Landjaeger is done!

 After fermenting for 2 days, then smoking, then hanging for 2 weeks, the landjaeger is done.  Here's a photo of the fermented sausage hanging in the smoker.  I used apple wood, figuring it's something reasonably local: Landjaeger is a southern German, Swiss, Austrian sausage, and there's plenty of apple trees in the area.  After smoking, I hung it at about 60 degrees/50% RH .

The recipes all say to monitor the mass to know when it is dry enough; so it started weighing about 35 ounces, then a few days later was down to 26, and still pretty squishy.  By a week, it was down to 21 ounces, and yesterday, it was at 17 ounces, about half the original weight. As it dried, it got darker, which is nice, because I was afraid that I hadn't put enough smoke into it, but it turns out that it's more about oxidation (I assume) than smoke that does the color. 

And here it is in cross section (because, hey, you have to cut some off and eat it!).  Tastes like landjaeger I've had before, so it's a winner. If you've not had landjaeger, it's basically kind of like jerky, serving the same general purpose of a dried, preserved meat for traveling.   I'm thinking about getting ready to do a slow fermented sausage next.. salami.

While we're looking at food from southern Germany, I also made some sauerkraut from a leftover half a head of red cabbage.  It's crunchy and sweet, just like it's supposed to be.

Landjaeger & Pate

The landjaeger has been stuffed and fermented for about 2 days now. A mixture of beef and pork with spices, stuffed into hog casings. (we had fun with the extra casings.. now I know where balloon animals came from).  I don't have official wooden landjaeger molds, so I squished them between a couple sheet pans for 48 hours.  The bacteria inoculation wants to ferment at 80F or so, which is convenient since it's been 80 in the garage for the past few days. 

You're supposed to dry the sausages for a bit, so we did that today, giving me a chance to take a picture.  Tomorrow evening, after another 24 hours of fermentation, (and I might add, they smell like they are fermenting.. a distinct acidic odor), I hit them with low temperature smoke for 4-6 hours, and then they go to cure for a couple weeks at 50-60 F (e.g. the temperature of the wine).

I got ambitious yesterday.. watching the DVD that comes with Jacque Pepin's new book I saw how you can bone out a chicken while keeping the skin intact to make a ballotine. It actually worked (although I'm not nearly as proficient and speedy as Jacque).

And, I made a pate (my first)... a pork tenderloin with a pork forcemeat around it, with a garnish of andouille. Tastes pretty good.

Viognier dessert wine

While making the Landjaeger, I opened a couple of bottles of Viongier dessert wine for a horizontal tasting. Both from Santa Ynez, both from 2010, from Bridlewood and Dascomb. What a difference.., The Dascomb was sweeter and much more complex, caramel, apple, etc.   The Bridlewood... apple juice.  Really.. that's the first impression for the Bridlewood.. tastes like apple juice.  The Dascomb has the apple-y flavor, but has more to it.

Interesting.

And the sausage is curing in the garage.  It needs to ferment for 48 hours at 80 F, and conveniently, it's been hot outside, so the garage is in the 75-85 range.   After that, 10-14 days of drying at 50-60 sort of temperature.  I forgot the sugar.. the recipe calls for dextrose, which I didn't have, and I was going to substitute sucrose or honey, but I forgot.  Oops.  Oh well.  Those hardy Swiss didn't have buckets of glucose sitting around 100 years ago.  The meat probably has enough sugar in it to feed the bacteria.

(dessert wine tasting was AFTER the sausage making, so consumption of wine had nothing to do with the omission of sugar)

Canadian Bacon

I made some Canadian Bacon using the recipe from Ruhlman's Charcuterie.  It's pretty simple, you cure in a brine (with pink salt as the curing agent) for a couple days, let it dry for a day, then smoke it to an internal temp of 150F.  The brine has a few spices in it, but basically, this is a smoked cured ham (made from pork loin).

It came out pretty much as expected.  There's a small non-pink spot in the middle: perhaps the brine didn't diffuse quite far enough in in the two days?  With the commercial product, they pump the brine into the meat under pressure to get better perfusion.

I want to try Kassler Ripchen which is a similar product, but in theory is smoked first, then brined.  Or maybe it's cured, smoked, brined.  It's hard to get a straight story online: there's tons of recipes, the vast majority of which are basically identical to the Canadian Bacon.  The original Kassler process is about 100 years old, and may have done things that aren't good practice today.

