ianinfrance

I've had 'roo a few times. Cooked the fillet like beef steak. Excellent. When I was visiting a friend in Adelaide, I made the tail into a 'roo bourguignon. Needed long marinating and long slow cooking, but it was very good indeed. I'd not heard of the shoulder being used, but if I were faced with it, I'd be tempted to make a wine based ragout after marinating. Doesn't have to be a bourguignon. If you speak French, I heartily recommend looking in Google.fr for a Salmis de Sanglier (that's an elderly wild boar and it's pretty tough. The young one is called marcassin and is cooked differently). Without wanting to plug, here's a link to what I do for boar, though you might want to marinate the 'roo before barding it and cook it longer. Boar Salmis

We've got two in that range, the Santuko for me and the Usuba for my wife who does most of the veg prep. Wonderful knives, take a good edge and are excellently balanced. Can't speak for the others you got, but I'm sure you won't regret the Santuko DP. That said, a blade sharpened single profile at 15° is obviously going to be sharper.

Hi James, Difficult for me to give an estimation based on experience, because ever since I've been interested in wine I've been lucky enough to have (real) wine cellars under my houses. However, a lot depends upon the steadiness or otherwise of the temperature. For example, a wine held at a rock steady 65F is likely to have aged less than one held at 55±10F even though the mean temperature of the latter is lower. That's especially true of diurnal temperature changes. They (dam)age wine more than the normal biennial winter/summer temperature variations that are responsible for wine's normal aging. But from what I've read, I'd guess you're not far wrong in your 10 year ball park figure. Just wanted to add that as long as the bird isn't TOO heavily hung, Zachary's suggestion is excellent. At least I think it is, because I am a bit confused about red-legged pheasant. Surely it's partridge that's red or grey legged - or is this an American variant? Either way, I would happily eat either of these with a top red burgundy.

Yes, you're quite right and as vengroff said, I also use sous vide more with tender cuts to make them more succulent. I was careless in my language. I really intended to refer to the specific usage. Marinating to make Char siu. The marinating already makes for a result that is as juicy and tender as one could ask for. That said I've not tried it.I may be in a minority, but if I'm going to use sous videry, then it is to solve a particular problem rather than out of general principles. For example, when buying a chicken, the breast and legs need cooking differently to both sow at their best IMO. So I joint my chicken and get the best out of both cuts by cooking them both sous vide. But it has to be admitted that it's a bit of a fiddle, particularly with meat that's marinated. (I use a clamp vacuum sealer). When cooking char siu, I marinate my meat, roast/grill (using alternating surround and grill heat) for as long as it takes to get the meat surface nicely charred. It's beautifully juicy & tender in the middle. Now if someone can give me a proper recipe to follow with quantities and all, (don't need pics) I'd love to give it a try. And if I'm wrong and the results are better than I normally get I'll be the first to come back and say so.

Hi, It certainly is. It comes from the other side of the T bone. Think beef. As tenderloin is to the fillet so loin of pork is to sirloin. Given that it's already normally very tender, I'm unconvinced as to whether it's a prime candidate for sous videry. I just marinate mine, and then blast 'em. Because the meat is tender to start with and marinated, it ends up succulent and delicious.

Hi Doug, :laugh: Isn't it irritating how real life experiments have this habit of biting your backside when you're not looking! (I say this in sympathy, as a (well retired) ex chemist). As this is my first post on this topic, can I quickly say how much I appreciate all the hard work you and others have put into this fascinating cooking method. Passim... I cooked 3 duck foie gras today sous vide at 66°C, one was in a terrine, and the other two in (4) vac packs each cut in half after marinating and before packing. If I had to restrict SV cookery to just one single thing, it would be this. The results are uniformly fantastic.

I'm unconvinced by the lamb pairing with red burgundy, I've had it, of course, but I don't think it's that wonderful. I find lamb goes much better with Bordeaux style wines. Anyway. A decent Clos Vougeot is not normally a shy retiring flower. At only 7 years old, it's still relatively young, so will have plenty of "oomph". However, as you have kept your wine in far too warm an environment for several years, it may well have aged prematurely so in fact it might be better to treat it as if it were an older wine. Normally I'd serve it perfectly happily with a decent Beef Bourguignon. By the way, one of the things that makes me grind my teeth is the attribution of a dish written by THREE people working in collaboration to Julia Child. It's totally unfair on the others whose contributions were even more important than hers. It's NOT "Julia's" Boeuf Bourg it's Boeuf Bourg from MTAOFC or Beck, Bertholle and Child's. However I can see that you won't know me from Adam, so you have no particular reason to trust my word for this, over that of other regular contributors. But, let me go left field. IMO The very best dish in the world for showing off a top class older red burgundy is top class chicken (free range and organic) roasted perfectly. Nowadays, however, with my increasing interest in sous vide low temperature cookery, I think I might go for a dish based on really fine chicken breasts cooked sous vide, rather in the way Keller does his Poularde at the French Laundry. The Roast chicken old red Burgundy is a combination I've done on several occasions, though usually with wines quite a lot older. Clos de Tart '69, for example and Clos de la Roche 70, as well as a decent '64 Corton (all Grand Crus as well).

