Ribs

I've been wanting to try ribs in the Big Green Egg since I got it. Let me say right away the ribs came out really tasty and fairly tender, but they were not moist and falling off the bone and I'm not sure why -- whether it was the meat, the recipe, the Egg, the execution (timing, temperature?).

I followed the Kansas City recipe from Jamisons' Big Book of Outdoor Cooking, which had a rub of many ingredients (paprika, chile powder, smoked salt, etc.), applied one-third the night before, one-third just before smoking, and one-third halfway through the cooking. I got three St. Louis cut slabs which weighed 6.25 lbs altogether. I also went ahead and got the Weber rib rack to hold them in the Egg. I used just beer and Worcestershire sauce for a mop (every hour). I kept the temperature pretty steady at about 200, though in the late stages it snuck up to 250 when I wasn't looking and I had a little trouble bringing it down. I gave up on them getting more tender after 4 hrs and applied the sauce (tomato sauce, brown sugar, corn syrup, tomato paste, etc.), cooking for another 40 min. Then I wrapped then in a double layer of foil for about 45 min.

It occurs to me that brining might get them more like the Rocklands finished product, but I also think these ribs (from Whole Foods) may have been a bit too lean. Researching a bit just now, I'm thinking the "country style ribs" from WF were more like baby backs and less like spareribs. Also the 4-hour cooking time specified by Jamison is too short, 6 hrs would be better. Temperature usually given as 225, so outside the 180-220 range Jamison calls for. Live and learn. I will no longer take Jamison as the last word or the gospel, but will consult other sources, too.

Used the pinto beans with beer and pepper from the same book, with the Rancho Gordo pinto beans. They were great but the recipe called for 2 Tbl of lard to sautee the onions that are added towards the end of cooking and it tasted too much of lard. Also, the beer does lend a slightly bitter taste, which I didn't mind but I might use a blander beer next time (or Mexican, as they recommend).

But it was a great meal, rounded out with Andrea's corn sticks, a big green salad with goat cheese, and a very seasonal fruit salad (peaches, plums, nectarines, raspberries) in mint sugar.

Chicken with plums

I've acquired some new cookbooks recently and I'm going to be trying them out. This simple recipe from Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food was great for a week night.

Originally, this Turkish recipe (Tabaka Piliç) was made with a whole boned chicken but she calls for chicken fillets, both white and dark meat. I shopped at the co-op and all they had was chicken thighs so I skinned and boned them and flattened them into fillets. These simply get sauteed in a skillet and then the plums added to soften. The co-op plums were big and a bit hard so I cut them up to soften more quickly. The real addition here is a sauce made of plum jam (St. Dalfour) with a Tbl of vinegar, a crushed garlic clove and a pinch of chile pepper flakes. I also cooked up some bulghur wheat from the co-op (too much, two cups!) and sauteed some zucchini to stir into that. Nice little meal.

Re-creation

You can never really duplicate a meal you eat in a restaurant and that was not our goal when we nonetheless set out this weekend to approximate a couple of the meals we had in France.

If the market had had girolles or any suitable mushroom, we would have tried the tagliatelle with girolles, but it didn't so we went to Plan B, which was to have the salmon rillettes on toasted baguette for a first course and a version of Christophe's pork and polenta for a main course.

The salmon recipe came from Susan Loomis's Cooking at Home on Rue Tatin. It had a great flavor though it did not come out as fluffy and light as the one at Bastide de l'Odeon. Andrea thought it needed more olive oil in proportion to the butter. Other ingredients were steamed fresh salmon, smoked salmon, shallots and chives.

We obviously were not going to get Basque country heritage pork and I'm not sure you can even get an "echine" cut here (which, according to Julia Child, is the shoulder or blade end of the loin). So we opted for pork tenderloin and used piment d'Espelette to acknowledge the Basque country. I got the tenderloins out of the fridge an hour ahead of time, salted (with our coarse salt from the Camargue) and peppered and pimented them. To cook, I seared them in a combination of lard and peanut oil then put them on a sheet pan in a 350-degree oven. I wanted to pull them out at 140 degrees, but by the time I realized the one instant-read thermometer wasn't functioning correctly, they had reached 160. So no pink, but still very moist and not overdone. I had deglazed the skillet and reduced that in a saucepan, enriching with butter (and a little jam since it was a bit bitter) to drizzle over the carved tenderloin.

The polenta I baked at 350 in my cazuela for an hour and a half, stirring after an hour and checking seasoning. I turned it out onto the pizza paddle and let it cool, cut it into small rectangles, then sauteed the rectangles in olive oil and let them crisp up in that same oven. It actually made for a very nice meal.

We had a white Cote du Rhone with hors d'oeuvres (cheese and crackers) and the salmon, and a slightly chilled Fleurie with the pork. Andrea had her first go at re-creating Ladurrees macarones, but may have made a mistake putting them in the fridge after they cooled because they came out a little tough.

Southern France

We had many nice meals when we were staying with friends outside Uzès, including friends of theirs who kindly included us in dinner parties. But the highlight of the week was a lunch at one of their neighbors. It was a repast that shows how deep the culture of food goes with the French and how intertwined it is with social interaction.

