Smelt!

Smelts are bountiful in the Great Lakes and the spring fishing season is well underway if not close to the end. Unlike their sea counterparts, river smelts are often full of delicious eggs and, for that matter, eating them whole still with guts and bones is a rare delicacy. I had to travel to Japan to discover how great these little fishes (shishamo) are, especially when eaten with beer. We had them grilled with a bit salt and presented simply on small plates; no dressing, no sauces... just delicious small fishes still full of their own roe.



As soon as we were back in Canada, we had to recreate this dish. Since fresh river smelts are available in season and frozen ones for a slightly longer period, it was an easy task. In fact, all you need is a handful of smelts, a good pinch of salt, a little bit of oil and a grill. Once on the grill, they cook in no time. As such, for a bit of color use a strong heat and a little oil to develop some color on the skin. Serve them hot, ideally outside, with a cold light beer... then fall of your chair upon realizing how good this is.

The part I did not show

On my last post, I kept quiet on the fact that only one of the plates looked they way it was intended to look like. I completely failed to unmold one of my flan. I learned a valuable lesson: placing a plate on top of the mold and shaking the whole thing will only create disasters when dealing with delicate food items. To unmold properly, you have to use a sharp object to free the flan from the sides and gently let some air get to the bottom of the mold otherwise the suction will simply be too strong and the flan will break in pieces. A hard learned lesson... particularly considering the fact that I was stressed by the outcome of my food that night!

It still tasted very good and at least my partner had a nice dish in front of her.

Lobster, morels and green vegetables flan with morel beurre blanc

The lobster fishing season is in full swing in the eastern part of Quebec (and probably elsewhere on the East Coast) and around here many grocery stores and fish mongers offer this delicious crustacean at a very reasonable price these days. Once considered a cheap source of proteins in many fishing villages, lobster is now widely considered a delicacy and is exported worldwide making it a luxury item for the table even in fishing communities.

As a conscientious costumer, I therefore do not cook or eat lobster very often which makes me a bit nervous when facing the task of preparing a meal out of these dangerous looking creatures. Not that I am one of those compassionate people who are afraid to plunge live lobsters in boiling water... I might actually be a bit cold-blooded and I consider such task to be the easiest part even considering the occasional splash of burning water.

What makes me particularly nervous is the fear of messing up and ending up with a mediocre meal when all are expecting a feast. It is true that simply boiling lobsters and serving them with a variety of melted butters never fails and can be a lot of fun. In fact, this is exactly what Fufu and I did yesterday. Sometimes however there is some excitement in indulging in, for a lack of better words, more “refined” pleasures and these times call for more careful efforts.

I prepared this dish a few months ago for our last Valentine's day without kids still looking for a way to impress Fufu as if we were still on a first date. Although both of us are not very fond of chi-chi presentations, I think the dish was very fitting: delicious and just kitsch enough for a Valentine's day diner.

Essentially, the dish is made of only two recipes: a beurre blanc and a savoury flan. Lobster tails were simply boiled and the broccoli florets steamed, no recipe there. The tomato concassé was a simple last minute garnish. The flan, if I remember it well, was made with broccoli, peas, mint and basil (the same herbs sprinkled around the dish). There are many vegetable flan recipes and the great thing with most of them is that they are all easily adaptable to your taste or to what is available to you at the moment. The key to this one was the addition of herbs to the vegetable puree.

Fufu and I are passionate mushroom hunters and every spring we hunt for morels in the woods around where we live. They should be available in some farmer's markets and specialty stores at this time of the year in most areas. Look for them they are magic and delicious. I am always a bit wary of marrying seafood and mushrooms but morels usually works well with a fish and lobsters. They were particularly good in this dish which relieved me of all the stress of cooking my expensive lobsters... perhaps the flan had something to do with it too.

The beurre blanc included the juices from the morels rehydration which imparted a great aroma to the whole dish. Beurres blancs are simple butter sauces made by using the butter’s capacity to emulsify fats and liquids at a certain temperature (too cold and your butter will remain solid, too hot and it will split). You will find the recipe of my morel beurre blanc bellow.

Morel beurre blanc

Ingredients:

• 1-2 finely diced shallots
• 3-6 dried morels
• ½ cup of white wine
• 1 stick of butter (cold)
• 1 quarter of lemon
• Salt and pepper to taste

1. Cover the morels with barely enough hot water to cover them for about 20 minutes. This should rehydrate them gently. Reserve the mushrooms and the liquid separately.
2. In a pan, sweat the shallot with a little bit of butter until they become translucent and add the morels for few minutes, reserve them for garnishing.
3. Add the white wine to deglaze the pan and reduce by half.
4. Add the morel juices and reduce again by half.
5. Lower the heat to a minimum and whisk cubes of butter one after the other until the sauce becomes nice and thick.
6. Depending on your wine’s acidity, squeeze a little bit of lemon juice to brighten the flavour. Add salt and pepper to taste.
7. Serve immediately because butter sauces are quite fragile.

You can adapt this recipe to make it more stable by adding a little bit of heavy cream before whisking in the butter. In a pinch, you can also substitute white wine vinegar instead of wine but make sure to reduce it to an almost dry stage before adding the butter to avoid unpleasant levels of acidity.

