Posts filed under 'meat'
No picture, but Lucy Vanel published one recently that looked very similar. She is a great photographer.
So we took the duck all apart and put the breasts in the refrigerator. Now we have to take them out. They need to come to room temperature, but they are easier to work with when they are quite cold.
The ingredients for four people:
2 boned duck breast halves
a mixture of salt, rosemary, garlic and pepper ground together or bought
honey
Oven should be preheated to 200°C or 400°F.
The first thing to do is to use a very sharp knife to score the skin in a checkerboard pattern. This will allow the fat to render out from under the skin as they bake. Fortunately, there is not so much fat under the breast skin, and much of it will melt away in the cooking. These are quite big and each is big enough for two. You can actually pretend this is TV now that your imagination is engaged. Now have a look at those edges. Any overhanging pieces of skin? If so, use that sharp knife to cut them away.
This recipe is so easy that it seems disgraceful to claim it. I’m going to anyway, otherwise the inventor of Hamburger Helper will get all the credit for being a time saver. Turn the breasts skin side down and sprinkle on and rub in some of the spice mixture, not a lot. Turn them back over and do the same to the skin side.
Line a shallow baking dish with aluminum foil. If you don’t you will be sorry. I used a broiling pan, but I was also making double the amount. Lay the breasts on the foil and drizzle honey over the skin, fairly lightly, just moisten it. Pop it into the hot oven. After 10 minutes or so, take it out. You should see red juices welling up through the cuts and a lot of fat melted around on the foil. Drizzle honey over it all again and put it back in the oven. Start watching the progress, because as soon as the skin becomes really golden and crisp, you must take it out of the oven. It takes perhaps 20 minutes total cooking time. The meat should be rare. The skin should look like cracklings. The smell should drive you mad. Let it sit for about five minutes, then using a very sharp knife, carve each breast into slanted slices. A garnish of rosemary branches is a reminder of what’s in there.
I served these with the Ligurian tomato salad I posted in August and the rosemary baked onions from the Slow Travel cookbook, for which there is a link to your right.
If you did not line the pan with foil, drain off the fat into the garbage and start soaking the blackened crusts of honey/fat immediately. It will take hours. Thanks to the reduced fat in duck breasts, however, a quick swish with a damp sponge will do for the oven.
September 7th, 2007
This can be made of thin, lean slices of veal, (the original) pork, chicken or turkey. We used turkey. We cut the slices from a boneless turkey breast of just under 1 kilo to serve 8 people. As I explained to the class, every dish in an Italian meal is as important as the others, so we don’t say something is a main course, signifying that the others are less important. The antipasto was an exceptional cheese served with a very nice fig jam, then the cozze with pasta was important, and now we have a meat course. So we’re not planning on everyone eating a huge amount of meat and just a little of this and that on the side. This was served with a dish of sautéed bietola, or Swiss chard.
For 8 people:
1 kilo mild, lean meat, not beef, cut in thin slices– usually you can buy them sliced here. Graeme cut ours because he said the pre-cut ones looked like they’d been cut with a dull ax. Using a sharp knife, he pressed down with his hand and sliced horizontally, which is a good way to get the meat to behave and not quiver with fear when it sees the knife. Partially freezing it helps, too.
Some good olive oil
1 glass (here meant to be about 4 ounces liquid measure) of white wine
grated peel of two lemons
125 g or 4 oz. of butter
1 glass of heavy cream
juice of two lemons
salt to taste
100 g or 3 ounces of Parmigiano Reggiano, grated fine
If you bought a batticarne when I told you to, here’s a chance to use it. If you didn’t, you’ll have to use the bottom of a bottle or the side of a meat mallet, but don’t use the spiky sides!
One by one, put the cutlets on a board and flatten them with the batticarne, then put them aside. We used layers of baking paper to separate the layers, but in the US I would have used waxed paper. You can do this way ahead, even the day before, then refrigerate them.
A few minutes before you want to serve, heat some oil in a wide frying pan over medium-high heat and start frying the cutlets a few at a time. It takes less than a minute per side if you’ve gotten them thin and well-beaten. Turn, salt a bit, cook the second side and put on a plate. Continue until they are all done. You don’t want to brown the meat, just make it opaque from its translucent beginnings. You may have to add a bit of oil once in a while.
When the cutlets are all cooked, turn the heat up and add the wine, stirring a bit. Then add the cream and the lemon rind and let boil furiously for a few minutes. It gets quite bubbly. Add the lemon juice, stirring constantly, then taste. Stir in salt and taste again. You have to balance the lemon and the salt– it should be very spritely and citrusy, but not too acid, which is what the salt does; it dampers the lemon juice. Reduce the heat to low.