Also on the list to try is Landjaeger: a dried, cured, smoked sausage made from pork and beef. Think of it as southern German jerky.  It's a dry cured sausage, but not the months hanging like salami, just a couple weeks; but it is fermented (unlike the Pancetta).  I also have a tub of sauerkraut fermenting in the wine locker.

More Charcuterie (Saucisson, a'la Pepin)

More sausage...

I got a Jacque Pepin cookbook for Father's day, and there was a series of recipes in there for a country saucisson.  A pork sausage with garlic, red wine, and seasoning.  It looked good, so I got out the grinder, a kilo packet of frozen pork shoulder, some fatback, and went for it.  One of the recipes called for chanterelles or similar.  I didn't have those, but I did have dried porcini, which I like the flavor of, so I used those.   It's a mild cure.. add curing salt, cure in the refrigerator for 2-7 days.

I wrapped the sausage in plastic wrap and foil, per the recipe, and let it cure.  It's been a week now, so time to test it.  I saw the recipe for saucisson in brioche (sort of a fancy pigs in blankets when you get right down to it) and decided to make it for breakfast, although it's really more of a dinner or lunch dish, but I was hungry this morning.  I didn't want to make bread dough for the brioche, but I did have puff pastry in the freezer, so I figured I could wrap the 2"x10" log o'sausage in the puff pastry and bake it.

OK.. it tastes pretty good.  Distinct red wine taste (I used a cheap Apothos red which isn't great to drink), some heat (I think I put some pepper in), nice earthy porcini taste.  Very, very different than the usual breakfast sausage or my standard spicy Italian sausage.  The puff pastry, though, pulled away.  Probably need bigger vents to let the steam escape during baking. Or maybe do smaller chunks of meat, or stretch the pastry, or, gosh, actually make brioche dough?

Froze the rest.  Pepin's recipes call for either roasting next to potatoes and onions (yum), or poaching in hot water and using with potatoes to make a potato salad.  So I vacuum packed the remaining three logs, and we'll see how it goes.  Some sausage freezes better than others.

The andouille worked great.. I did a peppers and onions saute with andouille this week and it was wonderful.  Next batch needs more heat, though.

Love that vacuum packer.. I also  packed 4 pounds of pork chops cut from a 8 pound loin that Sally got at Costco.  The other 2 pound chunks are going to become Kassler Rippchen and Canadian Bacon.  The former needs to be smoked before curing, the latter needs curing before smoking. I need to get some juniper berries, and I need 3 or 4 days to do the curing.  Sort of a German and Canadian take on what you can do with a lean pork loin!

Sorbetto ( Fruit Gelato)

I'm converging on recipes and processes for fruit gelato/sorbetto.  Technically, if it doesn't have dairy, it's a sorbetto, not a gelato; a southern Italian thing, as opposed to the northern thing where dairy rules.

In any case, Cooks Illustrated had a recipe for raspberry sherbet and that clued me in to a couple key facts.  Number 1: pectin is your friend; Number 2: don't churn too long.   I still have my refractometer, but so far, I've been going by taste.

Pectin (of which there is a lot in some fruit, and not much in others) helps maintain the structure so it's creamy and doesn't freeze into fruit icecubes. And, yes, there's  "yellow box" and "pink box" pectin, for "sugar added" and "no sugar added" jelly making.  The former expects to see TONS of sugar (as in cups per pound of fruit) and apparently, there's a whole complex sugar, pectin, gelling chemistry.
Not too much churning, because air whipped into it makes ice foam, not creamy sorbetto.

The goal is saturated taste, and the sobetto not melting into juice when it sits on the plate/bowl. (although Saddle Peak cheats on this by serving their sorbetti on a block of ice with depressions in it).

Strawberries don't have much pectin (as opposed to raspberries, and even less than apples). So I made a first batch with strawberries, sugar, and "add sugar pectin" because that's what I had.  about 5/8 cup sugar for a couple pounds of strawberries.  Zap it in the food processor until smooth, then spend 10 minutes ramming it through the chinois. (something I learned in cooking class at the Athenaeum.. get that little ladle out and beat it through the screen).  It was great, taste wise, but froze rock hard after a day.

