Mincemeat 2011

I might be in love with the idea of mincemeat more than the dish itself. It's an absolutely medieval combination of flavours: dried fruit, spices, liquour, and suet.

Last year I tried Alton Brown's recipe.  It was good, though not what I was expecting. His pie is fruity, tart, and sweet.  The texture was unique: the dried fruit partially reconstitutes during baking, making for an interesting chew.

This year I made some changes:

• I added meat to my mince.  Most recipes, including Brown's, contain only suet, but I know that my grandmother's also had beef chuck.  I heavily browned the meat before adding it to the other ingredients to develop flavour texture.
• I used lamb suet and shoulder, instead of beef.  I happen to have lots of lamb right now.
• I processed the mixture for a finer, more consistent texture
• I plan on adding bread crumbs to the mincemeat before I bake it in a pie shell.  Last year the liquor and fruit juices and rendered suet bubbled over the crust.  I think that the bread crumbs will help keep that moisture in the pie.

This mincemeat will age in my fridge until the winter solstice.  I'll let you know how it turns out.


Mincemeat
2011's version, grafting my grandmother's recipe to Alton Brown's, and using lamb instead of beef

Ingredients

• 2 tart apples, peeled, cored, and quartered
• 8 oz sultana raisins
• 4 oz dried sour cherries
• 4 oz dark brown sugar
• 2 ounces lamb suet, coarsely chopped
• 6 oz ground lamb shoulder
• 1 orange, zested and juiced
• 1 lemon, zested and juiced
• 1/4 cup spiced rum
• 1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp freshly ground allspice
• 1/4 tsp freshly ground clove
• bread crumbs

Procedure

1. Heavily brown the ground lamb in a hot, heavy-bottomed stainless steel pan.  The meat should be a deep amber on all surfaces.  Strain the meat to separate it from any rendered fat.  Chill thoroughly.
2. Combine all ingredients except bread crumbs in a food processor.  Pulse until ingredients are well-combined and desired texture is achieved.  Pulsing 10 times will give a mincemeat with a coarse texture.  I prefer a finer, more homogeneous texture.
3. Transfer to an airtight container and store in the fridge atleast 1 week before using.  Keeps for 6 months.
4. Before adding to pastry, fold in breadcrumbs.

Tangle Ridge Ranch Lamb

If you're unfamiliar with Tangle Ridge Ranch and their pastured lambs, here's some information to digest:

• the Tangle Ridge website, complete with a video interview by Kevin
• an article from the Edmonton Journal with a punny title, which I think is a requirement for all food articles in print newspapers

Last week Tangle Ridge killed this year's lambs, and Lisa and I were fortunate enough to get a whole, uncut carcass.  My primary motivation was securing lamb meat and offal for this January's Burns supper (stay tuned...)  Here's some details on the purchase.


Cutting Lamb

Lamb is a relatively simple animal to butcher.  The carcass is easy to handle (typically 40-60 lbs) with fewer cuts than, say, a cow, or even a pig.  For details on cutting, here's a great video of a master butcher breaking down a whole lamb.

Lambs are cut into four primals.  First is the front, from which you get:

• neck, or "scrag": one of the most repulsive words in the English language, but a fantastic piece of meat for braising
• shoulder chops, roasts, or stewing meat
• arm chops
• foreshanks

Then the loin, which yields:

• loin chops, analogous to the t-bone steak on a cow
• racks, often prepared with the slender ribs still attached and thoroughly cleaned, at which point it's called a "Frenched" rack.  (Is their any other nationality that becomes a verb so easily?)

The belly section of the lamb is called the flank.  It's usually made into ground meat, but can also be braised or stewed.

Finally there's the legs, most often kept whole or nearly whole for large roasts.

It took me an hour to break down the lamb, including the time for the more tedious tasks like portioning the chops and Frenching the racks.

The Numbers

Compared to most other meats, lamb is expensive.  My side of pork this year was $2.15/lb for a 110 lb side.  This whole, uncut lamb was $5.85/lb for a 50 lb carcass.  The cut and wrapped lambs sell for $7.50/lb.

Yes, compared to pork this lamb is expensive.  But compared to supermarket lamb, Tangle Ridge is a steal.

