Memorial Day Dogs

Memorial Day 2020 was pretty subdued at our house, what with the quarantine and social distancing, with plenty of time and peace and quiet to reflect on the true meaning of the day. It wasn't the big cookout that it usually is for us. Still, we managed to grill hot dogs for the first time in years.

Fully Loaded Dog: Mustard, Onions, and Chili

About a month ago, before I lost my job, I finally invested in a propane grill. Before leaving Virginia in 2017, we sold our previous grill to a neighbor. Because finances have been a bit shaky ever since, we've done without a grill. It's been torture ignoring all the neighborhood grill smells over the past couple of years. Truth be told, we've both been salivating for a great grilled hot dog.

I try to get to the grocery store about every ten days or so to limit my exposure to other people and when I was last there, they had a big display of hot dogs from Hill Meat in Pendleton, Oregon. They were labeled Old Fashioned Frankfurters and while they looked pretty decent, we have been deceived by good looking franks before. I took a chance.

Ann and I both lust after a great dog with good flavor and a great snap when you bite in to it. To say that we have been disappointed more times than not is an understatement. On a scale of 1 to 10, these were a good 8. I wanted more seasoning in the dog, more coriander and more white pepper or even spicy paprika. I would buy them again, but they were not enough to halt my search for the ultimate hot dog.

Rippers: Dogs with Real Casings

Annie Ready to Attack Her Dog

We sat out back on the rear patio and ate our hot dogs, while the two real dogs alternated pacing through the garden and begging for some of our hot dogs. While we were out there, I took a few photos. The photos are untouched except for cropping, which is to say that these colors are real.

We planted Earliglow strawberries in the bins below the living wall on the side of our garage, mainly as a way to shade the bins to help preserve moisture, but also because, well, strawberries! We've been eagerly awaiting our crop this year, but as each berry has started to ripen enough to consider picking, it has disappeared. 

Skunks? No, I trenched along the fence and buried hardware cloth 12 inches down to keep those rapacious bastards out. Coon? Could be, but we don't have great coon habitat. Slugs and snails? No trails and no leaf damage. What could it be? And then, as we were sitting out eating our hot dogs, we saw the culprit, perhaps one of two culprits.

Furry Strawberry Thief in Flagrante Delicto

Yellow Grandiflora Rose

Edible Calendula

Campanula: So Purple it Hurts

Westerland: Unimaginable Fragrance

My Favorite: Darlow's Enigma

Memorial Weekend, Rooftop Portland

A couple weeks back when Chris and Perrin visited us in McMinnville, the girls hatched a plan to pick up some sushi and meet at the coast this weekend. With this COVID pandemic, all our calendars are out of kilter, and none of us realized that it was Memorial Weekend.

In years past, Memorial Weekend was a huge event in the wine industry and would not have been anything to slip my mind. We had originally thought that we might find a safe spot to sit and watch the waves roll in off the Pacific, but certainly not on Memorial Weekend with its attendant traffic and thickets of visitors.

Once the powers that be realized that our coast foray was scheduled for Memorial Weekend, Plan A quickly morphed to Plan B: get some sushi and hang out on the rooftop of Chris and Perrin's apartment building in Southeast. Perrin also invited her friends Bridget and Michael.

I wasn't sure what to expect. I guess I was thinking back to the days of hanging out on the flatter parts of a rooftop in college and drinking a few beers. I certainly did not expect a deluxe rooftop party pad with furniture, a fire pit, a sound system, and a couple of grills! Somebody—not naming names here—is living large!

This Rooftop is Sweet

Ann and I Arrive with Flowers and Drinks

Flowers from our Garden

Just before we left McMinnville for the hour-long ride to Portland, I cut some flowers from our garden: twinberry honeysuckle, lovage, calendula, chives, allium, rosemary, and lavender. Note to self: twinberry does not hold up as a cut flower.

           

Greeted with a Glass of Bubbly

Perrin greeted us with a glass of sparkling wine. It's probably not at all coincidental that we also brought sparkling wine and lager beer, two of the best pairings with sushi. I love the bubbles in wine or beer with sushi: they scour the palate.