Try #2.. got pink box pectin (processed to require less sugar, apparently.. it's on the web, google pectin and you'll find out more than you want to know). Spun up some fresh strawberries (bought yesterday) in the processor, churned it this morning, and it's freezing now.

Also did a raspberry according to the Cooks Illustrated recipe this morning, beating it through the chinois as well.   Just churned it, so it's freezing (curing) now too.

We'll see how it comes out.   Raspberry on the top, Strawberry on the bottom.

Next, up: real gelato with dairy. Caramel, chocolate, vanilla (vaniglia), etc.

A spectacularly bad restaurant meal

I'm back in DC for a workshop, and I'm staying at the Hilton Garden Inn near the workshop location.  Getting here was a mite weird: I got bumped from the overbooked flight to Baltimore (my preferred airport) but they got me on the flight to Dulles that actually got here sooner.  I did have the last seat on the plane (and was the last to board, after running from gate 75 to gate 68 at LAX): a middle seat in the next to the last row next to a large gentleman who coudn't get the armrest all the way down.  But no matter, my seat on the Baltimore flight wasn't much better. I can take it for 4 1/2 hours, and I've definitely had worse.

The hotel is, so far, unexceptional, but hey, it's a place to sleep, and it's basically across the street from where I need to go.

There is a restaurant in the hotel called Todd Gray's Watershed, or something like that, so I headed down to get dinner (not having eaten on the plane, and feeling a bit peckish by now.. about 5PM home zone time). The menu was sort of interesting, a lot of shellfish and seafood, sort of mid Atlantic seaboard styles. So I decided on the "Carolina Style Barbequed Shrimp with creamy white grits, andouille sausage, and green onion butter".  The Reuben sandwich also looked good, but, hey, might as well try something new, and the combination of shrimp and andouille looked interesting, if a bit more Louisiana than Carolina. It's just a name, after all.  Part of it was they didn't have beer listed on the menu anywhere, and a Reuben needs beer, really. And nobody should eat fresh fish in a restaurant on Monday; fishermen don't work on Sunday, after all. 

The wine list wasn't all that exotic, so I went for the Clos du Bois Sauvignon Blanc: safe, by the glass, a basic supermarket white bordeaux I'm sure I've had before. I figured the acidity would work with the buttery grits and sausage.

The whole thing goes downhill from there.  The waiter finally shows up. Monday night, maybe 20-30 people in the place, total, at a dozen or so tables, half a dozen waiters.  I do the ordering thing, ask for some water.

A while later (a long while), my waiter shows up with a glass of red wine (most likely a Malbec, based on the bill, about which more later).  Oops.. Dude, I ordered a white, even pointed to it on the menu, it's in the white column as opposed to the red column.  He trundles off.  Another long while later, and my glass of wine shows up. It's sort of ok, but not what I've been drinking recently (Santa Barbara county white bordeauxs for the most part). No matter, it's cold, it's wet, it's got some acidity.  But still no water.  A reminder, and he shows up to fill the glass with water.

No bread or rolls, but maybe that's just not something they do at this place.

The entree shows up a bit later.  I asked for some bread or something to go with it, and the waiter disappeared to fetch it (I guess they have bread in some form here).  It's hard to actually see it, because it turns out there's no real light near the table, but it is clearly shrimp on top of something creamy and grits-like.  Using the cellphone as a flashlight confirms this.

It tastes fairly good.  A sort of plain grilled shrimp (I was sort of half expecting a vinegar mustard sort of glaze), and some smoky bits of sausage.  The grits were good. The green vegetable material was sort of unidentifiable, but even as just color, it wasn't bad.  I thought maybe chard or some mild greens.  I'm not sure if that's the green onion butter, but it sure didn't taste like green onions.

My waiter brings a little 2 inch cubical piece of bread that looks kind of like a pretzel (salt on top, dark brown crust) on top, but is basically fluffy dinner roll underneath. No big deal, it's bread, and can be used with the sauce.  There's a small dish of clear liquid with it, which I thought might be olive oil or something, but it's pretty clear for that. It's oily, has almost no taste. I'm guessing peanut oil or corn oil or maybe (real) light olive oil, something useful for sauteing, but not really what you want to have on your bread.  I guess there's a reason they don't serve bread with the meal.

