Barbecue Ribs

We recently returned from a trip to the US. We had many, many culinary adventures on this trip through the American South- but this post will focus one particular discovery of the trip - BBQ ribs.

I've never been a huge fan of ribs; they always seemed like more bone, fat, and gristle than meat. I've had great oven cooked ribs, but the ones off the grill never enticed me. On this trip we decided to investigate the world of BBQ ribs. We had our first rack at L.C.s in Kansas City and they were so good, I knew we were on to something.

Some other notable racks from our journey:

On the left - Memphis dry ribs at The Rendezvous. (The picture at the top of this post is an example of Memphis wet ribs, at B.B. King's.) The folks in Memphis are pretty proud of their ribs - these two places were suggested by the security guard at Graceland.
On the right - beef and pork rib combo at Leatha's, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I am still astounded at the huge hunk of meat attached to this rack. Where can you even buy ribs like this? These were absolutely delicious, but the sauce was really sweet. These rib leftovers made really good tin-foil dinner supper 6 hours later.

When we returned home, I thought I'd try making these for myself on our new smoker with an off-set wood box. I tried out the ribs two ways - one rack was kind of steamed in tinfoil in the oven at 250 degrees, and the other rack went into the smoker, maintained between 225 and 250 degrees. We used dry Manitoba Maple for the smoke.


This is what my smoked ribs looked like after about 4 hours. I took these ribs off the grill at about 4 1/2 hours. The ribs in the oven were falling off the bone after 3 1/2 hours.
The verdict?

The ribs from the smoker were too smoky and too tough, and the ribs from the oven were so soft they were almost mushy! The smoked ribs just needed more time and less smoke and the ribs in the oven definitely didn't need the tin-foil.

Food for thought for next time around. (And besides, Kansas City is only a 12 hour drive away if I want the real deal!)

Happy Marshmellowy Mother's Day!

My Mother Can Do Anything.
My Mother Can Make Marshmellows and make 5 dozen zwiebach at the same time.

To make marshmellows - boil sugar and water and gelatin together until it gets to soft-ball stage. (Add maraschino cherry juice to make it pink, just for fun.) Let it cool down, then beat until it triples in volume.
Once tripled in volume, spread it in a small pan coated in icing sugar and let set for a few hours.
Roll in coconut, and you got yourself the treats pictured at the top of the post. After finishing these, Mom said it was too much work.

To me, It seemed a lot easier than the zwiebach going on at the same time. My mother has a gift for the most amazing breads and buns. I love to cook, but I leave the baking to my mom!

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

Eggs and Salmon

I was somewhat remiss in my duties last week.
I forgot to take pictures of the potluck brunch after a weekend morning at the spa with the girls. There were beautiful foods at this brunch, and they must only be brought to mind with memory and no photos. Like the old days. (Sigh). My contribution was warm gingerbread (which really deserves its own post someday) and some devilled eggs filled with smoked salmon. The devilled eggs were quite delightful - I hadn't really thought too much of eggs and salmon before, but they were a tasty delight.

And subsequently, the inspiration for the following quiche a few days later:


I like making quiche. I pride myself on my pastry. Rarely attractive, but usually quite flaky.

This particular pie wasn't too flaky - the pastry ball was approaching freezer burn after living in the freezer for several months - but I thought this photo demonstrated the unattractive quality of my pastry, at the very least. This quiche was loaded up with Swiss cheese, red peppers, dill and chopped up smoked salmon.
Add some green salad, and you got yourself a nice early-spring supper.

Sushi

Enough about pork! Time for Sushi!

Lest you all believe that all I eat is salt pork, I would like to affirm that my pleasure of the palate are wide and varied.

That being said, these sushi rolls may not have been authentic, but they sure were tasty! And remarkably easy to make, too.

The Agony and the Ecstasy - Curing Pork (Part Three)

Part Three: Smoking.

The pancetta in the basement was joined by even more hanging meat. Smoke permeates the meat better if the surface is totally dry.

Jeff got to work preparing the wood. While it is true that you can buy wood chips all over the place, it seemed more fun to do that from scratch too. (Although not as much fun after an hour of sawing..)

This huge branch of Manitoba Maple fell down during one of last summer's windstorms.

Next morning, bright and early.

A few pieces of lit charcoal and a couple of chunks of maple got the smoke puffing nicely. Nice and cool.

Look at the happy smoker on the deck!

Look at the happy ham and happy hock and happy sausages!

Now look at the burnt, sad and unhappy ham!

This catastrophe occurred around hour 3 of smoking.

Everything had been going really well until that point. The wood was smoking consistently and was nice and cool for the first hour and a half, but then it started fizzling out. It took a while to get the next batch of charcoal and wood smoking nicely, so I figured I'd have to time it a little tighter on the next batch. Which led me, an hour later, to add half a dozen burning briquettes to the wood when the last half dozen were still going.

