World Cup Food Challenge: France - Jarret de Veau

With France beating Nigeria on Monday for a spot in the Quarter Finals of the World Cup I had a few days to plan another meal for tonight's match against Germany.  After failing to get horse and running out of time to get veal for the last round I made certain that I would have veal tonight.  I made the trip into Leeds on Tuesday afternoon, popped into B & J Callard's on Kirkgate Market and set the wheels in motion.

I was after veal breast to make Blanquette de Veau, a traditional French white stew, but as Callard's don't stock veal I was in their hands and the hands of their suppliers.  It turns out that the few veal suppliers out there are more than happy to sell prime cuts of meat but tend to use the secondary cuts to make burgers and sausages, presumably betting more bang for their buck, or at least shifting meat that they would otherwise struggle to sell.  Getting breast or anything from the shoulder was proving difficult, but Kyle from Callard's didn't let me down.

He managed to source a veal shin from a farm in North Leeds.  I regularly cook with beef so I knew it would be suitable to stew.  My plan was to cut the meat from the bone and crack on with the cooking, but once I saw the three wonderful Osso Buco steaks I had a change of heart.  I wanted to use them whole so that the marrow could cook into the sauce, so I started looking around for French versions of the classic Italian dish.

I found a typically French Jarret de Veau aux Champignon, got it translated and set about cooking it.  The meat was dusted in seasoned flour and then fried in duck fat*.  Diced onions, carrots and celery were then added to the pan along with a glass of white wine and some stock.  This was brought to the boil before being reduced to a simmer for an hour.

While that was cooking I made some boulangere potatoes and tucked into the rest of the bottle of wine that I had opened to cook with.  By the time I finished the dish with chopped fresh parsley, garlic, and lemon zest, France had been knocked out of the World Cup by Germany.  An outcome that I had seen coming from before the first ball was kicked back on the 12th June.

The veal was superb.  The meat fell of the bone and the addition of the fresh herbs at the end lifted the sauce.  Z was a little squeamish about eating the marrow but loved it after her first tentative morsel.  I would buy and cook this again in a heart-beat, if only veal was more readily available in our butchers and supermarkets.  The thought of perfectly good meat going to waste just because of fads, trends, and people's sensibilities saddens me.

I'm also sad to have cooked my last meal of the World Cup Food Challenge.  It's been fun but there is always another challenge.

*the recipe called for butter but after making confit duck I happen to have quite a lot of duck fat that needs using.

World Cup Food Challenge: France - Choucroute Garni

The problem with having drawn France in the World Cup Food Challenge is deciding what to cook.  Some of the countries taking part in the world cup have a limited culinary history.  When looking up dishes for Honduras I came across Carne Asada on four or five separate searches, the decision was made for me.  The French though have more iconic dishes in their culinary canon to lay siege on most of the rest of Europe, never mind the rest of the world.

Choosing Confit de Canard as my first dish was a no brainer.  I'd been looking for an excuse to cook it for ages.  Assuming that France would get out of Group E I had already been looking for inspiration for Tonight's Menu.  I originally thought that tonight would be the night that I knowingly tried horse for the first time.  Since horsegate I have been looking for an excuse to cook an equine supper and as the French love cheval I decided to give it a go.

I asked my butcher if he could source me some horse and sure enough he said that he could.  I'd decided that I wanted to cook Daube de Chevaline, a slow cooked stew that required some shoulder meat.  This was available but once you added on delivery to the butchers it was close to £25 for a couple of pounds of meat.  Horse was off the menu.  Next on my hit list was Blanquette de Veau, but sadly the time consumed in a fruitless horse chase ate up all of my veal ordering time too. 

Having tried and failed to get hold of the ingredients for two classic and refined dishes I decided to go a bit more rustic and cook Choucroute Garni.  This mountain of a meal has a place in the folk lore of Z's family.  Holidays to France weren't complete without a table bursting pile of sauerkraut festooned with various sausages, hams and pork.

My choucroute has a base of cabbage braised in white wine with onions, bacon, celery, caraway, mustard seeds, and juniper berries.  This was served with a Toulouse style sausage, belly pork and a joint of cured pork collar that were cooked separately and then added to the choucroute to warm through before serving.  I also cooked a load of new potatoes but there wasn't enough space on the serving plate to include them in the photograph.

I'll be honest, as meals for two people go this was excessive.  We managed to eat half of the collar, one of the belly pork slices and a third of the sausage.  There is plenty of cabbage and potatoes left too.  The collar will be part of some pea and ham soup.  The sausage will appear on sandwiches and pizza later on this week.  The rest will become soup-croute.

In case you are wondering, the stork garnish is one of Z's strongest memories of the holidays.  She and her brother used to collect them.  She now thinks that they were just put on every kids meal not just the choucroute, but we couldn't resist having one for old times sake.

World Cup Food Challenge: France - Confit de Canard

I have been planning to make my own Confit de Canard for a long time.  It's one of those dishes that makes me feel happy just thinking about them.  The problem is, duck isn't cheap, duck fat isn't cheap, and, in all honestly, the need to confit duck to preserve it for long term storage is kind of superfluous these days, what with the dawn of in-house refrigeration units. Freezers I think they are called.

Then, the draw for the world cup took place.  I had already organised the World Cup Food Challenge and knew that I would end up cooking dishes from the countries of Group E and France was first out of the bag.  I knew instantly that the first* dish I would cook to represent France would be Confit Duck.

I flicked through various cook books and trawled the internet before finding three recipes that I liked the look of, each with subtle variations that I wanted to incorporate into my duck.  Anthony Bordain, Nigel Slater and Valentine Warner were chosen as my inspiration and my guides for the week long duck-athon.

The first step was to salt the duck.  I added rosemary, lemon thyme, black peppercorns and juniper berries at this stage, rubbed the duck legs thoroughly with the salt and aromatics and put it in the fridge for 24 hours.  The following day I rubbed the excess salt off the duck, nestled it in the bottom of a pan, added some of the herbs that had also been in the salt, and smothered the lot in duck fat.  The fat, by the way, cost more money than the duck did!

The chefs all had differing opinions as to how to cook the duck at this stage. High temp in the oven for an hour, low simmer on the hob, or two and a half hours at a low temp in the oven.  At two to one the oven method had it.  Could I decide which temperature to set the oven at though? No I couldn't.  In the end I went for a middle ground of 180˚c, mainly because that is the maximum temperature that my pans can withstand.

After an hour I had a cheeky peek and decided that the oven was too high so I droped the temperature and let it cook for another hour.  And there it was, perfectly cooked confit duck, but now came the hard part.  It was Tuesday and I wasn't eating it until Thursday.  I left the duck in the pan of fat to cool overnight and popped it in the fridge in the morning.

Having gone to all the effort to make confit duck I then turned my attention to what I was going to serve it with.  There was a sizeable bit of my brain that wanted chips.  Another part of me wanted to go the whole hog and make cassoulet from scratch, but frankly I couldn't be bothered.  In the end I made boulangere potatoes, partly because I needed the oven on to finish the duck and partly because I love boulangere potatoes.  Think of them as a low fat version of gratin dauphinois and you're there.  A cheeky glass of wine and I could have been in France.

I very much doubt that I'll make my own confit duck again.  Don't get me wrong, it was magnificent.  The crispy salty skin, the soft melting meat, none of the thick smoke that hangs around the house for weeks after roasting a duck or frying a duck breast.  It just costs too much. 

*I'm assuming that I'll need to cook more French dishes when they get out of the group as group winners.