I'm not sure that what I do here in France is going to be much of a help, but here goes. I can't live without smoked bacon, and they don't make it here. So I've had to learn how to do it. I won't claim it's the world's best, or anything silly, but it's way better than anything I've ever bought in a supermarket in the UK. What I get here in France is "sel nitrité" This contains 0.6% sodium nitrite and is a straight 1 for 1 replacement for salt in any charcuterie recipe, obviating the need to fiddle around with calculating proportion of cure #1. However, in the Americas (and UK) that's what you have to do. So to cure sensibly in the States you need very accurate and sensitive scales to make sure you don't overdo the nitrite (which is highly toxic). I use my salt at the rate of 2.5% w/w and dry cure under vacuum. I use an equilibrium cure, which means that if you leave the meat curing too long, it's entirely unimportant. So.... I make up a mixture of one part demerara or other raw cane sugar to two parts of nitrited salt. I add quite a bit of black pepper corns after grinding them fine in a little rotary coffee mill, and some dried thyme. I then regrind everything together to make absolutely sure they are perfectly homogenous. You really don't want to find you've hit a high concentration of nitrite. So... using 2.5% w/w of salt, that will give 37.5g cure per kilo of meat. (the weight of spices and herbs is irrelevant). Prepare your vacuum pack bag so it's long enough to hold your meat, folding back the top so it doesn't get brine all over it. Now rub your cure well into the meat, working it into all the nooks and crannies. If the skin is on, use 90% flesh side, 10% skin side, otherwise use 60%:40% flesh: fat. When it's well rubbed in, slide the meat into the bag, wipe the edges unfold and vacuum pack. Measure the thickness at the thickest part. It's usually about 2 inches. Calculate the curing time as follows 2 days plus one day for every half inch thickness. (2in would therefore give 6 days, but to cure a loin (say 4 in) might take 10 days. Stick it in the fridge (less than 5°C to discourage botulism) and cure it for the time required, not shorter, though anything up to 50% more will do no harm. When the time is up, remove from the pack, rinse and dry. Put back on a rack in the fridge to skin up for a day or two. The bacon can be fried and eaten like that - in the UK it is called unsmoked or "green" bacon. I cold smoke my bacon. Dead easy to do with the "cold smoke generator" which you can get from MacsBBQ in the UK. I use that with my Bradley, but just using the Bradley as a container. I can't afford their Brickets. One single charge of the smoker lasts 10 hours and I find it's perfect to give me bacon the way I like it. Salmon can even be done at the same time though I give that only 5 hours. The CSG gives out very little heat, so as long as your ambient temperature is under 20C, you can cold smoke with it without a problem. I like to leave my bacon to settle down 24 hours after smoking, but it's by no means essential. Whew.... As for combining brine and dry rub. I sort of do that to make gammon. In fact I inject half of my total salt as a flavoured brine to make sure the centre of the meat is rapidly protected against botulism, and rub the rest on the outside. The cure takes about a fortnight. (I can give detailed quantities if requited, though the calculations are a little complex). Hot smoking is only an advantage in countries where you can't rely on the pork being parasite free. The quality of the bacon is way better if cold smoked. All the above is of course only my opinion. But it's shared by most people who've tasted my bacon.

Thanks very much Nayan,. I'll go and have a look.Thanks Mark, but no I'm afraid I don't. Although I'm half hungarian, it's my lower half, so I didn't learn to speak it. However I have to confess to knowing about twenty words. BUT unfortunately having heard quite a bit spoken in early childhood, I speak those few words with a very good accent, which causes great problems, when they rattle back at me.

And finally, one of my Belgian friends who replied Et dans un dictionnaire wallon français de 1839 on trouve: "Carbonâd, s. Carbonnade, viande roulée et grillée sur des charbons." Translated "And in a walloon (french speaking Belgium) dictionary of 1839 we find "Carbonâd Carbonnade, meat rolled and grilled on coals" She also said "Sur le contenant il n'y a rien puisqu'il n'y a pas de contenant de ce nom. Que la casserole soit en terre ou en fonte, ça mijote au coin du feu." "As for the cooking utensil there/'s nothing, because there is no utensil of that name. Whether the casserole be of terracotta or cast iron, it simmers on the edge of the hob." And finally at last Noel came back with "Comme le dit Danièle, il n'existe pas de plat ou de casserole dont la racine du mot serait carbonade. " As Danièle said, there is neither a serving dish or a casserole of whom the root of their name is carbonade". So, without saying that Txacoli is wrong as to what he remembers, it seems that the people who live in the Flanders area don't know of such a dish. But let's face it Colmar (where his chef Kalmus came from) is a long way away and France is highly regionalised. So it's rather as if a chef fom New Mexico claimed that the origin of the word "chowder" was "chow" to eat.

