the net while the gelatin traps fat and other impurities. There’s even a recipe for brown butter consomme to get you started. You can do it with a wide range of liquids, and you don’t need any equipment besides a refrigerator and a freezer. I’ll be trying this as soon as I get a moment.

This Weekend's Dinner Party

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

Only 2 percent of you have sounded off in the OWF 5-year Anniversary Reader Survey, but common threads have already begun to appear. One says, in short, “Don’t you ever cook anymore?”

I do, and I’ll renew my efforts to get more cooking posts onto this site. There’s no time like the present: We had our friends meriko and Russell over for a casual meal I threw together after the farmers’ market.

I sliced Fatted Calf Umbrian salumi and Charentais melon for a small appetizer plate, which I finished with salt-roasted pistachios and the last of our homemade olives. I always like to have snacks on the table when guests arrive — not to mention a glass of sparkling wine — and I liked the slight riff on the classic ham and melon pairing.

I had ideas about the appetizer platter before we got to the market, but I hadn’t put any thought into an opening course until I saw Phoenix Pastificio’s Meyer lemon pappardelle, wide noodles with a bit of tang from the mixed-in citrus zest. I bought zucchini and big, floppy, orange squash blossoms, and I mandolined the squash into thin planks that mimicked the noodles. I tossed the zucchini strips with salt and left them to drain before lightly sautéeing them with small onion dice and adding them to the pasta with the raw blossoms. A glass of Austrian Grüner Veltliner, relatively low in acid thanks to 2003’s soaring temperatures, washed down the light opener.

Everyone forgot about the pasta, however, when the roasted pork belly came to the table. A while ago, I purchased a share of pig meat that included two sides of belly, and I cured one in salt and herbs for a day before roasting it as described in The River Cottage Meat Book: 425° for 30 minutes and 350° for one hour. I cranked up the heat at the end to transform the scored skin into hard, brittle, crunchy bits of crackling that I could use as garnish for the layers of fat and meat on the plate. Slivers of pears roasted in canola oil and rosemary complemented the pork, and Massa rice with chiffonaded watercress added a semblance of nutrition to what is at heart a big chunk of bacon. The fatty pork and sweet pears in this dish demand a German Riesling, and far be it from me to argue with my food. I served a trocken spätlese Riesling from Germany’s Franken region.

Elise’s pretty plum galette inspired my peach and basil version, a casual dessert that allows a rustic — don’t call it sloppy — crust. Peach with basil is one of my favorite “surprise” pairings to present to guests, but meriko uses it as much as I do, so she wasn’t startled by its appearance. I topped each slice with a scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream. I hadn’t chosen a dessert wine, but meriko brought us Jepson’s Viognier Mistrel as a host present, and I knew the peaches-and-cream grape would pair well with our peaches-and-cream dessert.

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

Sweet Corn Ice Cream

Two weeks ago, Melissa and I went to the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market, and I saw them: the Brentwood corn farmers who perch their table at one corner of the building and sell out of their stock within just two hours. Their ears of corn, which have the color of a delicate custard, are among the sweetest I've ever had. (Modern eating corn has been bred to extreme sweetness to compensate for the fact that its sugars begin their path to flavorless starch as soon as you lop the ear off its stalk.)

I bought four ears.

They weren't destined for the pot or the grill. They were headed straight for the Glace-A-Tron 6000. My friend Tom had mentioned the sweet corn ice cream he saw on a trip to New York last year, and I filed the idea away for months, waiting for the season's bounty.

Neither of my ice cream books have a recipe for corn ice cream, and I forgot to ask Tom for details about the ones he sampled in New York, but I had a good idea of how it would work. Eggs will transform just about any liquid into custard, so I swapped some of my baseline recipe's half-and-half for the "corn milk" I got from pushing the fat kernels through a food mill, about 1 cup from the 4 ears. One taste of the pale, sugary liquid and I reduced my normal sugar proportions from 3/4 cup to 1/2 cup . Finally, I added an extra egg yolk to adjust for the fact that I had removed some of the total fat when I replaced half-and-half with corn milk.

The result was almost perfect: Intense corn flavor trapped in ice cream. But it wasn't quite right. Think of arcing your spoon through a scoop of ice cream. The frozen cream curls off in a smooth line. On my scoop, the cream sheared off in large chunks. And while the corn flavor was intense, it was also one-dimensional. It tasted of pure corn but lacked depth.

A week later, Melissa and I shopped at the Berkeley farmers' market. I saw ears of corn and snatched up another four.

