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.

Octopus sous vide and grilled

We've had some excellent octopus at Dino's and Zaytinya in DC -- tender and charred. When we enquired, both said they were first slow cooked, then charred over open flame; Dino said he then sautés his quickly for service. We wanted to replicate that at home and figured sous vide would be the way to cook until tender, and the barbecue would give it a good char.

We found 1.160 Kg (2.5 Lb) frozen Spanish octopus for $10/pound at Mediterrafish. We defrosted it overnight, then cut off the legs and head (already cleaned), tossing the middle containing beak and eyes.

We bagged it with some frozen olive oil, then chilled in the freezer an hour before vacuum sealing to prevent sucking out all the water.

Typical tenderization methods include smashing the octopus on rocks, beating with a mallet or even a daikon. Cooking techniques usually are to bake in a covered pot (to collect liquid and self-braise) at a very low temperature for a long time, or to boil (with the old wives tale addition of a wine cork, debunked by Harold McGee).  Boiling would lose any liquid that would be released from the octopus, so we used sous vide to keep the beast immersed in its own liquid while slowly cooking at a low temperature.

Different folks seem to sous vide octopus for 3-8 hours between 74-83c (165-180F), some reporting chewiness at lower times and temperatures. We went with 75c (167F) for 5 hours.

We'd read that octopus releases a lot of liquid when it cooks, and it sure did. Our long fat legs seemed to lose half their length and girth, and the vacuum bag was full of a reddish liquid.  We let the bag cool slowly on the counter in hopes the legs might reabsorb some of the liquid, before chilling overnight in the fridge.

The next night, we drained the liquid and weighed the octopus: 315 g.  We'd ended up with 27% of the weight we'd started out with -- that jacks up the price for the meal quite a bit!  What we figured might feed four or more would not be barely enough for two for dinner.  We strained the liquid and will make risotto from it: at least it's not going to waste.

At the barbecue, we brushed the legs and head with olive oil and dusted generously with pimenton, like a pulpo a la gallega presentation. I used skewers to keep the octopus parts from falling through the grates, and grilled for a few minutes a side.

What worked, what didn't

The octopus turned out tender enough, with a slight mucilaginous-ness which may be due to not rinsing off loose skin after cooking.  We didn't get the crisp char we wanted at all, and the octopus stuck a bit to the grill: these may be connected, as I didn't scrub and oil the grates.

The skewers worked well at holding things together and removing them to plates quickly.

It's also disappointing that $25 worth of octopus barely fed two people. I'll look around the Asian markets, and our local Brazilian/Portuguese store says they carry it.

Next Time

If I could determine a way to reduce loss to liquid I would, even if I sacrificed a bit of tenderness.

Thoroughly rinse off the loose skin after cooking so we don't have any mushiness on the outside.

Get the coals really hot and close to the grill grates, then clean and oil them before adding the octopus. Use the skewers for cooking again.

Mahi Mahi al Pil Pil

I think we may have broken new ground here: the classic Basque Pil Pil sauce is always made with bacalao -- salt cod. We repeated the modern poaching-in-olive-oil technique that we used recently, but this time for mahi mahi. It rendered a lower quantity of the gelatin required to make this wonderful emulsified sauce than bacalao, but it was plenty to sauce the fish: like bacalao, the fish -- along with good olive oil -- produced its own hollandaise/mayonnaise-like sauce, super rich. In tonight's experiment, we also tried a sea trout because it had a thick subcutaneous layer of fat, but it didn't render the gelatin like bacalao does, so it could not make its own sauce.

Mahi Mahi and Sea Trout with Pil Pil sauce, shishito peppers, potatoes

We reasoned that a cold-water fish with a layer of fat would work like cod, from which bacalao is made, so we got sea trout (150g); it looks very much like salmon.  We also wanted to try a warm-water fish like we find when we visit Florida, so we got mahi mahi (270g). The quantities don't really matter here, the technique does.