I went to Herzog way back in 2001 in December. Very good food. However they did commit one culinary solecism. They served a rather nice cherry tart, and called it "Clafoutis". Oh dear.

Hi, My brother and I are half Hungarian and are keen to go back to Hungary before the cuisine is internationalised out of existence. We are planning to go there next fall, spending about half our time in Budapest, which after all, is important in culinary terms. But we're also planning on visiting one or two of the major provincial cities - perhaps Szeged and Debrecen which both have considerable claim to excellence. Even Eger is possible. The last discussions date back to 2004 and there have been a lot of changes since then. So can anyone please help, or give us a tip as to who can perhaps give us a steer in the right direction. We don't want to eat hungarianised Euro food or modernist marriages, but real old fashioned Magyár nosh. Stuff like Transylvanian layered cabbage, or a proper bográc gulyás etc. And if we put on weight for those ten days, so be it!!

Now we're really getting somewhere! Here's a link to the CNRTL (which is the National centre for textual and Lexical Research) - one of the advantages of a Language such as French which is officially defined, is that such organisations actually exist. My link For those who are linguistically challenged and could do with a little help with French meanings, the gist is as I've already reported. "A preparation method which consists of grilling meat over coals". Hence "meat cooked in this way" And a quotation from Alphonse Daudet Chez les bouchers, quand la vieille Annou demandait une carbonade, l'étalier lui riait au nez; il ne savait pas ce que c'était une « carbonade », ce sauvage! A. Daudet , Le Petit Chose, 1868, p. 23. "At the butchers, when the crone Annou asked for a carbonade, the stall holders laughed in his face, because, uncivilised brute, he didn't know what 'a carbonade' was."

Right!! Got somewhere at least. Noel hasn't come back to me yet, but another friend who remembers an erudite discussion on a French Language discussion group abut 11 years ago, dug out a quotation from a french dictionary. "Godefroy 1895-1902 Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXème au XVème siècle" (Dictionary of old French and all its dialects from the 9th to the 15th centuries.) Here's a clip of what it says. The first definition says "grilled, meat roasted hurriedly over coals." A piece of meat big enough to cook in that way. Hence, cut someone with a great slice from a sword so that he swallows "sa capeline" and a slice of the cheek as well. In Bordeaux, they stuill call "carbonnade" a piece of veal cooked on the grill or more often in a casserole". ========= No mention of pork, and no mention of the cooking utensil. But of course, general dictionaries are not the best source of information when it comes to any specialised vocabulary,. However the tie in between the name and grilling existed in the 13th century in French.

I have to say that with the glorious insouciance of someone who's read neither of these two books, but who has at least eaten at the Fat Duck and has tried some of the recipes in Heston's "Family Food", I find the juxtaposition "Home cooking" with either of these two chefs to be odd. They're all doing it and it's no less absurd when it's Gordon Ramsay or Michel Roux Jr, trying to persuade you that really, you too can cook like them on a day to day basis. I cam live with a top chef writing an aspirational book and selling it to people who want to push the boat out for some special occasion. Actually, I can't blame them. We all want to make money, and so I can see why a chef wants to cash in on his cachet. And they are going to sell more books and get richer by trying to persuade the great unwashed that they too can cook like "that funny guy in Barcelona" or "that mad englishman with glasses" if only they buy their cookbooks, rather than to try to appeal to serious foodies.

If you get a piece which is wide enough, it's not bad cut very thin indeed, beaten out and either seasoned and rolled up and braised (German Rouladen) or wrapped round sausagemeat, and made into a parcel and also braised, to make the French Paupiettes. Not bad used in either of these ways. But like all meats that come from modern cattle raised in such a way that they don't have interstitial fat, there's a tendency for the meat to be dry.

I've used Magimix for 40 years. 2 machines. I only changed the first one because the automatic on/off switch would have cost me a bundle to replace, and for a machine that was already >20 years old, it seemed like a risky expense. The motor power DOES adjust to differing loads. I'd not consider moving down to a lesser machine.

Txacoli How fascinating. I'll post your comments to Noel Lepère (the pseudo of my Belgian chef friend) and invite him to comment.

Simple answer, because it's not made to be aged. Fuller answer. There's no point in aging a wine if it's got nowhere to go. Ie if the fruit won't develop into something more complex and if there aren't enough tannins and acidity to warrant diminishing them, and/or if there's not enough to make the wine live longer. Rosé is deliberately made light in tannins and acidity to make it an agreeable quaffing drink pretty well from the day it's bottled. I know of a very few exceptions and for some of these, they can and do improve for a couple of years, but not much more. I can give an even more complete answer, but will that do for the moment?

