Father's Day gifts.

In our house this year, Father's Day is about Father.  i.e., me.  So I'm going to smoke a brisket.  There's nothing more relaxing to me than tending a fire, and checking in on a giant slab of meat over the course of a day.  It will leave me time to have a beer (or two), to read a book (or two) and to play hockey with my 3-year old in the den.

I don't think I'm the only guy that looks forward to Father's Day as a day of meat and grilling.  So, if you don't mind, I'm going to make a few suggestions for Father's Day gifts for the meat-lover in your life that are really great resources, but that don't get the publicity of some of the more famous chefs and bbq enthusiasts.

First, up.  Pork and Sons.

This beautiful little book suggests all the fun French ways you can cook pork.  It has a particularly magical recipe for what to do with pig's feet.  I'll write about this some day, but suffice it to say, you boil the crap out of them, shred the meat, pack it into sausages with fried shallots, and pack them into sausage shapes to harden.  Broil slices of the resulting sausage, and serve slices on crackers.  And watch the faces of your loved ones (who will no doubt claim that they're not that into pig's feet) go from cautious to rapture.

Second up is my go-to bbq book.  This one has everything, and the worst recipes in here are merely good.  

I bring you Smoke & Spice.

I've already written about the beef tenderloin in here, and plan to do posts on some pulled pork and whole chicken preparations in the future.  This book is all yummy all the time.

My final meat book for you is my cured meat bible, Charcuterie.

I confess, I have experimented less with this book than with the other two.  But this book is worth it for the bacon recipe alone.  As everyone knows, bacon is pure yummy.  Home-made bacon is to grocery store bacon as a Porsche is to a Honda.  It's the stuff, and if you have a smoker, it's really very little time investment.  

All 3 of these books are fantastic references, and guaranteed to keep you in delicious meat.

Good luck with your last minute Father's Day shopping.

Bbq & Waffles Go Together Like...

On bbq day, I'm generally up pretty early.  Brisket can take as long as 12 hours to cook properly, so unless you want to be eating dinner late, an early start is required.  So after I get the meat out to warm up, and start the fire, I might as well make a nice breakfast.  How about buttermilk waffles?  Waffles are all technique, no ingredients.  The only thing you should need that's not in your pantry is the buttermilk.

Good waffles use the magic power of eggs.  Eggs are awesome.  And understanding how awesome they are is what makes working with them easier.  Egg yolks have the power of emulsification.  Emulsions are cool, so let's talk about them for a bit.  If you mix oil and water in a measuring cup, the oil will float to the top and you'll have two layers.  The oil layer.  And the water layer.  Emulsifiers make it so that you can get one homogeneous mix of oil and water.  Dishwashing detergent does this, but doesn't taste good enough to put in waffles or custards.  Egg yolks can also do this.  The trick is to add the oil to the yolks slowly, so that the yolks can coat the oil and suspend it.  So you beat the egg yolks until they're nice and yellow and yummy looking homogeneous mess, and then slowly add whatever you're suspending.  In the case of waffles, it's buttermilk and butter.  If you've done it properly, you'll get a liquid that's the same consistency throughout.  If you've done it wrong, the butter will float to the surface.

Alright, so on to the waffles.  I use the recipe in the 1967 version of the Joy of Cooking.  Really, get the book.  But don't get the newer versions (anything that has the name Ethan Becker on the cover, roughly 1995-present).  Because they "modernized" the book.  Which is to say, they made it suck.

The buttermilk waffle recipe:

4-cups pre-sifted all-purpose flour (gotta sift it first to get this right)

1/2 tsp baking soda

2 2/3 tsp baking powder

2 tbsp sugar

1 tsp salt

4 egg yolks

3 1/2 cups buttermilk

12 tbsp unsalted butter, melted

4 egg whites

Mix all the dry ingredients well.  Meanwhile, beat the egg yolks until they're bright, yellow and a bit fluffy looking.  Slowly add the buttermilk while mixing.  Then add the melted butter.  Slowly.  While mixing.

If you've done this part properly, when you stop mixing, the butter won't separate from the rest of the mix.