Did you know that at Chez Panisse, they don't use any prep cooks? The evening's cooks prep their own ingredients and adjust the final dishes based on the quality of the produce. It seems like an odd idea—how much do they really change in midstream?—until you're faced with four ears of corn that have nothing except a name in common with the four you bought the week before.

When I ground the kernels in my food mill, I ended up with two tablespoons of juice, a far cry from the 16 I had used the week before. I couldn't imagine the meager amount affecting the final taste. I didn't have time to go back to the market for more, so I improvised. I pureed the kernels with a bit of water and poured the lumpy, squishy mess onto fine-mesh cheesecloth. I gathered the corners to make a sack and began wringing the corn purée, squeezing first with my hands and then twisting the cheesecloth down and down, trying to make a diamond out of the rough goo. Finally, I had a cup of liquid.

This batch of corn milk didn't need a sugar reduction—a different breed, or a relatively long time since harvest? I did, however, replace the half-and-half with cream, and I added cayenne pepper to give the ice cream the depth that its spiritual ancestor had lacked. In fact, I added too much. But other than that, the ice cream was exactly what I wanted, with a perfect texture and a rich, corn flavor that had some kick.

I rarely publish recipes here at OWF, as I've said before, and the corn ice cream illustrates the reason. Recipes provide a template, but they can't know your ingredients. Cookbook authors publish individual experiences, but even when they've been tested by others, they don't represent a universal truth. Which corn ice cream recipe should I print? The one that assumes you have sweet, juicy ears, or the one that assumes you have drier, less sweet ears? You have to understand what a recipe wants to achieve in order to fit your ingredients and your tastes. That's cooking.

Rice, Peas, and Squash Blossoms

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

I don't often write a "what we ate last night" post. After all, others do it better. But Melissa decided to take this pretty picture of a weekend dinner I made, and I decided to share it.

We discovered Massa rice a few weeks ago and have used the new find with abandon. With some shelling peas and burgundy amaranth that we found at Saturday's market, we had a nice combination. But I couldn't resist the squash blossoms, which I stuffed with a mixture of goat cheese and crushed almonds before breading and frying the peppery, orange flowers.

Goat cheese with Sauvignon Blanc is a classic pairing, and that grape often has a flavor of green peas. How convenient that our friends gave us a Rochioli Sauvignon Blanc just two weeks before. Bright grassy flavors with a zingy lime zest component refreshed us as we ate.

Goat Milk Ice Cream

In March, I wrote about some of the ice creams I had made, which prompted frequent and knowledgeable commenter Faustian Bargain to say, “You should try goat's milk ice cream with nothing to flavour it but luscious, fat vanilla beans. It will be a revelation, I assure you.”

I like Lãloo's commercial goat milk ice cream, and so FB's comment nestled into my head until I spied goat milk in the refrigerator at Rainbow Grocery.

I came home like a little boy with a snazzy toy. The Perfect Scoop doesn't have a goat milk ice cream, but On Food and Cooking notes that goat milk has the same fat and protein content as cow milk. Given that, I made a batch of my basic ice cream, replacing the whole milk with my new ingredient.

That first batch was delicious, rich with the flavor of cream and egg and vanilla. But it lacked the grassy tartness of the goat milk. My second batch, sporting 2 cups of goat milk and 1 cup of cream instead of equal amounts, gave me the exact flavor I wanted: a tangy finish and a grassy, barnyardy undercurrent. It was less creamy, obviously, so on the next round I might add a tiny bit of vodka to soften the final ice cream.

Technique: Goat Milk Ice Cream

• 2 cups whole goat milk
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 vanilla bean
• 2 egg yolks and 1 egg
• good medium-sized pot
• good thermometer
• fine-mesh sieve

1. Put goat milk and 1/2 cup sugar into pot. Split vanilla bean down the middle, scrape the seeds into the milk, and add the denuded pod. Stir well to combine. Make an ice bath, put the cream into a bowl, and set the bowl into the ice bath. Put the sieve over the bowl.
2. Combine eggs and 1/4 cup sugar in a bowl, and whisk them until light and fluffy. Meanwhile, put the pot with milk, sugar, and vanilla over a medium flame.
3. Heat the milk until it reaches 175°. Temper the egg mixture by pouring 1/2 cup of the hot milk into it, whisking constantly, and then add the eggs back to the pot, whisking as you do. Heat the custard until it reaches 185°, stirring constantly.
4. Pour the custard through the sieve and into the bowl with the cream that's sitting in the ice bath. Stir the mixture until the base cools. Add the vanilla pod back into the custard (it will have been caught by the sieve), and cover the bowl with plastic wrap, pushing it down so that it touches the custard's surface.
5. Refrigerate for 8 hours, and make ice cream according to your machine's instructions.