We put each fish in its own small pan, skin side up (the skin sticks if it's touching the bottom), and covered with tasty extra virgin oil; we added a couple cloves of garlic to each. Heat up each to poach the fish, and hopefully release some precious gelatin which will act as an emulsifier.  Keep the oil well below boiling of water so you don't evaporate off any rendered gelatin. The trout released no gelatin, but the mahi mahi seemed to release a little.  The oil was about 90C/194F.

We pulled the trout out after about 15 minutes, but the mahi mahi is a more dense fish so we left it for about 30 minutes. Our theory is that the gelatin comes from just under the skin, so we pulled off the skin and added it back to the hot oil to cook another 10 minutes. We strained the oil into a measuring cup and let it settle, and after another 10 minutes or so were delighted to see oil on top and something that looked like heavier, water-based gelatin on the bottom. I separated most of the oil off and poured the gelatin portion into a tall narrow glass to separate further.

Oil on the top, gelatin on the bottom

I slurped the bottom layer of what we optimistically assumed was gelatin with a turkey baster and transferred it into a cool skillet. I then whipped this a few minutes with a fine mesh strainer to beat air into it and was very happy to see a foam form, the precursor to an emulsion. I added some of the now-cooled oil little by little to establish the emulsified sauce.

Whipping the gelatin until a white foam is established

It seemed more thin than the bacalao-based emulsion but I kept adding oil and it built up nicely. I had the heat on as low as it can go on my cooktop, but I'm not sure I needed any heat at all -- I think too much heat would cause the sauce to break.

Add the fishy oil little by little at first, more aggressively when the sauce is established

Once well-established I could add more oil with impunity. This 19 second video should show the sauce coming together.

The sauce was rich with olive oil flavor, a fine quality oil pays off here since it's really the only ingredient.   It wasn't seasoned with anything, so when we plated, we added some salt and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice.

What did we learn?

I've not seen recipes for pil pil using anything than bacalao. There are "shrimp pil pil" or "gambas al pil pil" but these are really shrimp in oil with garlic and hot chili pepper: "gambas al ajillo" and not an emulsified sauce at all.

Bacalao isn't the only fish from which gelatin can be extracted to use as an emulsifier for pil pil sauce. but not all fish will release gelatin. We have no idea which will and which won't, but mahi mahi definitely will. 

Next Steps

We'd like to repeat the experiment with the easier-to-find dried bacalao, the kind that's as hard as a sheet of plywood, and encrusted in salt. This is the classic form, and has to be hydrated with fresh water for a couple days. It has skin, and usually has bones which we're hope will be easy to remove once poached.  This is the baseline that all other work should really start from, and we're quite certain that will work fine.

Can we cook the bacalao with a minimum amount of olive oil using a sous vide technique? Use only the amount of oil you'd need for the sauce, maybe 200 ml, not the pots full we need for poaching. Freeze the olive oil solid (so it doesn't squirt out) and place in a vacuum bag with the hydrated bacalao and a couple cloves of garlic. Cook at the same 90C/195F for 30 minutes or so and check for rendered gelatin.

If sous vide works, can we use a lower, fish-friendly temperature, e.g., 50C/125F instead of the 90C/195F we used today?  We could hold the fish almost indefinitely without fear of over cooking, as long as we need to render gelatin.

Can we get gelatin from skinless, boneless bacalao that's now showing up in regular gringo grocery stores? This would make it much more accessible.

Can we season the sauce as we're building the emulsion? Salt seems easy, since salt cod's full of it. Can we add some lemon juice or white wine, or would those denature the gelatin and ruin the sauce?

Is the garlic important? In old school Catalan and Provençal aioli, garlic is the emulsifier. It's a very difficult sauce to make as it's a weak emulsifier and it breaks in the blink of an eye. Once we've established above what works with garlic, does the quality suffer without the garlic?

