The Tail: the Chicken Wing of a Pig

Our menu has been changing a lot lately.  I like to think of it as an evolution.  We tweaked things going into ArtPrize, and now we're being hit with the end of summer and the transition into cold weather vegetables.  This is probably the last week for heirloom tomatoes, but the Brussels sprouts and cabbages and kales are coming in beautifully. 
With all these changes the one I am most excited about, that I tell everyone they have to try, that I brag to my distant relatives about is our deep fried pig tails.  Crispy skin, succulent sticky fat, and the porkiest bits of meat pulled right off those tiny little bones.  Just like a chicken wing but so much better, because it comes from a pig.
Some dishes spring fully formed directly from the head of our Zeus, Chef Matthew Millar.  This one bounced around a bit, picking up bits and pieces before it found it's home on our menu. 

1. Chef was excited about some naturally fermented soy sauce being made in Kentucky and aged in spent bourbon barrels. Bluegrass soy sauce
2. I was dying to buy some fish sauce I had heard of being made the traditional way on an island in Vietnam, simply black anchovies, salt, and time. Red Boat Fish Sauce  When I called to order it the owner of the company answered.  He told me he had come to the U.S. as a refugee in the late 60s and had never been able to find fish sauce as good as what he remembered back home.  Together with his uncles he started the company to produce and import "extra virgin" fish sauce.  If you like Southeast Asian food you really need to buy some of this.
3. I brought about a dozen deep fried pig's feet to Chef's birthday party this summer.  If you want an amazing meal, go to a chef's birthday party.
4. We had a growing collection of pig tails in our freezer from all of the whole hogs we had been butchering.

Chef put it all together.  First brine and then confit the tails, and finish with a 350 degree fry in our lard filled fryer.  The dipping sauce is made with the Bluegrass soy sauce, Red Boat fish sauce, raw garlic, sherry vinegar, riesling, honey, chili peppers, and some ground black pepper that Cuong, the owner of Red Boat Fish Sauce, sent us that is grown on an island in the waters where the anchovies are caught to make his sauce.
We have sold out of pig tails every week so far.  The farm who supplies us, Gunthorp Fams, just over the Indiana border, only slaughters so many hogs per week, and each one only has one tail. They deliver on Thursday so your best bet is to come on Friday night to get one. 

In the Muck

 

Salad with Trillium Haven Vegetables

I went to college at Grand Valley nearly twenty years ago, so from time to time I found myself driving through the fields around Hudsonville and Jenison, just west of Grand Rapids. I clearly remember being struck by the dark, visibly rich soil that paraded up the hillsides; you can't help but be struck by it, it's everywhere. The gently rolling hills in the distance make this landscape quite breathtaking. There is quite a lot of agriculture in the area, ranging from good sized dairies and big tracts growing corn or soybeans for feed, to small organic vegetable growers like Trillium Haven Farm and Groundswell.

I wondered what made the ground so dark but not enough to dig in and find out. The aroma of onions was always thick in the air in the summer months so I figured this may be part of the reason. Eventually, Jesse from Grassfield's gave me an eye opening history lesson. Turns out that, like much of West Michigan, this area was first settled by the Dutch, specifically, Dutch farmers. In the Netherlands where most arable land was below sea level, farmers were used to draining the land they intended to farm. The Dutch are by nature creatures of habit so when they relocated to West Michigan they did what they knew: they found low lying land in a marsh or river basin and drained it. This revealed very fertile, rich, dark black soil on which to raise crops and graze animals. I have often heard farmers who work this land refer to as being "down in the muck".

The vegetables that grow there are different. You will notice this immediately on your first visit to Trillium's booth at the Fulton Street Farm Market. They visually have distinct, bright colors. The root veggies in particular are fat, round and sweet. Compared to the vegetables grown by another favorite organic grower closer to the lake and considerably further south, it's night and day. The Lakeshore vegetables are bright and lithe and tapered, with clear, clean flavors. They seem healthy like a long distance runner. Good vegetables grown in the Grand River watershed look rosy and plump, and seem healthy like, well, a strong Dutch farm wife. This little pocket of farms is West Michigan agricultural terroir in a bottle, a place where the physical character of the land and the cultural habits and know how of those who settled there come together to produce something that is not repeated elsewhere.

Vegetable season is in full swing and the output from Trillium and Groundswell is nearly overwhelming. It's a struggle to use everything we'd like to. The salad above features some of the current favorites, including purple, white, and red carrots, lamb's quarters, flowering dill, and baby fennel and will be hitting the menu next week.

TO ANYONE LEFT OUT THERE

So, not surprisingly we have committed a mortal blogging sin and left ours unattended for months. I would like to say that it's been too hectic, but the truth is we could've found time. Shame on us. Look for Green, Brandon and myself to begin publishing weekly at a minimum beginning immediately. The growing season is in full swing and farm visits are planned and we're looking forward to sharing what we learn.