Cheapest Possible Ice Cream Maker

Can't afford a Glace-A-Tron 6000? Or a Cuisinart ice cream maker? Or the neato ice cream making balls that shuna mentioned?

How about two plastic baggies? kidsdomain.com gives a guide to making ice cream in plastic bags. Put ingredients in small baggie. Put ice and salt and small baggie into large baggie. Shake, shake, shake.

via boing boing

To Brine Or Not To Brine

I used to be a fan of brining meat: immersing it into a salty liquid and letting osmosis carry the salt deep into the flesh. Cook's Illustrated has championed the technique for years—they may still—and that's where I first learned of it.

But I've debarked from the brining boat. Brining is useful because industrial producers have stripped the fat and flavor from their animals, breeding instead for lean meat and animals that handle stress better. Put the meat in salty water, however, and you add back flavor and moisture.

But you're not bringing out the natural flavor of the meat; you're adding an "artificial" taste of kosher salt and water. I first moved away from brining when I ordered heritage turkeys in 2002. Marian Burros's famous 2001 New York Times article, the one that brought these birds into the public light, mentioned that the heritage birds had an actual taste, and I thought of a scene in The Soul of a Chef where a cook gets a good piece of meat and says, in effect, "Why would I get rid of that flavor with a brine?" As I bought more quality meat, brining seemed like an unnecessary insult. Of course, Bay Area shoppers have the choice to buy this kind of meat. If I lived elsewhere, I might still brine the meat I could easily get.

As I moved away from brining, I noticed that brined meat was almost too juicy. Chicken, for instance, has a slippery, jelly-like consistency that doesn't feel quite right. Brined pork doesn't suffer from this, but you're still adding juice because commercial pork is too lean and doesn't contribute its own. I've heard cooks complain that the salty juices can't be used for a sauce, but I've never had this problem.

I do season my meat before I cook it. I rub salt on it 24 hours—ideally—in advance, a technique that I first saw in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, but which I've since seen in other places. The "perfect roast chicken" mentioned a few issues ago in The Art of Eating uses this technique, and of course pre-salting is nothing more than a dry rub, something that grillers and barbecuers do right now.

Do you brine? Pre-salt? None of the above? I wonder if brining is still alive and well, or if it's beginning to die out.

Wine and Food Pairing, Redux

At brunch with some other bloggers yesterday, I mentioned that I have just a few rules about pairing wine and food. Upon hearing me rattle them off, Elise suggested I post them. But looking at my old SFist post on the topic, I realize that my rules haven't changed. Read that first, especially the part where I say to not sweat it.

Some other bloggers at the table brought up points that I don't cover in the post. Clotilde asked about regional pairings, and this is a guideline I tend to follow, but I find it a rough rule. For one thing, only Europe and maybe South Africa have a long enough history of native cuisine and wines to pair. But even in Europe, wine making styles have changed over time. The traditional wine of Sancerre, after all, is a red, not the more common white of today. Bordeaux used to use Rhône grapes in varying amounts. Are you talking about a classic Barolo or one made in the modern, international style? A Chianti or a Super Tuscan? And is the chef keeping close to the traditional form of the dish, or using it as a springboard for a new concept? Regional pairings can be surprising: I consider Port and Stilton a regional pairing because the British controlled Portugal of the 600-year-old alliance and old trade agreements between Britain and Portugal, and the fact that the British control its most famous wine houses.

Amy added that you can make a choice to contrast the flavors in the wine with the food or make them comparable. I do this without thinking, based on my mood, so I tend to forget about it as a rule.

Marbling Ice Cream, Part I

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

When I pored through David's book, I noticed a small box that explained how to marble two ice creams: make the individual flavors, freeze them for about an hour, and then add alternating dollops of each to a central container. Tap out the air bubbles; finish freezing for another few hours.

What it doesn't say, perhaps because it's so obvious, is that you should choose two ice creams with contrasting colors. When I pictured a marbling of strawberry and white chocolate ice creams, I saw a map of dark red splotches on an ivory background, vivid, strong colors you might find on a wild horse.

But strawberry ice cream, as you probably know, is pink. In my case, it was pale pink. Pale pink and ivory don't contrast; they blend. Instead of a piebald mustang, I got a My Little Pony pinto.

The ice cream tasted fine. The white chocolate created a subtle undercurrent against the bright strawberry, a flavor that will only improve as the plump red berries show up at local farmers' markets.

