carswell

This probably means the lamb you've eaten has been closer to mutton than to spring lamb. Sheep secrete lanolin, which if I recall correctly also flavours their fat. Young lamb is lanolin free.

Chi è? A local or an outsider?

Anyone know about this product? Is it really apple-flavoured? Or is that just some SAQ flunkie's attempt at describing an obscure spirit? It's in a lot of Montreal-area outlets. For a complete listing, go to www.saq.com > enter the product code in the search box > click Succursales > select the region (e.g. La grande région de Montréal) > click the Rechercher button.

Yep. And lamb kidneys will spoil you for any other.

Hmmm. Do you spike the blood with a bit of vinegar? Also, do you warm the blood by adding an equal quantity of hot braising liquid to it a tablespoonful at a time? And once the warmed blood is added to the pot, do you heat it gently, briefly and never to — let alone beyond — the simmering point?

Whoa, dude. You drive fast!

Tranches de gigot or lamb leg steaks are great: flavourful, chewy but tender, quite lean, more affordable than chops and easy to prepare. When pan-fried, broiled or grilled, about 2 minutes a side does it, though they also take well to slow braising. Lamb shoulder and neck are wonderful for stews. Seared and/or roasted loins are a deluxe treat. Butterflied leg of lamb is one of the best meats for grilling. And bone-in roast leg of lamb absolutely deserves its classic status. Many Americans object to any red meat that doesn't taste bland, including cuts of beef like hanger steak. Others don't like lamb because they've never had access to the good stuff; the situation is improving but much of the lamb sold in supermarkets comes from fairly mature animals, which have stronger tasting meat. And lots of Americans overcook lamb, which ironically makes it taste gamier; I know several Americanos who like their beef rare but insist that their lamb be cooked medium to well-done. Agreed. Lamb is my favourite domestic red meat.

That's not my take on this discussion. For my part, I almost always brown red meat before adding the braising liquid, for colour, yes, but mainly for flavour. The browning should only sear the outside, not cook the meat through.

Civet sauce - what is it?

Talk about wussing out! Examining and discussing those reasons is the most interesting thing (maybe the only interesting thing) about this subject. I'm not a hunter so I've never actually had to face the question. But, yes, with a freshly killed hare, of course I would. Before the animal can be butchered, it has to be bled. Are you saying you'd just throw the blood away? If so, besides the gastronomic and nutritional sin you'd be committing, couldn't such wastefulness be construed as a mark of disrepect for the animal whose life had been sacrificed on the altar of your table? The domestic hare I sometimes get from my butcher is frozen and when it thaws it releases a quantity of blood. Ditto frozen hunks of moose meat received from hunter acquaintances. (Thinking about this now, I wonder if it's because the animals aren't properly bled to begin with.) In such cases, could you use the blood in the final dish? Too bad if not; a civet of moose is one of the best things I've ever made or eaten. The North American disconnect between living animals and meat is an astounding phenomenon, and because it arises from willful ignorance — a refusal or inability to deal with death, even when it sustains life — also a disturbing one. A friend of mine who gags at even the thought of eating boudin (blood sausage) or civet, always orders his steaks blood rare and takes great pleasure in sopping up the "juices" (i.e. blood) left on the plate. Is this anything other than cognative dissonance? edit: clarity

Mechanism, schmechanism. I'll take centuries of French cooking tradition and proven results over a probe thermometer any day.

Piling on here but my first thought was the cooking temperature. Stews should cook at the gentlest of simmers with only the occasional bubble breaking the surface. Even a medium simmer will dry out the meat. Any French butcher worth his cleaver will insist you choose at least two, often three cuts of beef for a stew, to give a deeper flavour to the dish and a richer texture to the sauce. (As I recall, the last time I asked for stewing beef, my butcher gave me some round, some blade, some neck and a few short ribs.) One of the unintended consequences of this approach is that it provides the opportunity for side-by-side comparison of how the various cuts react to identical stewing conditions. While it's true that the fattier and more gelatinous cuts turn out more succulent and the leaner cuts stringier and drier, the difference is minor in a properly cooked stew, which is why I suspect cooking temperature may have been the culprit in your case.

Hoping y'all will indulge me the self-reference, here's an extract from a post I made a while back to a thread on Quebec's "dépanneur" (convenience store) wines over on the Montreal, Quebec and Eastern Canada board. I've bolded a point that, assuming I haven't missed anything, hasn't been clearly made in this discussion.