Now, clean off your beaters.  You can't have any fat in the egg white, or it won't beat properly.  In a clean bowl with the clean beaters, beat the egg whites until they're stiff.  That means that when you pull the beater up, the egg whites hold the shape that you leave.

Now mix.  Anytime you have baking powder, you need to mix quickly so you don't over-hydrate the rising power of the baking powder.  So you mix quickly with as few motions as possible.  So mix the egg-fat emulsion with the dry ingredients as with as few motions as possible.  Then fold in the egg whites, again with as few motions as you can, so that the egg whites continue to add stability to the batter.    

Now fire up your waffle iron, and we're good to go. (As a side note, does anyone know a good waffle iron?  As best as I can tell, all modern waffle irons suck - mine is passable, but certainly not hot enough).

Pour some batter with a ladel onto the hot iron (you'll want to cover about the center of the iron, the waffle will spread - see photo below).

Cook the waffle until it's done to the level of brownness that suits you.  Consider this your Canadian public service announcement:

Do yourself a favour.  Buy real maple syrup to serve with it.  Real maple syrup turns waffles and pancakes from being something banal to being something special.  And you're worth it.  Sure, maple syrup is more expensive, but it's soooo tasty.  And you'll use less of it than you will of that garbage phony maple syrup.  The corn syrup in a crappy Aunt Jemima syrup really isn't that tasty.  

Familiar Food

When it comes to food, I'm not a traditionalist.  I don't buy into the idea that you have to drink beer with barbecue.  Sometimes I drink wine.  I also don't buy into the idea that barbecue needs to be served with a crappy slice of Wonder bread (though many great bbq restaurants do, indeed, serve crappy Wonder bread with their beautiful, tender, slow-smoked meat).  

I'm quite convinced that the majority of people (foodie and otherwise) aren't as interested in having food that tastes good as they are in having food that tastes familiar.  This is why people will argue long and hard about the "proper" way to smoke a brisket, and about whether Tennessee or North Carolina-style pork is "better".  The traditional barbecue community is afflicted with this love-of-the-familiar as much as foodies are.  That's why I was delighted to find this new book by a barbecue aficionado who clearly loves barbecue, but doesn't feel constrained by tradition.

Adam Perry Lang trained in world-class restaurants, before deciding to focus on barbecue, and as such brings a fresh perspective to barbecue.  His recipes are exciting, and look like good fun, including everything from leg of lamb to whole pig roasting, and everything in between.  The instructions included are sufficient for the beginner, so this could be a good introduction to barbecue (though many of the recipes do call for chile peppers that may be challenging to source locally).

I'm looking forward to cooking from this book, and will report back after I've made his beef brisket.  Stay tuned.

Strawberries with crème anglaise

I love custards.  Crème brûlée.  Ice cream.  And crème anglaise.  Crème anglaise is just a runny custard sauce, good on fruit.  I got the recipe for this one from the New York Times, but shrunk it for 2:

3 tbsp chopped almonds

2 tbsp slivered almonds

1/4 cup milk

1/4 cup cream

2 tbsp sugar

1 egg yolk

strawberries for two

Toast the almonds.  This takes about 3-5 minutes in a dry pan over medium heat.  They're done when they smell great.

Add everything except the egg yolks.  Mix well, and warm up the milk/cream/sugar/toasted almond mixture.  Then slowly pour into the beaten egg yolk, while mixing vigorously.  If you're photographing it yourself, grow an extra arm:

Keep in mind, making a custard is just like making salad dressing.  You're trying to make an emulsion.  Instead of an emulsion of oil and water, it's an emulsion of cream, milk and egg yolks.  Since the egg yolk is the emulsifier, you add the liquid slowly to this.  Add it slowly and mix well, and you get an emulsified custard.  Add it too quickly, or in the wrong order, and get scrambled eggs floating in milk.  YUM!

Pour the mixture back in the pot and mix well, heating it until it thickens slightly.  A crème anglaise is much thinner than a regular custard, so it won't set up like a custard does.

When thickened, pour it through a sieve, then rizzle it on the strawberries, and garnish with toasted or untoasted almonds.  This cream sauce is delicious, easy to make, fast, and a mild, creamy addition to beautiful spring strawberries.  Thank you, New York Times.