chicken broth

Okay, this is a no-brainer, but since I made it last night and both the 'fuzz and I went ga-ga over it, I have to post it.

Whenever you cook chicken, keep the bones or necks or scraps or whatever in a bag in the freezer. Then, when bored, put it all into a pot, along with a hacked up onion and some celery (including leaves), and "sweat" it for a bit (PMC's terminology). Cover everything with water, add peppercorns and a bay leaf. Simmer for 45 mins or more. Strain and add salt bit-by-bit until it's delicious.

In principle, you can use this, diluted, in the many soup recipes on F,NRS. In practice, it tastes so damn good, you will just eat it all right away.

boule of country bread II

Bread flour and terra cotta tiles make all the difference. I used about 6 cups of Robin Hood "Best for Bread Homestyle White" bread flour and half a cup of stone ground organic rye from La Milanaise mill in Quebec to 2.3 cups of tap water. (This gives a percentage of water of about 70, normalized to the weight of the flour.) Of this, two cups of bread flour and one cup of water were used, with half a teaspoon of active dry yeast (Fleischman's), to make a "sponge" the night before. This, with the rest of the flour and water and 1 tbsp of sea salt, was used to make the final dough, which was almost pourable, but that apparently is what you're after with this kind of bread.

The first rise took about three hours. I did not punch down the down but rather gingerly scraped it out onto a floured board and gently formed a boule, a disconcertingly flaccid boule. The second rise of about 45 minutes was in a muslin lined colander. Meanwhile, I covered a large jelly roll pan with a double layer of unglazed terra cotta tiles and set it in the oven to preheat at 450 degrees F.

When I put the bread in to bake, I thought, "There's no way this big floppy pancake is going to bake into anything resembling a loaf of bread." But wow! Those big air bubbles I was so careful to preserve hit the heat of the tiles and the surrounding air and up, up, up. The bread tastes great too. Hooray!

cod puttanesca

Last night's supper was fish baked in sauce, but what a sauce!

• Sauté 4–5 cloves of garlic, minced, in about 5 tbsp of good olive oil until just turning golden.
• Add a 28 oz can of diced tomatoes packed in juice and bring to a simmer.
• While simmering, drain and rinse a small can of anchovies and fire those into the sauce. Then add about 20 pitted black olives (Kalamata, baby) and a heaping tbsp of capers. Add a pinch of crushed chiles or some harissa, sambal olek, etc.. Do not add any salt to this sauce.
• If your sauté pan isn't oven proof, pour the sauce into a baking dish. Lay fresh cod filets on sauce (we also had some ocean perch or "sebaste" in French, which is damn cheap and very good) and bake in a medium oven (around 350) for 10 minutes. Sprinke with fresh parsley and tuck in.

We ate this with basil mashed potatoes (russets + olive oil and butter + milk + fresh chopped basil + salt and pepper) and garlicky, lemony sautéed red Swiss chard. The sauce is potent, so I opened a fairly big wine, a 2002 Vacqueyras, to go with it.

The kids powered back the fish, so I'm afraid there were no left overs for bloggers seeking adoption in our household. On a related note, if "Kurt" could be persuaded to come east for a visit this summer, I would gladly make the trip as well to ply him with sourdough buckwheats and sage sausage in exchange for his insight on classroom management

boule of country bread

If there is one food true to the spirit of F,NRS, it is bread. Few ingredients: flour, water, yeast, salt. In fact, these all fall into the category of staples and so hardly even count as ingredients in the way it is meant here. But simple procedures? Well, yes and no. It comes down to technique and knowing what things should feel, look, sound and smell like at each stage of the process. For me, making a fruit pie is now a simple procedure, but I've made dozens of them in the past few years. I have a fairly good idea of the tolerances on the procedure, where I can cut corners and where I have to take my time and do it right to get a certain quality of finished product. That's a place I'd like to be in bread baking. Yesterday's effort—a boule of "pain de campagne" or rustic country bread—has a nicely crackled thick crust and good colour and is very moist but the crumb is way too tight and uniform. Also, the salt didn't distribute properly through the dough, so there are some quite salty bites in there.

The Best Recipe by the editors of Cook's Illustrated is my main reference, but my inspiration is a chapter in Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything. There are several loaves I'd like to reproduce: the NYC's Sullivan Street Bakery filone, the "pain aux céréales" from Eric Borderon's in Quebec City and his boule of "pain de campagne". This last loaf has a cracked, blistered deep honey-brown crust with a moist, chewy crumb full of air pockets large and small. I'll post updates from time to time.

sourdough buckwheats and sage sausage

I took the leap and made sourdough buckwheat pancakes for the family this morning, without a net. Frequent readers of F,NRS will recall that while my crew are all devoted pancake eaters, I feared this more agressive cousin would turn them off. Well, never underestimate kids who prefer roquefort to processed singles! Here's how John Thorne makes these in Serious Pig:

• At T minus 24 hours, make the sponge. Put 3 tbsp all-purpose flour, 3 tbsp buckwheat flour, 6 tbsp warm water and 1/4 tsp active dry yeast in a small bowl. Stir, cover with plastic wrap and leave on the counter.
• At T minus 12 hours, mix 3/4 cup all-purpose flour and 3/4 cup buckwheat flour in a larger bowl. Whisk in 3/2 cups of warm water followed by the sponge. Cover with plastic wrap and leave out overnight.
• At T minus 2 minutes, add 3/2 tbsp molasses, 1/2 tsp baking soda and 1/4 tsp salt to the batter, stir and let rest while heating up a griddle. Lightly grease the griddle (bacon drippings, anyone?) initially and between batches.
• Cook the sourdough buckwheats and serve with maple syrup and butter or molasses or sorghum or...

Thorne mentions sage breakfast sausage as a great foil for the grassy, earthy taste of these cakes. I have no idea where one would buy such a creature, so I made some, following Daniel Pinard's guidelines in Encore des pinardises: Recettes et propos culinaires:

• Mix a pound of lean ground pork with a generous tsp each of fine sea salt, chile pepper flakes and dried sage (or a tbsp of finely chopped fresh) and 1/4 cup of white wine.
• Form into patties (long, fairly flat ovals are nice).
• If you have the time, leave in the 'fridge for a few hours to let the flavours marry and the salt and wine work on the protein in the meat.
• Heat a frying pan over medium heat (no need to grease it) and fry up those sausages.

These aren't in casings, but who cares? I don't want to hang them for smoking or drying, which is the main purpose of such packaging; I want to devour them posthaste. By the way, pork, salt and wine in the same proportions plus:

• 1 tbsp each fennel seeds and chopped fresh parsley, 1/2 tsp ground black pepper and 1/2 tsp chile pepper flakes gives you Sicilian sausage
• 2 cloves of garlic minced, 1 tbsp Hungarian paprika, 1 tsp cayenne pepper, a big pinch of ground cumin and one of ground coriander gives you chorizo (replace the pork with lamb and the coriander with ground cinnamon andcloves and you've got merguez)

(In the same chapter: Eat a raw oyster on the half shell, followed by a bite of warm homemade thyme sausage, then a bite of buttered bread and a big sip of white wine (preferably graves, otherwise muscadet, chablis or sancerre). Repeat twelve times in the company of good friends. Know then what it means to be happy. Raw oysters, you say? I guess this form of happiness will have to wait a few months, right friends?) What a wonderful brunch! The only thing missing was baked beans...