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Charcutepalooza October: Stretching: Galantine

by David Dadekian October 15, 2011

written by David Dadekian

Galantine

Another month has passed and we’re sadly that much closer to the end of The Year of Meat. There’s no way I’m going to stop making any of these Charcutepalooza treats, but I don’t think I’ll be documenting them in quite as much detail. Usually when I’m cooking there’s fourteen other things (or just two little girls) vying for my attention and I don’t get a chance to make notes or pick up my camera—or make sure when I do pick up my camera I’m not getting schmaltz on it. However, this month’s challenge, as complicated as it was, was a huge amount of fun and I found myself constantly washing my hands (or pulling off the non-latex gloves) and taking a photo. I would go so far as to say, while I’ve enjoyed mostly all of the Charcutepalooza challenges, this one ranks up there as one of my favorites.

While many of the challenges are easily recognizable to the non-meat-obsessed, I’m willing to bet the photo above and even the caption “galantine” may not be as commonly known as say bacon, corned beef or even terrine. What you’re looking at there and in the many photos below is, from the center out, a boneless, skinless chicken breast encased within a chicken thigh & liver forcemeat (remember blended ground meat and fat), wrapped in chicken skin, poached in chicken stock and then chilled.

Now, you may be thinking, as I did, I love chicken skin and all, but I like it nicely roasted or fried crispy, not poached and then served cold. But trust me, the galantine is a thing of beauty. The key is to make very thin slices when cutting the final product. Don’t just take my word for it, here’s the conversation I had with my brother Andy when I unwrapped and served the galantine last week.

Andy: What is this you’re serving?

Me: A galantine. It’s chicken breast inside ground chicken meat wrapped in chicken skin.

Andy: What?

Me: Trust me.

Andy: What the heck is this? (eyes the slice, picks it up and pops it in his mouth) Oh wow, this is goooooooood.

So there you have it, third party proof. And if there’s anyone who likes to give another person trouble and not let them think they did something right, you know it’s a little brother.

One of the reasons galantines may not be as common as a terrine or pate is because it is a bit of complex, time-consuming process to create. First you have to take the skin off a whole chicken, intact in one piece, something I had done several times in the past (did I mention I liked fried crispy chicken skin?). It’s not super difficult once you learn how to do it, it’s more a matter of time and patience. It was a plus having this challenge in October because some of the more gruesome horror movies can come to mind when doing it (Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs anyone?). Then you have to freeze the skin, scrape off the fat from the skin, butcher the chicken, sear the breasts, make the forcemeat (which is a whole Charcutepalooza challenge in itself), roll the whole thing up and tie off the ends, wrap it in cheesecloth and tie that, poach it in the stock to the proper temperature and chill it. On second thought, did I really mean this was one of my favorite challenges?

Truly it was, plus I had a good amount of forcemeat leftover that I put a delicious terrine together too. Before I close with the many photos of this process a mention should be given to Blackbird Farm (one of the many places I work with). We’ve begun raising chickens at Blackbird Farm. They’re Cornish Rocks, raised on pasture and supplemented with organic feed if they so desire. The birds are really beautiful to butcher and I couldn’t be happier cooking with them. So thank you Blackbird Farm for the chickens to do things with them that the folks at the farm never heard of, and, as usual, thank you to Cathy Barrow a.k.a. Mrs. Wheelbarrow and Kim Foster a.k.a.not The Yummy Mummy anymore for all the #charcutepalooza fun.

Skin removed from a whole chicken in one piece

Skinless bird

Searing the breast meat

Chicken fond, shallots, garlic & Madeira—wonderfully fragrant

Skin with seared breast meat inside forcemeat

Wrapped and tied galantine

Wrapped in cheesecloth and poaching in chicken stock (floating in photo, but submerged to poach)

First slices of galantine

Galantine (thick slice for photo purposes only)

Galantine slice 1

Galantine slice 2

October 15, 2011 0 comments

cooking

Charcutepalooza July: Blending: mortadella

by David Dadekian July 15, 2011

written by David Dadekian

cross-section of mortadella

I’ve discovered an interesting ratio between my love of photography and my love of cooking, more specifically, my love of cooking all these excellent Charcutepalooza projects. The more I enjoy a project and have fun doing it, the more I think to stop and pick up my camera to make photos. When I’m as thoroughly frustrated as I was making this month’s mortadella, and last month’s sausage, making photos isn’t the first thing to come to mind—and I make photos almost every day.

