Technique: Chicken Rillettes

I often buy a whole chicken for a week’s worth of dinners. The first two meals are easy: something with the legs and then something with the breasts. But what about the wings?

There’s not much meat on them; certainly not enough for a main course. In the past, I’ve picked the meager flesh from the bones and added it to omelettes or soufflés, dishes where you don’t want a big hunk of meat with rich eggs. But for a few recent chickens, I’ve made the wings into rillettes, a spread of shredded meat and fat.

I think I got the idea after making rabbit rillettes from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. While many books suggest treating rabbit rillettes just like pork rillettes — cook the meat slowly in fat — Rodgers takes a more complicated route that gives the delicate meat a chance to shine: Poach in water with mirepoix and white wine, add a pig’s foot for body, pound in a mortar and pestle, and dribble in fat in tiny amounts.

What had worked so well for rabbit might also work well with chicken, I thought. I modified the recipe — I don’t have pigs’ feet in my freezer on a regular basis, no matter what you think — but the results were still delicious, and the dish has been a recurring favorite.

Except I make them in an ad hoc way. You could argue that Rodgers’ recipe has little in common with my technique, but they share key kinships.

First, salt the wings. Sprinkle a handful of kosher salt onto a plate, press the wings (both sides) into the salt and set them on a dish in the refrigerator for 24 hours or so. The first time I made the dish, I tried to skin the wings: I urge you not to do this; it is time-consuming and ineffective.

The next day, poach the wings in a stick of butter and just enough water to cover them. (If you want to add a little dry white wine or white wine vinegar, please do. If you want to add spices and aromatics, please do.) Cook them at barely a simmer until the meat falls off the bone with even the glancing blow of a fork, about an hour to an hour and a half. Pull the wings from the liquid and let them cool briefly, and remove the liquid from the heat. Using your fingers, strip the bones of the meat and skin and put them into a mortar. Pound the meat with the pestle until it begins to flatten. Now dribble in a tiny bit of the fat from the pot — it will have risen to the top. Pound the meat some more. Dribble in a little more fat, and continue to pound. I probably add two or three teaspoons of fat over five or six doses. You want a spreadable paste of shredded meat, but you also want the flavor front and center: Too much fat will mute it. Season with pepper, smush into a ramekin, cover, and refrigerate. If you won’t use the rillettes that day, you can let the fat continue to cool and then spoon it over the rillettes to seal them in.

Then what? I smear rillettes onto bread or put it into dumplings. Two chicken wings do not yield a lot of rillettes, but two people can get a decent dinner out of them. The other night for a potluck, I smeared a dollop of rillettes and butter onto baguette slices and topped the smear with sliced radishes to make 18 bites of finger food. The rillettes added flavor, while the butter added richness and volume.

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.

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.

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.

Potluck Recipes: The Bean Dish

In my mental recipe file, I have a section labeled "potluck recipes." The imaginary index cards hold dishes that don't cost much to make, come together easily, and scale well. Usually they can be served at room temperature, so that I don't have to fight for the one reheating option in the room.

My latest addition is a bean dip of sorts. Not puréed refried beans but whole beans cooked and mixed with a variety of flavors. The dish was inspired by a recipe in Mediterranean Street Food, though I've never made the original: cannellini beans stewed with saffron, onions, and parsley.

But it's an easy dish to modify. Soak good dried beans in water for two hours. Drain, cover with an inch of water, add half a stick of butter and any other seasoning, and simmer uncovered for 30 minutes. Add diced onions—about half the volume of the beans—and more delicate spices. Simmer for half an hour more until the beans are tender. If you have too much liquid, drain the beans, capturing the liquid in a bowl, and moisten the beans until they seem right to you. If they're too dry, add more water. Season the liquid to taste.

Serve with pita bread triangles. You don't have to make the pita yourself.

It won't take you long to think of the obvious addition: pork. I add cubes of smoked sausage when I start to cook the beans. A tomato component works well: Once I used slivered sun-dried tomatoes, and another time I used homemade tomato paste. Add whatever seasonings you'd like. A bouquet garni, peppercorns, whatever. Swap out different beans. No matter what, your fellow diners will consider the pot lucky indeed.

A Lotta Frittata

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

My father and mother, who shared cooking duty in our home, influenced my cooking style in different ways. From my mother, I acquired a love of the elegant: tarts, soups with swirls of crème fraîche, and planned platings. From my father, I acquired a taste for improvisation, ingredients and techniques sifting though my head like pachinko balls and producing something better than I expect. Each of them could work in the other's style, but my parents, in my memory, gravitated toward those differences.

So perhaps it's appropriate that I had to improvise a dish for my father's 60th birthday, the Monday of a weekend-long family celebration. He had rented a house in Cayucos, a small coastal town near Hearst Castle, and a week before Melissa and I drove down Highway 101, he called and asked if I'd make breakfast for the 12 celebrants.

I steered towards a frittata, a flat omelette that's baked in the oven and not on the stove top. I don't know that anyone would label my inch-thick sheet of fluffy, cooked eggs a frittata, but my family loved it and asked for the recipe. Of course there isn't one; I made up the dish on the spot. But I based it on techniques that I've used dozens of times. You probably have, too.

I cut two large onions in half through the poles, peeled the hemispheres, and sliced them into longitudinal arcs, from edge to center. I melted most of a stick of butter in a pan, and added the onion curves, reducing the heat to very low. I let the onions wilt, but not caramelize, while I worked on the rest of the dish, about 30 minutes.

I sliced my ham, a Fatted Calf petit jambon, into thick pieces and heated some oil in a pan. I crisped the thick ham slices, two at a time, and sliced them horizontally and vertically into rough squares. (If you're not using a beat-up nonstick pan in a rental house, be sure to degrease and deglaze the pan with white wine, letting it reduce to a syrup and adding that to the eggs as well).

Finally, I whisked 24 eggs and added a splash of milk, a few pinches of salt, the ham squares, the onion arcs, and 3/4 pound "Swiss cheese," one of three options at the Cayucos market, a glorified convenience store. I buttered a 9" x 13" baking pan, the only item we could find that would hold the mixture, and put it in the oven. I could tell you that I cooked it at 350° but that was more of a starting point. I increased the temperature a little more each time I checked the "frittata," ending at 425° about 40 minutes after I put it in. I took the pan out when the egg mixture was solid around the edges but still jiggly, not sloshy, in the center. Just as you do for any egg dish.

The result was a pillowy brunch item that we served with sausage and a simple fruit salad. I worried that I had made too much, but my teenage cousins—and their younger sister, a burgeoning gourmet—polished off the last few pieces.

Wine Notes
As soon as we finished brunch, we all set out for three hours of driving. But if I had served wine, I would have chosen a sparkling wine made in the Champagne style. We were celebrating, after all, and the bubbles add body that can stand up to the richness of the eggs, while the acidity cuts through the tongue-coating fat. The dish has similarities to Quiche Lorraine, and the regional pairing of Alsace Riesling or Pinot Blanc would also provide good acidity to contrast the rich egg and salty meat.

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.

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.