DEL.ICIO.USHours of low-temperature cooking yield tender, juicy meat
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Ever since Americans discovered balsamic vinegar, each year seems to herald the arrival of an exciting new cooking ingredient. For one season, this prized treasure will be all over restaurant menus, food magazines and dinner parties. It may disappear in a flash (remember fennel pollen?), overstay its welcome (truffle oil) or, possibly, change the way you cook forever more.
This year the must-have ingredient seems to be in the latter category. It is something commonplace yet always in short supply, and never used to its full advantage. What is it? Apparently, time.
Sara Hopkins/ AJC Special
Seven-Hour Leg of Lamb is really a misnomer. Preparation and cooking encompass two days. The recipe calls for a 6- to 8-pound whole leg of lamb.
Sara Hopkins/ AJC Special
Cajun seasoning, brown sugar and spicy brown mustard are ingredients in chef Richard Blais’ 14-Hour Brisket.
From the plethora of crockpot cookbooks that continue to line bookstore shelves to the revolution of sous vide cookery remaking restaurant kitchens, slow food is today’s food. Quick sautés are fine, but today’s chefs have discovered that foods cooked for many hours — or, in some cases, days — have all the sex appeal.
Trendy menus that once drew attention to the farm that raised their meat now boast of the time in the oven. Consider Richard Blais, the “Top Chef” finalist who impressed the competition judges with a brisket he cooked overnight. After returning to Atlanta, his 14-hour brisket became a signature dish during his stint as chef at Home restaurant in Buckhead.
This is a trend worth learning more about and emulating, particularly with holiday dinners around the corner. Maybe you’re not ready to attempt 48-hour short ribs poached in vacuum-sealed plastic bags, but a slow-cooked roast promises great impact at the table and no-fail deliciousness.
No special equipment needed
While Blais got a rap for relying too much on gadgets, here he used only his noodle to turn a basic oven into a slow cooker. After searing the brisket over a grill for smoky flavor, he encased it with a flavorful mustard-brown sugar rub in foil and essentially left it to braise in its own juices.
Your oven is, in fact, the best slow cooker in your house. Think of it like your barbecue — without the smoke or live fire, alas, but with a much more reliable thermostat.
As any barbecuer knows, the sweet spot for slow cooking meat lies in the range of 225 degrees to 275 degrees. Temperatures in this range are high enough to break down the tough connective tissue into soft gelatin, but not so high as to force too many of the moist juices from between the meat fibers and into the pan. Fatty cuts of meat do particularly well as the melting fat bathes the surface of the meat and prevents evaporation.
Wet vs. dry
While you’ll find any number of recipes — some go all night, some merely all day — they all line up behind the two basic methods: wet cooking and dry cooking.
When you cover a dish, the food within braises in its own juices or softens in its steam. This is wet cooking, and as long as you keep the pot juices at a simmer rather than a boil, this is the best method to keep meat velvety and moist.
You may, however, leave the same dish uncovered and wind up with different results. The radiant heat from the flame or element perpetually bombards and browns the surface of the meat, creating all sorts of tasty flavors but potentially desiccating it. This is dry cooking.
Match method to cut
Chef Billy Allin of Cakes & Ale restaurant in Decatur says both methods can prove just as easy — and just as rewarding — depending on the cut of meat used.
He prepares a rolled boneless pork shoulder with wet heat to keep it as moist as possible.
“I like to do something between a French pot roast, with just a small amount of liquid in the pot, and an American pot roast, where you put in some aromatics and a bit more liquid.”
Allin adds a judicious amount of stock and plenty of onions to the pot, covers it, and deliciousness ensues.
But were he to cook a large bone-in pork shoulder, he’d prepare the dry-heat one he learned when working at the legendary Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.
“We used to cook it in a big, deep vessel with tomato and lots of grated onion in the bottom of the pan. I remember grating the onions until my knuckles hurt,” he recalls. “The trick was to keep turning it over and over in the pan to keep it from drying out. When the juices start soaking in, you get a really great crust.”
Self-basting meats
Some cuts, however, come with such a thick layer of fat that they prove perpetually self-basting and require no tending at all. Chef Anne Quatrano of the Bacchanalia group likes using a picnic ham (i.e., a fresh foreleg ham) for just this reason.
When Quatrano has her staff up to her Cartersville farm, she likes to brine a fresh picnic ham, score the thick, fatty skin on top, rub it with fennel seed and red pepper, and then slow roast it overnight with olive oil and lemon juice.
“You can just pull the meat apart with your fingers and let it soak up that lemony sauce,” Quatrano says. “The skin makes for great cracklings.”
Experimenting with lamb
Yet even leaner cuts respond well to direct heat. The French have a number of recipes for “seven-hour” leg of lamb — some cooked with a cover (wet cooking), others simply set in a roasting pan (dry cooking). It’s an unusual way to present a cut of meat that’s often blast-roasted and still bloody at the bone.
I tried the wet-cooking method first, with the leg immersed in a soupy melange of white wine, herbs and aromatic vegetables. It came out good in an enormous lamb shank kind of way. Soft. Shreddy. Fine, but nothing more.
But thinking about Allin’s advice, I then tinkered with a dry-cooking recipe. I turned this leg a couple of times over the seven hours and basted it whenever the thought occurred.
This burnished haunch made for a gorgeous presentation, smelled like meat heaven and got well nigh devoured to the bone at the table. It sure beat worrying about degrees of doneness and mint jelly for once.
With this recipe, time was clearly on my side.
Technique was a life-changer
When Thomas Keller, famed chef at the French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley, was approached in 2000 to contribute to a line of frozen entrees, little did he realize the experience would change his fundamental approach to cooking.
This experience gave Keller his first opportunity to take a serious look at the sous vide technique in which foods are vacuum-sealed in plastic and then cooked in a tub of warm water flowing around the bag with the help of a heater-thermostat-pump called an immersion circulator. It is a common practice nowadays and is responsible for those preternaturally tender duck breasts and short ribs, as well as the firm and flavorful vegetables you might encounter in the kind of upscale restaurant that can afford the equipment.
Now Keller, along with some key members of his staff, share their insights in the new book, “Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide” (Artisan, $75). Keller and crew explore many applications from bolstering the impact of marinades to giving juicy fruits such as pineapple a meaty texture. More than anything, it allows for utter precision and allows the cooks to find the exact temperatures at which cooked foods show optimal expression.
If you’re looking for tips on buying a home system and bringing sous vide to your table, this isn’t the book for you. But if you’re interested in seeing the workings of a great culinary mind or perhaps have access to restaurant equipment, then you may want to check out this odd but important book .
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