All posts by allansuddaby

Sour Cherry Barbecue Sauce

Pork ribs glazed with sour cherry barbecue sauce.

Sour cherries, being sour, are best cooked with sugar, so their most obvious applications are pies, pastries, compotes, and the like.  This is a problem because sour cherry trees are prolific, and a man can only eat so much pie.  Over the years we have struck upon other winning preparations for the efficient preservation and consumption of sour cherries, notably drinks like rum pot and cherry liqueur.  But to really showcase the fruit’s versatility we’ve been eager for ways to use them in savoury meat dishes.  Enter sour cherry barbecue sauce.

For most of my grown-up life my house barbecue sauce has been the Carolina-style recipe in Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie.  It is what I call a “pantry … Continue reading.

Homemade Frankfurters

Homemade frankfurters with potato salad and mustard.

In Vienna these links are called Frankfurter Würstl, named for the city Frankfurt am Main in Germany. In most of the rest of the world (including Frankfurt) they are called Wieners, which means “Viennese.” Go figure. Whatever you call them they are the ancestor of the North American hot dog.

The old world version is usually 100% pork in delicate lamb casings, lightly smoked. North American hot dogs can be pork, beef, or a combination of the two, usually in synthetic casings.

I link mine extra long, so they barely fit on a dinner plate.

To emulate the very fine texture of the commercial varieties I grind twice through a 3/16″ plate, and then do a lengthy mixing phase, roughly … Continue reading.

Three Meals in Piemonte

Photo by Lisa Zieminek

I’ve always felt that whether you’re in Edmonton or Manhattan or Red Deer there will be good food and there will be bad food.  No matter where I’ve travelled I’ve had great meals and abhorrent meals, often in the same day.

Of course, I haven’t travelled everywhere, but this idea has been corroborated by several writers, even regarding Paris.  Jeffrey Steingarten acknowledges that most baguettes, even in Paris, are shit.[1]  George Orwell went so far as to say that his time in Paris “destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it.”[2]

In other words you can’t look at one city or region and say unequivocally, … Continue reading.

Pepperoni Sticks

Pepperoni sticks are a great introduction to air-drying cured meat at home. The process is very quick and very forgiving: even if you don’t have a whiz-bang curing chamber with perfect temperature and humidity control, you can probably make these pepperoni sticks at home and be very pleased with the result. And if for some reason you are worried that the whole process has gone sideways, just hot-smoke them or cook them and they will still be delicious. This is one of the recipes we make in my More Charcuterie at Home class, which is all about curing and air-drying meats.

These are meant to emulate the pepperoni sticks you get at gas station convenience stores. The recipe was developed … Continue reading.

Mead Vinegar

My food heroes are those who can generalize food concepts for me. I’ve mentioned Ruhlman’s book Ratio about a hundred times on this site. Some other examples. I love the flavour of preserved lemons and I’ve made them a few times, but then I saw Mojojo Pickles makes preserved lime. This completely changed how I saw my preserved lemon recipe. Instead of one recipe that can preserve one ingredient, I now see it as a generalized process for preserving citrus. ​​​Or Kevin recognizing that blanching is not just for endives, but a great agricultural technique to use on other bitter greens like our local dandelions. This type of thinking drives so much of modern food, whether it’s David Chang … Continue reading.

Matzo Ball Soup

Matzo ball soup and Reuben sandwich at June's Delicatessen in Edmonton.
Photo: Justin Benson

I did not grow up eating matzo ball soup; it was completely unknown to me and my family. In fact it was so foreign that the first several times I heard mention of it I assumed it was “mozza ball soup”, which I guess would be some kind of Italian-American soup containing mozzarella cheese. This is emphatically not the case.

Matzo balls are a kind of dumpling. Matzo ball soup is usually a chicken soup with matzo balls in it.

It turns out this classic Jewish preparation is much more familiar to me than I ever would have suspected. While the most common term in North America is matzo ball, the true Yiddish word for the dumpling … Continue reading.

Schmaltz

A jar of homemade chicken schmaltz.

Schmaltz is the Yiddish word for rendered fat, or grease. It is taken from the German Schmalz.[1] I wrote about how to render pork fat here, and the two preparations Grammelschmalz[2] and Schmalzfleisch. While schmaltz can technically refer to rendered fat from any animal, obviously in the context of Jewish cooking we aren’t talking about pork fat. While goose fat was common in Europe, the Jewish emigrants arriving in North America found chicken fat much more readily available, and this remains the default schmaltz in Jewish communities in the new world.

There is quite a different ratio of fat to lean in a chicken than a hog. It is easy to cut away large slabs … Continue reading.

Pancetta

Originally published May 31, 2010! Holy smokes. Re-published today to include more info and some nicer photos.

Pancetta is Italian for “little belly.”  The term refers to pork belly that has been cured and at least partly air-dried.  Unlike North American bacon it is usually not smoked.  It is a very important ingredient and foundational flavour in many Italian cuisines.

While North American bacon tends to use a simple salt and sugar cure, Italian pancetta is often redolent with flavours like juniper, nutmeg, and herbs.

Plus it is made in three distinct shapes.  Pancetta tesa is a flat slab of pork belly, like bacon.  Pancetta arrotolata has the belly rolled over the long axis, giving the sliced meat … Continue reading.

Pot Dumplings

Pot dumplings cooked in a chicken stew.

One time I was at my parents’ house on Boxing Day, and I used their Christmas leftovers to make a turkey pot pie.  I shredded the turkey leg meat, combined it with mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, and  gravy, then baked the mixture in a pie crust.

When we sat down for supper my dad said that his mom used to make “pot pie”, but that it wasn’t a pie.

“A pot pie that wasn’t a pie?  What was it then?”

He thought for quite a while before saying, “It was chicken with dumplings.”  He couldn’t tell me much more, except that the dumplings were roundish.

At this point I was pretty sure he was confused.

I more or less forgot … Continue reading.