But what to do about the contrast? If I go to the effort to marble ice creams, I want my guests to notice. Privately, David tells me that his strawberry ice cream recipe, made without eggs, is darker than the version I made, which is a hodgepodge of techniques. So perhaps I'll use his recipe. Maybe I need to use cherry or raspberry, or fresher strawberries, instead.

Melissa is willing to suffer through the experiments. She's good to me that way. And we'll make sure you get to follow along.

Ice Creams I Have Made Of Late

I have grand plans for the Glace-A-Tron 6000 and its doorway into exotic ice cream experiments, but so far I have been driven by my lovely wife's requests. Here are a few ice creams that have been filling our freezer.

The Template
Grab your pens, folks: This is one of the few times you'll see a recipe here on OWF. This is the template I use for all my ice creams. It started as the basic recipe from Cook's Illustrated's out-of-print How to Make Ice Cream, but that recipe is too eggy, and I have replaced one egg yolk with an egg white on the advice of an ice-cream-fiend friend. This step can add a glassy texture to more delicate ice creams, so I'm thinking of trying a batch with 3 yolks and no white. For gelato, use 2 cups of milk and 1 cup of cream.

• 2 egg yolks and 1 egg
• 3/4 c. sugar
• 1 1/2 c. milk
• 1 1/2 c. cream
• A good thermometer
• Flavorings (see below)

1. Combine 1/2 c. sugar with milk and cream, stir to dissolve, and heat over medium-low flame until the temperature reaches 175°
2. Meanwhile, combine 1/4 c. sugar with eggs and whisk until mixture is light and fluffy—or your arm's about to fall off, whichever comes first.
3. When the dairy reaches 175°f, temper the egg mixture: Pull out 1/2 c. of the hot milk-cream mix, and add it to the egg mixture, whisking constantly. Now add the eggs into the milk-cream mix, whisking constantly.
4. Stir with a wooden spoon until the mixture reaches 185°.
5. Remove from heat, push through a fine strainer, and let cool to room temperature. Cover with plastic wrap, letting the plastic sit against the custard. Refrigerate overnight.
6. Make ice cream. Freeze for several hours before servting.

Pistachio
Holy cats, this Cook's Illustrated-inspired ice cream was good. I toasted and ground a couple handfuls of shelled unsalted pistachios, and added them to the custard as it heated. Don't strain them out until just before you put the mix into the ice cream maker. Just before the machine finishes, stir in some candied pistachios and let them fold into the ice cream.

Chocolate
Cook's Illustrated's "Chocolate Truffle" ice cream tastes the way I expect chocolate ice cream to taste. Add 1/3 cup cocoa powder to the sugar and eggs, increase the amount of sugar by 1 tablespoon, and stir 4.5 oz. melted and cooled bittersweet chocolate into the hot custard. Some of that chocolate will harden overnight into microchips.

Fig
The Cook's Illustrated idea was weak. Rehydrate dried figs in hot water and mince? No. Use red wine and water, with some peppercorns tossed in for good measure. Purée the cooked figs in a food processor and stir in to the custard until it thickens.

Salted Caramel
I'm still tweaking this recipe, but my current incarnation is pretty good. Don't add sugar to the milk and cream. Caramelize 1 cup of sugar in a deep pot until it's nice and dark, just this side of molasses. Slowly add cold milk and cream (the mixture will bubble up), and then continue as normal. When the custard is made, add kosher salt to taste. Taste it again when the custard is at room temperature. At service, garnish with fleur de sel.

Hard-To-Make Mint Chip Ice Cream

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

Melissa and I don't always agree on the ice cream flavors that should go into the Glace-A-Tron 6000, but mint chip sits high in each of our pantheons of favorite combinations.

My go-to ice cream book, Cook's Illustrated's old How to Make Ice Cream, has a recipe for mint chip ice cream: Make the normal custard base and add crème de menthe and chocolate chips. The easy instructions produce a better version of the supermarket staple.

Where's the fun in that? I wanted to depart from the standard and produce an ice cream alive with the taste of fresh mint and chock full of flavorful chocolate.

In my first batch, I plucked mint leaves from a thick bundle of stems, placed them into a plastic bag, and pounded them with a meat mallet to bruise the leaves and release the oils. I placed the leaves into the milk and cream and proceeded to make the ice cream, leaving the mint in the custard as it chilled overnight. This simple technique created a minty ice cream, but the long steeping time also pulled out earthy, vegetal components from the leaves. These were less welcome flavors.