Enjoy the morel and lobster season!

Homemade sauerkraut

I realize that with spring in full swing it is not necessarily the best time of the year to discuss sauerkraut. The fact is that I have been wanting to write about my sauerkraut experiment for months now but my last months have been quite busy for a few reasons chief among that was that I finally found a job and recently became proud father of a beautiful 2 weeks old boy. My parental leave now allows me a little bit more time to spare at the keyboard.


Making sauerkraut is quite straightforward according to what I read on various websites and books: for each 5 pounds of sliced raw cabbage, you need 3 tablespoons of kosher or pickling salt. I looked at dozen of recipes, the ratio almost always remains the same: 5 pounds of cabbage, 3 tablespoons of salt. Since the same ratio is found in almost all recipes, we could believe that one needs to use very strict measurements but since cabbage varies in water content and salt in weight to volume, there is inevitably some leeway in this. In fact, I did see a few outliers such as the ½ cup of kosher salt for 2 ½ pound of cabbage in Lucy Norris’ Pickled or a few potentially dangerous sodium free recipes but these were not the norm at all.



All recipes advise to place the salted cabbage in a non-reactive crock and place a weighted plate on top to press the cabbage down. Eventually, a brine should form from the juice extracted from the cabbage by the salt. If it does not, one can always add salted water to insure that the cabbage is submerged. You then place the whole thing roughly at room temperature or in a cool place (18°C to 24°C according to Harold McGee) for a few weeks to let the fermentation do its magic. This, at least, is the theory!

My first sauerkraut experiment was a bit of disaster. I followed the instruction on the Kitchen Gardeners International website where instruction from Sandor Ellix Katz’ Wild Fermentation had been adapted. After a few weeks of fermentation and skimming of the scum floating at the top of my brine, I had to throw the content of my plastic bucket in the garbage. A very unpleasant smell developed probably from unwelcome yeasts or other micro-organisms… not the ones I was expecting for sure. For some reasons, I kept my sauerkraut nearly two months thinking that the smell would disappear and be replaced by a more fragrant sour aroma. I even tried a few bites of the foul smelling cabbage and while it did turn sour, the stench was just too bad to make a meal out of it. In retrospect, I believe that I should have thrown the whole thing away earlier and I should never have tried to eat it.

Since hundreds and more likely thousands of people use this method successfully, I assume that I have simply been unlucky; that some bad micro-organisms got in before the proper lactic fermentation developed to protect the cabbage. The remedy to this problem is quite simple: protect the brine from ambient air. In my ill equipped kitchen, I simply used a layer of loose plastic wrap to cover my bucket. This was not enough. Some people succeed with no cover at all but I did not and the whole experiment put me off trying this method again.

The next method I tried made good use of many tricks gathered on many website and on an E Gullet forum discussion (link). This time, my goal was to avoid any airborne contamination by creating an almost air-tight cover. A few plastic bags filled with water (ideally with brine in case of leaks) were placed on top of a plate, itself covering a few large outer leaves from the cabbage. The sliced cabbage was also slightly pounded down to help the extraction of the juices.

The result, this time, was great. The sauerkraut was tangy and still crunchy and developed a very nice aroma.

We ate it very simply with boiled potatoes and sausages. I will certainly make more sauerkraut in the fall so if you have any recipe using sauerkraut, please let me know!

The Method

Here's a review of the whole sauerkraut fermentation process, it includes tricks and details from a variety of sources, most mentioned in the above section of this post:

Ingredients:

• 5 pounds of cabbage
• 3 Tablespoons of salt

Tools:

• A sharp knife or a mandolin
• A non-reactive crock or a food grade plastic bucket
• One plate slightly smaller than the bucket
• 3-4 freezer bags
• Water or brine to fill the bags

1. Clean all your tools very well and sterilize them if possible.


2. Core your cabbage and reserve a few of the outer leaves.


3. Finely shred the remaining cabbage using a sharp knife or a mandolin.


4. Mix the shredded cabbage and the salt in a large crock or food grade plastic bucket by adding one layer of cabbage at a time followed by a sprinkle of salt. At this point, you can pound the cabbage using your hands or a heavy object in order to help the release of juices.
   
   
   


5. Place the reserved cabbage leaves on top or the shredded cabbage.
   
   
   
   
6. Cover with a plate. Apply as much presure as you can to make sure everything is well packed.
   
   
   


7. Fill your plastic bags with brine or water and place them on top of the plate. Do not overfill them so that they are still soft enough to close all the gaps.
   
   
   


8. The next day, make sure the juices extracted from the cabbage cover the cabbage by at least 3 cm or an inch. If more liquid is needed, you can add a brine made by mixing a cup of water with a teaspoon of salt.


9. Leave at room temperature (bellow 24°C or 75°F) for at least 3 weeks then test it every week until it reaches your desired degree of acidity. If you like a delicate flavor, a three or four weeks is more than enough; if you prefer your sauerkraut on the stronger side, leave it to ferment for up to two months.


10. In general, placing your sauerkraut in the fridge will stop the fermentation and will keep well if enough acidity was developed beforehand. Some people also can their sauerkraut but the process will necessarily affect the texture.