About fifteen minutes later, Jeff saw flames spitting out of the smoker. No more smooth, cool smoke. We had fire.

Now, the whole thing about smoking is that you want to flavour and somewhat dry out the meat without cooking it. This is why the low temperature is so important - you don't want to render any fat or cook the meat. Which is what happened.

I wept bitterly.

But all was not lost. The burnt parts of the ham were cut off, and then we roasted it. The smoke had permeated about 3/4 of an inch into the ham, leaving a nice pink ring on the outer layer. It tasted...kind of hammy.

Some of the bacon had started cooking in the fire and had gotten pretty leathery. I cut those pieces off to use later as salt pork, some of which flavoured a huge pot of spicy baked beans beautifully the next day.

There was about a 6-inch square of usable bacon from each slab that I had prepared. Hey, for my first try, that's not so bad, is it?

Mmmmm. Homemade maple bacon.

The Agony and the Ecstasy - Curing Pork (Part Two)

Part two: Bacon and Pancetta.


The dry cure sucked out a lot of the moisture from the meat as it sat in the fridge, creating its own brine, as seen below. After about 5 days, it was time to get the meat out of the salty brine. The remaining salt was scrubbed off the meat and thoroughly washed.


The two slabs designated to be bacon were dried off, and placed into new bags into the fridge. I added some maple syrup to one of them, and garlic and pepper to the other so the flavour could permeate a bit before smoking. (The scallops pictured on the Valentine's Day post were wrapped with the maple bacon from this stage.)


The slab designated to be pancetta was also scrubbed and dried off, then covered with a thick layer of cracked black pepper.

Then came the fun part - rolling up and trussing the tightly rolled meat.

Rolling - easy, trussing - tricky.

And then the easiest part - Hang it up, and let it cure.

Thank god the cats can't jump higher than two feet - the basement is usually their domain, but the cool, dry environment down there was very nice for the pancetta.

The finished product, after curing for almost four weeks:

For more info on making pancetta, check out http://www.chowhound.com/recipes/10699.

The Agony and the Ecstasy: Curing Pork (part one)

2007 - The Year of the Pig.

Pork intrigues me more than beef, somehow. Beef is too simple. You don't have to work with it to get results. It justs sits there, tasting good, being beef. But pork! Working with pork is like a culinary costume party. Different preps of pork leaves you with totally different tasting meat. Pork for the sake of pork - I could take it or leave it. But seasoned, smoked or cured pork becomes a seasoning of its own.

Yes, I could find simpler hobbies. Hobbies with less sleepless nights, with less heartache and tears, with less crushing disappointments. But then I'd never have homemade bacon!

O.k. So this all started about two and a half weeks ago, when I purchased half a pig. Half an organic, raised under the oak trees in La Broquerie pig. After trying out the flavour of the fresh pork by roasting the bone-in loin roast (juicy and succulent - organic pork for the sake of pork is pretty damn good!), the work of curing began.

Three projects were started: ham, bacon and pancetta. I received several small ham roasts cut from the leg, and I chose the largest roast (about 6 pounds) as well as the hocks to brine and eventually smoke. The belly came in a 8-pound slab that I cut into three equal pieces. One piece would become pancetta, and the other two were destined for becoming bacon.

Darling husband made the brining possible by procuring some lovely plastic buckets from the cafeteria at U of W.The brine for the ham and the hocks was salt, brown sugar, some juniper berries, and water. Next came the pancetta. This was a dry cure, pictured above: salt, brown sugar, bay leaves, juniper berries, fresh thyme, chopped garlic and cracked black pepper.

This spice mixture was rubbed liberally all over the slab of pork belly. This was repeated with the other two slabs of belly, but with a simpler cure of salt and sugar.

The slabs of bacon were placed into air-tight plastic bags, and then weighted down in the fridge. I used a sophisticated method of placing canned goods on top of them. Clever, yes?

The brine with the ham and the hocks were placed in a cold corner of the pantry. There happened to be a cold snap during this time and this room was probably around 5 degrees. Although it probably slowed down the process of salt absorption, I didn't have to panic that it was going to go bad on me!

Then, I waited.

Happy Valentine's Day!

My Valentine's gift to Jeff: A kielbassa heart.



Jeff's Valentine's gift to me: fresh Digby scallops, brought home on the plane. (wrapped in our very own homemade bacon - as yet unsmoked - updates on bacon shall come soon...)


...and pretty flowers too.

Tourtière!

Here on Planet Borscht, I present to you our very first guest Blogger.
Please warmly welcome Miss Harms and her tales of fine food from afar!