Thanks for your patience.

REAL MEN (MAKE) QUICHE

Quiche Lorraine. Mangalitsa bacon, onion, and Pennsylvania Noble

Like a lot of chefs my age, I've spent many hours with Thomas Keller's books. There are techniques from The French Laundry Cookbook and Bouchon that are still in use in my kitchen today. A few years ago at Journeyman, we decided to check out Keller's quiche recipe and we liked it so much, that after a few minor tweaks to "make it our own" it went on the menu where it was universally beloved.

Keller describes quiche as "the essence of luxury", a statement that sparked our interest in trying his out. The quiche we knew was typically a soggy, frozen pie crust filled with spongy, curdled eggs and a few poorly cooked garnishes throughout. This is not French quiche, he explained. French quiche is deep, two inches, and is a quivering, light, luminous custard spiked with flavorful, seasonal, and carefully prepared ingredients. This is typical of Keller's recipes. Simple and familiar things are granted enlightenment through an understanding of a dish at its essence, through its history, or possibly a reexamining of its role in modern cooking. Eating this quiche for the first time was like finding a long lost brother.

Brandon, my current sous and butcher, spent a few years as the "day guy" at Journeyman, and is intimately familiar with this quiche. He has made dozens. He has lived through the frustrations of finicky pate brisee, the horror of opening the oven door to find your batter leaking, or leaked and baked solid to the sheet tray, and the not so momentary hatred of a not so competent line cook turning his back on it for a minute too long, only to find the buttery, crisp crust burned to charcoal. This quiche is a labor of love, time consuming and demanding. Give any phase of its production less than your full attention and it can fail. But when it's right...

Brandon, Green and  myself have talked fondly now and then about quiche. Brandon began wondering if there could be a place on our menu at Reserve for it. As he is prone to do, he prowled the internet late at night, learning what he could about its history and found that in the days of the guilds in France, where the art of charcuterie was, if not born, formalized, it was actually the right of the charcutier to produce and sell quiche. That's right, quiche is charcuterie. Not pastry, not brunch. Charcuterie. I suppose it makes sense. Pate means "paste" in French, and back in the day referred to anything (though usually meat) baked in a pastry crust and eaten cold. Quiche is of course most commonly eaten hot these days, but this one is a knockout cold. It has therefore joined our terrine and sausage on our charcuterie menu as a nod to its history.

After some time spent damming his leaking quiche with corn flour, Brandon has mastered it. Like Keller, we have a taste for the classics: Florentine (spinach, cheese, and shallot) and Lorraine (pictured above and on the menu now). Our quiche Lorraine contains our house made mangalitsa bacon, caramelized Visser Farm onions, and a blockbuster American artisanal cheese (in lieu of Gruyere) called Pennsylvania Noble. It is a cheddar in style, inoculated with a white mold -- the same mold responsible for brie and camembert -- during the last two months of aging. The custard is made with Hilhof organic cream and milk and eggs from S & S Farm. Thanks to these great producers, Keller's mentoring, and Brandon's obsessive-compulsive nature, it is outstanding. I won't describe it further. Come in and taste for yourself.

Keller ends his introduction to quiche by saying "I'm sorry America has lost the quiche - or never really had it. I'd like to see it return to its proper form, and for more people to know about it and appreciate it." We're in, chef. We will do our best to spread the good word.

How to cook

When I talk to people who don't cook I often find myself saying something ridiculous like, "Cooking is easy, it's mostly just paying attention to what you're doing."  Which I really think is true but is just about the most unhelpful statement you can make.  It got me wondering if I could come up with a formula for cooking, breaking it down into its parts, 10% this and 33% that.  So here is my list and percentages:

shopping 35%
     you can't make good food with bad ingredients
technique 15%
     it's easy to destroy good ingredients if you don't treat them right
history/knowledge/context/experience 5%
     mostly avoiding past mistakes or building on past successes
creativity 5%
     I think often over-rated in American culinary culture, the quest for the next new thing leads to more bad food...
patience 15%
     knowing when not to mess with it, waiting until summer for strawberries
paying attention 25 %
     cooking is an interactive and dynamic process

What do you think, would you assign different percentages or different elements?

Salt cured egg yolks

 

Allie caught me with the camera salting egg yolks.  Chef calls it "chicken bottarga."At the moment I completely could not remember what fish is used to make bottarga.  For the record, it's tuna, grey mullet, and sometimes swordfish.

Spinach & poached egg risotto

hooligan, midnight moon, sweet peppers

 

Our menu has changed a lot since we opened back in September.  We lose a dish most often because the season has changed and we can't get a key ingredient any longer of the quality that we need.  Sometimes, we just want to move on to something new, sometimes we just get bored.  My favorite dish these days is our risotto, one of our classics, on the menu since day one, with very few changes.  It's also one of our top sellers.  One night Scott had 17 orders come in all at once.  The risotto part of that is easy, but 17 perfectly poached eggs at the same time is no small feat.  

