Grapefruit Rosemary Sorbet

This unusual flavor pairing works well and is a great way to end a meal. You can use a little rosemary for a subtle accent, but it's a fun slap-in-the-face if you use a lot.

The proportions for the grapefruit sorbet were found on the net, copied from Harold McGee's book The Curious Cook. The addition of salt as a flavor enhancer comes from Shirley Corriher's book CookWise.

Our ice cream maker is a cheap but effective model by Deni (it wasn't nearly that $60 when we bought it), with a chilled tub that's spun by a motor that holds the dasher. There are other makes and models for less, and for more.

125 ml    Water
215 g     Sugar
1   pinch Salt

1-4 sprig Rosemary, leaves pulled from stem
          Zest from Grapefruit, optional (microplane 1 grapefruit)

250 ml    Grapefruit Juice, fresh squeezed, sieved to remove pulp

Add Water, Sugar, Salt, Rosemary leaves and Zest to a pot.
Heat and stir until sugar is dissolved.
Cover and let steep on very low heat (or none) to infuse Rosemary, about 15 minutes.
Strain rosemary syrup into Grapefruit Juice;
you should have about 2 cups liquid.
Chill in freezer for an hour or fridge overnight to chill well.
Add to ice cream maker and process per instructions;
on ours, we let it spin about 20 minutes.
Scoop out the sorbet into containers, cover, and freeze hard over night.

If the Sorbet is a bit crunchy, like granita, next time back out the water or simmer the syrup a bit to drive off some of the water: it'll will become more dense and creamy in texture.

In the photo, We added a dollop of the sorbet to a sweet dessert wine, unconventional but very good.

Dessert wine with grapefruit-rosemary sorbet

Cranberry Sauce

This tasty, easy cranberry sauce is based on Cooks Illustrated from November/December 1999. We've been making this for years, it's simple, intensely flavored, not too sweet. The orange zest and liqueur are welcome additions. You can easily double this recipe.

340 g   12 oz   Cranberries

215 g    1 cup  Sugar

180 ml 3/4 cup  Water

pinch  1/4 tsp  Salt

                Orange Zest (microplane one orange)

 30 ml   2 Tbs  Orange Liqueur (Triple Sec, Grand Marnier, etc)

Add the Cranberries, Sugar, Orange Zest, Salt, and Water to a pan.

Just add the ingredients (except Liqueur) and bring to boil

Bring to a boil to dissolve the sugar. Initially it will foam up, berries start bursting violently. Then it settles down as the pectin bursts from the berries

Simmer about 10 minutes until most of the Cranberries have popped open.

Let cool a bit, off heat, then add Orange Liqueur.

Spoon into serving dishes like ramekins and let setup to firm.

Redneck Roulade: hotdog farce

We were on a roll (hah!) with our ballotines and roulades, and had some extra chicken breast. For fun, we decided to do a "Redneck Roulade" -- a chicken breast stuffed not with a farce, but a simple hotdog.

It may look like a pig in a blanket, but it's a chicken blanket

We split one leftover breast with a butterfly cut, then pounded each half between cling film so they'd each accommodate a hotdog -- a Nathan's Jumbo restaurant style to be precise.

Breast butterflied and pounded to enclose the dog

We added a bit of mustard figuring it's a typical condiment for a dog, and not too uncommon in chicken preparations. We laid the breast and dog on the skin which we'd carefully saved from boning out chickens, then wrapped them tightly in a couple layers of cling film to give them shape.

Season with mustard, wrap everything with chicken skin

Shaped with cling film before bagging for sous vide

An hour in the sous vide bath between 60C and 70C cooked them through, and we chilled them in an ice bath and kept 'em in the fridge until we wanted them for dinner.

They came out of the sous vide bag is fine shape, chicken flesh firmed up around the dog as we'd hoped.  We trussed them in classic style with butcher's twine to keep the skin in close contact with the flesh, in hopes of preventing it from shrinking or separating.

Classic trussing, serious overkill

We browned them in a bit of chicken fat in a skillet, then served them with roasted winter veggies. Since they were already cooked we just needed to heat them through for serving and try and get some crispness in the skin.

Brown the skin, but don't overcook the chicken breast

As in our previous adventures, the sous vide technique kept the chicken moist and tender, definitely a good technique for such dry and mild-flavored meat. The skin didn't get nearly as crispy as we'd like, but that's been a problem in our last roulade/ballotine adventures too, whether we used a broiler or Searzall blowtorch.

Served with the trussing, like a package to unwrap

Chicken ballotine with dark meat

It's not unusual to bone-out a chicken and stuff it, truss it up, then cook it. The problem is that -- like turkey -- the white meat (breast) dries out before the dark meat cooks sufficiently. To solve this problem, we removed the breast meat and replace it with extra thigh meat, then ground the white meat with seasonings and use that stuffing in the center so it was protected from the heat by the rest of the bird's dark meat.