I weighed every piece of meat that I got from my lamb to see what those final cuts would cost when purchased from retailers.  In the spreadsheet below, the weights are what I got from my animal.  The costs are for an identical cut, as sold at local retailers, mostly Sunterra Market in Lendrum, which carries a lot more lamb than most grocery stores.

There are a few cuts (flank, neck, and the "fatty trim" that I rendered out for cooking fat) that are not available in grocery stores.  These represent small portions of the carcass, and are estimated at very low prices, so are a correspondingly small source of error.

If I purchased all the cuts of lamb that are now in my freezer from a grocery store, it would have cost about $8.26/lb, instead of $5.85.

I can't wait to tuck into this lamb.  I'll be posting about some of the preparations over the next few months.

Burns Supper - The Main Event: Haggis and Clapshot

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!

-Address to a Haggis, Robert Burns

Haggis: unquestionably the king of the Scots kitchen. Rarely eaten, much maligned, completely misunderstood.

Haggis is made of a sheep's pluck, which is a tidy term for the lungs, heart, and liver. Traditionally these parts would be boiled, ground, mixed with oats and onions, then stuffed into a cleansed sheep's stomach, making what is essentially a large, round sausage.

Sheep are rarely brought to maturity in North America, so all the offal I used was from a lamb. Lamb bits are smaller and milder in flavour than sheep bits.

Most of the ingredients were easier to obtain than you might expect. Four Whistle Farm routinely brings offal of all sorts to the Strathcona market, so I just sent a quick e-mail to Marius to confirm that the required organs would be there on the required Saturday. (The lungs, discouragingly, were not held in the "Lamb" section of the display, but the "Dog Food" section...)

The only real trouble was the stomach. I approached a few vendors. Most gave excuses, citing, for instance, "regulations" or some such nonsense. Others said plainly that the abattoir doesn't like to do weird things like that. Eventually I found that Jim from Trowlesworthy Farms was able to procure a lamb's stomach, but unfortunately not in time for Burns night.

I ended up using a beef bung instead of a sheep's stomach. A beef bung is a long, dead-end portion of the cow's intestinal tract. Once stuffed it is about five inches across and a few feet long. It is the traditional casing for mortadella and cappicola. I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the images of haggis I came across during my research were actually made with beef bung.

The details of the preparation follow.


Haggis
Adapted from The Scots Kitchen

Ingredients

• 2 lamb lungs, roughly 300g
• 2 lamb hearts, roughly 300g
• 2 lamb livers, roughly 400g
• 300g chopped onions, gently cooked in butter
• 150g lamb suet
• 150g honeyed, toasted, rolled oats (you can use this recipe for granola)
• 27g salt
• black pepper, nutmeg, and allspice to taste
• 1 beef bung

Usually the raw offal is thrown in a pot of boiling water, but I decided to sear mine in a hot pan first, just for some extra colour and flavour.


Put the seared offal in a large pot. If you are lucky and your lungs are still attached to their windpipe, drape the windpipe over the edge of the pot so that any fluid expelled by the lungs doesn't end up in your water. If you don't have a windpipe, don't worry. Cover the offal with cold water, then bring the pot to a boil. The lungs, as you might expect, want to float, so you'll have to weigh them down. I used a plate and a tin can. Classy.

Simmer for an hour and a half. All kinds of ungodly brown scum will form on the surface, especially if you don't have the windpipe as a purge line. If you are very diligent with the skimming, you may still be able to use some of the flavourful cooking liquid later on.


Chill the cooked offal thoroughly. Mix with the fat, onions, salt, and spices.


Grind the mixture through a 3/16" plate.


Add the toasted oats to the ground offal. Mix on a low speed, slowly incorporating a bit of the boiling liquid. If your boiling liquid was deemed undesirable, use stock. The forcemeat should become somewhat paste-like, though not as tacky as a sausage force.


Soak the beef bung for about an hour. Rinse thoroughly inside and out.


Roll up your sleeves and stuff the forcemeat into the bung. Pack it tightly, ensuring there are no air pockets. Traditionally the sheep's stomach would be sewn shut (hence the line "Your pin wad help to mend a mill / In time o' need" in the Address to a Haggis.) Working with the beef bung, I simply tied the open end in a large knot.


Simmer the haggis until heated through, about two hours. The beef bung, just so you know, is not usually consumed; it's just a vessel.