So, cranberry bean is the family name and there are different varieties within the family, one of which is the Jacob's cattle bean? I ask because I'd been calling the locally grown cream and scarlet-striated beans cranberry beans for years until I ran across this blog entry, which dubs them Jacob's cattle beans. (A local green grocer has them labelled as romano beans, which I assume is really wrong.) And now I wonder if I've ever eaten a true cranberry bean. Cranberry or not, the Jacob's cattle beans cook up into earthy delights. Besides enjoying them in both Hazan recipes referred to upthread (especially that mussel soup), I often heat them in a skillet with diced pancetta and a dollop of crème fraîche. They're great chilled in salads, too.

The Caffine Machine Or off the shelf?

Mavrodaphne is an affordable sweet red from Greece; it's pretty widely available, too. Both California and Italy make red (sometimes called black) muscat wines. There's also a number of off-dry to sweet fizzy red wines; the best known is Lambrusco (e.g. Riunite). Late-harvest reds (zinfandel, cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir, etc.) are often less than bone dry. That can also be said for some low-end "dry" wines, especially from the New World (e.g. most of the reds from California's Delicato winery). What many people who say they don't like reds really don't like is the tannins, so suggest choosing a low-tannin variety like zinfandel, merlot, shiraz, charbono or gamay (the first three can be made in a more tannic style but usually aren't at the low end in the New World). Also, many are available in boxes, an advantage from both a price and reduced spoilage standpoint. Native American varietals other than concord are often made sweet to hide their "foxy" flavour. If your friend can find a local winery or an East Coast winery that ships, he'll be all set, because the prices are usually low, low, low. And why rule out the classic fortified reds like Port, Banyuls, Maury and Riversaltes? Port comes in all price ranges; vintage character, crusted, ruby tend to be the least expensive, late-bottled vintage a bit pricier. One advantage of fortified wines is their longevity once opened; they tend to taste good even after being open for a week, something to bear in mind if your friend intends to drink only one glass per evening.

Received my copy of TCOSWF last week but have not had time to read through it. On first glance, it looks really impressive — a must-buy for anyone with the slightest interest in the region and its food. On the weekend, I celebrated the book's arrival by making the Casserole of Moulard Duck Breasts with Potatoes as Prepared in the Region of the Bigorre: Partially cook duck breasts in a skillet, then set them aside. In a casserole (I used a well-seasoned cast iron chicken fryer), cook thinly sliced sweet onion and diced ventrèche (pancetta) in some of the rendered duck fat. Add peeled and thinly sliced red potatoes, turn them in the fat, press down to form a disk, and cook until the slices begin to brown. Turn and press again, cover and cook over low heat. Repeat, adding a bay leaf. Repeat, adding salt and pepper. Repeat, adding chopped parsley and garlic. Slice the duck breasts crosswise. Place the slices atop the potatoes, season, cover, raise the heat and cook 2 to 3 minutes. As you might expect, this dish was rustic, warming and tailor-made for a bottle of Madiran. It was also easy to put together in under an hour. And it looked almost as good as the photo in the book. The only hitch (and a minor one at that) was that some of the onions were blackened by the end; however, they were easy to pull out. I had the good fortune to test several recipes for the book in the summer and fall of 2004. The most involved was the traditional confit of duck. Others included the sous-vide duck confit ("confit lite" was how Paula referred to it); duck breasts cooked on a string; an early version of the duck breasts with mulberry cream; two or three potato recipes; and the Salt-Cured Pork Belly with Fresh Fava Bean Ragout. The others I'll discuss in future posts. For now, I'll follow other testers' lead and append a slightly edited version of my comments on that amazing pork belly. A description of the dish: The recipe comes from Jean-Pierre Moullé, whom many here will know from his days as a chef at Chez Panisse. You start four days out by brining the pork belly in a mixture of water, salt, sugar, bay, allspice, clove and pepper. On the fourth day, you put the belly on a bed of onions, carrots, garlic and fennel in a roasting pan, add sweet wine, cover and braise in a medium oven for 2 hours, then uncover and roast for another 30 minutes. After cooling, you cut the belly into 4-ounce portions, which are then reheated on a grill pan and served atop a ragout of fava beans, artichoke hearts, fennel, pancetta and shallots. My comments:

Actually, it's pretty effective, though I find putting the bottle under an aluminum foil pyramid while closing my eyes and chanting Burma Shave slogans backwards works even better!