Hello fine foody folks.

I recently returned from La belle province, and while there, I dined at 'Aux Anciens Canadiens'. This most charming restaurant in Old Québec specializes in old school cuisine served by delightful wait staff wearing period costumes. . .the period being French colony Québec.

The lunchtime meal--Table à Haute: your choice of main dish, including soup du jour (a delightful creamy tomato while we were there), dessert (maple sugar pie or apple cranberry pie served with fresh cream, not whipped cream or ice cream. . . cream!) and a glass of wine or beer! And the beer was not hum-drum beer. It was all tasty beers like Boréal Russe, ooh or Blonde. . . mmmm) (Coffee was extra) for a mere 14.95$!


And now, the meat of my entry-- the main dishes! First, "Tourtiére Lac-St-Jean avec des viandes sauvages" (right). The wild meats included caribou, boeuf, cerf (deer) and wapiti (elk). It was a most succulent tourtiére. So juicy, and seasoned excellently. It was the best tourtiére ever to touch my tastebuds (sorry St. Jo).


Also, the tourtière was not in pie form. It was more of a loaf. The breaddy crust wrapped around the meaty filling. Note the lovingly cubed potatos, and the bits of extra-burned. Oh, Heaven!


And the daily main dish special "Pâté en croûte de Wapiti avec le Romarin" (super-flaky crusted wapiti pie with rosemary). Oh my, yum yum yum! the wapiti was definitely much drier (and therefore leaner?) than the tourtiére. The crust was most dilectible, and melt-in-your mouth. I am guessing it was definitely lard. And the rosemary crept up on you and enveloped your olfactory and savory senses in a big blanket of joy!


To top it all off, the sides that accompanied the main dish (viewed here and above) were divine! The orange-red-yellow mixture is a tomato, onion and yam pickle. It is sweet, tart and delightful, and I will never enjoy ketchup again. There was a smattering of lightly--perfectly--steamed sugar snap peas, and the most amazing yams I have ever tasted. They must have been approximately 2/3 boiled yams mashed with 1/3 butter, and liberallty mixed with salt. And piping hot! Everything arrived at just the right time, and steaming to perfection!

Vive Le Québec!

Three Fondues

I'm always up for over-the-top food. And if an idea is a good one, why not triple it?

Having received a chocolate fondue set for Christmas, we were eager to try it out. It seemed appropriate to plan a multiple fondue feast - Cheese, Broth, and the Chocolate for dessert. It also seemed like a good opportunity to return the hospitality of Chris and Coral for their mid-December feast. (Thanks go to Coral for the pictures of the broth fondue and the chocolate fondue treats!)The cheese fondue was composed of McEwan's Scotch Ale, two cheddars (one smoked), some mustard and some cayenne.
The McEwans was a great choice for these cheeses - the strong and sweet ale paired really nicely with the slightly smoky cheddar. I probably should have paid more attention when warming it all up - it curdled quite quickly but a bit of lime juice smoothed it out a bit. We eventually enjoyed it with roasted potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower, kielbassa rounds, bread cubes, and cherry tomatoes.Considering the heaviness of the cheese fondue, I opted for a broth fondue rather than oil for cooking meat. I had planned on getting some wonderful scallops from Mariner Neptune and thought a nice gingery broth would work really well. Unfortunately, the scallops were way too huge to cook properly in the over-crowded fondue pot! The beef, chicken and prawns worked really nicely though (and left me with some tasty broth at the end of the night!)
We had a couple of very nasty fire flare-ups as a result of the old lamp oil that we used for fuel. Both pots got charred black and the metal pot had a 1/2 centimetre of ash covering its base. (Note for future reference: buy Sterno for next fondue).



And to end off the evening, we had strawberries, bananas, marzipan cubes, marshmellows, and peanut butter balls for dipping in chocolate.
The chocolate that came with the fondue set didn't last long though, and I had about as much success with melting more chocolate that I had with the cheese earlier. I brilliantly thought it would be clever to mix in some plain yogurt to melted chocolate, forgetting how easily this stuff seizes up... But thank goodness that you only need a bit of chocolate to make the sweetness of a strawberry sing!

January Eating

The More With Less cookbood is my bible for simple, cheap eating. Rich food has its place, but after days and days of non-stop seafood and donairs last December, I started craving simpler food. And this soup recipe is one of the simplest.These are the basic ingredients: lentils, onions, garlic and lemon juice. Here's what you do: Boil lentils with cumin. Fry onions and garlic in olive oil. Add a tablespoon of flour to coat onions. When lentils are cooked, add the fried onions and lemon juice.

Garnish with yogurt, and you got yourself some damn fine soup. Lentils rule!