PaulDWeiss

Blether - "breaking trail?" I didn't use any trail. (Sorry, kind of a weak snipe-woodcock joke.) I think that the weights and ratios were approximately as follows, weights in pounds: Liver - 1.5 Kidney - .5 Heart - .75 Lamb lean - .5 Flare fat - 1.0 Oats - 2.0 Had this been a pork sausage, that would be a very lean mix - about 15% fat. I usually try to have my pork sausages up near 30%. However, the pork fat has a higher ratio of mono and poly unsaturated fats to saturated fats than lamb fat, I think. (Too lazy to look for a reference to corroborate that, so maybe I'm screwy on that....) At any rate, the lamb fat is a greasier, heavier fat, and at about 15%, the mouthfeel was greasy once the haggis dropped to room temperature. It was rich and unctuous when it was warm, but the fats "crystalized" after it cooled. A pork fat stays more fluid at room temperature, and doesn't crystalize until it's a bit cooler. I'm not certain that less fat would please me more, but I'd like to try adjusting that next time around. I had several choices for the oats. Whole groats are available, but would be too coarse in that form. My means of cutting them is the dry-blade canister on a Vita-Mix, which acts as a sort of hammer mill, and results in a lot of fracturing and fines, rather than all cut grains. I could have passed the fines through a tamis and pitched them out, but I thought that I could get closer to my goal by going with a pre-processed product. Rolled whole oats don't have nearly the right texture, so they were out. The other 3 choices were all called pinhead at the local Scottish products store. (Get yer bagpipes and sporrans, step right up!) There was a commercial imported Scottish all-oat porridge, but the store keeper said she thought that it had a lot of fines, also. Down to two, both milled Scottish-style of locally-grown oats by an Oregon mill: steel cut groats (claimed to be cut into about thirds), and a coarse stone-ground product. The shop keeper suggested that haggis babies might be least frightened of the ground oats, so that's the one I went with. I think it would have worked as well with less oats, but the proportion and texture were pleasing to me as it turned out, and the whole thing was ultimately inhaled by people who had started off by saying things like "This looks truly repulsive, no offense." The 4 ½ hour cooking time was, in fact, sort of middle-of-the-road for the range of recipes I had found, and was determined finally by what time the forcemeat was finished, and what time the party was supposed to start. I thought the texture was good: oats neither hard nor mushy, fat melted into the whole, and the heart and lean still had a nice amount of tooth. Dumb luck on the timing; it's one of those dishes where you don't have any feedback at all along the way; you don't know what you've got until you cut the bag open. The sauce was inspired by the classic Canard à l'orange sauce from James Peterson's "Sauces" book. The veal stock had a very nice amount of gelatin once it was reduced (the modern loose definition of "demi glace"), and didn't need any other liaison. I caramelized the sugar more strongly than Peterson suggests, to keep up with the stronger flavor of the lamb liver, relative to a roasted duck. Now I'm all excited by gastrique-based brown fruit sauces, and will have to do a few more experiments with them. I think that my knee-jerk rejection of all things sweet-and-sour comes out of experiences of horrible examples from Americanized Chinese restaurant cooking, but I have seen the light. Paul

