My name is Allan, I am a very serious chef, and this post is about making Spam-style luncheon meat from scratch.
I didn’t grow up eating Spam, but I have friends for whom it is a powerful piece of childhood nostalgia.
Spam is a pork forcemeat that is packed and cooked in a can. The overall effect is rather like a terrine, especially reminiscent of the cured pork meatloaves of Europe, like leberkäse. There is some speculation about the origin of the moniker. Is it an elision of “spiced ham”? An abbreviation of “shoulder of pork and ham”? These are all apocryphal, and the producer of Spam, Hormel Foods, has … Continue reading.
This post is about making sausage rolls from scratch.
In theory any style of sausage meat can be used, but I think this English banger sausage mix is most like the rolls I ate growing up. It is made from pork, simple seasonings (pepper, mace, nutmeg), and a good quantity of rusk or toasted breadcrumb. The breadcrumb gives the sausage a distinct texture, slightly less springy than, say, fresh bratwurst or breakfast sausage.
As for the dough, most sources say to use puff pastry. I tend to disagree. High quality puff might be acceptable, but poor quality produces an airy, insipid texture. I prefer my standard pie dough with a touch of baking … Continue reading.
A Ploughman’s Lunch with bread, cheese, meat, and a homemade Branston Pickle.
I like the idea of Branston Pickle more than the actual product. A cousin of picalilli, Branston Pickle is a condiment based on chopped vegetables like rutabaga, carrot, and cauliflower, that have been cooked in a very dark, very sour liquid that reminds me of bad barbecue sauce (sorry / not sorry).
In putting together a ploughman’s lunch, I wanted a condiment inspired by Branston Pickle, but with a couple important differences. First, instead of hard crunchy vegetables suspended in flowing liquid, I wanted cubes of vegetable bound together by the sauce. In other words I wanted a clean quenelle on the plate, not something that would run. … Continue reading.
Summer Vegetable Terrine set with agar instead of gelatin.
This post is about setting terrines with agar instead of the traditional gelatin mixture like aspic.
One thing that irritates me about the classic texts on garde manger is that none of them sufficiently generalize and theorize the concept of a terrine.
For instance, most of them provide the following two categories of terrine:
Pâté en Terrine – Made by pressing raw forcemeat into a dish and baking or steaming. The terrine is set by the protein network of the forcemeat.
Aspic-Bound Terrines – Made by combining cooked-and-chilled products with warm aspic or other gelatin-rich liquid, packing them into a dish, and chilling. The terrine set set by the cold gelatin.
An emulsifed sausage (top) compared to a coarsely ground sausage (bottom).
This post is about making emulsified sausages like hot dogs, wieners, and mortadella at home, using a grinder and food processor. Emulsifed sausages are those in which the meat and fat have been so finely comminuted that you can no longer visually distinguish them in the cross-section of the sliced sausages: they have become a completely uniform, homogenous paste.
This is a style of sausage for which several of my trusted recipe sources often get the procecure wrong. The most common error is putting the ground meat and fat in the processor at the same time, and then trying desparately to keep the mixture below 4°C. The … Continue reading.
This post is about making better beef sausages, without the use of pork or pork fat. We’re after an all-beef link that has the cohesive, juicy texture of a pork sausage.
To make a simple, fresh pork sausage we start with pork butt, ensure it contains about 25% fat (adding fatback as necessary), cube it, chill it, grind it, add 1.5% salt and 5% water by weight of pork, then mix until it binds. This yields a cohesive, juicy sausage. If we do the exact same thing with beef, say, bottom blade, which is analogous to pork butt, the final sausage will be fine, but it will not have the same, well-bound, juicy … Continue reading.
Traditional Scotch eggs are hard-boiled eggs, peeled, wrapped in loose sausage mix, breaded, and deep-fried. They’re awesome, and I’m putting one on the menu at Ernest’s.
The Eggs. For our style of service, where most guests get three courses, I plan for most of the appetizers to have an edible portion size of 6 oz. For this reason I brought in small chicken eggs, which are about 40 g, instead of large, which are 50. I hoped this would also decrease the total cook time and expedite service. Cases of small eggs will be ordered at least a week before I think we’ll need them, as older eggs … Continue reading.
Dry-Aged Duck Breast with buttered grains, beets, and sour cherries. Served at Ernest’s Dining Room Winter 2024.
It was the dry-aged duck at The Naramata Inn (RIP) that inspired me to start dry-aging at Ernest’s.
When properly scored, seared, rendered, and cooked, fresh duck breast is good. But the dry-aged duck at the Inn was excellent: the skin brittle and crisp, and the meat brawny and tender, in a way I hadn’t experienced before. The Inn was buying dry-aged crowns from Yarrow Meadows,[1] but one of the chefs, Macia, gave me some tips on doing it myself.
Crowns are duck carcasses that have had the wing tips, wingettes, legs, and the lower portion of the spine removed. At … Continue reading.
Parsnip & Pear Agnolotti with brown butter, sage, and parsnip crisps
Another gem of a technique taken from The Naramata Inn (RIP). I’ve seen root vegetable chips in many forms, but they are often either not fully crisp, or too dark in colour and flavour. At the Inn they used a simple procedure for perfectly brittle, vibrant crisps of parsnip, beet, carrot, and other root vegetables. The technique works well for fried shallots, too.
First, get the thinnest possible shaves of vegetable. It’s tedious, but in my experience a peeler is best. A mandolin on the thinnest setting works too.
Next, dredge the product with cornstarch. It is critical to add the absolute smallest amount of cornstarch while still coating … Continue reading.
A chive vinaigrette made with chive oil and chive flower vinegar.
For the few weeks they are in bloom, I put chive blossoms on everything. Even so, I struggle to use them all before they go to seed and cast their thousand black specks across the yard like confetti. They have to be picked before this time or my entire yard would be chives.
One year I tried drying the flowers to use through the winter. I had recently had a lamb tartare that was garnished with dried onion blossoms. The meat was good but what I really took away from that dish was the dried onion blossoms. I thought, “Wow! These are fantastic! Really beautiful and flavourful. I can … Continue reading.
The personal website of Edmonton chef Allan Suddaby