For most white fish, I want the lemony notes blanc de blancs sparkling; for red and dark fish, I want the subtle red fruit notes of blanc de noirs. When I don't know what we're having, I go for blanc de noirs. As for beer, lightly hopped and crisp is my rule. Being a huge IPA fan, this is pretty much the only time I reach for lager.

I've never been a fan of pairing sake and sushi. It strikes me as rice on rice and it just isn't done in Japan for that reason. I prefer great sake on its own so that I can appreciate the subtle floral notes without interference from food.

           

What to Drink with Sushi: Bubbles

           

What to Drink with Sushi: Lager

Photobombed by an Osprey!

Solving Problems One Beer at a Time

Two Peas in a Pod!

           

She's Got Stars in Her Eyes!

           

When we got there, Perrin and Chris had the rooftop decorated and tunes going on the sound system. Perrin thinks of everything from chop sticks to soy sauce bowls.

           

Perrin Thinks of Everything

They had arranged to get take-out sushi from both Afuri and Nimblefish, a beautiful selection sashimi, nigiri, and maki.

After being holed up at our house in the valley, what a great treat it was to head into the city. More importantly, this was the first sushi we've had since coming to Oregon in 2017. We're scared to try the local sushi joints. Chris and Perrin, thanks for your friendship and your hospitality: our treat next time!

Chicken Paprikash Soup

Chicken Paprikash Soup

My adult friends will not be surprised to know that I was different from other kids. I read about food, cuisines, cultures, and languages when my childhood friends were into comic books and cartoons. While we all came together on the baseball field, that's where the common interests ended.

My food orientation started early. I have memories of making crème anglaise at five or six year old, up on a stool at my mother's stove. My food curiosity was always in high gear, even as a grade schooler. I could break down whole chickens before I hit my teens. If you believe in predestination and preordination, it should be no surprise that I ended up being a professional chef.

I recall being fascinated by Hungarian cuisine at an early age—no doubt from avidly reading my parent's subscription to Gourmet magazine—for no other reason than it seemed so foreign. In the 1970s, outside of a handful of major US cities, there were few ethnic restaurants and no place to eat something as alien as Hungarian food. My curiosity would have to be satisfied from books.

In 1971 when I was nine, famed New York restaurateur George Lang published his now landmark cookbook called George Lang's Cuisine of Hungary, with its nearly 150-page lovingly curated history of Hungarian cuisine as a preface to a treasure trove of recipes.

Although I knew of the book early on, it wasn't until I was 18 or 19 that I managed to get a copy for myself from a little bookseller on Elliewood Avenue in Charlottesville, VA when I was a student at the University of Virginia. I read that book—and hundreds of other similar seminal cookbooks—cover to cover.

For me, reading cookbooks is not about learning recipes but about reading critically and distilling to the essence, comprehending the history, metaphors, and techniques of the cuisine so that those can inform my own cooking. Mr. Lang's book was among the best I ever read for conveying the essence of a cuisine.

One of those essential ideas that I took from Lang's book is the holy trinity of Hungarian cooking: onions and paprika sweated in lard. While only a fraction of dishes in the Hungarian repertoire include paprika, onions, and lard, it is a signature forever tied to the cuisine.

Just as a cuisine has an essence, those techniques and ingredients that make it unique in the pantheon of cuisines, so does a single dish have an essence. To understand a dish's essence, it is necessary to compare many recipes from many cooks.

Comparing recipes quickly shows what is theme—the essence of the dish—and what is variation—the improvisation of the individual cook. The theme, the essence, is what you should be after when learning a new dish. Once you have the theme in hand, the basic melody, then you can riff.

Now in the age of world interconnection, it is trivial to compare recipes, clicking instantly between web pages. Before Internet, however, to understand a dish such as paprikash, I would compare seven or eight recipes from as many books piled all around my chair. My collection of Hungarian cookbooks comprised 15 to 20 volumes before I retired and donated my 1000-volume collection to the local culinary school for their library.

I wonder if my children can even imagine sitting in a chair with a pile of books and physical bookmarks, surfing old school. I wonder if they even know the tactile delight of reading a book. I miss my books like I miss my now scattered-to-the-wind children, even as my fading eyesight makes it difficult to read other than a backlit screen.

By my mid-twenties, after I had added the basic themes of paprikás, gulyás, pörkölt and many other Hungarian stews to my culinary arsenal, I devised the soup that is the subject of this rambling essay as a riff on, an homage to, a tribute to paprikash.