For the second batch, I bruised the leaves as before, placed them into a pot with the milk and cream, and brought the liquid to a boil. I turned off the heat, let the pot cool to room temperature, and then brought the liquid to a boil once again. I let it cool to room temperature again, strained out the mint leaves, and used the infused milk and cream for making the ice cream. This double-infusion process takes much longer, but the final ice cream had a fresh mint flavor with just a tiny hint of the vegetal character that I disliked the week before.

Parallel to my mint experiments, I toyed with the chocolate chips. Don't tell anyone, but I've become a chocolate snob. I turned up my nose at the bags of Nestle chips in the store and bemoaned the death of Scharffen Berger's "Chocolate Chunks" product, morsels of chocolate that didn't catch on in time to justify the expense of making them.

I decided to make my own version of this bygone product. I melted down bittersweet Scharffen Berger bars, re-tempered the chocolate (poorly, I might add), and spread it into a wide, thin strip. Once it cooled, I chopped the slab into small chunks and added them to the ice cream as it finished churning. This worked well, and I used the leftover chunks to make chocolate chip cookies. David Lebovitz, spying Melissa's picture and her description of my efforts, commented that I probably didn't need to temper the chocolate. I didn't need to worry about a higher melting point for ice cream-bound chips, he pointed out, and the untempered chocolate would be softer in texture and flavor. I tried the straightforward melt-and-cool technique for my second batch of ice cream, and I decided that David was right. I like the perverse idea of an impossibly difficult mint chip ice cream, but these chips were a better fit for the ice cream.

Wine Notes
I don't like to serve wine with ice cream. By the time the cold has numbed your taste buds and the cream and egg yolks have coated your tongue with an impenetrable shield of fat, any subtlety in the wine has disappeared. What To Drink With What You Eat has an entry for ice cream in general, and of the listings, Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venice, a Southern Rhône dessert wine, makes the most sense. It has an assertive flavor that will stand up to the taste-numbing aspects of ice cream, and its acidity can combat the fat coating your tongue.

Home-Cured Olives

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

An olive grove sits across one border of the orange farm my family owns, gray-green spiderwebs facing dark green puffs across a wide stretch of light tan dirt. Once, when I was "helping" with farmwork—a ten-year-old riding in the trailer and staying out of the way—my grandfather asked if I had ever tried an olive fresh from the tree. When I said no, he stopped the tractor pulling the flatbed trailer and urged me to pluck one from the neighbor's grove to my left.

Eating a raw olive is a once-in-a-lifetime event; you will never want to repeat it.

The uncured fruit has a bitterness that burns into your memory as it sucks the feeling from your mouth. But just as some distant, desperate eater once found their way to the heart of an artichoke, another learned that if you soak the olive in repeated changes of cold water, you wash away the harsh compounds and produce a bite-size morsel heavy with the taste of earth and grass.

Last December, I spied raw olives at Oakland's Market Hall and decided to cure them of their bitterness. Several of the books in my food and wine library offer instructions for brining olives, but the technique in Simple French Food doesn't use lye, which I didn't have at hand. Richard Olney's Provençal olive-curing recipe suggests that you crack the olives lightly with a mallet, cover them in cold water, and then drain and replenish that water every day for ten days. Finally, you create a simple hot brine (1/4 cup salt per quart of water) that covers the olives as well as the fennel fronds and garlic cloves you add for flavor.

Wait two weeks, says Olney, and enjoy.

Wait even longer, say I, and then enjoy. Two weeks after I placed the olives into the brine, they still tasted horrible. Not as bad as raw olives, but bad enough to trigger that long-ago memory of my grandfather's cruel trick. I worried the cure hadn't worked, but I decided to check the olives again a few weeks later. Olney had placed the olives in his cellar, and I thought my colder refrigerator had slowed down the leaching process.

Last week, the olives were transformed. They had a young, green, olive taste that you rarely find in commercial versions, with hints of garlic and fennel from the brine. Perhaps a touch of the original bitterness, but no more than that.

Of course, the state's olive harvest has already gone to the press or the canning factory, but if you spy some uncured olives next winter, pick up a pound or two and cure them yourself. And when you've eaten through your batch, use the brine for cookiecrumb's olive-pickled eggs.

Wine Notes
These olives make perfect lunchtime snacks or pre-dinner appetizers, and thus you want to serve them with a light, refreshing white wine that whets the appetite and doesn't overwhelm any wine that might follow. Because of the Provençal seasoning, I'm sure Olney would have urged a white or rosé wine from France's Bandol region. In fact, any similar wine from Provence or northwestern Italy would work just as well.

