by Edward Lee
⅔ cup grated semi-firm cheese, such as Gouda
Garnish
½ cup diced tomato
Chopped fresh sage and thyme
2 slices bacon, cooked until extra crispy and broken into bits
Smoked paprika
1Preheat the oven to 325°F.
2Warm a Dutch oven or a large cast-iron skillet over medium heat. Add the bacon and cook until it renders its fat and begins to crisp, 4 to 6 minutes. Remove the bacon and drain on a paper towel; leave the bacon fat in the pan.
3Add the butter to the pan and melt over medium heat. Season the turkey legs generously with salt and pepper. Add to the pan and brown on all sides, 8 to 10 minutes. Transfer the turkey legs to a plate.
4Pour off all but 2 tablespoons of the fat from the pan. Add the carrots, celery, and leeks and cook, stirring occasionally, until they begin to brown, about 5 minutes.
5Add the bacon and turkey legs to the pan, then add the sorghum, apple cider, and chicken stock and bring to a simmer. Add the sage, cover with the lid, and transfer to the oven. Bake for 45 minutes.
6Check the turkey legs. If they’re not totally immersed in liquid, flip them over and replace the lid. Cook for an additional 35 minutes, or until the meat is falling off the bone. Transfer the turkey to a plate and let cool slightly. Set the braising liquid aside. (Leave the oven on.)
7Meanwhile, spread the croutons on a baking sheet and toast in the oven for 8 to 10 minutes, just until slightly browned. Remove from the oven.
8Pull the skin off the turkey legs and discard. Remove the meat from the bones and shred it with your hands.
9To serve, divide the braised turkey meat among four bowls. Add the cheese to the braising liquid and whisk until combined, then season with salt and pepper. Ladle about ½ cup of the braising liquid into each bowl. Top each serving with some croutons, a spoonful of the diced tomato, a pinch of the fresh herbs, and some bacon bits. Dust each bowl with paprika and serve immediately.
If you are using store-bought low-sodium chicken broth, I recommend concentrating it a bit to intensify the flavor. Pour the broth into a pot and reduce it by one-third over high heat. The reduced broth can be stored in your refrigerator for up to one week.
Honey-Glazed Roast Duck
Chinese roast duck is one of those dishes that people tend to eat only in restaurants. The perception is that making it involves numerous steps and lots of industrial equipment. I went through many a duck trying to modify the traditionally complex recipe so that it was feasible to make at home. Why bother? Well, I think there’s no meal that’s more fun than tearing into a roast duck with a table full of friends. I serve the duck with lots of condiments. I like the abundance. I like fighting for it at the table. Try and find a duck with the head still attached. Yes, the neck is delicious. And it makes for a dramatic presentation.
Invite a lot of friends over and open some Tsingtao beer, a few bottles of Mollydooker Shiraz, and a flask of reliable whiskey, and take the time to enjoy life. / Feeds 6
Duck
One 5-pound duck
¼ cup kosher salt
15 garlic cloves, peeled
Salt and pepper
Glaze
½ cup honey
2 tablespoons fresh orange juice
2 tablespoons soy sauce
For Serving (choose any or all)
Hot Sauce (recipe follows)
Hoisin sauce
Pineapple-Pickled Jicama (page 172)
Bourbon-Pickled Jalapeños (page 175)
Fresh cilantro sprigs
Fresh basil sprigs
Sliced cucumbers
1Preheat the oven to 325°F.
2Remove the gizzards from the duck and save for making a broth another day (see note). Rinse the duck under cold running water and pat dry. Using a very sharp knife, score the skin, making a diagonal crosshatch pattern across the breast. I basically just let the weight of the knife sink into the breast fat as I swipe it; be careful not to cut into the meat. Place the duck in a colander in the sink.
3Bring 4 cups water and the salt to a rolling boil in a saucepan. Set the pan of boiling water near the sink. Using the largest ladle you have, slowly pour the boiling water over the duck; it will look like you are giving the duck a spa treatment, and the skin will shrink and curl up a bit. This renders fat from the skin without cooking the meat so the skin gets crispier.
4Scatter the garlic cloves over the bottom of a large cast-iron skillet or a roasting pan. Season with salt and pepper. Set the duck, breast side up, on the garlic. Roast for 45 minutes.
5Flip the duck over and roast for 15 minutes. Flip the duck back, so the breast is facing up again, and roast for another 15 minutes.
6Meanwhile, make the glaze: Combine the honey, orange juice, and soy sauce in a small bowl and whisk together.
7Take the pan of duck out of the oven, carefully tilt it, and pour as much of the rendered duck fat as possible into a bowl. (Store the fat in a lidded jar in the refrigerator, for a worthy friend who will appreciate the privilege of having you cook for him or her potatoes or eggs in duck fat.) Brush the glaze generously over the breast and legs of the duck. Turn the oven up to 450°F and roast the duck for 15 minutes, brushing a little more glaze over it once or twice till you’ve used all the glaze.
8Take the duck out of the oven and baste with any glaze remaining on the bottom of the pan. Serve immediately, with all the accoutrements and the roasted garlic.