We started with champagne -- what else? -- and munchies consisting of olives, saucisses and a saucisson roquefort. We sat at a table in the courtyard under a big tree that created lots of shade. The hosts had decked out three outdoor tables for a dozen guests, tablecloths of Provencal colors, and several glasses at each place.

The first course was the classic melon and prosciutto, though the melon was from the market and perfectly ripe, so unusually flavorful. (The host had been a farmer and grown melons himself, so he knew how to find just the right ones.) The ham was local jambon de pays.

What followed was an assiette de crudités that raised this humble dish to a new level -- cucumbers, tomatoes and wonderful beets with vinaigrette, all fresh from his own garden. In the meantime, our cook lit some dried oak branches and let them burn down to charcoal so he could grill lamb chops from the local market. These he served with individual vegetable (courgettes) casseroles. No salad course but some beautiful cheeses that we lingered over with much more wine. And then large portions of a creamy, smooth flan, more champagne, music, coffee, more wine. We started at noon and left at 4:45.


The other culinary highlight was our meal at L'Olivier in nearby Serviers. It was a small simple restaurant with a fresh and innovative cuisine. We ate in the courtyard. Because it is limited to five tables some of the dishes were no longer available. Andrea got the daily special of foie gras de canard in roasted fresh figs for a starter -- a very nice combination -- and then got the scallops as a main course. I took the sauteed crayfish tails with chervil and ginger for a starter and filet of sandre, a freshwater fish similar to perch, for the main course. We had a white Cote de Rhone with it. Dessert was an assortment of chocolate dishes, with the standout being a kind of pudding that was like the molten part of a molten chocolate cake.

On our last day, I fixed a meal for our hosts that I had often fixed in France, a grilled chicken with lemon from Roger Verge's Cuisine du Soleil cookbook, paired with his tomato salad and grilled eggplant. We got two poulets fermiers at the market, along with the tomatoes and eggplant. You butterfly the chickens, flatten them as best as possible, then marinate four hours in salt, pepper, olive oil and oregano on a bed of sliced onion with lemon slices covering them. You remove the lemon slices, grill the chickens on both sides, then return them to the roasting pan with the onion, put the lemon slices back on top and pop them in a very hot oven. The tomato salad is very simple -- you put a couple of tablespoons of salt on the tomatoes, immerse them in red wine vinegar, drain after half an hour or so then dress with olive oil.

Paris

We had many nice meals in Paris and especially nice times with old friends. We tasted some classic French specialties in places like Fontaine de Mars (the foie gras!), Perraudin and Wepler.

But for the blog I want to focus on two restaurants where young chefs are adapting classic French cuisine in new ways. Chef Gilles Ajuelos at La Bastide de l'Odeon, a small restaurant tucked in next to the Odeon where we had lunch the day we arrived, seeks to reinvent Provençal cuisine.

For starters, we had rillettes de saumon and a roasted eggplant timbale they called a millefeuille. Both were delicious -- the rillettes were fluffy on toasted baguette slices and the eggplant was al dente with a great vegetable flavor. What stole the show, though, was Andrea's tagliatelle with girolles. The homemade noodles were perfectly cooked and the girolles were redolent of garlic and butter without reeking of either, firm and tender without being chewy or tough and were simply delicious. I had a very nice mullet filet with a version of ratatouille also done as a timbale (yes, somewhat similar to my starter).

On Sunday, after a nice appero at Closerie des Lilas, we walked down to Christophe, another small eatery behind the Pantheon on Rue Descartes, for another inventive meal. Where Bastide was all warm Provençal colors, Chef Christophe Philippe wants to paint in earth tones.

I had a spring roll with cochon basquaise that was delicious and we were asking ourselves what was Basque about it because Andrea ordered the echine as a main course. It turns out there is no spice or rub, these are simply a breed of pigs that are raised in France's Basque country. So Andrea's echine (loin) had the most marvelous pork flavor, savoring of the marbling that characterizes this cut. It was a dark brown rectangle on a white plate, with another brown rectangle of polenta overlapping it. Not a presentation to my taste, but the flavors were delicious.

I had a similarly monochromatic main course with my sweetbreads and mashed potatoes, both an off-white on a white plate. It was certainly the largest portion of sweetbreads I've ever eaten and tender beyond belief, with that oh-so delicate flavor of this cut. The potatoes may have been the smoothest whipped potatoes I've ever had, with a strong earthy taste and just the right hint of butter. Andrea's starter, by the way, were some very green haricots verts with a slice of bacon, no doubt from those same Basque pigs.

Wines were a good deal here (three young diners at the table next to us went through at least four bottles), and we had a nice chilled red (sorry, forgot where it was from).

Both of these restaurants were among the 102 reviewed in Alexander Lobrano's Hungry for Paris. These chatty descriptions, apparently a collection of magazine reviews, are supplemented by a helpful "In a Word" summary and a "Don't Miss" catalogue of signature dishes. Equally helpful are the listings at the end. We found both these restaurants under the heading "Bistros, Contemporary", as opposed to "Bistros, Traditional" and other restaurant categories ("Haute Cuisine", etc.).

To my amazement, under "Foreign Cuisines" (a short list of four), Lobrano listed L'As du Falafel, which indeed was exactly the takeaway falafel place in the Marais that I always went to on Sunday and that we visited again on Sunday for a falafel sans pareil.