It’s a cliché, but it’s true: Stock is the soul of the kitchen.
When I’m cooking a meal for a large group, I always start by making stock a few days beforehand. Our dinner on Thanksgiving Monday, for instance, starts with a turkey stock made on the preceding Saturday. Last year’s New Year’s Eve dinner started a couple days before when I made a ham hock broth. Stock is the flavour-foundation of the meal. The showpiece of Thanksgiving dinner is the turkey, and besides enjoying the meat, turkey-flavour finds its way into the soup, the stuffing, the gravy, and often the vegetables. The turkey stock unites the dishes.
The ideal stock has three characteristics: above all it is flavourful, with … Continue reading.
Scotch eggs are hard-boiled eggs that are wrapped in sausage meat, then breaded and deep-fried. They’re eaten cold, ideal for picnics and packed lunches. Actually if you watch the original British version of The Office you’ll see that Keith always has a Scotch egg for lunch.
Tonight is Burns Night, and we’re going to be serving little Scotch eggs made with quail eggs, instead of the traditional chicken egg, as savoury bar snacks.
Tourtière is made differently in every home, and can incite intense feelings of loyalty to ones mother. I will proceed cautiously with a definition, but I warn you: there are lots of qualifiers in this post.
Tourtière is meat pie. It is often based on pork, though veal and game are also common. If anyone tells you that it was traditionally made with pigeon, you can politely dismiss their story as folklore. A false etymology has developed because of the similarity between the words for the pie tourtière and the Quebecois word for the now-extinct passenger pigeon, tourte. Certainly many a pigeon has been baked into pie, but the similarity between the two words is entirely coincidental. Tourte also … Continue reading.
There is something miraculous about baked beans, or “brown beans,” as I know them. You take legumes that usually disintegrate when overcooked, and by adding a special blend of ingredients, you can suddenly stew them almost indefinitely without compromising their shape and texture. There are in fact three magic ingredients in this potion:
acids, usually in the form of tomato, mustard, or vinegar, “make the cell-wall hemicelluloses [in the beans] more stable and less dissolvable”;[1]
sugar, in the form of molasses, maple syrup or, um, sugar, “helps reinforce cell-wall structure and slows the swelling of the starch granules”;[2]
calcium, usually in the form of molasses and brown sugar, “cross-links and reinforces cell-wall pectins”.[3]
The theory behind trussing is that birds, in their natural, irregular shape, do not cook evenly: the slender, exposed limbs, the wings and the legs, cook faster than the breasts. This is true, no doubt, but the legs, made of dark meat, need to reach a higher temperature than the breasts to be cooked through. By leaving the legs un-trussed and exposed, they reach their higher finishing temperature at pretty much the same time as the breasts. For this reason the only thing I do to prepare a bird for roasting is bend the wingtips and tuck them behind the bird’s back.
At any rate, Thomas Keller holds trussing as a fundamental skill, so I … Continue reading.
During Advent I started writing about brewing beer at home, but I got distracted and didn’t finish all the posts. So far we’ve discussed mashing and boiling, so now we move on to fermenting.
This post is about fermenting homebrewed wort to make beer. I wrote it on a Tuesday afternoon. Earlier that day I had gone to Sherbrooke Liquor and found that they had bottles of Muskoka Spring Oddity (750 mL, 8% ABV) on sale for $6.99. I first tried this beer in the summer of 2012, and thought it was pretty good: broadly in the witbier style, malty, cloudy, aromatic, laced with spices. While I would never turn down a glass of Oddity, the truth is I’ve … Continue reading.
Smoking meat is without exaggeration one of the most rewarding food experiences. The smell is bewitching, and the meat goes through a remarkable transformation in taste and colour. If you have a fire-pit or some type of wood-burning oven, you already have a smoker. Simply build a fire, let it burn down, then toss some hardwood twigs or wood chips onto the coals. This post is about some simple ways to use common backyard barbecues to smoke meat.
Most of the commercial smokers I’ve used suck. Especially the ones that come with little pucks of sawdust that are somehow bound together. The smoke produced by these pucks has a harsh, ashen quality reminiscent of cigarettes. The joke Mike and I … Continue reading.
Last year I wrote that ham hocks are only consumed in one of two ways in my house: either slowly roasted so that they have glassy crackling, or simmered so that their intense, smoky, porky essence can be collected in a broth.
This ham-hock broth is the distilled essence of eastern Canada, and the foundation of split-pea soup.
Once you have simmered the ham hock and collected the broth, here are some thoughts on making split-pea soup.
After extensive cooking the ham hock itself has very little flavour and seasoning, but it still makes for a good garnish.
I use yellow split-peas, because the green ones look like baby poo once they’re cooked.
Did you know that for much of modern history domestic consumption of coffee involved roasting the beans yourself every time you intended to brew a cup of joe?
When coffee first swept Europe in the seventeenth century, most coffee was brewed and consumed in public coffee houses, but by the nineteenth century, most coffee was prepared at home.[1] Green coffee beans were purchased from a grocer, then roasted, ground, and boiled just before serving. And not just on lazy Saturday mornings: under every circumstance, if there was time to drink coffee, there was time to roast the beans yourself. During the American civil war, green coffee was a standard ration for the Union army,[2] and every night soldiers … Continue reading.
The personal website of Edmonton chef Allan Suddaby
It’s a cliché, but it’s true: Stock is the soul of the kitchen.
There is something miraculous about baked beans, or “brown beans,” as I know them. You take legumes that usually disintegrate when overcooked, and by adding a special blend of ingredients, you can suddenly stew them almost indefinitely without compromising their shape and texture. There are in fact three magic ingredients in this potion:
Did you know that for much of modern history domestic consumption of coffee involved roasting the beans yourself every time you intended to brew a cup of joe?