To make matters just slightly more down this month, while I and my family loved the June project’s end result of duck sausage and spicy Italian sausage, none of us really liked the mortadella. It’s not that it was bad at all. It’s just that for the amount of work and mess I created, I was hoping for something that tasted a little better than just really good bologna. Especially since I don’t really enjoy bologna. I have had mortadella many times in the past and never thought much of it, but I was really hoping making it myself with good, locally raised, pastured pork would make it great. Greatness, while achieved with several other Charcutepalooza projects, was not within my grasp this time.

Instead of regaling you with more tales of my stuffing clumsiness and emulsion-making-mess woes (I’ll just say emulsified meat does wash out of children’s hair and leave it at that), I’ll move on to what I did with the final product. As you can see from the photo above, I chose not to use pistachios or other “mix-ins” in my mortadella. I never much cared for nuts in it in the past, and my wife Brenda doesn’t love olives. In thinking about it now, that may have been my mistake, because the only time I’ve ever really enjoyed mortadella is in a muffuletta, which of course is always loaded with an olive salad.

So I’m looking at this gigantic round of mortadella that I’ve sliced in half to take the above cross-section photo and, besides that weirdly unnatural pink color, I see a lot of fat, beautiful pork fat that I was kind of cursing myself for wasting inside this emulsion. All the while Brenda was washing and spinning greens and, after tasting the mortadella, declaring she would prefer not to have that on her salad. I thought, but what if it was a crispy lardon? Look at all that fat. It’s got to render and crisp up nicely.

Out came a frying pan and in went 1/2″ cubes of mortadella (see last photo, extremely zoomed in for effect). Fifteen minutes later and we had the below salad. Then I went the extra step of deglazing the pan with balsamic vinegar, creating a rough 3:1 ratio of rendered mortadella fat and a little olive oil to the vinegar, stirring in some Dijon and cracked black pepper, and we had a vinaigrette.

I’m going to sound like a complete downer, but I still didn’t love it. I know, perhaps there was something wrong with me. Just to be on the safe side I had a chicken skin club sandwich with homemade bacon today. It was fantastic, so thankfully my taste buds still work. I’m not about to give up of course, especially not since I already know that next month’s challenge involves terrines, which I love making, so I’ll see if my photo making ratio theory holds up.

Thank you again to Cathy Barrow and Kim Foster, and I do mean that sincerely. Maybe it wasn’t my cup of tea, or cup of emulsified meat, but it was a new experience for me to stuff a bung (did you really think I’d get through this whole month’s post without mentioning bung once?), and new experiences are always much appreciated.

salad with mortadella "lardons"

close-up exploration of a cube of mortadella

July 15, 2011 0 comments

cooking

Charcutepalooza May: Grinding: merguez and Mexican chorizo

by David Dadekian May 15, 2011

written by David Dadekian

Sometimes, as the poet Burns wrote, “the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.” That isn’t to say I didn’t grind meat for this month’s Charcutepalooza challenge. Nor is it to say the final product wasn’t very tasty. It’s that, well, things went awry. Which is why there are only two “before” photos of my sausage making and none of the sometimes-food-porn that I make of the final product (see February’s “The Salt Cure: bacon & pancetta” for glistening pork love).

I love making sausage. I’ve been making it for years. Even when I lived in a studio apartment and only had a tiny kitchenette, I kept a food processor on what ridiculously little counter space I had and would pulse up all kinds of sausage patties. Since then I’ve graduated to a KitchenAid mixer and the very first attachment I bought was the sausage making kit. Which isn’t perfect, I know, but unless you’re going to buy me this beautiful beast, I don’t want to hear it. So when I saw that May’s Charcutepalooza challenge was grinding, I wanted to come up with something that was an additional challenge for me.