And it gets weirder.  The sausage is cold. They're little chunks: like you took your andouille and sliced it lengthwise into quarters, then chopped it to make sort of cubes.  And when I fork up a couple, and chew them, they're distinctly cool. Not refrigerator cold, but cool, and definitely not "fresh out of the saute pan" (which is how *I* would have done it.. zap them into the pan with the shrimp and get some sizzle on it).  And as I eat the shrimp I realize, they're not really hot, just warm.  Hmm, looks like they have a couple big pots of grits and greens, and a steam table tray of shrimp that have been previously cooked, and a bin of sausage bits. No wonder it didn't take too long to make this dish.. all they had to do was "spoonful of grits, smaller spoon of greens on top, sprinkle sausage chunks, stack shrimp on top, and serve".  It could have been so good (and probably was, when Chef Todd did it the first time).

And the bowl is dirty on the outside. At first I just thought it was a sort of rustic texture, but it wasn't even around the bowl, and upon closer inspection (cellphone as flashlight again), yep, food residue on the outside of the bowl. Well, hopefully it's just sloppy plating and not a derelict dish machine operator.

Meanwhile, the waiter never comes by, nobody fills the water glass, etc.  I finish and wait. And wait. And wait.  Another waiter walking by buses the dishes.  Finally my waiter reappears and he has the bill.  By this time, I'm ready to do the zero tip thing and put a long written list on the back of the bill.  Except.. there's no pen to sign the check with (or to make my ranting list).  The waiter comes up with a pen when asked.  So I start my listing on the back of the bill, and then turn it over.  Whups... the entree price is different than what's written in the menu (less, as it happens), and the kind of wine is wrong (later, on comparing with other wines by the class, the abbreviation matches Malbec), although the same $9/glass price.  So I ask for the manager.  As does the guy at the table next to me, who has ALSO had appalling service.

The guy comes over and I point out that the prices on the bill don't match the prices on the menu, but beyond that, there's some problems, which I list.  He disappears for a while, and comes back with a revised bill with no entree, but still the wrong kind of wine.   I was willing to pay for the entree.. it's not the first, nor will it be the last, where I gamble and lose, but the guy insisted.  I asked about the variety of wine (an old fraud between bartender and waitstaff, or manager and owner, is to ring up different items than actually sold, especially if the margin is better on some than others. ) Oh well.. I sign the tab for $9.90 (no tip) and resolve never to eat there again.  The conference is feeding us, I think.

So here's the list...

• No water offered, but water glasses on table. Had to ask, and it took forever. Glass never refilled, until after bill brought.
• Wrong wine brought, and exorbitantly priced: $9/glass for a $12/bottle supermarket wine? $4-5 seems more reasonable, but hey, it was marked at $9, and I was willing to buy it.  I still think it tasted kind of pallid and thin, but I'd have to go buy a bottle and compare to be sure.  Maybe that's the Clos du Bois style, but it tasted like some of those almost tasteless $4-5/bottle whites we bought at Cost Plus. Sure didn't match some tasting notes I found online which talk about zesty citrus and crisp acidity.  Maybe they brought the wrong white.
• Sausage chunks cool, but not cold, nor hot. I'd be interested if the inspector or chef ever shoved a thermometer in the sausage chunk bin.  I'm betting around 50 degrees. It's a partially cured sausage, so the nitrites will kill the bacteria.
• Shrimp warm, but not hot.  140F (the usual holding temperature) is pretty toasty warm.  If you touch it, it feels hot.  I eat quite a lot  medium rare meat which is around 130-135 internal temp, and this shrimp was around that temp (by my calibrated tongue<grin>), and certainly no warmer.  It's pretty clear that this shrimp didn't just come off the BBQ grill or saute pan when plated.
• Unclean bowl.
• Bill incorrect in amounts and itemization.
• Remarkably inattentive service, for a $20-25/entree (without salad, etc.) price class place, especially when it was only 1/3 full.

We'll see how it goes.  Rarely do I eat at a place in the US where I actually worry about temperature control on the food, but there's just so many other little evidences of inattention that I just wonder. Is this a place where the eponymous Todd built the menu and then left others to run the place and they've sort of drifted into bad habits? Maybe it's because it's Monday night.

Take home summary:  The food concepts are good, the taste is good, the execution and (especially) the service is the pits.