Bone Marrow Dumplings in Consommé

Marrow dumplings in consommé
Photo by Melissa Schneider.

I still remember the first time I made bone marrow dumplings, an idea from the Austrio-Hungarian cookbook East of Paris. I forgot to add eggs to bind the dumpling mixture, and the pretty balls of bread crumbs and bone marrow disintegrated into the consommé I had made, transforming the crystal-clear liquid into a muddy broth.

When I spotted marrow bones at Prather Ranch's farmers' market stall, I decided to climb back on that horse, even if the bones came from a cow. I bought two packages and scraped the pink, chalk-like substance from one set of frozen bones before placing them in the stockpot. The second set awaits an ogreish feast of marrow-sucking straight from roasted bones.

The dumplings came together quickly. I sliced stale bread into cubes, sautéed them in butter, and puréed the croutons in my food processor. I added the bone marrow, the eggs—don't forget the eggs—and seasoned with minced carrot tops, pepper, and salt. The thick paste looked promising, but I decided to cook the dumplings in salted water instead of the consommé, just in case.

When you poach dumplings, kitchen wisdom says to remove them from the water shortly after they float to the surface, buoyed aloft by the steam of vaporized water inside the dough's air pockets. These dumplings sprang to the top of the pot in 20 seconds or so, hinting at the airiness we later noticed as they melted on our tongue in a warm explosion. The marrow added richness to the morsels, and the lightly cooked celery and carrots added crunch. Cheddar cheese melted on toast rounded out our simple evening meal.

Wine Notes
It's hard to pair soup with wine, because the subtle flavors disappear under the onslaught of sensations that wine provides: acidity, tannins, and aromas. But this dish, with its meaty consommé, crisp vegetables, rich marrow dumplings, and toasted cheese side, can stand up for itself as long as the wine is restrained. In this case, the dish has such a strong tie to a European culture—Austria—that I looked for regional wines that have evolved alongside the cuisine. I chose a Burgenland Blaufränckish. It was a lean wine, not lush, with its own subtle flavors. Low alcohol kept the wine light, so it wouldn't overpower the soup, which I tarted up with red wine vinegar to give it a touch of acidity.

Vinegar-Braised Pork Shoulder

Until you taste it, there is little to recommend vinegar-braised pork shoulder. The steam from the pot, heavy with acetic acid, burns the eyes of the cook who checks on it. And stews rarely allow for pretty presentation.

But after two hours of slow cooking, the harshness has disappeared and the ingredients are transformed. The pork, stoic to the end, at last sighs and mingles its juices with the vinegar. Sweet tomato paste blunts the acidic bite. What's left is fork-tender pork swimming in a tart, complex, brick-red liquid. "An instant hit," declared Melissa.

I first saw the dish in The Art of Eating #68, which you can still order if you'd like the full recipe. That issue included Ed's inspiring article about making red-wine vinegar alongside recipes that used it. Despite the three-day preparation time, it would be hard to find a simpler dish. Rub the pork shoulder in salt; let sit for 24 hours. Marinate the meat for 24 hours with spices and a mix of vinegar and water—I used 1 cup of red wine vinegar and 3 cups of water, but you might choose 2 cups of each if you use a commercial vinegar, which has lower acidity and less flavor than homemade versions. Cut pork into big chunks and lightly simmer them in half of the marinade (diluted with an equal amount of water) in a partially-covered pot until the meat falls apart with little effort, about two hours. Add a dollop of good tomato paste about an hour into the cooking.

Ed suggests serving the broth in one course and the meat in the next, but I combined them into a single dish perfect for a winter evening. Lay stale bread onto the bottom of a bowl, top with rosemary roasted root vegetables and the cubes of braised meat, and ladle the liquid into the bowl. The bread will soak up some of the broth and become soft and flavorful.

Serve a tart, fruity red wine alongside the stew. A Beaujolais (not Nouveau), a light Pinot Noir, or a Blaufränckish should all work. Don't bother with the Da Vinci Chianti Classico Riserva, which I received as a sample and tasted that evening. The best I can say about the wine is that it's inoffensive and mediocre.

Your Advice: Hare Salon

I'm getting some hare next week as research for an article. But I'm not really sure how to cook it. I have tons of recipes for rabbit; hare is outside my normal repertoire. Most say that it's a different beast in the oven than its domestic cousin.

So once again I turn to you, my knowledgeable readers. I assume I should braise the tougher meat, but that's only a guess. I'd like to do the meat justice, so any ideas are welcome. Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Bacon Toffee?

