Cassoulet

We've been making Cassoulet since 1996 with various complicated French recipes, and even took a class at L'Academie de Cuisine. It's a great, rich, hearty, cold-weather bean and meat stew from southern France. We've even made a pilgrimage to Castelnaudry which claims to have invented the dish; indeed, the fields all around the town are planted with the white beans that comprise the base. Now we're not so fussy, especially after seeing L'Academie's chef-owner wasn't even following his own recipe. We always used to start with a 2-pound bag of white beans, but it makes a ton of rich stew; here, we're cutting back to 1 pound dried beans to start: it still makes 6-8 portions.

The basic idea is to cook the rehydrated beans in a rich, flavorful stock, then combine with garlic-y sausage and duck confit; some recipes have you layer them, others have you combine at service; it's OK to just combine when you're finishing in the oven.  Most recipes suggest adding breadcrumbs and fat while finishing in the oven and this gives a wonderfully crunchy crust.

We make duck confit with a simple sous vide technique; it's so easy there's no reason not to have this simple luxury.

Ingredients

• 1 pound Beans, dry, white, northern or flageolets (2 Cups)
• 4 Cup Stock
• 1/2 pound Bacon, slab
• 1 Carrot, cut into thirds
• 1 Onion, halved, stuck with the Clove
• 1 Clove
• 1 Bouquet Garni
• 1 Tbs Salt
• 2 piece Duck Confit (legs), prepared earlier
• 1 Sausage, garlic or lamb, cut into coins
• 2 Onions, finely chopped
• 3 clove Garlic, chopped
• 1 Tomatoes, peeled, seeded, chopped bean-size (or 2 Cups canned)
• 1/2 Cup Breadcrumbs
• 1/4 Cup Duck Fat from the Confit

Beans

Soak Beans in 3x amount of cold water for 12 hours. If after 6 hours water is cloudy, change it. Drain. Rinse the Beans and place in large heavy-bottomed pan. Cover with cold water and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Drain. Return Beans to the pot and add 4 Cups Stock. Add Salt, Bacon, Carrot, Clove-studded Onion, and Bouquet Garni. Bring to boil and simmer for about 1 hour, until beans are almost tender. Do not stir while cooking.

Meat and Veg

Meanwhile...

In saute pan, brown the Sausage; you can also brown the Duck, skin side down, or pull the skin and crisp it separately, adding the cooked Duck Confit in later. Season with salt and pepper and set aside. In the same pan, sweat the finely chopped Onions in butter until soft and translucent. Add the chopped garlic, tomatoes, and 1/2 C of the cooking liquid from beans. Cook covered for 5 minutes; if drying out, add some stock.

Assembly

When the beans are almost tender, remove Carrot, Onion, Bacon, Bouquet Garni; Beans should be still quite wet, lots of liquid remains; this is necessary. 

Add the Onion/Tomato mixture, Sausage, Duck meat pulled from the bones. 

Check the seasoning of the Beans; some cooking liquid should remain.

In a large oven-proof casserole, layer or simply combine the meats and beans with their liquid. Sprinkle with Breadcrumbs and pour 1/2 Cup Duck Fat over the crumbs. Bake covered at 325F for 2 hours. Uncover 20 minutes before done to brown the Breadcrumbs.

2012-02-26 Dry Beans

We didn't have hydrated or soaked beans so use a pressure cooker to expedite the cooking -- we wanted cassoulet tonight, dammit! We used 2 pounds dry Great Northern Beans (about 5 Cups), 15 Cups water, 6 Tbs Oil (to prevent foaming), and included Bacon Rind, Carrot, Onion. Pressure cooked at 15 PSI for 20 minutes, and the beans came out done -- done enough to eat, but a little too done for further cooking. Since our beans were wet and finished, we cut back from 8 Cup Stock to 5 Cups. We baked uncovered so we didn't cook any more than necessary. Here too we used duck confit made directly by sous vide method. Next time, for 2 pounds (5 cups), cut back to 12 cups water and 15 minutes pressure cooking.

Sous Vide Duck Leg Confit

We love duck leg confit but don't want to scavenge for a bucket of duck fat. We can instead cook it sous vide in a minimal amount of fat, and add salt and seasonings directly to the cooking bag. This makes it a no-brainer, without losing quality and taste.

Traditionally, duck legs are dry brined with a lot of salt and some spice in order to draw out the blood and firm up the flesh; it's then rinsed, dried, then submerged in duck fat and cooked low and slow, and finally left to cool completely covered in an anaerobic layer fat. This is a technique borne out of the necessity to preserve the meat before refrigeration.

