The Jersey Report: White Bean Soup with Cured Ribs

(Dear MAC:)

Every time I buy a pork belly from my local Asian butcher, it comes with about 6 ribs attached. I've tried using the ribs in soups and stews but they never quite had the savoriness that I wanted. This week I finally separated them from the belly, cured and smoked them with the bacon. I don't know why I waited so long to try it; they were so fantastic that I ate a couple of them within 5 minutes of being off the grill. The cure was the regular pink salt/kosher salt/brown sugar/maple syrup from Ruhlman's Charcuterie. The ribs were so salty, sweet and smokey and I couldn't eat just one...kind of like the ham popcorn of my dreams. I was planning on throwing them into the white beans in the slow cooker (just to get rid of them), but briefly considered hiding them from the family and eating them while everyone's asleep.

I've been making some version of this white bean stew for years now, and I feel like I'm getting closer to my ideal. They no longer feel like a dish of privation, something to be eaten only during the lean weeks. I've pushed the dish to an almost cassoulet-like heaviness. Here's the current recipe:

1/2 pound dried white beans (Great Northern or Navy) soaked overnight, then cooked until tender with water to cover, an onion, a bay leaf, a couple cloves of garlic, a carrot and/or a chunk of smoked pork skin from bacon-making (basically whatever I've got on hand)

After that, the drained beans go into the slow cooker with:

2 links of Italian sausage, sliced
a chunk of slab bacon, sliced
one 16 oz can fire-roasted tomatoes (crushed or whole are fine)
a few sprigs of thyme (if it's not covered by snow in the garden)
a bay leaf or two
some diced onion
a couple crushed cloves of garlic
salt pepper
chicken stock or water
smoked pork belly ribs (if you have them)

I cooked everything (but the ribs) in the slow cooker for a few hours but the dish was still too runny. I threw it into the Dutch oven and put it in a 325-degree oven, uncovered, for about 90 minutes. Garnish with some good salt (smoked salt is really good) or some grated Parmesan. Serve with crusty bread or toasted breadcrumbs or even croutons....some red wine...and a nap.

Grace had four helpings before she went to bed without complaint.

(Brian)


Thanks for writing, it sounds magically delicious; however I would advise not hiding smoked ribs from your pregnant wife.

Cheers.

Duck and Ham: The Final Chapter

Birthday Weekend in Wisconsin.

Le Diner

Magret Sec (duck prosciutto)
Bacon and Onion Tart
Trout a la Meuniere
Cassoulet
Sticky Date Pudding


Le Petit Déjeuner

Croissants avec:
Jambon et Comté
Pâte d'Amandes
Chocolat

It been a busy couple of weeks here at the hermitage, but we will always take time for food and friends. This past weekend we took the show on the road to celebrate birthdays and to execute the final chapters of Ham Serial and Duck Tale.

Magret Sec (duck prosciutto)

It embarrasses me to say duck prosciutto. I suppose it's a good name, it succintly describes the flavor and the process, and it certainly has a better ring than dried duck breast, but it's not ham. So I came up with a new name, Magret Sec. It's French for dry duck filet. Sliced thin, the magret does taste a lot like its former namesake, but instead of curing for a year or more, I got mine in about a week.


I dried them for about ten days achieving about a thirty percent reduction in weight. The temperature stayed in the fifties but my humidity dipped as low as forty percent. Well worth the effort. For anyone thinking about curing duck, go for it.

Bacon and Onion Tart.

Next on the appetizer parade is Bonne Femme, with her signature Bacon and Onion Tart. Her recipe is adapted from the cookbook, Cooking with Master Chefs.

The tart is wicked easy, especially when you have frozen puff pasty dough and a Cuisinart. The bacon was cured in the pot with the ham and cold smoked for six hours.

Trout a la Meuniere

People often ask me: Are you learning anything at culinary school? Oui. On the day we were pan frying fish, Chef talked about a hatchery in Wisconsin that was great place to get fresh trout. Turns out this place is about ten minutes from where we were staying.

Rushing Waters Fisheries was pretty cool and the fish doesn't get any fresher. Since I just wanted a quick and easy appetizer, I pan fried the filets in clarified butter, then finished with a whole butter and lemon sauce served on mixed greens. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode when I cure and cold smoke some filets I brought home.

Cassoulet

Oh boy I love this stuff. I wrote about cassoulet last year and I focused on the idea that this dish is a combination of items that come from your pantry and larder (pronounced beer fridge). This version raids the pantry again but I also made a quick trip to Walt's for some lamb.

I started with salt pork. This is cured pork belly trimmings that I did at the same as the bacon and the ham. Salt pork is bacon that has not been smoked. I chopped this stuff up and blanched it before throwing it in with the beans to cook.

While the beans are simmering I started the ragout with a couple of jars of tomato sauce (the pros call it tomato coulis), duck stock, a bouquet of rinds, and some cubed lamb shoulder.


For the sausage portion of the program, I made two kinds: A garlic recipe adapted from Ruhlman's book Charcuterie, and a Toulouse sausage.

Toulouse Sausage is required ingredient to that city's version of cassoulet (Toulouse is the Holy Ghost to Castelnaudary (the Father) and Carcassonne (the Son) in the Holy Trinity of Cassoulets) The sausage is supposed to be roughly chopped, I made mine with pork, some salt pork, salt and quatre épices.



Remember our crock of canard from two weeks ago? I had to warm the vessel in the oven so that I could wrestle the legs from their larded slumber. I browned them up in a pan along with the sausages and then assembled the whole lot (Beans and ragout too) into the biggest pan I could find.

Bubble in the oven for several hours, serve with love.