'Tis done, and 'twas a grand success, thanks in part to all of the participants here. It turned out that the actual prep of the stomach was the least interesting part: I parboiled it for a minute, then rotated it through 3 changes of salted and acidulated (cider vinegar) water over 4 hours or so, then scraped some of the looser membranes and fatty bits from the outside of it, and the bag was free of odd smells, and was ready to go. The filling mix was a lamb liver, two hearts, and four kidneys. Some unknown amount of lamb flare fat - probably close to a pound; I was working by feel and texture. As Tim Hayward has noted, the recipes are all over the map. I poached the organ meats (and a half pound of muscle meat to richen up the stock) at about 140ºF for an hour in just enough water to cover them, then ran the heart and the uncooked suet through a ⅜ inch grinder plate, and the liver and the kidneys through a ¼ inch plate. A chopped onion, and (because the second onion had rotted) a chopped large shallot. Parsley, a bit of sage, savory, salt, and a lot of pepper; pretty simple seasoning. 2 pounds of oats were coarsely ground, browned dry, and when I mixed the whole works up, I used the filtered stock from poaching the meats to moisten it. That gave me enough filling for at least two finished haggis-es, or whatever the plural is, and maybe three; the extra got cryovac-ed and is in the freezer. Filled the stomach, tied it up, and poached it for 4 ½ hours at just below boiling. A local cook had suggested a whiskey plum sauce, which appealed to me, given that the skeleton of the evening was going to be a single malt tasting (we had 9 different malts). I made a gastrique with a half cup of well-carmelized sugar, into which I whisked a quarter cup of red wine vinegar. A quart of veal stock got reduced to 2 cups, into which I whisked 4 oz of German blue plum butter, 2 oz of a boring and undistinguished blended Scotch, and two tablespoons of the gastrique. I brought that back down to 2 cups, and finally added a tablespoon full of Laphroaig close to the end to add some peat; I just left the sauce on the fire long enough to evaporate off the alcohol. The sauce was terrific - I would have made a meal of sawdust and the sauce. Overall, I was quite happy with the finished dish. Next time I'll try to reduce the amount of suet; it all disappeared during the cooking, but there was more than I think would be optimal. I had thought that I had too little oats in the mixture as I mixed it up before poaching, but that turned out to be just right. I served it to a room full of 20 haggis-neophytes who started off uneasy, and ended up enthusiastic; what could be better! Thank you all for your help. Paul

Blether - thanks for the references to Scottish history, and to that of The Bard. I love it when I'm sent off to learn a bit about things I know nothing about, which is almost everything. By the way, my suspicion is that all of the southbound sheep you used to see were heading down for a couple of weeks at Brighton, that their lungs might clear. Paul

Blether - very interesting questions, at least partly because I don't think I ever asked them of myself with regard to haggis. I think my motivation is pretty ill-defined, actually; I'm not a food historian (although I love to read that stuff), but I do have an unexamined bias against, say, a vegetarian haggis with fun miniature marshmallows, wrapped in fresh tofu skin, and sauced with a passion fruit foam. That still leaves a lot of turf to explore, I guess. After reading your questions and rubbing my chin, I did go downstairs to look the word up in the Oxford English Dictionary (the big OED, with the tiny little font), and found that pretty instructive. The recorded uses of the word go back to something earlier than modern English, and even very early citations talk about haggis made with veal and pork, not just with sheep, and sometimes with blood, too. So, what is haggis in the first place? It doesn't even seem to have been thought to be a characteristically Scottish dish until the beginning of the 18th century; before that, it was homely English cooking as well. So perhaps my vision of a shepherd's dish is itself my own invention. I believe that my initial impulse for posting is more clear to me: I was looking for enough guidance in prepping the sheep stomach that the likelihood of presenting my guests with a plate of inedible slime might be minimized. But in terms of my overall culinary haggis goal, I think that I have a fuzzy model of one particular meal I had in Glasgow 20 years ago, when I decided that all the previous versions of haggis I had tried had sucked, but that that one was really good. I think I made the jump from that to a belief that I had been shown something essential, authentic, and defining about haggis, but who knows? Maybe the chef had thrown some passion fruit in there, and that's why I liked it so well. This all reminds me of a terrific book I read about a year ago - "The Discovery of France," by Graham Robb. It's a history book that talks, not about a geographical discovery (which had been accomplished by Cro Magnon humans, and probably by Neanderthals before them), but the creation of a shared understanding of history and culture - of Frenchness - within France, and just how amazingly recent that is. Some of it's about food, and if you read about the maggotty filth almost everyone in France used to eat just a short time ago, it's amazing how firmly ideas about traditional foodways have been established in the blink of an eye. Great book, for a lot of reasons. OK - local time zone says it's way past a reasonable bedtime, not to mention that I'm pushing the clocks forward tonight. Thanks for the questions - thinking about them is as much fun as doing the cooking! Maybe more fun than scraping the stomach! Paul