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

Let me say right now that bacon toffee is not some new Derrick weirdness. Toponia Miller, co-owner of Fatted Calf, thinks it dates back at least to the 1970s. If that's true, we food lovers need to rescue this retro snack from oblivion. We've repopulated heritage turkeys and polished the passé from fondue; we can bring this candy back from the brink.

We can and we should. The unusual combination contrasts butterscotch sweetness with smoky saltiness and chewy texture with tooth-shattering caramel. It is a piece of heaven.

If you read The Ethicurean, you probably saw Bonnie's rhapsodic post about this same topic. Our convergence is no coincidence: She and I attended the same party. At an event overflowing with palate-popping delicacies, from paella-stuffed squid to olive-brine pickled eggs, the bacon toffee might have snagged more comments and satisfied lip-smacking than any other dish.

Doralice of Healdsburg's Cheese Shop, who brought the toffee but skedaddled before we descended on it, posted a full recipe in the comments on Bonnie's post. You could just follow that recipe, but where's the fun in that? I wanted to play with the idea and try to improve it. Toponia said that she once had a version with cayenne mixed in to the toffee, and it's not hard to spring from that flavoring to other spices such as pepper, allspice, or cloves.

But I had a different idea. Foreign Cinema offers a brunch item of bacon cooked in brown sugar, and the combination inspired me to swap brown sugar for white in the toffee recipe. I hoped the molasses in the brown sugar would add complexity to the candy.

And if I could change the sugar, why not fiddle with the fat? Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking explains that the milk solids in the butter provide the toffee taste, but the fat controls the texture. I interpreted that to mean that you can change one fat for another, but you sacrifice some of the typical flavor. I decided that 1Tb bacon grease mixed in with 7 Tb of butter would carry a subtle porky quality throughout the candy, not just in the bacon bits.

The results were not as dramatic as I expected. Melissa preferred the normal recipe to my pimped-out version because the light toffee and dark bacon made a sharper contrast to the eyes and tongue. My darker toffee had a more homogenous earthy flavor.

When she suggested that I add the brown sugar at the end, as a mix-in, I realized that I had used the brown sugar for the molasses character, and I could cut out the middle man by squirting molasses over the top of the sticky mass after I poured it onto the Silpat. This did add a subtle smokiness and the bacon-toffee contrast remained intact. Our friend meriko suggested crisping the bacon in brown sugar and adding that combination to the toffee, a variant I'll try soon.

I don't know what I would serve with this candy. A good stout came to mind, but I wonder if a Tokaji Aszú or Madeira would work, if you wanted to stay with wine.

Basic Toffee Technique (should scale well)
I use the proportions I learned in a candy-making class, but any good toffee recipe will work. And that sticky pot may look impossible to clean, so here's a tip: Fill the pot with water, and boil it until the caramel is all melted.

Do your mise en place. For normal toffee, break up nuts or chocolate chunks. For bacon toffee, crisp 5 pieces of bacon, drain on a paper-towel-lined plate, and chop into small squares; put molasses into a squirt bottle. Line a baking sheet with a Silpat liner.

Combine 1 cup of sugar, 1/4 cup water, a pinch of salt, and 4 oz (1 stick) butter. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring often. You don't need to worry about in-the-pot crystallization, because the butter's fat will introduce flaws that prevent the quick-as-a-blink switch from liquid to solid that sneaks up on the casual sugar cook. Continue to stir until the mixture reaches a temperature of 285°. Take off heat, stir in mix-ins, and pour onto the lined baking sheet. Spread the mixture quickly until it's about 1/4 in. thick all around. Squirt molasses over top in a decorative pattern. Set aside to cool for 2 hours.

Fold a paper towel into quarters and place it on a part of the toffee blob. Rap lightly with a hammer. Repeat at other parts of the toffee. You should see cracks forming throughout the candy. Run a spatula under the candy, and it should break apart into shards. Store the fragments in an airtight container at room temperature.

Don't Cry For Me...

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

Because I shed plenty of tears of my own when I wrote about onions for my SFist column.

The Glace-A-Tron 6000

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

Our new ice cream maker has an official model number, the Cuisinart ICE-50BC. But I started calling it the Glace-A-Tron 6000 after I unwrapped the hulking, stainless-steel appliance, a birthday present from my mom. I first played with this semi-industrial ice cream machine at meriko's house, where we made two ice creams on Thanksgiving morning; she in turn bought it based on David's recommendation.

The Glace-A-Tron 6000 features an internal refrigerator unit that cools the quart-sized container in situ. You don't need ice or rock salt. You don't need freezer space to pre-chill your bucket. You don't need 24 hours to refreeze the bucket between batches of ice cream and sorbet. The next time we have a dinner party, I plan to make a Frozen Trio dessert of some form, just because I can.