Stuffed Squid with Pepper/Pimenton Sauce

I really enjoy squid: it's quick to prepare, and stuffing them takes 'em to another level. We threw this together with things we had around the house and it came out rich, earthy, and intensely flavored. No recipe this time, just improvising.

Irene cooked the tentacles then we ground them in a food processor with some salami for flavor, some sautéed onions for sweetness and liquid, and an egg to bind it all. We wanted a smooth stuffing about the consistency of a pate. We used a pastry bag to stuff each of the squid -- so much easier than trying to force-feed them with a spoon. Then I sealed them shut by running a toothpick through the opening of each sock-shaped squid. It's a little tedious but not horrible for a work-day dinner.

We had some oil I'd infused with half a barrel of mint leaves harvested from the garden: we'd had squid stuffed with mint once in Sorrento and found it a surprisingly harmonious combination. So we shallow fried the stuffed squid in the minty oil until done. The squid don't take long and the filling was cooked except for the egg so it didn't need much time. Some of the filling squeezed out of the squid as they shrank while cooking; it looked like a flavorful fond so I strained off the oil and crisped up the shards in the skillet a bit.

Irene had meanwhile cooked up a zesty sauce of roasted red peppers, sautéed onions and garlic, and a healthy dose of pimentón -- Spanish smoked paprika. When the pimentón hit the oil left from the sauté, it filled the kitchen with such a powerful aroma I almost got whiplash as I spun around to inhale the fragrance. Great stuff.  She whizzed this all together with a stick blender until mostly smooth, resulting in a sauce that's more rich and thick than a tomato sauce, and much more interesting.

She sauced the plates and I burned the tips of my fingers yanking the toothpicks out of the squid socks before nestling them in their sauce.  A generous garnishing with the crunchy bits brought a further intensity and new texture to round it out.

Fun meal, and definitely worth doing again, perhaps next time with ground, spiced, pork belly.

Bacalao al Pil Pil

Bacalao is salted, dried cod; pil pil is the amazing Basque sauce that is created by the addition of olive oil, which is whipped into a Hollandaise to Mayonnaise-like creamy texture.  In this post, I'll share a modernist technique we learned at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival's Basque food demonstrations: it's much more reliable than older procedures we've tried. This will be a fairly detailed post because I want you to be successful when you make it -- it was a revelation to us.

Background

I've written about my love for Bacalao elsewhere in this blog. While popular in the Nordic countries, Portugal and Italy, I've mostly had Spanish bacalao dishes -- specifically from Catalunya and the Basque country. It's got a firm texture and slight funk that I like.

But what I'm really excited about is the pil pil sauce, and how it's different from it's more famous emulsified cousins. What's cool about pil pil is that it needs no added emulsifier to make it thick and stable.

Emulsions

An "emulsion" is a mixture of two or more liquids that normally won't stay together as one. An oil and vinegar salad dressing is one example: it's unstable -- you have to shake it to get them to mix, and if you let it sit, the oil and vinegar will separate.

An "emulsifier" is an ingredient that will help the separable liquids combine in a stable way. In a Hollandaise sauce, the egg yolk keeps the water and fat in the butter together in a sauce. In Mayonnaise, egg yolk does the same for the oil, vinegar and lemon juice. In the Mediterranean, Aioli sauce uses just garlic as an emulsifier to make a sauce from of olive oil; this is a more difficult sauce to make as garlic has less emulsifying power than yolks. Less commonly, paprika can be used as an emulsifier. The food industry has developed plenty of concoctions used as emulsifiers.

In pil pil sauce, there is no egg yolk, no garlic, no other emulsifier. Everything needed to thicken the sauce comes from the fish itself -- pretty cool!  My understanding is that there are proteins between the skin and flesh of bacalao that act as emulsifiers when leached out as part of the cooking process: every recipe for pil pil I've seen says you must use skin-on bacalao, presumably for this reason.