Imagine traditional chicken paprikash as plated for restaurant service. A pile of tiny boiled dumplings similar to spaetzle would be in the center of a large soup plate. A meltingly braised chicken leg would be perched on top, accompanied by a couple of ladles of glorious paprika-hued roux-thickened sauce ladled over, the whole drizzled with a thin sour cream.

For my variation on the classic theme, I crafted a one-pot soup with all the elements of paprikash except for the roux, a soup that could serve several people with minimal effort and minimal clean-up. After 35 years of riffing on this dish, my variation now has its own variations.

For the most basic form of the soup, I would typically poach a chicken in a soup pot, remove it, pick the meat, and reserve it. Then I would sweat onions in lard until just translucent, add paprika and garlic, and cook that for a minute. The onion-paprika mix would go into the boiling chicken stock along with noodles. As the noodles were nearing being cooked, in would go the reserved chicken meat to reheat. Off heat, after the noodles were done, I would stir in a bit of sour cream and serve it.

At some point after falling in love with Spanish cuisine, I veered away from tradition and substituted bacon and bacon grease for the lard and the oh-so-sexy pimentón de la vera (smoked paprika) from Spain for paprika from Szeged. Bacon, at home, is the easiest way to render lard, albeit smoky lard, now that the restaurant and its buckets of lard for confit are in the rear view mirror. The resulting absolutely delicious bacon-inflected dish was true in spirit but with a smoky departure that is foreign to Hungary.

And for my wife, who likes chicken breast far more than do I, in some versions, I remove the breasts from the chicken and make the stock with the remainder of the bird, then reserve the cooked chicken meat for some other purpose, such as chicken salad or chicken tacos. I then cube the raw chicken breast, sear it in the bacon grease, and add it to the soup just as the noodles go in, timed such that the chicken and noodles are just cooked at the same moment.

Notice that dumplings don't play a part in this soup. I love them and we made hundreds if not thousands of pounds of them at the restaurant. I don't love the extra work and the extra mess to clean up, now that I have a kitchen staff of one person to both cook and clean. So noodles it is.

I use the cut called Dumplings from No Yolks, because they are a decent quality soup noodle and available just about everywhere. As a how-coincidental aside, these noodles are manufactured in the New World Pasta plant in the city of Winchester, Virginia, where Ann and I lived before moving to Oregon. Execs and suppliers would often eat at my restaurant. I once had a fascinating conversation with one of the suppliers of pasta dies, pasta making being something we did at the restaurant on a decidedly non-industrial scale.

Chicken Paprikash Soup

1 fryer chicken, 3-4 pounds
Kosher salt, to taste
1/2 pound bacon, sliced or diced
1 large yellow onion, sliced
4 garlic cloves, minced
1/4 cup or more fresh Hungarian paprika
12-16 ounces wide noodles
2 cups sour cream

Cover the chicken in water in a large soup pot and slowly bring to a simmer.
Add a teaspoon of salt.
Poach the chicken until done, 90 minutes to two hours.
Remove the chicken from the stock and let it cool.
Pick the meat from the carcass and reserve the meat.
Render the bacon in a sauté pan.
When the bacon is nearly crisp, add the onion and sweat until limp and translucent.
Add the paprika and garlic and cook for another minute, stirring well.
Bring the chicken stock back to the boil and add the pasta.
When the pasta is nearly done, add the onion mix and the reserved chicken to the soup.
When the pasta is done, turn off the flame and let cool for a couple of minutes.
Stir in the sour cream and add salt as necessary.

Mushrooms are really good in this soup, if you feel like adding some.

Savory Pancakes

Ham and Chive Pancakes

One thing seems certain about this period of quarantine: it is getting people back in the kitchen. From what I see posted on social media, people are cooking like never before in recent history—and enjoying it. I am no exception.

For me, I needed a break from cooking for a few years before I was ready to get back in the kitchen. I'm not sure that anyone outside the restaurant business can really appreciate how much a career in the kitchen can sap the joy out of cooking. But now I've got enough distance (and truth be told, the availability of time, now that I am no longer working) to get back in the kitchen.