Here are the birthday girl(s) at about 23:30. JJ brought a cheese plate and Chrissy made the sticky plum pudding, shown here with candles and a caramel sauce. Zach discharged his duties expertly, sommeliering his way through the courses with some great wine choices, mostly Côtes du Rhônes, but also some domestic white and Austria red (who knew?) just to mix it up.

With dinner service concluded, time to hit the hay. The kids will be getting up in a few hours and they are going to want breakfast.

et le Jambon?

I am happy to report that the ten day long transformation from leg of pork to country style cured ham was successful. Most of it is still waiting to be made into sandwiches, the bones I saved for lentils, but some of the choicest slices went to Wisconsin last weekend to play the lead role in breakfast,

the ham and cheese croissant.

I made some chocolate ones and some almond ones too.

After breakfast we went outside.

Good food, good friends, great weekend. Anyone can do this anywhere.

Don't fuss, just cook.

Cheers.

Cassoulet

Well mes saucisses, winter has finally blown in and it is time to raid the pantry and whip up some hearty food. I have been intrigued by cassoulet ever since a hazy day (of the mind not the weather) in Carcassonne, when a traveling companion was set on finding some cassoulet authentique in the famous walled city. While we did find a nice lunch under the shade of some mulberry trees, the authenticness of the medieval town was of a more Disneyesque hue. They had steam tables full of cassoulet, they also had plates of oven roasted pork chops or chicken with haricots-verts . Wine and shade was all that I desired while others picked through the Ye Olde Gift Shoppe for plastic coats of armor.

But from that day until now the idea cassoulet has stuck with me, French comfort food. I would listen to my friend Brian talk about it and it became a mystic stew of various ends and joints. Soissons or Arpajon, saucisses de Toulouse ou de campagne, confit of goose, bacon, salted pork, mutton, who would get these exotic ingredients for a pot of beans? Why the French of course. But wait: For the French (I know I am over simplifying and romanticizing country life) it's actually no trouble at all, these ingredients are all (as they have been for centuries) in the larder.

Emboldened by this realization I raided the larder, also known here in the Chicago Southland as the Beer Fridge, in an attempt to capture the essence of cassoulet, and I would do it without driving to Whole Foods for goose fat. As regular readers will attest, even though I profess the desire to live simply, I always find a lot of little things to do to keep it simple, this simple pot of beans is no exception.

Cassoulet d’Owl Head

The Beans.

203g - 7-1/8 oz bacon cut into 1 inch by ½ inch cubes
454g - 16oz dry great northern beans sorted and washed.
1 medium onion peeled studded with 4 cloves
1 carrot chopped
Bouquet garni (handful of thyme, a couple of bay leaves)

A handful of thyme from under the snow

In the stock pot I melted the bacon a bit then added all other ingredients along with six cups of water. Brought the beans to simmer then slow cooked until beans were tender, 4-6 hours. Add salt to taste.

Saucisses de Campange

2 lbs Pork shoulder
20 g salt
5 g quatre-epices (See Notes)
½ c (126g) red wine

I diced meat, tossed it with the spices and , then rested the mixture in the fridge for at an hour. I ground through large plate into mixer bowl. I added the wine and mixed with paddle attachment for about a minute.

I stuffed the mixture into hog casings, and realizing at this point I wasn't going to finish until the next day, I hung them in the fridge to dry a little bit. I made eight 6-8 inch sausages.

The next day I started the again:

The Ragout

2 lbs pork shoulder cut into 1 inch cubes
1 28oz. can whole peeled tomatoes

10g quatre-epices
6 cloves garlic smashed, peeled and chopped

Bouquet garni (handful of thyme, a couple of bay leaves)

In a large saute pan, I browned the pork in a bit of lard, then I threw in the rest of the ingredients and simmer for a couple of hours so that the sauce had cooked down a bit and the pork was fork tender. Add salt to taste.

Final assembly

2 c toasted bread crumbs
dollops of lard or butter

I got the pot of beans from the day before and saved the beans and the bacon for the dutch oven. I got out the dutch oven, still warm from baking the No Knead bread, and quickly browned the skins of four sausages in a thin film of oil over medium high heat. Then I assemble the cassoulet: A few ladles of the ragout and then a layer of beans and bacon. Next I placed the four browned sausages in the pot. In go the rest of the beans, the rest of the ragout, leveled it out, then put on the bread crumbs. I had planned on using lard to dot the crust, but the lard I made in December had started to turn, so few tablespoons of butter here and there was a suitable replacement. I put the pot, covered, into a 325F oven for about two hours. Since most everything was cooked already, it probably didn't need cook it that long. I looked for doneness in the sausage (internal temp 150F) and everything looked warmed through and bubbly.


Now a few notes about the ingredients: I had three pounds and fourteen ounces of pork belly left over from making bacon, hence the call for two pounds for the sausage and two pounds in the ragout. When I do it again, I would use two and a half to three pounds of meat for the ragout, and if I am at the store, I would look at using lamb shoulder. A bouquet garni, will usually have a minimum of parsley in addition to the sprigs of thyme and bay leaf, but I didn't have any. For the quatre-epices, I mixed 15 g white pepper ground, 2g clove ground, 2g dried ginger ground and 2g nutmeg grated. I hope to have more about the spice mix soon.

Cassoulet d'Owl Head avec pain de No-Knead

There you have it, pork and beans French cousin, Cassoulet, warming and immensely satisfying on a cold winter day. So now your appetite is piqued but you are thinking "Gee who has all the time do do this?" I sympathize, I have an espresso machine that is constantly running. But for those who would like to try something quick, click over to Andouille and White Bean Soup by Restaurant Widow, it looks good and simple.

Cheers.