Usually I would play with recipes, experiment with different flavors and try something different in the mix. Something that would set me off on a new path. However, having made both merguez and chorizo in the past from Ruhlman & Polcyn’s Charcuterie recipes, I knew that for me they are two of the most bulletproof recipes in the book. I really like them both the way they are (though in typical I-must-do-things-in-the-kitchen-my-way fashion I’ll admit to doubling the red wine and nixing the chilled water in the merguez recipe). So I headed downstairs to the freezer and perused our inventory whiteboard attached to the door to see if it would spark some improvisation.

I knew it would be goofy to share that I have a whiteboard attached to our standalone freezer listing the contents of the freezer, but I didn’t realize how weird it would be describing it.

In the freezer we have a lot of lamb. I love lamb. My grandmother used to make us rib chops all the time and ground lamb is very common in many Armenian dishes. I really love lamb fat too, and we had a few pounds in the freezer, so I decided to use it instead of any pork fat this time out. Then I saw on the whiteboard that there was still some lamb offal left from the lamb I got for Christmas, and since there are very few ways I could sneak half a lamb heart and a liver into my family’s meals, they seemed perfect for sausage. I took from the freezer the lamb fat, heart and liver, along with some pork shoulder and liver, and a bag of corn cobs. Then I meticulously removed the items from the inventory whiteboard of course.

I left the meat items on the counter so they would thaw just a little bit, but not entirely as I wanted them firm to grind. I put the corn cobs into a pot of simmering water to make broth as I had this spring dinner vision in my head. I also stuck the KitchenAid grinder attachment and bowl in the freezer to chill. A couple of hours later I had this bowl of meat, fat and offal.

Clockwise from top: lamb liver, pork liver, pork shoulder, lamb fat, half a lamb heart

The corn broth had developed nicely so I added a couple of pounds of diced potatoes and some salt and went back to my sausage making. First up, merguez with the lamb heart, liver and fat. I had about 500 grams of heart and liver so I created a quick ratio to the amount of meat called for in the Charcuterie recipe and figured out the amount of fat and other ingredients I needed. Then I began grinding. Here’s where I first realized this might not be the best idea I’ve ever had. Everything ground up fine, I mixed in all the herbs, spices and wine and it certainly smelled like the same merguez I’ve made before. But it didn’t look right. The liver and heart were just too soft and I shouldn’t have thought to treat them like meat. As I tweeted to my friend Janis, the end result looked like an “unattractive meat slurry.”

Not to be deterred I heated up a saute pan, sprayed on a little non-stick cooking spray, took out a #20 disher and dropped two scoops of the liquid sausage into the pan. Kind of like meat pancakes. I cooked them for a few minutes on each side, and while the end result still looked kind of unappealing, it tasted exactly like good, spicy lamb sausage. I made the rest of my merguez-cakes before moving on to the chorizo. The pork ground up much tighter and behaved more like ground meat because of the shoulder. Also the pork liver was a lot more dense and meatier than the lamb liver. I added in the rest of the lamb fat too for texture.

Grinding away, the blurred shapes are arm movement during the long exposure

So maybe things had gone awry, but I was back on track and having fun grinding. It was then that I realized how much time had passed, dinner wasn’t ready yet, my wife Brenda was hungry and also a little curious about the amount of blood and meaty substance that now covered a lot of our kitchen counter. She was also a tiny bit concerned about the fact that I had prepared sausage for dinner out of a bowl that looked like it had meat batter in it. So instead of taking the time to stuff the chorizo into casings, I whipped in the herbs, spices and liquid, turned the whole thing out onto a huge sheet of parchment paper, rolled it up tight into a 4″ diameter tube, placed it on a sheet pan and stuck it in the freezer. The next day I quickly sliced the chorizo tube into 1/2″ rounds and put those into bags in the freezer, keeping one out to fry up and make sure it tasted like chorizo, which it did.

So I completed the May challenge with two sausages that tasted great. The chorizo I’ll use in all kinds of dishes, maybe even frying up a slice for a quick snack or putting a round on the grill during the summer. The merguez? That went into our late dinner which was: Corn Broth with Potatoes and Freshly Sliced Schartner Farm Asparagus, Accompanied by Floating Rounds of Merguez.

Lawyer-poet John Godfrey Saxe said, “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” I’m sure there are hundreds of Charcutepalooza posts out today that disprove that quote. Thanks again to Cathy Barrow and Kim Foster. This month you inspired and challenged me.