I find myself stocking the refrigerator with basics now, just to have them on hand when I need them. This is one of the things about the restaurant that most people won't know. We had a dry goods pantry with over 750 items, including 15-20 different kinds of rice; an entire rack in the walk-in devoted to sauces, syrups, and garnishes, such as hickory syrup, chipotle honey, and salsa verde; and another rack devoted to pickles of all kinds from fiddlehead ferns to cauliflower kimchee. With a menu that changed with whim each night, I needed that kind of aresenal and now, at long last, I miss it at home. In just the last week, I have stocked the fridge with salsa verde, salsa roja, harissa, and salsa fresca. I can tell the cooking urge is coming back.

Another benefit, at least for Ann, of this forced quarantine is that I am cooking dishes for her that I never have before. In all our years, I had never made her French toast until just recently, even though we made it often in the restaurant as something of a luxury crouton at the bottom of a plate to serve as the foundation (and a silky sop) for the plate. And pancakes: I had never made her something so simple as pancakes until a few days ago, despite having cooked thousands in my life, including hundreds of wasabi-edamame blini that we used to serve with our prosciutto of salmon.

In long-winded fashion as I am prone, this brings us to the savory pancakes that I made for dinner the other night at Ann's request. These had about a half a cup of minced chives from the garden and about half a cup of finely diced ham included in the batter. These crisp four-inch cakes made a delicious if unorthodox dinner.

Basic Pancake Recipe

There is never any excuse to use a mix for pancakes, none at all, given this simple recipe which scales in pretty directly. This will yield about 18 4-inch pancakes.

1-1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
3 tablespoons vegetable oil or melted butter
2 large to extra-large eggs
about 1-1/2 cups of milk

Mix the dry ingredients and then add the wet ingredients. Stir until just incorporated. The batter does not have to be entirely smooth: to do so is asking to overwork the batter and develop the gluten, resulting in a not-so-good pancake.

I never add all the milk at once. In fact, I don't even measure the milk. I know that a good pancake batter is thin enough to run to the full width of the pancake within a few seconds of hitting the pan. If you're not sure about the desired consistency of the batter, try a test pancake. If it has trouble spreading out, you need more liquid. I've seen line cooks trying to wrangle way-too-thick batter way too many times.

The only reason that I make 4-inch pancakes at home is because I can get three of them in my large skillet at once. Make whatever size you want.

One of the tricks of making good pancakes is moderating the heat of the pan so that the pancake browns on both sides while just getting done in the middle. Most of my line cooks would try to use a flame that was too high, until they got the hang of it. A moderate flame is what you want.

Pancakes are neat in that they come with a built in timer. As they cook, the baking powder creates carbon dioxide bubbles that leaven the cakes. The bubbles also rise to the top of the batter. When you have a good ring of bubbles halfway from the edge to the center of the cake and a brown, crispy bottom, you have the flame just right.

Make sure you have a thin film of oil in the pan for each batch. Oil is necessary to create the best crispy surface texture. Low fat pancakes are low joy pancakes.

Play around. Cooking is about playing around, learning tricks, and learning to trust yourself. Within reason, add ingredients to your pancakes such as ham and chives. Once you get pancakes down, experiment with the batter. You don't have to use just milk. You don't just have to use AP flour. Try taking a cup of old fashioned oats and soaking them in a cup of milk for 20 minutes and then building your batter with the remaining flour and milk. Try using cooked rice. Try adding cornmeal. Pretty soon, you'll be making wasabi-edamame blini too.

Guilty Pleasure: Fried Rice

I have very few guilty pleasures in my life. If I were making a list, though, fried rice would be right up at the top.

Sunday, Ann and I were discussing shrimp around noon as an idea of what to have for dinner without ever concluding anything before we took a nap. After awaking, I started prepping vegetables from the refrigerator.

Seeing me working, Ann asked what I was making for dinner. When I said shrimp fried rice, she thought that she had told me earlier in the day that she wanted shrimp fried rice. But she only thought it, never saying it out loud. I guess we were on the same wavelength!

Broccoli Stem, Carrot, Red Onion, and Chive Fried Rice

There are precious few shrimp in the dish above. Duh! I forgot to prep the shrimp. Oh well, we didn't need them anyway.