The ingredients are simple. Rice, butter, vegetable stock, fresh spinach (currently from the greenhouses of our friends at Visser Farms), two excellent cheeses, midnight moon and hooligan, a poached egg, and a sweet pepper relish. 

I have to tell you a little bit about those cheeses because they are a big part of why I love this so much.  Midnight moon is made by Cypress Grove from Humboldt County in California.  It's a slightly aged goat cheese that is the hands-down favorite among our servers.  Which is probably why it is also our best seller from the charcuterie and cheese menu.  It's mild, smooth, and nutty, reminiscent of parmigiano but not as powerful. 

The aggressive cheese in this mix is Cato Corners' Hooligan.  Hooligan is a stinky and flavorful washed rind cheese produced by a mother-son team on a 40-cow dairy in Connecticut.  It's intense and has scared away more than a few timid tasters, but it  is mellowed out in the risotto.  It's the tuba in this orchestra, unmistakable on its own but it blends in so well that you don't know it's there unless you look for it.

 

I don't know where Matt got the idea to put a poached egg on top of risotto,  but now that I've had it I don't ever want to make any kind of risotto without an egg on top.  I love breaking open the yolk and mixing it in to the rice, it adds that extra bit of richness that makes this so satisfying to my mouth, and stomach, and soul. 

The egg is topped with sweet pepper relish.  We buy fresh red, yellow, orange, and even, sometimes, ivory peppers.  Roast them, peel them, chop them, cook them with herbs, make them even more delicious. 

This is the dish I always want at the end of the night when I'm tired and hungry.  It's comforting and restorative.  It's a culinary Snuggie.

So many tortured metaphors in support of one simple $11 dish. 

MONTELLO MEATS

Standing rib roast from Montello Meats

Many meat lovers bemoan the loss of the family butcher shop these days, and with good reason. Really great beef requires excellence at several stages of production and this level is infrequently achieved. On the farm it is  essential to raise animals in a healthy environment which suits their natural habits: access to clean air and water, room to move about, and fresh green grass. At the slaughterhouse, care must be taken to keep stress levels as low as possible. And with beef in particular, the butcher plays a vital role.

All meats benefit greatly from a skilled butcher's expertise, but beef requires it most. Beef must be aged to become tender and pleasant to the modern palate. This takes place over the course of a minimum of two weeks and there are two ways to do it: wet aged and dry aged. In modern, industrial meat packing, wet aging is the preferred method. The carcass is cut to to large primals and vacuum sealed in plastic bags, boxed, and left to age for several days to weeks. During this time, lactic acid builds in the muscle tissue and tenderizes it. With dry aging, the carcass is split in two, sometimes four, pieces and left to hang in the open air.

Modern meat packers prefer wet aging because it is cheaper. It requires less cooler space, less labor, and produces higher yields. Dry aged beef requires room for air to circulate around it and the outside dries and gets trimmed off. Also, there is moisture loss, which means less money per pound per carcass (open a plastic bag of wet aged meat and the liquid pooling in the bottom of it would have evaporated during dry aging -- good for the packer, but not your plate).

The building of lactic acid takes place whether beef is dry or wet aged, so tenderizing takes place in both methods. Dry aging concentrates flavor, improves texture, and creates complexity and depth. Wet aging degrades texture and can sometimes contribute unpleasant metallic and sulfurous aromas and flavors. If you want a really great steak, you want it dry aged, but the expense involved has all but driven it out of the marketplace. Those who know, however, will happily pay the premium.

Enter Montello Meat Market. Tony and Tina Larson own this small butcher shop on the south side of Holland, Michigan and are of a dying breed. The family butcher shop has all but vanished from our culinary landscape and we are truly blessed to still have one in our neck of the woods. The Larson's buy grass fed, hormone and antibiotic free beef and age it in house for a minimum of 21 days. Then Tony and his oldest son Sam set to work on it, producing various cuts with artistry and obvious patience, practice, and skill.

Visit often enough, and you will eventually meet all of the Larson clan. They all pitch in to make a go of this truly family run small business. Tony obviously taught Sam, and like many butchers, guards that knowledge carefully. Brandon and I once asked if we could come follow him around for a few days to learn from the master, and with his trademark ear to ear smile and genuine good will, he politely declined. I don't think he actually said no, but it was clear that mentoring was for his heirs only. I will have to content myself with the fruits of his labors.

The Larson's are a perfect example of why buying from the little guy is so much more rewarding than giving your money to a big box store. The big guys can never give you the sense of confidence and community that comes effortlessly from Tony and Tina, not to mention the artisanship, the preservation of economically challenging techniques, and the simple damn deliciousness of a food treated thoughtfully, carefully, and with the health and happiness of the client being priority one.

Long live the corner butcher shop.