May 15, 2011 0 comments

cooking

Charcutepalooza March: Brining: corned beef

by David Dadekian March 15, 2011

written by David Dadekian

All the ingredients needed to create corned beef

One of the quickest and easiest ways to change the flavor of a food is to brine it. Essentially a heavily salted liquid with aromatics, a brine can add flavor to meats and fish, turn vegetables into pickles and, in the case of this month’s Charcutepalooza challenge, alter the profile of beef brisket into the popular March meal: corned beef.

When I was growing up, at some point in mid-March, there would be a pot of boiling water on the stove with an oddly pink piece of meat in it, along with some potatoes and other vegetables. Corned beef, so named because the large salt crystals used to brine the brisket resembled kernels of corn, the very Irish-American dish, was always served around St. Patrick’s Day in our Armenian-American home. I never really cared for it and when I no longer lived at home it wasn’t something I ever considered cooking for myself.

Around ten years ago I learned about brining from the same person it seems as if most of the world learned it from, Alton Brown. O.K., maybe I’m exaggerating, but it did seem like Brown brined a turkey on Good Eats and suddenly every home cook was trying it. In the days before I could easily find pasture-raised chicken, turkey or pork, brining made a world of difference in the flavor of supermarket meats that had had all the taste bred out of them. Now that I’m fortunate enough to buy really excellent local meat, I don’t brine as much as I used to, but it’s still an excellent technique for older chickens or very lean cuts of pork like chops or loin.

Charcutepalooza

Or in the case of beef brisket, because you can turn it into corned beef that actually tastes delicious and not at all like something displayed in a huge pile in a supermarket refrigerated display once a year. A brined brisket can also be smoked and steamed into pastrami perfection, but to paraphrase Brown, that’s another article.

The corned beef you’ll see below started like most of my corned beef and pastrami creations of the last few years, with a good size, pasture-raised, 100% Angus brisket from Blackbird Farm (I work with the farm, but certainly wouldn’t work there if I didn’t love their beef). My brine is a combination of ingredients from a few different sources that I’ve played with over the years. When I began to assemble everything, the photograph you see above came into my head and I had to make it (see last photo for exactly what’s what). A few people who’ve seen the photo already have asked why the pink curing salt is still in it’s bag and not in a bowl. That’s because I have a crawling 1-year-old and while it may be an adventure if she gets a hold of a peppercorn or juniper berry, the nitrite should be kept secure (and then I thought the red pepper flakes and tiny mustard seeds were probably a bad idea to let loose on the floor as well). So after making the brine and submerging the brisket for about seven days in the refrigerator, I then had (uncooked) corned beef.

It’s been over twenty years since I’ve had to endure the Dadekian mid-March corned beef. In the meantime, I married an Irish-American girl whose family loves a boiled dinner. So now I happily “corn” a brisket a few times a year and the other night we had a Dadekian mid-March corned beef dinner, complete with boiled potatoes, carrots and onions. My mother-in-law made soda bread so I made rye. Hopefully, my Irish-Armenian-American daughters Brigid and Moira will look forward to it each year.

Notes:

My photos this month reflect a close-up look at brisket and the striations in this heavily used muscle (kind of the breast of the animal). When cutting brisket, be it corned beef or pastrami or just cooked as it is, it’s recommended to slice across the grain, to get a piece where all those muscle fibers are short and easier to chew.
Also, like my bacon, the brisket never leaves a refrigerator or stove-top, so pink curing salt is not a necessity here. However, if you don’t use pink salt your final boiled corned beef will be more of a gray color than the vibrant red we’ve come to know. I’ve had to get pink salt online at The Spice House. There is now a locally available source, Persimmon Provisions in Barrington, Rhode Island.
Fittingly enough, I’ll be at Claddagh Farms on St. Patrick’s Day this year, at the Cochon & Charcuterie Workshop given by @Podchef, Kate Hill & Dominique Chapolard. There is a waitlist for the main workshop, but space is still available for the prequel day slaughter.
Thanks again to Mrs. Wheelbarrow and The Yummy Mummy for the Charcutepalooza fun.