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

The Glace-A-Tron 6000 is not the frozen dessert's answer to a bread machine, a one-button start-and-forget factory. You must still assemble the ice cream base on the stove top. You must still freeze the ice cream after you remove it from the Glace-A-Tron. Do you need to cool the base before you place it into the cold embrace of the Glace-A-Tron? I don't know. Melissa, bless her heart, has urged me to experiment. A lot. I might put sorbet into the refrigerator before churning it; the transition from very cold to frozen produces smaller crystals, and thus a smoother texture, than when you move from room temperature to frozen. But I made salted caramel ice cream—a near-repeat of the version that meriko and I assembled—by pouring 185° custard into the Glace-A-Tron, and it came out very well, though it took just over an hour to freeze to the right consistency. Perhaps the fatty custard staves off large ice crystals?

I have eyed these machines before, but I have told myself that I don't make enough ice cream to justify the cost. This is the wrong argument. Once you have a Glace-A-Tron, which is cheaper than similar machines, you start making enough ice cream to warrant the expense, because all you need is a whim and a bit of time on a weeknight evening. Melissa and I each have lists of flavors to try. (Melissa's includes pistachio and mint chip. Mine, butternut squash sorbet and olive oil ice cream.)

That freezer space for the ice cream bucket? I think we'll be filling it up soon—with actual ice cream.

Developing a Dish: Foie Gras Confit With Pickled Beets

"Be a little crazy and a lot daring." Jack and Joanne urged us guests to bring a new, untried dish to their holiday party. I took up the implicit challenge and thought about what I might bring to their gourmet feast. I turned over ideas on my walk to work, rejecting each for one reason or another.

Then my mental merry-go-round brought an old memory to the front. Three years ago I saw Alain Sailhac's "Confit of Whole Foie Gras" in Michael Ginor's Foie Gras: A Passion. At the time, I thought it above my skill level, but since then I've gained confit experience and the confidence to work with foie gras. A whole foie gras poached in duck fat struck me as both crazy and daring—at least for any guest trying to dodge a heart attack.

A week before the party, I cured the intact liver for 24 hours. As with any confit, you can add your favorite spices to the cure; I kept it simple with the Basic Dry Cure from Charcuterie, an 8:4:1 blend of kosher salt, sugar, and sodium nitrite. When I did a trial run—opting for the spirit of the invitation's law instead of the letter—the liver oxidized to an unappealing gray. The sodium nitrite added a reddish, meaty tint; it noticeably improved the look of the final dish.

I poached the liver in 2 pints of duck fat kept at 185° Fahrenheit. Seven minutes on one side and four minutes on the other. I told the other guests that you could count the dollars as the liver shrank, its fat becoming one with the cooking fat. I turned off the heat and let the fat drop to 160°, at which point I transferred the quivering liver to a plate and let the cooking fat cool to room temperature. Finally, I moved the liver to a small container—a terrine mold—and poured the liquid fat over it, covering it completely. Then I moved the terrine to the refrigerator, where the liver developed flavor for a week in its solid fat tomb.

I turned my attention to the "something extra" the dish needed. The rich fat in foie gras coats and deadens the palate; an acidic add-on refreshes the taste buds. I made fennel ceviche to pair with the first batch, but the thin arcs were too crunchy. The night before the party, I stumbled upon the pickled beets from Quick Pickles. Boil beets, peel, dice, and cover in a hot syrup of red wine vinegar, brown sugar, and spices.

On the drive up to Jack and Joanne's house, and as the party started, I let the confit come to room temperature. The recipe implies that you should serve the dish cold, but that gives you little but a solid chunk of fat. At room temperature, the foie gras hovers somewhere between liquid and solid, a trembling mass barely contained by its cellular structure. Also, at room temperature it's easier to remove the pure fat you poured over the liver, which can be greasy and unappealing if left clinging to the foie gras. I upended the terrine and poured the duck fat into a bowl.

I cut the confit into small squares, and placed each atop a baguette slice. On to each square of foie gras, I placed a single cube of pickled beet.

I worried that I had assembled too many of these little appetizers. But the guests pounced on the dish and finished off the bites almost before I had cleaned up the aftermath. Even I, my harshest critic, couldn't find any fault with the combination. The earthy sweetness of the beet paired with the meaty liver, and its acidity cut through the rich fat. If I made it one more time, I might lightly toast the thin baguette slices, but this would be a minor edit on an almost-perfect dish.