When it is perfect, put the cutlets back into the sauce and turn them to coat them. Using tongs, arrange the cutlets on a platter being very artistic, and dump the rest of the sauce over them. Scatter the Parmigiano over the dish and serve.
The sauce is very good with bread, and leftovers are welcome even here in leftover-haters house. Because it is a very pronounced flavor, I like to serve gentle vegetables with it.
September 1st, 2007
All over Italy, millions of Italians are on their summer vacations. They are huddled on the beaches and scattered on mountaintops, in the traditional holiday that gives them a break from summer. This year, however, a cold mass moved in and they are all freezing. This meal, written up for winter, I made this week and it was just the perfect thing. No, it isn’t like January now. The windows are still open a crack, the heat isn’t on and I am not wearing twinsets and socks, but it’s gray and cool and having the oven on for a while feels pretty darned good.
I am republishing this at the request of Ruth, of Presto Pasta Night. This will be a long post, because it is about cooking one thing that you can eat in more than one way. It’s cheap, easy and some of my favorite cold weather indulgence. Remember, once a week you can go to Once upon a Feast and see pasta recipes from the world, not just Italian pasta, either, but ways to use bean thread, rice noodles and every sort of noodle that exists.
This is brasato of pork spare ribs on polenta and with grated Parmigiano Reggiano. Here is how I made three single meals of it. It can be expanded to any size you like.
1 pound of lean pork spareribs
1 large onion cut into spears and then those halved
salt
1 whole clove of garlic
a handful of flatleaf parsley
2 allspice berries
2 cloves
1/4 cup of fortified wine, like Martini and Rossi or sherry or whatever, but NOT sweet
1 large 18 ounce tin of peeled whole tomatoes.
I heated a heavy iron pan to quite hot and then seared the ribs until
they were browned. Remove the ribs to a plate, and put the onions into
the fat the ribs gave up, adding about 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and stirred
them around until they were transparent and starting to brown. Add the
garlic and stir in a bit. Add the wine. Put the ribs back in, then
the allspice, the cloves, the parsley and stir about. Add about
another 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Pour the tin of tomatoes over all.
Bring to a simmer, then put a lid on and reduce the heat the minimum
possible on your stove. You don’t have to do anything else, as the long cooking will do all the work.
Leave them alone for a couple of hours,making sure that they don’t dry out and burn on. Add a bit of water if
they seem in danger.
The polenta is made according to the directions on the package , and I use Valsugana, which takes eight minutes to cook. If you use the thirty minute kind, you may want to make extra to cool into a block that you can slice and use for other dishes. There are any number of them here on Think On It, and one memorable restaurant dish I loved consisted of a roasted quail perched on a slice of toasted polenta and surrounded by salsa verde. Go with it.
I ate that version two times, even though I don’t like leftovers, because this is one of those dishes that gets tastier after a day or so in the fridge.
Then today, when there was pretty much only the sauce left, I decided it would be a great day to make tagliatelle for the sauce. People make such a thing out of making pasta. That’s just wrong! I watch an Italian cooking show sometimes, and in the twenty minutes they have to prepare a whole meal, they can make fresh pasta, a sauce, then cook and serve it in twenty minutes. So can I, and so can you. I never buy egg pasta.
My secret is a pasta rolling machine. It is cheap and sturdy and YOU MUST NEVER WASH IT. How about that? Something you don’t have to clean up. Otherwise you have to roll it out with a rolling pin, letting it rest if it doesn’t behave, cut it by hand. Get the little roller!
Here is where it starts.
That is merely 100 grams of plain flour, an egg and a pinch of salt. I stir it around with a fork until the flour starts to soak up the egg. Then with floury hands I start to knead it until it doesn’t have lumps and graininess and looks like this.
Remember, this is a single serving if you are eating only pasta. The recipe is expandable to whatever amount of dough you can handle. Every 100 grams of flour gets an egg and a pinch of salt. That’s it! You can also see that my dough scraper gets lots of use.
The pasta roller has a wheel with numbers on it. You always start with #1. Cut that ball into two pieces and put it into the slot and turn the crank. It will roll right through and turn into a strip. Fold it to make a short piece again and roll it through again. Fold and roll about 12 times. It will become flexible and smooth and almost like damp skin. Every once in a while you may want to lay it in some flour on the counter to keep it from getting sticky.
No brushing it with basting brushes, no cutting off irregular edges, just fold and roll. I am making homemade pasta and I have no desire to have it look like factory made pasta. When it has become slick and soft, start changing the numbers to 2, then 3, etc. until you get to #6. This shot is just as I am thinning it down.