ChefCrash - what a great-looking recipe! What's in Lebanese 7 spice mixture? Paul

Thanks, Blether. I hadn't found the Margaret Dods book. I've been finding a lot of digitized old public-domain cookbooks, and have added that one to my collection. I still don't know what she might mean by a "haggis bag," however, although I have read of treatments where the haggis is poached in a muslin bag, which is slit open at the table at service, the haggis being spooned out on to the diner's plates. Interesting to me that she's calling for beef suet. The old recipes I've been finding are running about 2 to 1 in favor of beef suet, with only one third using mutton suet. I'd guess that, given its provenance as a shepherd's dish, the fat originally used was that of the beast supplying the pluck, but perhaps that's a romantic assumption. I'm a bit more dubious about the Tim Hayward piece. He's got the anatomy wrong for a starter: the rumen is the first chamber of the ruminant's system, not the fourth, and is sold in France as "gras-double," or "panse," and in the US as "blanket tripe," if you can find it. The reticulum is sold here as "honeycomb tripe," and the omasum as "bible tripe." Are those the names used in the UK market as well? I don't think there's any commercial human-food use of the fourth chamber (the abomasum, or true stomach; the one with the acids) here at all, though I don't know why not. The bottom line is that the rumen is very far away from anything which might be considered fecal; in fact, the rumen contents of a farm-slaughtered animal in particular looks a lot like the last couple of mouthfuls of grass or hay which the beast ate, which is exactly what it is. No matter, he's using ox-bung anyway, which is marketed as beef bung in the US, and which is easy to get from sausage-making supply houses. (Now, the bung is the large intestine - THAT'S had the poo in it!) I've had a couple of sausages and puddings stuffed into bung, and they have the virtue of being pretty easy to work with; nice and clean, not only flushed, but stripped too, and very uniform. My grandmother used to make her lung sausage with bung, but she did the stripping herself, turning it inside out and using a dull soup spoon to scrape the mucosa out, which seemed to take about forever. In her version, the sausage was finally baked, and the casing ended up shiny, brown, crispy, tough, and wonderful; definitely the part everyone at the table tried to negotiate for. Another thing that I find dubious about the Tim Hayward dish is the seasoning. If he had seasoned his haggis with gorse instead of rosemary, I might find it a bit more believable, but he's making a northern shepherd's dish with Mediterranean herbs. Delicious, I'm sure, but might as well choose a different name for the dish. My objective was (is) to get as close as I can to the original form of the dish, so I'm trying to pass on beef bung, ground beef meat, and barley, among other more modern improvements. Maybe I'll like the more modern one better; dunno. Thanks again for the pointer to the Dods book; that's a treat! Paul

Hi - I'm making a haggis in a few days, and will be getting a flushed (hosed out) lamb stomach to use as a casing directly from the slaughterer, as an unwanted by-product of a Halal kill. I haven't had a real haggis for more than a 15 years, but I remember the casing being thinner than - say - blanket tripe, which makes me suspect that the mucosa from the stomach has been stripped. The recipes I'm working with are 50 and 60 years old, and assume that I'll start with a stomach which is going to be butcher-prepped. They assume that at least it will have been parboiled/blanched, and one reference I've found implies that the stomach will have been pre-treated with some sort of lye solution. I don't know if that's traditional enough that the other references thought it beneath notice, but I don't have a clue about concentrations or times, let alone a reason as to why this might be a good idea. None of this butcher-prepping is going to be true for the stomach I'm getting; the beast's stomach contents will have been rinsed out, but that's it. If anyone knows what the correct prep is for this piece before stuffing, please give me a response, and (as always) if a previous thread discusses this, a pointer would be much appreciated. I'm not interested in finding general discussions of haggis recipes; it's the prep of the crude stomach in particular where I'm looking for help. As a second question, when I had haggis in Scotland oh so long ago, one of the variety meats normally included was lung, which is no longer available for human consumption through the USDA food chain. (I grew up eating a fondly-remembered Hungarian-Jewish beef lung and rice sausage laboriously made by my Bubby.) Lungs (lights) are listed as a primary offal ingredient in most of the old haggis recipes I've found, as a primary part of the pluck. However, the slaughterer (who is also the éleveur, and who won't sell me any lung) has told me that here in the coastal NW USA, very few field-raised ruminants have clear lungs as a result of our wet climate. So, for instance, there is no longer any Kosher lamb production here, because too many carcasses get rejected after the kill on the basis of guidelines of ritual inspection. An interesting topic in itself, but let me get back to the haggis. It seems to me that a possible substitution for the lung might be spleen, which has a similarly spongy texture, and which is more generally available (especially as pork spleen). Any thoughts on the use of spleen in haggis? I've never seen it listed in any recipe I've encountered. Thanks for the help, Paul Weiss