Fried rice is one of the great clean out the refrigerator dishes. Leftover bits and pieces of lots of things can find a home in fried rice. Use whatever you have at hand, but avoid wet ingredients that will turn your rice into mush. I found a half a red onion, a carrot, and the stems from about five heads of broccoli.

Broccoli stems are a great treasure in the kitchen and I have never understood why people pay top dollar for them only to pitch them in the trash. Use a paring knife to pull the skin off all the way around the stems and dice the sweet, crunchy interiors as you would any other vegetable. They are wonderful raw and lightly cooked, having a sweet flavor something like kohlrabi.

Peeling broccoli stems is a good down-time activity. I sat out on the back patio with a bowl of stems and a paring knife and peeled the stems while chatting with Ann. this makes me recall that I used to go to a Chinese restaurant where mid-afternoon, the entire crew would sit around tables with bus tubs of broccoli stems to peel, chatting away, and waiting for the dinner rush.

Prepped Vegetables Ready to Cook

As I was at the stove making the fried rice, I couldn't help but chuckle as I remembered overhearing a conversation in the restaurant between a line cook and his mom:

"Seriously, Mom! A recipe? For fried rice? The recipe is in the name: fry some rice!"

Cooking the Vegetables with Ginger and Garlic

Well, there's slightly more to it than that, but not much. Fried rice, when really well made is a wonderful thing: too bad so many restaurants make such terrible fried rice.

Fried Rice Tips

Rice. Use cold, leftover medium to long grain rice for fried rice. Cold rice doesn't clump as much as hot rice and is easier to break into grains if necessary. If you don't have leftover rice, don't sweat it. We don't ever have leftover rice at our house because of portion control. We would pig out on rice if we had it around, so we only make what we need. For this fried rice, I cooked it an hour before needing it, spread it out on a sheet tray to cool, and popped it into the fridge. Done.

To Egg or Not to Egg. A lot of fried rice contains egg. I do and I don't. Last night, because I forgot the shrimp, I added two eggs for a bit more protein. There are several ways to add eggs to fried rice and I do them all from time to time:

• You can cook the egg beforehand into a really thin crepe-like omelet, dice the omelet, and add it as a garnish to the rice. 

• While the rice is frying, you can crack one or more eggs into the rice, then stir fry them along with the rice. This leaves streaks of white and streaks of gold.

• While the rice is frying, you can add beaten eggs to the rice. This gives a more uniform dispersion of gold. Last night, I beat the eggs, added a 1/2 cup of fresh chives from the garden, and a slug of soy sauce. Then I added this mix to the rice at the very end.

Seasoning the Oil. Traditionally, you would season the oil in the wok by frying garlic and ginger slices until golden, then removing and discarding it, before cooking the rest of the dish. I like a stronger flavor of ginger and garlic, so I add both, finely minced, when I am cooking the vegetables. Because I don't have a wok and I don't have particularly high heat, I'm not worried about the ginger and garlic burning.

There is also another way, a non-standard one that I learned from a Thai chef in making khao pad, Thai-style fried rice, which at the time was the best fried rice I had ever eaten. He created a special curry paste of shallots, cilantro stems and roots, green chiles, galanga, and white pepper. Then he would fry a spoonful of this fiery paste in his wok before starting the dish: absolutely fragrantly mind-blowing. I do this from time to time by dropping all the ingredients into the Vita-Mix with enough oil to emulsify. Granted, I get better results by banging this out in my big green granite mortar from Thailand, but I am not cooking in a Thai restaurant, or any restaurant.

No Wok, No Fear. Fried rice is best when you get a great sear on the rice, something that is hard to do without a wok. I don't have a wok and I don't have ventilation worth a darn either, so I have to do things a bit differently at home. I build my fried rice in stages. First I cook the longest cooking items: the vegetables and proteins, in a couple of batches, adding them to a big bowl when done. Then I cook the rice, perhaps in batches, adding it to the bowl. When I'm done, I mix it all together and serve. The point is to not overload the pan so that it stays hot.

Seasoning. At the end of cooking, it is typical to add a splash of soy or fish sauce to season the rice. I like only a little in my rice, preferring to let guests season their own bowls at the table. I use soy sauce when I'm in a Chinese or Korean mood, fish sauce when I'm in a Southeast Asian mood. In this case, I mixed the soy sauce directly into the egg mixture.

