Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
-Tennyson
Happy New Year from Lisa and Allan.
All posts by allansuddaby
The Hunter’s Cabin
Or: Manly Pursuits in the Austrian Alps
Of the handful of places I worked in Austria, Looshaus, near Kreuzberg, was my favourite. Located in the mountainous borderland between Lower Austria and Styria, Looshaus is a restaurant and small hotel with maybe twelve bedrooms.
I didn’t know this at the time, but the building itself is a fairly famous little piece of architecture. It was designed by Adolf Loos, an Austro-Hungarian architect who worked in the first part of the last century. His most famous buildings are the American Bar in Vienna, a short walk from Stephansplatz, and the Goldman and Salatsch building, on Michaelerplatz, also in Vienna. In 1930 he designed an alpine home for Paul Khuner, the Viennese food … Continue reading.
Sugar Plums
Sugar plums are one of those items that are common in Christmas carols and stories and yet are basically unknown to modern revelers. (Other examples: wassail, yule, and figgy pudding. Furthermore, I’ve never seen mistletoe before, and I just saw real holly for the first time a few weeks ago, at the farmers’ market. I got excited, grabbed the leaves, and stabbed myself.)
My dictionary defines a sugar plum as a small ball of candy, and nothing more. There are not necessarily any plums in sugar plums. The word “plum” is associated with dried fruit, and good modern dictionaries still give one of the many meanings of “plum” as “a raisin.” The most common manifestation of sugar plums is … Continue reading.
Relish – The Post-Pickle Blitz
The following post is either going to blow your mind or convince you that I’m stupid.
I don’t eat a lot of relish, but every now and then it goes well with charcuterie, or maybe a steamed wiener on a sweet white bun. For the past few years I’ve been trying to make relish and other condiments like piccalilli by chopping up a bunch of vegetables and canning them with a sweet and sour pickling liquid. I haven’t been entirely happy with the results. Maybe I chopped the cucumbers too coarsely, and the condiment didn’t have the semi-fluid, spreadable consistency I was looking for. Or perhaps, since the chopped vegetables have to be completely submerged in the pickling liquid for … Continue reading.
Know Your Steaks
This post is about the most expensive cuts on a side of beef: the standing rib, the striploin, the tenderloin, and t-bone and porterhouse steaks.
A Cow’s Skeletal Anatomy, Briefly…
The skull is connected to the neck, which connects to the backbone. At the front of the back bone are the shoulder bones that connect to the front legs. Farther down the backbone are the ribs. A cow has thirteen ribs. Backbones with ribs connected to them are called thoracic vertebrae. Between the rib cage and the hip is a section of backbone that has no ribs. These backbones are called lumbar vertebrae. Then there is the hip bone, which connects to the hind legs.
When a cow is … Continue reading.
Beef Cutting: Breaking Beef Forequarter into Primals
This is a forequarter of nouveau beef from Nature’s Green Acres. A side of beef is split into a forequarter and a hindquarter by cutting between the twelfth and thirteenth rib, which is the last rib.
Cutting beef is more complicated than cutting pork, and I find I sometimes lose my way and forget where I am and what piece of meat I’m looking at. To give you some idea of what we intend to accomplish in this post, here is a picture of the forequarter afterwards, broken into its subprimals.
The first cut I make is between the fifth and sixth ribs. At the top right of the picture below, above the backbone, is the standing rib … Continue reading.
8-Cut Chicken: The Classic Fried-Chicken Cut
Fried chicken should be eaten off the bone. Following is the classic way to break down a whole chicken into boney pieces that can be dredged and deep-fried. Traditionally there is a lot of cutting through the bones, which is fun but can leave little shards in the meat. I’ve cleaned up the method somewhat by separating at the joints where possible. Even so, I wouldn’t cut this way if I were feeding small children.
We start by removing the legs at the hip. Bend the leg backwards to expose the joint, then cut with a knife.
To separate the thigh and drumstick, bend the knee against it’s will until it snaps, then cut through the joint. These are the … Continue reading.
Onion Jam
This is one of my favourite condiments of all time.
I make two different versions of this jam, one for red onions and one for white onions, the only difference being the colour of the final product. The recipe below is for the red variety. To make the brown marmalade, at left, use white onions, dark brown sugar, and cider vinegar instead of red onions, white sugar, and red wine vinegar.
Red Onion Jam
adapted from River Cottage Preserves Handbook
Ingredients
- 120 g canola oil
- 1300 g red onion (about 4 large onions)
- 100 g granulated sugar
- 120 g crabapple jelly, or some other red fruit jelly, such as currant
- 200 mL red wine vinegar
- 1/2 tsp kosher
Tart Dough
In North America, this style of dough is called tart dough, or possibly short dough. In France it’s known as pâte brisée.[1]
Pie dough has clumps of butter that separate the sheets of flour and water, creating a tender, flaky crust. Tart dough is not flaky. It has a very fine, even texture, and a delicate crispiness. Actually it’s kind of like a thin shortbread cookie. The butter is incorporated as tiny uniform pieces, instead of the irregular chunks in pie dough. The cook also has to be careful not to develop too much gluten, otherwise the cooked tart will be tough.
Besides being the base for classic tarts, this dough could also be used for custard-type … Continue reading.
Cider Vinegar
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley.
-Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”
This year, for the first time, I successfully “made” vinegar. I didn’t write about it earlier because I didn’t feel like I had actually done anything, or learned anything. Hence the quotation marks. The truth is that with the numerous little crocks and tubs in which I’ve fermented cider, every so often something really weird happens that I can’t explain.
I tried really hard to make vinegar last year. I read quite a bit online about the process. The conversion of alcoholic beverages like wine and cider into vinegar is a fermentation in the broad biochemical sense. When we make cider, yeast, a … Continue reading.