Hi James, and thanks for the welcome, So do we. As for substituting the beer. I am afraid I'm a bit of broken reed - one of the disadvantages from your point of view of having someone from Europe contributing. I simply don't know enough about the flavour profiles of beer in the States to be able to give an intelligent answer. If you read MTAOFC (I've seen this abbreviation used) you'll see that they use extra ingredients, - sugar and vinegar - to compensate for the lack of the right beer, and then they thicken with cornflour to compensate for the not using spice bread. As you know, Lambic is beer fermented by using natural yeasts that float around in the brewery. I get one from about the best of the producers, called Cantillon. However I have to ask a friend to bring it down for me. Here where I live the choice is pretty wretched. Gueuze Bécasse is about it. I don't think it's right to use a very hoppy beer, nor one that's VERY dark, like a Guinness. But if you can find a lightly hopped golden malty beer, that would be fine, and then you would add some sugar (or better, malt extract( to sweeten slightly, and a tad of malt vinegar to balance it up. Hope that helps a bit. Here's the way I do it.

I believe there's a traditional saying in the Po area, which goes "Rice is born in water, and must die in wine". Good enough for me. Although I've tried Gordon Ramsay's short cut recipe, which reduces the finishing time to about 8 minutes, I don't find it as good while demanding a load of preliminary fiddling. I just live with 18 minutes stirring. For me, never any cream, never brown either the soffrito or the rice, just soften the vegetables in butter, and then raise the heat before stirring in the rice. I want it to get hot enough to boil off the alcohol from the wine and reduce it quickly, without taking any colour. Then I start adding the boiling brodo (stock/broth). I feel a risotto coming on! Butternut squash, I feel, with the squash from the garden. To accompany some wonderful farm pork chops.

Sorry Docdix, but I must disagree. Remember that traditionally (although RTWC isn't really very traditional) Tokaji Aszu was fermented open to the air for several years. Like Sherry and Vin Jaune, it is protected from deleterious effects by a "voile" - sherry "flor", which controls the way in which oxygen affects the wine. Anyway, what I'm trying to say here, is that first of all, the wine is immortal, and secondly that it extremely stable. As I type, I have a bottle of Tokaji Édes Szamarodni 1993 in front of me. It was opened about three weeks ago and sat since then in my centrally heated sitting room, until I brought it into my study to answer someone else about it. Admittedly it does have a cork in it, but there is only about 3/4 inch of wine left in the bottle. It has not changed in the least in that time. I'm not saying that RTWC wine is as stable as that, but strictly, that's a criticism of their way of making it. If you really want to see what great Tokaji Aszu is like, try one from Királyudvár or Istvan Szépsy. In a much more modern style. Disznökö is also wonderful, redolent of crystallised orange peel and marmalade. I'm a total fan of Tokaji wines and have visited and tasted my way round the area on several occasions.

Hi guys, For my first post on egullet, can I give you a tip of two that I had from a Michelin starred (now retired) chef from Brussels as to how to cook this. (I'm en English ex chef, now living in France. First. The word "Carbonnade" relates to grilling and therefore the dish is best cooked with thick slices of meat such as would once have been grilled. I use flatiron (french paleron) steak, cut about 1cm thick or a tad more. Call it ½ an inch. (See Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Bertholle, Beck and Child for a description). Second. The beer he used - and which I also use now, is Lambic Gueuze. I'll not insult you by telling you what it is, but the flavour profile which has some residual sugar from the unfermented malt, and is slightly sharp from the oxidation from the slow fermentation process all go to make the beer quite different from the very hoppy flavours of many dark beers (I have never tasted much hop in Lambic). Thirdly, as others have said, the dish is best thickened with a kind of bread. Here we use "Pain d'Epices" which is often made with honey, rye flour and is quite spicy from sweet spices. Gingernuts have more ginger than most pain d'épices. For about 900g or so of meat, which is more than enough for 6 people as part of a 4 course dinner you would use three slices of this bread/cake each of which is liberally slathered with made french mustard. Half the weight of sweet onions to meat. A large faggot of herbs and that's it. Far fewer ingredients than many recipes, because one has no need to compensate for using the wrong ones. I fry the beef in beef dripping, but other fats are fine. Then sweat/fry the sliced onions in the same pan until they've deglazed it and softened. Crushed garlic into the onions. Then layer up 3 layers of onion, 2 of beef, tucking the faggot onto the first layer and the bread onto the second. Pour over enough Geuze to cover (the original recipe calls for stock as well, but as I buy my Gueuze by the litre bottle and think it's vile to drink, it all goes into the stew! So I don't need any more liquid. Lid on, into a slowish oven until it submits. We eat this with baked potatoes and a green salad. Lovely stuff. All the best Ian