Clapshot: Neeps and Tatties

Clapshot is mashed turnips ("neeps") and potatoes ("tatties"). I have no idea where the term comes from. The classic recipe uses equal parts of each, but since turnips are so much moister than potatoes, I prefer one part turnip to two parts potato.

Peel the potatoes and turnips and cut them into large chunks. Boil them in separate pots, as they take different lengths of time to cook. Simmer each until very tender, but not falling apart. Pass the vegetables through a food mill while still warm. Combine, then spread on a tray to cool thoroughly. This can be done the night before the meal.

To serve, heat the milled vegetables with a bit of lamb stock. Beat in cubes of butter, and season with salt and pepper.

This really is the perfect accompaniment to the haggis. The sweetness of the turnips compliments the savoury offal. The slightly fluid nature of the mash allows it to mingle with the haggis.

This was my first taste of haggis since I was a little boy visiting a historical village somewhere in Ontario. Frankly it blew my mind. You would expect offal boiled for hours to be tough and dry, but the grinding tenderizes the meat and glands, and the onions and stock-drenched oats give moisture. The final mix looks a lot like ground beef, but it's much lighter and moister than hamburger. I can't wait to try this again.

Burns Supper - First Courses: Barley-Broth and Scots Rabbit

Some would think this is the inside of my compost bin, but it's actually the inside of my stockpot: roasted lamb bones and vegetables, as well as all the darkly caramelized bits scraped from the bottom of the roasting tray. These flavours formed the soul of the Burns Supper, as the resulting stock was used not only in the soup, but also in the haggis and the clapshot. They were the mellow, earthy foundation of the entire meal.

Making a pot of stock the night before a large meal has become a very fond tradition. The house fills with the aroma first of roasting bones, then of the simmering stock, while excitement for the coming meal slowly accrues.

Some specifics on the stock. First I roasted lamb bones from Four Whistle Farm. It's hard to come by good lamb femur bones, I think because of the popularity of leg roasts and shanks. A touch of tomato paste was smeared over the bones for the latter half of the roasting. Then onion, carrot, celery, and garlic were baked. The pans were deglazed with water, and bay and rosemary were added. Finally the whole lot was covered in cold water, brought to a simmer and left overnight.
 
 

Barley-Broth

Vegetable-wise the soup contained onions, kale, and carrots.

Pearled barley was cooked in a separate pot so that it wouldn't cloud the stock.

The final garnish was lamb neck. Neck is a variety-cut that sounds a lot grosser than it really is: the meat is indistinguishable from that of the shoulder. The necks were seared, braised in some of the lamb stock, cooled, shredded, and added to the soup.

Rabbit

This dish is most commonly called either "Welsh rarebit" or "Welsh rabbit." "Rabbit" is the original name, though no one knows the origin of the term. Some say it was originally derogatory, suggesting that if a Welshman went out to hunt rabbit, he would end up eating cheese for dinner.  The dish is currently experiencing a revival, and modern authors and cooks prefer to use the corruption "rarebit," as it avoids the obvious confusion with the hopping mammal.

At its heart, rabbit is hot cheese on toast. The best versions also include beer.I borrowed a technique from Fergus Henderson's book The Whole Beast. He makes a roux, then whisks his beer into it, creating what is essentially a beer velouté. The cheese is then melted into this sauce.

Besides serving Henderson's version of "Welsh" rabbit, made with Guinness and cheddar, I also developed a Scots version using Innis and Gunn and a mild gouda. If you are unfamiliar, Innis and Gunn is a Scottish beer that is aged in oak barrels, and is really one of the most remarkable beers I've ever tasted.

Scots Rabbit
Adapted from Fergus Henderson's recipe for Welsh Rarebit

• one tablespoon butter
• one tablespoon white flour
• one cup Innis and Gunn


• one pound mild Sylvan Star gouda, grated

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour, and cook until starting to colour. Whisk in the beer and bring to a simmer. Add the cheese. Stir the mixture until the cheese is thoroughly melted and a uniform sauce forms. Pour into a shallow dish and allow to set. This can be done the day before the meal.

To serve, spread onto pieces of toast and broil until the cheese browns.

The rabbit goes very well with a glass of the beer you used to prepare it. Actually it goes well with alcohol of any kind.