Quebec Part I: Cretons

These days the best-known food from Quebec is smoked-meat, bagels, and poutine. These are undeniably important parts of Montreal's food scene, but are not as relevant to the rest of the province. Montreal gets its unique bagels and delicatessens from the large Jewish populations of the older neighbourhoods like Mile-End. Over the past few weeks I've been thinking about the winter food of a Quebecois farmstead (rather than the metropolitan dishes of Montreal). While tinkering with this idea I'll forgo the poutine italienne and look instead at dry-stored root vegetables and legumes, all manner of dairy, craft beer, maple syrup, and pork.

In Quebec, the pig is king. This is partly their cultural heritage: "For centuries pork was the most commonly consumed meat in rural France. Rare was the small farm without its own pig." (Robuchon). Pork also has an entire craft dedicated to its preservation (charcuterie), which is useful for rural winter-dwellers.

With this in mind, the first dish I made was cretons. Cretons is a pork spread, usually served on toast. Most cretons is made by simmering pork shoulder and aromatics in milk. Once the meat is tender enough, it is mixed until creamy and spreadable. It is very similar to the French rillette, which is pork shoulder simmer in stock, then mixed until spreadable. Cretons are usually eaten for breakfast. In making my own cretons I combined a rillette recipe from Rhulman's Charcuterie, and a recipe by Ron Eade, a food writer for the Ottawa citizen. I spliced these recipes together, replacing the stock with milk. Rillettes are traditionally sealed in ramekins with rendered fat. This is not traditional for creton, but it makes for such a fantastic presentation that I couldn't resist. Especially in winter, as the fat looks like a skating rink once it sets, and because with the addition of a sprig of rosemary and some peppercorns, you can imitate holly. (Ron Eade's idea.) Here's my variation:




Cretons

• 3 lbs pork shoulder, diced to one inch pieces
• 1/2 lb bacon
• 1/2 lb smoked ham hock
• 1 pork bone
• 1 bundle thyme
• 3 bay leaves
• 1 medium onion, roughly chopped
• 1 stalk celery, roughly chopped
• 4 peppercorns, tied into a cheesecloth bundle
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves (I didn't have whole cloves on hand, though those are probably to be preferred...)
• 1.25 L milk

First cover the diced shoulder with water and bring to a boil. This draws blood and impurities from the meat. Strain, discarding water. Place your purified shoulder and remaining ingredients in a large pot and cover with milk. Bring to a simmer, then place in 300F oven. Cook for 4 to 6 hours, until meat is falling-apart-tender.

Strain mixture, reserving liquid. Make sure you remove the bay leaves, peppercorn bundle, and pork bone. Place meat in standing mixer and mix on low speed, slowly adding reserve liquid until contents are moist and spreadable. This should take a couple of minutes.

Taste for seasoning. Since the dish will be served at room temperature, season assertively.

Smoked Ham Hock Cont'd

Some left-over ham got mixed with swiss cheese and mustard and baked in a pie crust.

Smoked Ham Hock

I picked up a monstrous hock from K&K Foodliner. It was one of the cheapest cuts of meat I have ever bought: about $6.50 for 1.7kg.

The plan was to convert this raw hock into a smoked ham hock, and then to use that to make a broth.

I put the hock in a simple brine solution for about a week, then smoked it over cherry wood.

I simmered my smoked ham hock for about an hour. The flavour was unbelievable. Obviously it tasted like pork, but it was so smoky it verged on campfire. If it were any warmer outside, or if I were serving the Queen high tea, I would have diluted it. But today it seemed right.

Next I used the broth to cook my vegetables. I actually used up the last of the carrots and potatoes from the fall harvest at Tipi Creek, (though we still have about a dozen squash and countless bags of frozen vegetables). Even after an aborted attempt at making sauerkraut, we also had lots of cabbage heads rolling about our refrigerator.

To recap, that was carrots, potatoes, and cabbage simmer in a ham hock broth. Garnished with shredded ham and celery leaves. Served with mustard and bread. A good cold-weather meal.

Barbecue

The term “barbecue” is used pretty loosely around these parts. Most often it refers to an outdoor grill, but I have also had “barbecued” items in restaurants that haven't been anywhere near an outdoor grill. In fact, these items, usually ribs or pulled-pork, have been braised or even stewed in an acidic solution called "barbecue sauce".

True barbecue is pork that has smoked at low temperature for several hours. The home of true barbecue is the American south, notably the Carolinas and Tennessee. When I say "true", I'm not arguing about the origin of the word or the antiquity of the practices, although I suspect that Southern barbecue would win on those fronts, too. I mean that the quality of the resulting product is infinitely superior with true barbecue. It is unlike any meat I have had before: it is transcendent.

The difference in taste is obvious. Complex, aromatic smoke is the base. Barbecue sauce is added towards the end of cooking, for a little acidity and sweetness. The real surprise was the texture. Food that is stewed in barbecue sauce is touted as "tender", but is actually just mushy. Food cooked low and slow and dry are tender, but they still have texture and bite.