What they all said. If storage space is a problem, boil it down — in the approximate ratio of one bottle to one cup and with a bit of minced shallot softened in butter if you like — for use as a wine-reduction sauce for red meat and flavourful fish like salmon. The reduction can be frozen in ice-cube trays and the cubes stored in a plastic bag in the freezer.

Considered this, too, when thinking about a kaffir lime, coconut, pineapple trio. But I wondered if it wouldn't prevent the cream from setting. ← Yes, I was also worried that the acidity wouldn't work...hmmm, maybe a plain vanilla creme brulee topped with chunks of grilled pineapple? ← I have done the pineapple. Small tiny chunks of pineapple in the ramekin and I let a few chunks soak in the mixture for a few days I have not had any setting problems ← Thinking about this, I realized I've made perfectly solid pineapple flans with egg and cream. According to several websites and a couple of cookbooks I checked, fresh pineapple contains an enzyme that prevents gelatin from setting. (Heating destroys the enzyme, which is why the canned pineapple and lime jello salads of my youth weren't soup.) That must be the factoid I was incorrectly recalling.

For the Pavoni lever machines, four is pushing it; many users claim that the first shot is good, the second best and the third a little bitter (from overheating) and the remainder write-offs. It takes 15-20 minutes for the machine to cool down sufficently for the next round, unless you resort to heroic measures like wrapping the group in towels that have been soaked in ice water. Am not sure about the heat issues with the Elektra, which I've never used. Maybe Coffeegeek's detailed review or alt.coffee discuss the problem. I'd check for you but I've got to split for a Thanksgiving dinner.

Some Elektra models come with an aqua Mulino glass ball instead of the Eagle. Looks really sharp atop an all-chrome machine. Unfortunately, it appears the only way to get it on a lever model is to buy the transportable unit with the aluminum case and interchangable caps. You could always try contacting a dealer or the factory and asking. Before buying a lever machine or even a Silvia, you should make sure you won't often be making milk-based drinks for a crowd. If you entertain a lot and like to offer cappuccinos at the end of the meal, a heat-exchanger or double-boiler machine is the way to go.

There are two schools of thought about roasting quail. The first is to roast them in a medium oven for 45 minutes to 1 hour. This produces very well-done meat (with a tendancy to dryness, especially if you don't bard) and lends itself to stuffing. These days, most chefs prefer roasting the birds in a hot oven (400ºF+) for 8 to 15 minutes, depending on the oven temperature, the size of the bird and whether the birds have been browned in a skillet beforehand. This produces juicy, pink meat but precludes stuffing. Other cooking methods include spit-roasting, stovetop pot-roasting and, when spatchcocked, grilling and broiling. If you forwent stuffing, you could serve the birds with a cranberry jus (adulterated with a little demiglace?) or a cranberry relish along the lines of oceanfish's. Or you could fashion a glaze for marinating the birds in and basting them with as they cook.

sf&m's cited chapter and verse but I mentioned this last spring in the Dispatches thread. At the time, one of the HaG brothers told me "the red currants come from North Hatley and claimed that, in large part due to agricultural practices used, they are superior to European fruit." (As I recall, the agricultural practices were the use of pesticides, fungicides and chemical fertilizers.) Not taking sides here — I don't think I've ever consumed French red currants except in the form of crème de cassis — just pointing out that their take on the fruit is 180º from yours. Now that's interesting. I've been told that the Lower North Shore and southern Labrador are cloudberry heaven, the fruit more plentiful and, if anything, higher in quality that Scandinavia's. Have always wondered why we don't see more of it; it's so prized in Sweden. For several years I've had the fantasy of making a cloudberry eau-de-vie along the lines of framboise or kirsch; it'd probably catch the soul of the fruit better than that goopy Chicoutai the SAQ sells. Maybe after I win the lottery...

Have you ever tried one made with fresh lemon verbena? If not, its haunting flavour might make a convert out of you (I say this as someone who generally prefers his CB flavoured with vanilla). The nuts can be ground, used to infuse the cream, then strained out through several layers of cheesecloth, which should be squeezed tightly at the end to eek out the lost drops of nut milk. This leads to the obvious suggestion: a trio of nut-infused crème brûlées (almond, macadamia, pistachio?). Considered this, too, when thinking about a kaffir lime, coconut, pineapple trio. But I wondered if it wouldn't prevent the cream from setting.