Pâté is fancy French meatloaf: it’s ground meat, bound with dairy, eggs, and bread. The only difference is that pâté usually contains some liver, and it’s usually eaten cold. If it’s baked in a special ceramic dish, it can be called a terrine.
Within that definition, there is a spectrum of pâtés that runs from rustic to refined. The two qualities that decide a pâté’s place on the spectrum are texture and ingredients. Rustic pâtés are coarser in texture and made with cheaper, heartier ingredients, like liver. They are often described by words like campagne (“country”), grandmère (“grandma”), and maison (“house”). Refined pâtés have a finer, creamier texture and feature meat more prominently than liver. … Continue reading.
I’ve given details on preparing tongue a couple times (here for buffalo, here for pork). This corned beef tongue was brined with curing salt and lots of pickling spice. As you can see in the picture, the tongue has some insanely thorough fat marbling. It actually looks a bit like Wagyu beef! Fantastic sandwich…
After this year’s Eat Alberta conference, I had a few people ask me about giving some kind of “advanced” sausage-making class. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert sausagemaker, but at Nomad I got to make them almost every week, so I picked up lots of tricks. I thought I’d compile some of those ideas in this post.
The following are notes on refining ingredients and techniques to better tailor your sausages to your liking.
Ingredients: The Meat and Fat
Every book on sausage-making says pretty much the same thing: use shoulder. Maybe jowl, maybe belly, and maybe a bit of trim from around the carcass, but shoulder is the undisputed sausage-making cut. The reasons are this:
This happened ages ago, back in September, and Kevin has long since posted a fantastic video about it, but I want to write about a pork butchery workshop that took place out in Sangudo, Alberta. The workshop was put together by Kevin Kossowan, and hosted by Jeff Senger of Sangudo Custom Meats. The day started with the killing and processing of one of Jeff’s own pigs. Since it was Saturday and there were no inspectors present, the kill took place on Jeff’s farm, then the pig was processed at Sangudo Meats. The day continued with a hands-on meat-cutting class, and finally some demonstrations of sausage-making and other charcuterie preparations. … Continue reading.
As mentioned in the Intro, the primary job of a brewer is to create a fermentable liquid called wort. This involves converting some of the complex starches found in grain to simple sugars, then extracting those sugars into a solution so that yeast can metabolize them and create alcohol, carbon dioxide, and a number of other aromatic and flavourful compounds.
This post is about making wort. It includes info on water, barley, malt, grinding, mashing, lautering, and sparging.
Water. Water is important. Beer is, after all, mostly water. So are we. Historically the water source at a brewery informed the style of beer that they made. Places with alkaline water found that using acidic, heavily roasted malts … Continue reading.
I consider apple cider to be a generous gift from nature: with a small amount of work you can secure enough alcohol to last a year. There are thousands of well-established apple trees in Edmonton. At this point in time most of the owners can’t or don’t want to use all the fruit, and by volunteering with OFRE or just knocking on doors you have easy access. Once you have secured apples, if you crush and press them, they will, of their own accord, turn into cider. No need to add sugar, or acid, or yeast, or anything. It’s amazing.
Beer is quite the opposite. Brewing is so complicated, and relies so heavily on human intervention, it’s difficult to imagine … Continue reading.
On the North American frontier, it was not uncommon for the pioneer housewife to bake 21 pies a week – one for every meal.
-from Professional Cooking for Canadian Chefs, Sixth Edition
I’ve posted several recipes in which I make a hand-waving reference to, “your favourite pie dough” or “standard pie dough” without giving any idea of what exactly I mean by that. (Examples: Rabbit pie, pumpkin pie, sour cherry pie, pheasant pot pie.) For the sake of completeness and concision I thought I’d tell you my preferred recipe and method for making North American pie dough.
I think we’ve all had both very good and very bad pies in our time. Good pie … Continue reading.
In case the title didn’t tip you off, this post contains pictures of a lamb brain and details on its preparation for human consumption. If that bothers you, there’ll be a new post tomorrow that you’ll like better.
“Because of their delicacy and easy digestibility, spine marrow and brains are of great nutritional value for children and old people.”
-Escoffier, La Guide Culinaire
I would say that I eat more offal than most. I don’t really seek it out, but by buying whole animals, there’s always some available to me. Most of the offal I eat is from lambs, which is weird, because most of the meat I eat is from pigs, cows, and chickens. The main reason that I … Continue reading.
Having removed the scrag when breaking the lamb into primals, the components remaining on the lamb front are the shoulder, the breast, and the shank.
I love having ground lamb in my kitchen, so usually I bone out on entire lamb shoulder just to run it through the meat grinder. The other half is broken in a bone-in shoulder roast, a boneless breast ideal for stuffing and rolling, and a shank, one of the world’s supreme braising cuts.
Here is half of the lamb front, with the fell still attached.
We remove the fell to expose the fat cap.
Here is the inside of the front, showing the backbone on the top, the first six ribs, and the breastbone … Continue reading.
The personal website of Edmonton chef Allan Suddaby