Since fridge-free preservation is not our concern, we don't need to draw off the blood that would spoil in the bucket o' fat. We'll just add a reduced amount of salt and spices to our vacuum bag with the legs directly. We can leave it that way in the fridge to let the seasoning penetrate a bit before cooking sous vide, but that my not be necessary -- the long cooking time should be enough. When cooked, we'll pour off the juices and fat, and separate, then save the jelled juice separate from the fat: both have plenty of uses.

We'll cook in the skin which should render some fat. If we're serving this directly, we'd then sear in a screaming hot pan, skin side down to crisp up. For cassoulet, we'd pull off the flesh and then crisp the skin separately to use as a crouton-like topping.

Various recipes suggest anywhere from 75-82C temperatures, for 8-24 hours. We'll go with 80C for 12 hours, since we're targeting meat for cassoulet; we'd probably do 8 hours for a leg we'd sear and serve by itself.

2 whole Duck Legs, skin on
1 Tbs Kosher Salt
2 tsp Pepper Corns
1 Bay Leaf
2 clove Garlic, minced
3 springs Thyme
2 Tbs Duck Fat (from previous adventures; pork, bacon, butter, or oil are OK in a pinch)

Sprinkle the legs with the salt.
Grind/chop the dry spices and dust the legs, sprinkle on the garlic.

Add the duck, spices, garlic and a couple tablespoons of duck fat to the vacuum bags and seal.
Let sit overnight in the fridge for flavors to penetrate.

Cook sous vide at 80C/176F for 8-12 hours.
If you're serving this soon, pour off the fat and liquid and separate, and save; then finish the duck as you like (e.g., sear the skin on ripping hot cast iron).
If you're saving this for later, drop the bags in an ice bath to chill, then store in the freezer until desired.

Christmas 2015 Capon Stuffed with Duck, Sausage, Cherries

After watching Jacques Pepin's video of deboning a chicken ("it should take no more than one minute", hah!) we knew we wanted to do a ballotine -- a bird stuffed in a bigger bird. So for Xmas 2015, we asked M&P to pick up a capon (a castrated chicken, a very large bird) and a duck. We deboned the capon per Pepin's technique, and did likewise for the duck even though we didn't need to.

The deboning took at least 2 hours as the muscles and tendons of capons and ducks were much more developed than chickens, but we were practicing our technique. We separated the meat from the duck skin, and cooked up a log of pork sausage for the center. We laid out the sausage and duck meat on the opened deboned capon, then sprinkled with dried cherries.

We then rolled it up tight, ensuring the skin covered as much as we could, trussed it up tight and let it rest uncovered in the fridge overnight to ensure the skin was thoroughly dry to improve crispness.

The next day, we put it on an open rack over a shallow pan; it started breast side down since the white meat would tolerate less heat. We cooked it as low as the oven would go -- 170F; we were hoping to achieve an effect like we'd get with sous vide cooking: evenly cooked all the way through, avoiding drying out the exterior before the dense dark-meat ducky interior was thoroughly cooked. We had a temperature probe embedded in the center and watched it rise about 10F every half hour, and -- sure enough -- it rose from fridge temperature (maybe 35F) at noon to our target of about 165F at the designated dinner time of 6:00PM.

A blast under the broiler gave it a beautiful burnished look.

Then we cut off the strings and carved it for serving. Since it was cooked long and low (like sous vide) there was no need to rest it like conventional cooking. The meat held together well (even without transglutaminase, aka "meat glue") and maintained its shape.

Ed, Marge, Scott, Irene, Pat and I enjoyed it with roasted potatoes and green beans, and a gravy Irene elaborated from a stock she made from the bones. 

One disappointment we didn't expect was that capon skin is much thicker than chicken, so although it browned attractively, it was much too tough to chew through. This is definitely something we'd do again but I think we need a more domesticated bird to get the crisp skin.

Daily Dinner #2

Shannon challenged us to post our regular, day-to-day dinners. We'll try and do them in weekly batches. 

This week was a bit unusual as we had colleagues staying with us to work on a big software project, so we went out more than we normally would. 

2015-07-19 Sunday

We brined an Amish chicken from the market in a 3% solution (e.g., 1 Liter water to 30 g kosher salt) overnight. The brine keeps it moist, seasons it, and the breast bones keep the heat from drying out the meat. We cut out the spine so we can "spatchcock" it, allowing us to lay it flat over the coals. We also remove the wing tips for stock, and reserve the wings and drummettes to make Buffalo style chicken wings sometime in the future. 

We took the brined chicken out the next day, drained it, then let it sit in the fridge to dry out the skin a bit. I painted it with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and paprika, and repeated this once on the fire. 