Ideas. Use sesame oil or a mix of a neutral oil with sesame oil for a twist. Spicy: curry paste, white pepper, green chiles, kimchee, gochujang. Herbs for last minute addition: chives, garlic chives, Chinese chives, green onions, Thai basil, cilantro, kaffir lime leaves. Proteins: egg, shrimp, tofu, pressed spiced tofu, seitan, ham, lop cheung (Chinese sausage), roast pork, roast duck, roast chicken. Vegetables: broccoli stems, gai lan (Chinese broccoli), turnip, radish, kohlrabi, rutabaga, baby corn, corn kernels, carrots, peas, sugar snaps, snow peas. Other: shiitake mushrooms, tree ear mushrooms, pickled mustard stems, peanuts, cashews, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds. Use your imagination but keep it simple so as not to overload the dish. Pick a protein, something green, and one or two items for contrast.

Rainy Day Comfort

Marinara-Braised Pork Shank on Polenta

We had a wonderful stretch of unseasonably hot to gorgeous weather last weekend, followed by several days of rain this week as a low pressure system slowly worked its way off the Pacific. There seems to be a 24-hour respite coming tomorrow, but another large low is headed straight off the Gulf of Alaska right at us in the Willamette Valley.

Just what we need right now after the tease of sun obliterated by days of cool, gloomy weather: a long stretch of more cool gloomy weather. On top of a pandemic and quarantine and the same four walls. On top of some family issues. On top of losing my job. I'm feeling down.

What to do? Comfort food!

Not in the mood to do a lot of cooking, into the cocotte went a can of tomato purée and a can of diced tomatoes, a cup of green olives, a bunch of dried basil, half a head of minced garlic, a drizzle of olive oil, and a big old pork shank straight out of the freezer. I had a bunch of pork shanks cut for me at the local slaughterhouse back around the holidays and I've been holding them in the freezer.

Frozen Pork Shank Ready for Oven

I checked the shank after 4 hours and it wasn't quite ready. At five hours, it was falling off the bone tender, just where I wanted it. I let it cool and picked the meat off the bone, reserving the meat for dinner.

Pork Shank Out of Oven

After picking the pork, I seasoned the sauce. It only wanted a touch of salt. That couldn't have been any simpler: just dumping a bunch of stuff into a pan and into the oven!

I made a batch of polenta (see below) and served the pulled pork on top of the polenta with a big ladle of marinara on top of that. Then I sprinkled on some pickled capers and grated Pecorino Romano over all. The pickled capers are to add just a snap of acid to the long-cooked sauce.

One of the things that I hope all my line cooks learned from me is that long-cooked sauces are generally really flat and need just a touch of acid to bring them back to life. I used to get a great kick watching my cooks' eyes after adding a touch of vinegar to a long-cooked sauce: that profound light bulb moment was priceless.

Cooking Polenta

This is heresy. Be forewarned.

I've been thinking for a long time that polenta is a whole lot easier to cook than most people suggest. I have no desire to stand over the stove, stirring a pot of bubbling, geyser-like cornmeal mush all afternoon. There has to be a better way, so I tried a highly successful experiment.

Start by adding the ground corn to the pan in which you are going to cook it, off the heat. Add a little salt.

Add about half the amount of cold water as the amount ground corn. Stir to make a rough paste. Add water by dribbles until you have a very smooth paste with no lumps.

Now add more water until the water is about a quarter-inch/centimeter above the corn.

Now turn the heat on and stir until you need to add more water. Keep stirring and adding water until the polenta is thick and bubbling, about 8 minutes in my case.

Turn off the heat. Stir in another cup of water. Cover the polenta. Walk away for 20-30 minutes.

Come back, and see if the water is all absorbed. If it is, add another cup of water, cover, and leave it for 20-30 minutes. Stir in another cup of water and leave it be until you are ready to serve.

At service, bring the polenta back to temperature and thin, thicken, and/or season to your liking.

There you go: polenta with about 10-12 minutes of active work and no molten fountains splattering your stove.

Terrine 101

This Terrine Mold Has Cooked a Lot of Terrines

My good friend Mike inspired this post. I see from his social media posts that he’s really cooking some good stuff and now he wants to learn terrines. I’ve made many hundreds in my life from the simplest to the most intricate, and here’s a little of what I have learned.