When you get to #6, it will be very long. Lay it on the floury counter and cut it in two to make it shorter. Then change the crank on the machine to the cutting part and run that through the wide noodle slot. And when you have done it all, you will have this.
Start warming the sauce you want to use. Put a big pot of water on to boil. When the water is boiling hard, throw about a heaping soup spoon of salt into it, or the amount you like if it’s more than that. Pick up these lovely tagliatelle and lay them into the boiling water, then give them a good stir or two. They will be cooked in just about one minute. Don’t wander off!
Drain them and immediately put them into the pan in which you have heated your sauce. Toss about, serve them immediately.
Not bad, eh? My sauce from the brasato is a pretty chunky sauce, so yours may look more refined, but these tasted good!
And the clean up? I brushed the flour off the pasta roller and put it back into the cupboard. I used the dough scraper to scrape up every scrap of flour from the counter. A quick swish with a damp sponge finished it off.
As always, click to see bigger photos.
August 22nd, 2007
This is my start, but maybe this is not what you find in the market. Veal breast has always been around and cheap. Ask the man at the meat window about it. You can tell by the color of this piece that it is not the white veal so many object to, but a normal animal that is being treated decently. It happens that at my supermarket there is a sign saying where it’s reared and where it’s butchered. Both are towns near to me. That’s a particularity though, and it’s not crucial information.
Anyway, so you get veal breast and it has rib bones in it and it is a flat piece with a flap. You can fix that.
No running into the bathroom or the bedroom and pretending it’s all too much. It is not a highly specialized skill! You can do this, armed only with a thin sharp knife and some basic common sense. If you have time to watch American Idol, Deal or No Deal or Isola dei Famosi, you have time to do this and save a bundle.
One way to remove the bones is to work from the underside and slit the thin membrane over each bone, then using your fingers to slip up and around the bone, you can get it free. If it is attached to anything, cut around what it is attached to and remove that, too. Another way is more like filleting fish. You need a boning knife for that. You insert the boning knife on one side of the first bone and run it along. sawing a bit, over all of them until they are free, then go underneath the bones and do the same thing. Those are now spareribs, because they are ribs and they are spare and not required for this dish at all. See how logical cooking is?
Whichever way you have done it, you will then have a flat piece of meat that could have cost you $6 per pound or more if someone at a butcher’s did it for you. Work it out.
Why did you learn this? Because you are the first or second generation not to know how to do this, after centuries in which every ancestor knew how and had to do it unless she had servants. It isn’t like corning your own beef or making marzipan, it’s easy. It’s basic knowledge that helps you to better meat for less money. Rolled veal breast is superb meat. It can be made up to be very fancy or it can be simple. You can remove excess fat if there is any– mine didn’t have any– and you are in control of what you eat.
Get out cotton string that isn’t coated or treated. If you’ve any questions about your current string, ask at the butcher’s counter or buy kitchen string at a supermarket — depending on which country you live in. Get out a pair of shears. Put whatever you want on that flat piece of meat– here you see coarse sea salt, thyme and a branch of rosemary. Another idea is stuffing like you put into a turkey. Still another idea is a meat mixture seasoned like a spicy meatloaf. If you live in Italy, the latest issue of Sale e Pepe has a recipe for a meat stuffing for veal breast.
Then roll the flat thing up, tucking in any raggedy edges, until it is a nice rotund sausage shape and wrap it all around with the string. Tie it here and there, then cut off spare pieces of string and put them over there with the spare ribs.
Heat a heavy pan with a lid to very hot. Add a little oil and then brown this veal roll on all sides until it is really well-colored. Pour in about 1.5 to 2 liters of stock, bring to a simmer and then put the lid on and reduce the heat to the absolute minimum you can attain. Cook it until it is very soft and a cooking fork enters it easily. Take it out and let it sit for a few minutes, or allow it to cool in the stock.
When preparing to serve, you may cook some vegetables in the stock to go with this. You don’t have to.
It cuts best when cool. Remove the string and use a sharp knife to make thin slices. You can then warm them in a bit of the stock. The rest of the stock should be poured into a container for the freezer. It can be used for anything stock is good for, and every time you cook meat in it, it just gets better. If you don’t have freezer space, you can keep stock in the fridge, but you need to reboil it for 5 minutes every 4-5 days. The freezer is much easier.
I chose this post as a response to a challenge by Sognatrice of Bleeding Espresso. It is meant to be the sign of after all, this is Think On It!
April 28th, 2007
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