Cook it skin side up, breast bones down, until done all the way through. The dark meat gets a bit closer to the heat, the white meat is well protected, so they get done to the right temperatures about the same time; you want the dark meat cooked to a higher temperature than the white meat. When cooked through, I turned it upside down to crisp up the skin a bit.  In the background, we have some garden cherry tomatoes heating through.

Once off the grill, we divide the chicken up into the constituent pieces: separate the legs from the breasts and divide into drumstick and thigh; cut the breast down the center, then divide into front and back portions. 

We served the chicken on a bed of arugula, radicchio, sorrel and oak leaf lettuce that's coming into its own in the garden. 

Irene made a potato salad from new potatoes we picked up at the farmers market, dressed with mayonnaise liberated from various lunch counters, capers, horseradish, vinegar, oil, chives, spring onions, and mint from the garden.

This turned out very well, the brine allowed us some leeway in our cooking, but kept it moist and flavorful. I couldn't get as much crunch as I'd like in the skin, I think I let the coals die down too much. 

The wine was from Chateau Costco, a Marlborough sauvignon blanc that was quite decent for the price. The blue glasses have fizzy water we make, adding a bit of epsom salts to our tap water to get a mineral profile similar to that of Apollinaris, then force carbonate with gear I used to use for homebrewing.

2015-07-20 Monday

Irene was cooking crawfish and grits so Chris decided to do a New Orleans cocktail, the classic Sazerac. We went old school, with brandy instead of the modern rye, and used pre-post-prohibition Absinthe we brought from Spain (the real spirit containing wormwood was illegal in most countries, including the U.S. at the time, the modern stuff eschews wormwood), and Peychaud's bitters from New Orleans, muddled with a sugar cube.  It has the class of a Manhattan but a bit sweeter, with the distinctive Absinthe aroma. A great cocktail! 

Sauté the onions and garlic with thyme, add garden tomatillos, cook down to release a bit of liquid.

Then add crayfish/crawdads/mudbugs and cook through. Season with some vinegar-based hot sauce to taste. 

We served it with leftover grits, plumped with the corn we got from the farmers market this weekend.

I get a kick out of a nicely laid-out table, including old-school napkin presentation. 

2015-07-21 Tuesday

Hot days call for a Caipirinha, the Brazilian cocktail featuring Cachaça; I prefer the assertiveness of Pitu brand over the dainty smooth ones. We're a bit heavy-handed and use 3 ounces Cachaça, two tablespoons of Sugar, and one lime per person.  

Muddle limes with sugar to extract flavor from the skins, add the booze, shake on ice, strain, serve. 

We made some chorizo from pork loin we'd cold smoked. The smell and taste were great but the lean meat didn't have quite the right texture. We cooked 'em up with new potatoes, leveraging the fat that came off the sausages.

We served these with roma beans from the garden, steamed then sautéed with a bit of the fat left in the skillet.

2015-07-22 Wednesday

We don't go to Cowboy Cafe every Wednesday for 50-cent wings, but we've got geeks over to sprint on a big software project, so beer and wings seemed like just the right thing for a late dinner. These are the Edgar-style wings, with a great crusty exterior.

 Don't forget to eat your vegetables.

2015-07-24 Thursday

Irene picked up some quality ribeye steaks from Costco while the geeks toiled in the basement. While we were prepping dinner, I made a variation on a Manhattan with Temtation bourbon, Vya Vermouth (flavorful, full-bodied, from California), and a homemade maraschino-style cherry. 

Irene built a big fire (hardwood charcoal, of course). We dropped the grates as low as we could to get an intense sear, and when they were nearly done, moved them well off the heat to rest before cutting them up.

We also grilled up some garden zucchini and bush beans, mushrooms, and grilled some of my bread.

Left to right, Charles, Earl, Reed, and Irene, finally getting dinner at 10pm.

2015-07-24 Friday

The gang's still here, hacking code til late, so we ran out to the Lebanese Tavern. It was a really pleasant night so we were able to sit outside.  We started with some interesting cocktails (Beirut Mule, with Arak instead of Vodka), with some freshly made and delicious pita.  Entres were rare lamb, well roasted lamb, and roasted chicken. I stupidly forgot to take pictures, the rare lamb was gorgeous. Roasted lamb, from a Yelp posting:

We then stayed up way too late drinking through a bunch nice booze: Temptation bourbon and Redemption rye, smooth Jura and smoky Bowmore single malt whisky.

2015-07-25 Saturday

We continued to work straight through dinner time, then went out to Janet's rooftop party on Capitol Hill. Irene made phyllo pastry stuffed with arugula pesto -- crunchy and rich from the butter and filling. Below, they're chilling before baking.

It was a perfect night, with killer views. The U.S. Capitol's undergoing renovation and the scaffolding makes it look pixelated, like it's built from legos.