Terrines are simple!

If you can make a meatloaf, you can make a terrine. Why? Because at the basic level, they’re very similar! You’re not scared to make meatloaf, so you shouldn’t be scared to make a humble terrine.

Terrine Mold

Terrines are baked in loaf pans and after chilling are sliced and served cold to room temperature. You might recognize the Latin root terra (earth) in terrine. The original terrine molds were earthenware and like a lot of dishes, terrines ultimately ended up named for the pan in which they were cooked.

Although you can use just about anything for a mold, most of us in the trade use the pretty much industry standard enameled cast iron Le Creuset mold that holds about 3 lbs of forcemeat. If you use a different size mold, you’ll have to experiment a bit with the quantities of forcemeat and seasonings.

Before you run out and buy a $175 Le Creuset terrine, use a loaf pan or something else that you have on hand until you’re sure you want to make the investment. In a super pinch, I have used a disposable aluminum pan from the grocery store. Talk about ghetto!

A Primer on Ingredients

There are four ingredients-related things to think about:

Forcemeat

Fat

Interior Garnish

Flavorings

Forcemeat. This is the meat paste that forms the body of the terrine. While I’m a big fan of duck terrine with green peppercorns and orange zest, it’s best to start with store bought ground pork. It’s cheap, forgiving, and damn near impossible to mess up.

Once you have a few terrines under your belt, you can start custom grinding meats, producing layered terrines, and other fancy things such as putting bacon-wrapped rabbit loins down the center of the terrine. Then you can branch out to seafood, mousseline, and vegetable terrines.

Fat. Fat makes the terrine. Commercial ground pork has enough fat that you don’t need to worry. Otherwise, think about a 70:30 ratio of meat to fat or even 2:1. I also will often add a bit more fat in the interior garnish plus a bit of heavy cream in the flavoring mix. Professional charcutiers weigh the meat and the fat and grind them together in their own unique formulas, but you don’t need to be that technical.

Interior Garnish. This is the visual aspect that comes into play when you slice the terrine. For example, cubes of ham stay pink and cubes of fatback (or even raw chicken breast) stay white and contrast with the surrounding forcemeat.

Interior garnishes can also offer textural contrast in addition to visual contrast. Consider green peppercorns or pistachios which add crunch as well as a contrasting green color. Or dried fruit or other nuts. Dried morel or porcini mushrooms. Olives. Sun-dried tomatoes. Stay simple at first; play later.

Flavorings. Because terrines are generally intended to be served cold and cold numbs our sense of taste, they want to be highly seasoned. [Ooh, but grill extra thick slabs of terrine on a smoky fire and serve them warm for a special treat!] Flavorings break down into three categories: liquid seasonings, herbs and spices, and cooked alliums.

Liquid Seasonings. It is common to use small amounts of highly concentrated stock to amplify the meat flavors. It’s also extremely common to add some kind of alcohol, such as a splash of Port or red wine. Imagine a shot each of brandy and Grand Marnier in that duck terrine I’ve already mentioned. I also use some heavy cream in which to disperse my dry ingredients.

I will also include an egg in the liquid flavorings to help the terrine bind (but in the case of most red meat with high protein content, an egg isn’t necessary). Eggs or other binders are necessary in low protein (for example, vegetable) terrines.

Liver often enters the equation at the liquid stage. If I’m adding liver, I usually blend it with some of the liquid to smooth it out. At other times, I chop the liver for a texture effect and add it as an interior garnish. But most of the time, I don’t add liver: in the restaurant business, I found Americans to be skittish of liver in terrines. For family, however, I am well known for my chicken liver terrine that contains no other meat. My peoples can eat some chicken livers.

Herbs and Spices. All terrines will need some salt, though if you’re using a highly salted interior garnish such as smoked bacon or ham, you’ll want to tread lightly. For pork terrines, I like to include a little sweet spice such as allspice, cinnamon, and/or cardamom. Ground bay and ground thyme are wonderful as well. Have some dried mushroom crumbs laying around? Put them in a spice mill and add the mushroom powder to your terrine. Fresh herbs rarely feature in terrines (but then, there’s jambon persillé, a classic aspic-bound terrine featuring lots of fresh parsley).