Chicken stuffed with dark meat and ground, seasoned white meat

Procedure

We made two stuffed chickens but only served one; quantities here are per bird. Bone out a whole chicken being careful to keep the skin in tact. We followed Jacque Pepin's fantastic technique shown on Youtube. It took us longer than the "less than a minute" he says it should take, but we haven't worked as line cooks for 30 years.

Boned out using Pepin's technique

We then carefully removed the breast meat, leaving the skin in tact.  We boned and skinned 2 thighs, and pounded them to make them a bit more even, and put them where the breast meat had been. 

Boned-out, breast meat removed

Use 2 boned, skinned, pounded thighs per boneless chicken

Dark thigh meat replaces white breast meat, protects the stuffing

We took some "Surryano" ham that was quite dry and ground it fine in a food processor, added 1 of the breasts, the tenders, and some shallots and garlic cooked in duck fat, fresh rosemary and processed to a paste, somewhat like a lumpy pate. We pushed that into where the bones had been in the legs and wings, and put the rest in the center on top of the thigh meat.

Ground white meat, Surryano, allium stuffing in center

We rolled it up, overlapping the skin just a bit then tied a few pieces of butcher's twine around to hold it in place.  The shape was a little awkward and the assembled ballotine a bit floppy, so I wrapped tightly in cling film to give it a dense sausage shape.  

Spineless and floppy ballotines (two chicks, we served only one)

Two compact ballotines, 1 stuffed chick each, ready for cooking

We put this into a sous vide bag and started cooking in a 60C bath, the ideal temperature for the white meat, but too low for the dark. After an hour, when the center should just about reach the 60C target, we turned up the heat to 70C so that the external layer of dark meat would get cooked sufficiently, but the temperature gradient should keep the interior at the desired cooler temperature; it cooked for another hour.

Finished cooking, a little tasty jus escaped but kept in the bag

When done, we torched it with a Searzall to brown and crisp the skin, cut into slices, and arranged on a platter. We drizzled the small amount of juices that came out in the bag onto the slices.

Torch to brown and crisp

The chicken, both dark and light, came out beautifully cooked. The roll held together pretty well, though not perfectly: thinner slices tended to want to separate at the boundaries between the different layers of meat. It was juicy and tender, not remotely dry or stringy. 

Despite the crazy heat of the Searzall, we didn't get a deeply crackly skin. Perhaps I needed to dry it out more before torching it, but this was better than the much longer time our previous trial run spent under the broiler.

This was served with a friend's excellent focaccia bread, roasted winter veggies, a bright salad, and ended with a grapefruit-rosemary sorbet.

Chicken breast roulade

We're testing techniques for making a porchetta-like chicken and came up with this chicken breast stuffed with chicken for dinner. It turned out reasonably well but there's room for improvement.

Self-stuffed chicken with roasted potatoes and farmers market beans

Procedure

I deboned a chicken, removed the skin from the breast, and butterflied the breast to give myself a wider area to stuff. I then pounded it between sheets of cling film to a roughly square shape, and then trimmed all the rough bits.

We had some "Surryano" ham which is quite dry but intensely flavored and processed it to crumbs, then added some cloves of garlic, a shallot, and fresh sage. I then added the trimmings and some other white meat from deboning the chicken and processed to a coarse paté-like paste.

I laid this stuffing down the center of the expanded breast, rolled it up, wrapped the skin around, and trussed with butcher's twine it to form a cylinder.  I then wrapped it tightly in cling film and rolled to make a tight cylinder and put it into a sous vide bag and vacuumed it.

The next day, we cooked it sous vide for 2 hours at 60C, removed it, then threw it under the broiler to crisp the skin.

Results

Irene said it was dry but I didn't, or maybe just a tad. The garlic and sage were quite pronounced, too much so.  Broiling took longer than expected and might have dried out the flesh a bit.

What did we learn?

For chicken breast, I could drop the temperature a couple degrees.

The ground stuffing had a good consistency, we didn't need to use a meat grinder. Happily, it held together well and bonded to the outer meat pretty well.

The alliums need to be cooked before adding to the stuffing ingredients -- the taste was too raw.  Back-out the sage.

Changes for the polletta

The "polletta" (or is it "chicketta"?) will be dark meat on the outside, so we'll have to bump up the temperature a bit.  Since we don't want to overcook the white-meat stuffing, we could cook it near the same 60C, then crank it up a bit for the final period to cook the external dark meat a bit higher, but (hopefully) use the temperature gradient to prevent the increased heat getting to the white-meat stuffing.

The alliums will be cooked, and we can use some rendered chicken or duck fat to add moisture to the stuffing.

The polletta will be a deboned chicken, whole, so won't roll into a neat sausage-shape.  That will prevent it from broiling evenly so we can use the Searzall to blast it after it comes out of its bath.