In the southern states, there are barbecue restaurants. They have smokehouses where they cook pork ribs and beef briskets for eight hours. People line up to eat at these places. They literally go through tons of meat every day. They sell out of product every night. Occasionally one of these places will be featured on a Food Network show like Diners, Drive-In, and Dives. To my knowledge they just don't exist in Canada. Luckily you can do it at home.

Over the past two weeks I have barbecued twice. The first was with pork shoulder from Trowlesworthy Farms. The second was today, with grocery store side ribs, in the photo above.
Required Reading:

• Jeffrey Steingarten's essay "Going Whole Hog", from The Man Who Ate Everything. Does a good job describing the mania for barbecue in the southern states.
• Michael Ruhlman's recipes for Pulled Pork and Carolina Barbecue Sauce in his book Charcuterie.

Preserving by Drying

Or, How to Make Things Uncomfortable for a Microbe.

A simple start: dehydration. All life needs water, so removing the moisture from food makes it inhospitable to microbes. Some items can simply be air-dried. One week in July Lisa bought a whole bag of hot peppers from Doef's, then strung them together with unflavoured dental floss and hung them in our kitchen. The skin has become paper thing and brittle, and when held to the light you can see the shadows of the seeds. It's a simple preserving method that requires almost no work and keeps us in pepper heat all winter long.

You could probably also naturally air-dry fruit, but partway through the summer a family of fruit flies moved into our house, so we had to give our drying method a little boost. We had a couple gallons of saskatoons and tried a batch in the oven and a batch in a food dehydrator that Lisa and Judy found at a garage sale (one of several fantastic finds this summer.) Both turned out great and make a tasty addition to our infinite supply of granola.

Beef Stock

Before I even had the chance to awkwardly approach a butcher to ask for animal bones, Lisa and I found some at the farmers' market.

Four Whistle Farms sells two-pound packages of beef bones for about $3.50. So does Trowlesworthy Farms, but they were sold out by the time I got to their booth.

The Four Whistle Farms bones still had lots of meat on them. In his book Sauces, James Peterson says that meat adds flavour to stock, while bones add body. An ideal, savoury stock would be made with only meat. This would be extremely expensive, so we use bones, vegetables, and meat scraps as a compromise. That extra bit of meat on the Four Whistle bones was definitely not a bad thing.

As with my last stock experiment, I once again worked from a Robuchon recipe, but this time with some major departures, using beef bones instead of veal, and tomato paste instead of fresh tomatoes.

I roasted the bones and vegetables without parchment on a non-non-stick pan [sic] so that meat juices could caramelize on the surface. Then I deglazed the pan with water. This is a great way to add flavour to your stock. According to James Peterson, it also results in a clearer stock.

First while roasting, and then while simmering, the stock made my house smell unbelievable. Like, "run in off the cold street from a game of stick ball to find Nonna at the stove" unbelievable. "Provincial farmstead kitchen" unbelievable.

The finished product tasted great, but was a little heavy on tomato paste.

Beef Stock (adapted from The Complete Robuchon recipe for veal stock)

• 2 pounds beef bones
• 1 carrot, coarsely chopped
• 1 large onion, coarsely chopped
• 1 celery stalk
• 1/4 pound mushrooms
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 bouquet garni
• 1/2 cup tomato paste
• salt

Brown beef bones on a baking tray in 400F oven for about thirty minutes. Spread tomato paste onto bones and add carrot, onion, celery, and mushrooms. Brown vegetables. Place browned ingredients in stock pot with garlic, bouquet garni, and a pinch of salt. Deglaze pan with water or beef stock and add to stock pot. Cover contents of pot with cold water and simmer gently(!) for four hours.

Health Check Imposter

Notice anything peculiar about this chocolate bar? Doesn't that symbol on the bottom right look suspiciously like a heart? With a check mark on it?

The really sad part is that when I first saw this, I wasn't that surprised that a chocolate bar could carry the Heart and Stroke Foundation's Heart Check symbol. After all, other "heart-healthy" items endorsed by the Heart and Stroke Foundation include Slush-Puppies, hamburgers, and tater-tots.

For thorough critiques of the Health Check system, check out the Weighty Matters blog, or this expose from the CBC's Marketplace.

Anyways, Coffee Crisp obviously does not sport the Health Check symbol. That bulbous red patch is actually Nestle's logo (so you can see the same picture on other Nestle products, like Smarties). I have no idea what it is supposed to represent. Below the check mark the wrapper reads, "Your good health comes from a balanced diet, proper nutrition and physical activity."

At first I thought the slogan "Coffee Crisp makes a nice, light, snack" was a reference to the light texture of the bar, but it's actually meant to trick people into thinking that wafers covered in chocolate might be good for you.

Unbelievable.