Cooked Alliums. Most non-seafood terrines will include some onion, garlic, shallots, leek or some combination. I always sweat alliums in butter or olive oil such that they give off their water while sweating and not into the forcemeat of the terrine, which could weaken the terrine a little and cause the slices to break.

Basic Procedure

Mix the liquid seasonings with the dried seasonings, then add the interior garnish. You’re trying to get even distribution in the liquid of all the seasonings before adding the meat.

Add the ground meat and mix well. I use my hands because I want to feel the texture of the forcemeat. You can use a paddle mixer if you like.

Taste the forcemeat and adjust seasonings. You can fry a little forcemeat and taste it, but I prefer to poach it. Frying the forcemeat caramelizes the surface and doesn’t give as true an idea of the flavor of the final product as poaching. But, who am I kidding? I’ve made so many terrines in my life, that for home use, I don’t taste them. But if you’re starting out, taste the forcemeat. And remember, you’ll be tasting it warm. Your guests will be tasting it cold and cold requires a bit more seasoning.

I coat my molds with pan spray but it probably isn’t necessary. Make sure you press the forcemeat into the mold well to eliminate any air pockets. This is super-critical if you are adding large-sized interior garnish.

Cook the terrine low and slow (300-325F) until a thermometer in the center registers 145F. Final temperature should be at least 155F. Terrines will continue to climb another 10 degrees out of the oven.

Cooking at high heat forces the proteins to bind hard, to shrink, and forces a lot of the fat out of the matrix. Fat is what keeps the terrine from being rubbery, not to mention what makes it taste great. Along these lines, if you’re using a thin metal mold, you may want to use a water bath to moderate the temperature of the terrine in the oven. I only use a water bath with terrine de foie gras, not wanting to screw up $250 of raw product.

Refrigerate the terrine overnight to solidify the fat and give it maximum structure. To unmold, run a knife blade around the sides of the mold and pop the terrine out.

A Sort of Recipe

Remember the line from the original Pirates of the Caribbean: “…the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.”? So go all my recipes, this one included. Learn the procedure, understand the ratios, and let your palate guide you. Mistakes are still edible and not costly, and there’s always next time.

The following “recipe” is for three pounds of ground pork forcemeat, about as simple a terrine as possible.

½ medium yellow onion or two shallots, finely diced

2 cloves garlic, finely diced

Canola or olive oil or butter

½ cup heavy cream

¼ cup Port, red wine, or brandy

1 extra large egg

1-1/2 teaspoons Kosher salt (1/2 teaspoon per pound of mix)

½ teaspoon ground black pepper (or ¼ teaspoon ground white pepper)

1 teaspoon ground allspice

1 teaspoon dried basil

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 pinch cayenne

½ cup shelled pistachios

¼ pound diced ham

¼ pound diced bacon, fatback, or guanciale

2-1/2 pounds ground pork

Procedure

Sweat the onion and garlic in fat until translucent. Add to large mixing bowl.

Add the liquid ingredients including the egg and mix well.

Add the remaining spices and mix well.

Add the pistachios, ham, and fatback. Mix well.

Add the pork and mix until all ingredients are thoroughly distributed.

Cook a little of the forcemeat and adjust seasoning to your palate.

Place in mold in a slow oven and cook until the thermometer reads 145F.

Remove from the oven and cool.

Refrigerate overnight.

Unmold and slice.

OK, Mike. A little long-winded and I hope that doesn't put you off. Your turn. I expect photos!

Update: Quarantine

Our California Poppies, May 2020

Ever since we moved to Oregon in 2017, work at the winery consumed a lot of the time I had spent blogging. Even though I missed keeping up on the blog, other things occupied my spare time: being with Ann, working on the house, and landscaping a bare lot.

You can see the waning blogging: 100 posts in 2016, 67 posts in 2017, 9 posts in 2018, 5 in 2019, and none in 2020.

And although I've had a good bit more spare time thanks to social distancing and quarantining in this new era of the COVID-19 virus, the motivation hasn't been there. I can't be the only person whose motivation has been sapped by this pandemic.

But now that my job is gone and I'm at home full time, I hope to get back to writing a little.