2011.02.23 Cassoulet Part Duex

People are not kidding when they say Cassoulet is an undertaking.  I think I am on pretty solid ground in saying that if you don't have too much experince with kitchen logistics, you should stay away from this dish.  It is about as intense as a dish can get.  That said, once you break everything down into component steps, it is fairly easy.  You just have to think ahead and be aware of how many pots / pans / burners / time you have.

I started today at 3 after class.  I was hoping things would just slowly simmer away on the stove as I studied--that was not the case.  From 3-9:20 I was basically standing in front of the stove or doing some prep work.  It seems that 6-hours of attentive kitchen work are required for this dish once the Fonds Brun has been made.

The day started with more meat.  This time on display we have, a breast of lamb, 2 duck leg-thigh combos, 3 Toulouse sausages, some extra lamb bones, and about 1.5 pounds of salt pork with rind attached.  I also had some pork bones, but they went bad.  It seems like our fridge is really underpowered.

 

Meat

 The Duck looked really nice, a gorgeous dark burgundy color.  A quick confession, this is the first time I have cooked duck since the Christmas disaster of 1998.  I am now older and wiser, and realize it was a horrible idea to make duck off a recipe I found on an AOL food community page.  Enough said about the year I ruined Christmas.  This time everything turned out perfectly.

Duck

 Toulouse Sausage (expensive)

I am not going to post the recipe--its just too complicated and I would totally just be copy-right infringing Julia Child's estate.  That said, there are probably more modern and clearer recipes out there, sorry Julia, but you could have used a tad more narrative on this one.  In any event, the first step was sorting some white hericot vert, putting them in a pot, adding some water boiling and waiting an hour.

Sorting Hericot Verts

 

While the beans are soaking, the rind is simmered a few times to soften it and leach salt.  Once boiled, it is cut into strips and then into triangular shapes.  Why triginal, who knows?  If anyone does know, please drop a comment.  The rind does throw a fair amount of scum, but this can be ignored as it is drained after a minute of boiling.

Rind added to water

 Rind throwing Scum

Rind Cut into small Triangles

The small triangles are then added to a small amount of water and boiled for half an hour.  At the conclusion of the simmer, the water and rind are added to the soaking beans along with the salt-pork and other aromatics.  This pork stew is then simmered for 1.5 hours until the beans are just tender.

 Simmering the Hericot Vert with Salt Pork and Aromatics

While the beans were simmering away, I also roasted the duck and the sausage in the oven.  When they came out, everything looked great.  The roasting fat and fond were also reserved.

 Roasting Pan

 Roasted Meats

All right, all that was pretty easy--now for the first annoying part of the day.  The boning and browning of the breast of lamb.  For those who don't know the breast of lamb consists of the intercostal ribs, and the meat and fat which cover those ribs.  It's basically the spare-rib on pork.  I have never boned a breast before, but, it turned out to be fairly easy once i thought about the anatomy for a bit. 

Breast of Lamb

The really annoying part was browning all the meat and bones that resulted.  I used the congealed fat off the stock to form a hot oil and then went to town.  The whole process took well over an hour in my wok and yielded a lot of fat which was later added to the reserved duck fat.

Browning the Lamb

  

To the wok, which had some great fond, was then added some vermouth, the fonds brun that i made a few days ago, some tomato paste, other aromatics, and the browned lamb.  This was left to simmer for 1.5 hours.

Simmering the Lamb

O.k., now came the second annoying part.  You have to separate the beans from their cooking liquid and the lamb from its cooking liquid.  Then recombine each 2 more times in specific ways to infuse the beans with the tomato-lamb stock. I'm not going to go into details, check out Mastering the Art of French Cooking if you really care.  In any event, it was made worse by the lack of large vessels in the kitchen, but I got it done and everything is now totally separated and chilling on the roof outside my bedroom window.

After all that I had a quick dinner of store made ravioli with a quick butter-laurel sauce.  It was really quite nice.

Final assembly and baking tomorrow!  Until then.