Science vs. Grandmothers

Teresa Barrenechea's book, The Basque Table, describes the classic technique. After rehydrating and desalting the bacalao, it is simmered in water, then placed skin-side up in a earthenware casserole. A small amount of olive oil is added and the fish is swirled around in a circular motion through the oil until an emulsion forms. Oil is slowly added to the existing emulsion to build the sauce. As she says in the book, "Bacalao al pil pil is technically difficult to make, but not too hard for the home cook to master."

In my experience, it's exceptionally hard to get the emulsion to start; and there are many variables including the amount of heat to apply, whether to add a touch of water, when to add the oil, etc. We've left a lot of the clay from the bottom of our cazuela on our gas cooktop ring in the process of swirling for what seemed like an eternity. This technique, handed down from grandmother to grandmother, may be classic but there must be a better way -- we need to understand why the emulsion forms.

The Basque cooking demonstrations at the 2016 Smithsonian Folklife Festival finally revealed the secret: science!

Chefs Igor and Igor from Escuela Superior de Hosteleria Bilbao gave a great demonstration of this sauce.  After hydrating bacalao, they poached it skin-side up in olive oil for 10 minutes to cook it. They kept the temperature low so that they didn't boil off the precious juices that the cod exuded, which they called "gelatin"; I interpreted this to mean the liquid should never reach the boiling point of water. They also held the microphone to the pot and explained that the noise the small bubbles made was the origin of the name "pil pil"; there is some debate on this matter, but it seems as reasonable as any other explanation. They set the cooked cod aside and poured out the oil containing the gelatin and allowed it to settle out; they then separated the oil from the magical cod juice.

Chef Igor holds the separated cod gelatin with a layer of oil on the top. This is precious, "you can't buy it."

They then poured some of the white liquid into a pan on a very low heat and agitated it to start the emulsion by whipping some air into it. Instead of the grandmotherly technique using the fish itself, they used a small strainer, something that is great at whipping air into the liquid.  When the liquid started to set up a bit into a thicker consistency, they dribbled oil into it -- slowly at first then more rapidly once the sauce was well established. It worked beautifully.

Procedure

We got bacalao, skin on and without bones from a local Portuguese/Spanish shop. They have the dried bacalao but one kind had no skin and the other had bones; the skin-on boneless one was kept in the fridge, and had already been rehydrated so it was basically ready to use.  The 1.6 Kg was $28 so it's not cheap, but neither is fresh cod.

We defrosted it then put it in a pot, skin side up, and covered with good olive oil. We added some garlic cloves and a dried spicy chili, and set it on very low heat.

Because of the thickness of these cod loin sections, it required quite a bit of oil. We heated it very gently, ensuring the oil never came near the boiling point of water, which would evaporate the fish juice. Below, there are 4 cloves of garlic, but you can also see little globules of the gelatin coming out of the fish and falling to the bottom of the pot -- we knew we'd got it right at this point, science to the rescue!

Our cod loin was about 7cm/2.5in thick, about double that of the cuts the chefs used, so we cooked it 30 minutes to ensure the fish was thoroughly cooked through.  Fish is done when it's 50-54C/122-130F, so cooking it low is fine. We kept it below about 80C/182F and just watched in amazement as the fish continued to release more gelatin; check this 7-second video:

(In books, blogs and such we've read, chefs say that when fish exudes white protein it's just at the point of being overcooked. Brining, they say, helps prevent this.  We wonder if the "cod juice" we're obsessing over here is the very same protein liquid that others are trying desperately to prevent.)

We pulled the fish out of the oil and set it aside; it was cooked throughly enough that it threatened to break apart along the muscle fibers, perhaps a bit too long or hot.

We poured out the oil and liquid and let them separate, then extracted the gelatin; we weren't worried that it had some oil left on it -- the pil pil needs it.

