Category Archives: Special Topics

Maple/Birch Sugaring, Other Doughs and Batters, Seasonal, Starch

Pancakes

2 Comments

Frying pancakes in bacon fatLast night was Pancake Tuesday, the appropriately subdued Canadian version of Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday.

I want to tell you about my pancakes.

 

The Recipe

Pancake styles occupy one point on a continuum between slack batters and stiff batters.  Slack, or high-liquid, batters make thin, soft, limp pancakes the size of dinner plates.  Stiff, or low-liquid, batters, yield thicker, cakey pancakes the size of tea saucers or smaller.  For home-cooking I favour the stiff variety, making a batter that is barely, barely pourable.  The resulting cakes are more dense, but still soft and moist.  They develop a delicate, crisp exterior during frying, something that the slack batters can’t do because of their high liquid content.

In the … Continue reading.

Christmas, Seasonal

Ukrainian Christmas Eve – Sviata Vechera

1 Comment

I’m not even remotely Ukrainian, but (as I’ve written many times before this) I am fascinated by the food that Ukrainians have brought here to central Alberta.

Yes, perogies.  And yes, sauerkraut, kielbasa, and cabbage rolls.  But the more I read into this cuisine, the more I respect it.  There are so many interesting preserves, and countless recipes of ingenious frugality.

It also seems that every ingredient, dish, and meal comes with superstition and ritual.

Take the traditional Ukrainian Christmas Eve dinner, or Sviata Vechera (literally “Holy Supper”), perhaps the most beloved of all Ukrainian feasts.  Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar, so their Christmas Eve falls on January 6.  There are more traditions associated with this dinner than … Continue reading.

Austrian, Bread, Dumplings, Starch

Serviettenknödel – Austrian Bread Dumplings

5 Comments

This post is actually about two kinds of Austrian dumplings that are made from old bread.

The first is best made with bread that is a few days old, bread that is dry, but not brittle.  If you let your bread sit for more than a week, so that it’s completely hard throughout, you can make the second dumpling.

The first dumpling, made with days-old bread, is the Serviettenknödel, which literally translates as “serviette dumpling.”  Much like the French word torchon, which means towel, Servietten implies that the dumplings are shaped into cylinders by rolling in a towel or serviette.

The old bread is first cubed and soaked in milk, butter, and egg (full recipe below).

Then the … Continue reading.

Christmas, Sweets, Whole Grains and Legumes

Wild Rice and Barley Pudding

1 Comment

A variation on a Christmas classic, using some local pantry items.

I had some cooked barley in my fridge, remnants of a barley-broth.  I decided to employ the rice pudding method to save the left-overs.  (Rice Pudding Method: a lengthy secondary cooking in sugar and milk.)  The barley sucks up a lot of the milk and releases some starch into the pot.

Once a porridge has formed, cooked wild rice and dried cherries are added, and the whole lot is thickened with butter, egg yolk, and a touch of cream.

Since the wild rice and cherries are added at the end, they stay firm for textural contrast.

Wild Rice and Barley Pudding

Ingredients

  • 235 g cooked pearled barley
  • 300
… Continue reading.
Bread, Christmas, Sweets

Bread Pudding as God Intended It

Leave a comment

Bread pudding with raisinsWhen I say bread pudding “as God intended it,” I mean using actual, stale, left-over bread heels.  Buying fresh bread just to tear it up and dry it out is like using striploin to make sausage, or rolling a torchon of foie gras just to melt it into cooking fat.

To make bread pudding stale bread is soaked in milk, cream, eggs, and sugar, then pressed into a casserole and baked.

There is a continuum of bread pudding textures, ranging from the dense and eggy (the well-known Jack’s Grill (RIP) bread pudding was a good example) to the light and ethereal.

I want to take a paragraph to describe an interesting style of bread pudding that chef Nigel Weber taught … Continue reading.

Austrian, Coffee and Tea, Drink

Austrian Coffee Culture

2 Comments

I was surprised to learn that Austria has a strong, distinct coffee culture.  I probably shouldn’t have been, as the adoption of exotic goods like cane sugar and coffee beans was the hallmark of European imperialists, and Austria, as the granddaddy of European imperial powers until the First World War, has been roasting, grinding, brewing, and drinking coffee for centuries.

The story of how coffee came to Austria was told to me several times during my stay.  In 1683, the Ottoman army, led by the Grand Vizier, besieged Vienna.  A Polish soldier named Jerzy dressed in Turkish garb and left the city to contact Duke Charles of Lorraine and ask for assistance.  Jerzy snuck back into the city, bringing a … Continue reading.

Stock and Soup, Winter

Ice Clarification of Stock

2 Comments

This time last year I started thinking about preparations that take advantage of the frigid outdoor temperatures.  I made candy in the fresh snow and tried the “apple jack” method of concentrating alcohol by freezing.  I’ve just tried another sub-zero preparation, gleaned from the pages of The Fat Duck Cook Book.  It’s a fascinating technique called gelatin-clarification of stock.

In culinary school one of the cool-but-antiquated dishes you learn to make is consommé.  Consommé is flavourful stock that is strikingly, brilliantly clear.

The classical method for clarifying stock uses something called clear meat.  Clear meat contains albumen-rich ingredients like egg whites and certain cuts of meat like shank.  When albumen coagulates, it forms a delicate network that traps the tiny … Continue reading.

Halloween, Vegetables

Eating a Jack-o-Lantern

Leave a comment

Jack-o-LanternsThis is weird, I know, but most years, on All Saints Day, I eat my jack-o-lantern.  I usually carve the night before Halloween, then keep the pumpkin in the fridge overnight.  In Edmonton, Halloween is typically a chilly evening – sometimes there’s even snow – so setting the pumpkin outside for a few hours, I still feel perfectly comfortable eating it.

I should mention that the pumpkins we carve are from Tipi Creek CSA, so they taste fantastic.  Sometimes I carve other types of squash.  At left is a butternut squash jack-o-lantern.  I can’t attest to the eating-quality of the massive carving pumpkins sold at supermarkets.

So, after the trick-or-treaters have stopped calling, I take my jack-o-lantern off the step, … Continue reading.

Canadian, Pork

Scrunchions

9 Comments
Scrunchions and sea salt

These are scrunchions.  They’re a bit like pork rinds.

“Pork rind” simply means pork skin.  It can refer to the fresh, raw skin cut from a side of pork, but more commonly it means pig skin that has been rendered and fried crisp.  It is actually the same as crackling, though commercially-produced pork rinds are much more delicate than the crackling that develops on oven-roasted pork.

Scrunchions are made by a similar process, but they consist of pork fat, not skin.  I know it sounds funny that deep-frying fat results in a crispy treat, but raw animal fat also contains a good deal of connective tissue that holds the fat cells in place.  When you fry strips of raw, … Continue reading.

Poultry, Stock and Soup, Thanksgiving

The Thanksgiving Turkey

5 Comments

Turkey is certainly one of the finest gifts made by the New World to the Old.

-Brillat-Savarin in The Physiology of Taste

A Thanksgiving turkey, fresh from the ovenThe Saturday morning of Thanksgiving weekend we pick up a turkey from the Four Whistle truck at Old Strathcona, then take it home and cut it up, usually into two suprêmes (breasts with the drumette still attached) and two leg-thighs.  I know: bringing the whole roasted bird to the table, and carving that bird in front of the guests, is an indispensable part of Thanksgiving.  I appreciate the pageantry of tableside carving, but there are some huge advantages to separating the bird.

With the bird broken up into smaller pieces I can sear them to jump-start the browning.  … Continue reading.