Sooo, directly from the frigiarium to the tepidarium?

An aquarium bubbler is the standard for on-the-cheap sous vide systems using rice cookers.

Hi - has anyone tried to use a commercial deep-fat fryer as a sous vide bath? 6 liter fryers are available new for under US$200. The temperature granularity of the fryer is coarse, but that shouldn't matter if the unit is plugged into a controller. If there's a thread which has already discussed this, I'd appreciate a pointer; I found a short one which discussed the use of a turkey fryer, but without substantive information. (In particular, the use of it and the objections to that use were theoretical; no one had tried it, as far as I could gather.) Tanx, Paul

Hi - I've used a FoodSaver for 6 or 8 years; it clearly earns its use of valuable counter space, and gets used a dozen times a day. Daily leftovers go into canisters or vacuum boxes - no more refrigerator taste, no more saran-covered bowls tipping over in the frigo, no more (or much less) flavor degradation from oxidation. That includes stuff like cut onions and garlic, which I always threw out before - the flavor degenerates quickly, and the odor spreads to places I don't want it, like my cheese. (I use the smallest roll bags for that - the gaskets of the canisters do accept a bit of smell, and I don't know what I'll want to put in them next. I cut the bag long enough to use it 4 or so times.) Wine bottles get the nifty vacuum plugs, and the quality stays much higher with the bottle evacuated than simply corked, until I drink the rest 2 or 3 days later. Works for cooking oils, also, whether or not they go in the reefer. Raw meat lasts "forever;" they say that 2 years is OK. I've never let it go that long, but taking advantage of promo prices on pork shoulder, or stocking up on organ meats which aren't always available, for that matter, is a no-brainer. It's always a bit of a plan-ahead situation to get some crepinette, so I get lots, pack it up 3 to a bag with waxed paper between the sheets, and grab it from the freezer for a fast defrost when I need some; I do the same with pork skin (couennes) for enriching stocks and stews. Marinating under vacuum is faster than at atmospheric pressure. When I smoke meats, which is also a big deal, in terms of setup and cleanup, I make three times what I'm going to eat immediately, bag it and freeze it. No freezer burn, ever. My own smoked duck breasts are my idea of a TV dinner Stock: it takes all day, but doesn't take any more time to make 4 gallons than it does to make one. I use non-stick bread pans to freeze one quart quantities, which takes a couple of hours uncovered, pop the frozen block out of the bread pan, then into a FoodSaver bag it goes. I've got stock (and extra marinade ready to go, and finished soups, also) that's more than a year old, and I'll tell you, it beats the hell out of anything I can get from the store. (We are blessed with an excellent traiteur in Portland, and I can get good stock from him, but the stock I make is as good, and a lot cheaper.) I've got a couple of very large canisters which I use as bread boxes for using bread one or two days after I get it from the bakery. There's a tradeoff there: the bread doesn't stale as fast, but you do lose the crunch of the crust. In short, I think that it's about as useful as a good knife. I don't work for them (or anybody else, for that matter), but I'm very high on their system.