We added all the cod gelatin to a pan that was barely heated -- again, we didn't want to evaporate the elixir.  We used a small, fine-mesh strainer to whip air into it. Miraculously, it started thickening a bit after just a couple minutes of agitation.

 

We drizzled a tiny bit of the fishy olive oil into the emerging sauce and watched it get absorbed and expand the sauce.

And then more oil, a little faster now:

Then more oil, without worrying much about how much we were adding:

It thickened to a Mayonnaise-like consistency. The color comes exclusively from the good olive oil we used, not eggs or other additives.

This may have been too thick for a classic pil pil, but it tasted intensely of olive oil -- including the slight cough-inducing bitterness -- and fish. A thick, stable sauce using only olive oil, in addition to liquid from the fish itself. Rather amazing.

We used some of the left over olive oil to poach baby potatoes, and sautéed home-grown shishito peppers with coarse salt and a bit more of the oil like we'd prepare Catalan Padrón peppers, and sliced and fried the cooked garlic cloves as a garnish.  There's quite a bit of thick pil pil sauce here:

It tasted intense, and worked miraculously -- no magic, no granny's secrets, just a great cooking technique.

What worked, what didn't

Poaching the cod in oil to extract the gelatin worked so much better than protracted pot-shaking. The strainer helped aerate the emerging emulsion.

The taste of the good oil really came through.

Our pil pil was probably too thick for the classic standard, more a Mayonnaise than a Hollandaise consistency.  We had used all the exuded cod gelatin, but probably could have used at most half, reserving the rest for our next adventure.

We had 2 cups olive oil left over. It's not going to waste, we can keep it from oxidizing by freezing it, and use it little by little.

Next Time...

We'd like to find a thinner cut of fish: it would require less oil to cover and cook more quickly.

Cook the fish less, ours was just barely holding together.

Use less cod gelatin, we'd like a less thick sauce and we'd like to use the extra fish juice to make pil pil for other dishes.

We could thin the sauce by adding a dash of lemon juice or white wine, but we wonder whether the ghosts of Basque grandmothers would haunt us to our graves.

Is it true that only bacalao can be used? That it has to be skin-on? In the pot, we saw bubbles of the liquid coming out of the core of the body of the fish, not just from under the skin; try it with:

• skin-on fresh cod.
• skinless cod, fresh or rehydrated bacalao
• skin-on sea trout which also has a thick layer of subcutaneous fat

Gray Pride

This cocktail's based on The Last Word, introduced to us by our "Beach Bartender, Bill" it was my favourite of his week of prohibition-era happy hour cocktails during our annual early summer week on the ocean.  It's equal parts Green Chartreuse, Luxardo Maraschino liqueur, lemon juice and gin. We'd run out of Luxardo, so cast around in the cocktail cabinet for something else sweet and perfumed as a substitute. The Crème de violette seemed like it would do the trick.

Instead of the light green color of The Last Word, or the purple sunset tones of the Aviation, this one came out a rather unusual, perhaps even unappealing shade of grey.  It tastes a lot like an Aviation, sweet and perfumed from the Crème de violette: smelling like your granny's dressing table or a roll of Parma violets.

Its name came to me on the spur of the moment, no doubt influenced by the fact we'd just attended our friends Aaron and Charles' wedding at the tail end of LGBT Pride month and of course it reflects my last name, handily compounding the pun.

For two cocktails:

2 ounces Green Chartreuse
2 ounces Crème de Violette
2 ounces Lemon Juice, fresh squeezed, strained
2 ounces Gin

Shake on ice, then pour into martini glasses.   garnish with a twist of lemon peel, extra points if it looks like one of the awareness ribbons that proliferate these days!

Given how pricey the Chartreuse is -- about double the cost of other amaros, $65/750ml or so -- we'll reserve that for The Last Word, which is fabulous.  what this cocktail lacks in attractiveness is more than made up for in the flavour.

Did you know that chartreuse is the only color named after a liquor? True fact.