When you have finished eating the duck, save the carcass to make a rich stock for soups, sauces, and more. The next day, put the carcass and the reserved gizzards into a pot, cover with water, and add aromatics like onions, carrots, bay leaves, and a few pieces of star anise. Bring to a boil, simmer for 2 hours, and strain. The stock keeps in the refrigerator, covered, for 1 week.
Hot Sauce
Makes almost 4 cups
1 pound mixed red jalapeño peppers, fresh Thai bird peppers, and habanero peppers
6 garlic cloves
2 cups apple cider vinegar
1 Red Bull (an 8.4-ounce can)
1 cup water
¼ cup hoisin sauce
¼ cup sugar
4 teaspoons fish sauce
4 teaspoons Asian sesame oil
1Trim the stems from the peppers. Combine all the ingredients except for the Asian sesame oil in a medium pot and bring to a boil, cover, then reduce the heat and simmer for 15 minutes.
2Transfer the contents of the pot to a blender and puree until smooth, adding water as needed to create a smooth sauce. Add the sesame oil and blend well. Transfer to a jar and store in the refrigerator. The sauce will keep for up to a month.
We drink a ton of Red Bull in my kitchen. It keeps us going through the sluggish afternoon hours. Some days, it seems to be the most prevalent ingredient in the kitchen, which always gets me thinking about ways to use it in a recipe. I used to put ginger ale in this hot sauce, but I like it better with the Red Bull. It’s sugary, citrusy, and loaded with caffeine. What’s not to like? If you are one of those people who are wary of the product, you can substitute ginger ale or Sprite.
Chicken and Country Ham Pho
Pho is one of those deceptively simple dishes that when done right is astoundingly satisfying. It is basically a clear meat broth that is ubiquitous in Vietnam. But making a good broth is like standing naked before your audience: There’s nothing to hide behind, no fancy garnishes, no sauces to mask mistakes. It is all about fresh ingredients, technique, and patience. A good pho should never be insulted by more than a drop or two of hot sauce. / Feeds 4 as a main course
Broth
2 onions, halved
A large knob of ginger (about 3 inches by 1 inch), thinly sliced
4 cloves
2 star anise
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
One 2- to 3-pound chicken, quartered and skin removed
3 quarts water
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
6 ounces rice noodles
2 cups fresh bean sprouts
½ cup fresh basil leaves
½ cup fresh cilantro leaves
2 serrano chile peppers, thinly sliced
4 slices country ham or prosciutto
4 lime wedges
Hot sauce for serving
1Preheat the broiler. Place the onions and ginger on a small aluminum-foil-lined baking sheet. Broil 3 to 4 inches from heat, turning once, until nicely charred, 5 to 7 minutes. Transfer to a large stockpot.
2Toast the cloves, star anise, coriander seeds, and black peppercorns in a small dry skillet over medium heat until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add to the stockpot. Add the chicken, water, fish sauce, and sugar and bring to a simmer. Simmer, skimming the foam from the surface frequently, until the chicken is cooked through, about 30 minutes. Remove the chicken from the pot, leaving the broth to simmer, and transfer it to a large plate to cool slightly.
3When the chicken is cool enough to handle, pull the meat from the breasts and legs. Transfer the meat to a plate, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate. Return the bones to the pot.
4Continue to simmer the broth gently until it is slightly reduced and flavorful, about 1 hour and 15 minutes longer. Strain the broth through a cheesecloth-lined sieve and discard the bones and vegetables.
5Meanwhile, place the noodles in a heatproof bowl, cover with boiling water, and let stand for 3 minutes; drain.
6Divide the noodles and broth among four large bowls and garnish with the chicken, bean sprouts, basil, cilantro, chile, and country ham. Or serve the broth and noodles in bowls with the garnishes on a plate. Add a squeeze of lime and a few drops of your favorite hot sauce to each bowl and serve.
The Craftsman
Robert Clifft is one of a rare breed of master turkey callers and box call makers. He lives and works in Bolivar, Tennessee. His box calls are a work of art: hand-carved mahogany, cedar, poplar, or butternut. Each one is different and requires a bit of getting used to. His call techniques are so realistic they give me goose bumps. When I have a free afternoon, I call him up and put him on speakerphone. We’ll both sit around with our box calls, and he’ll train me by making me mimic the sounds he makes. I’ve had more than a few people ask me if I’m raising turkeys in my office.
“Some folks say the best way to kill an old gobbler is to find one that wants to die. You will hunt a lot of times and not kill a turkey. Patience is something you must have. You are hunting in his living room, and he has all day. It has been said the difference between a deer and a turkey is a deer thinks every man is a stump and the wild turkey thinks every stump is a man.”
—Robert Clifft, master turkey caller and maker of handmade turkey calls aptly named The Last Call
Pigs & Abattoirs
It’s hard to imagine a decent restaurant these days that does not engage in building relationships with local farmers. To do so is simply our responsibility. To me, a menu is nothing more than a written promise that, to the best of our abilities, we will cook with seasonal foods, procure our ingredients from farmers we trust, and nurture relationships with purveyors who give back to the land as much as we take from it. Wendell Berry, the writer, political activist, humanist, farmer, and philosopher, has often been quoted as saying, “Eating is an agricultural act.” And no other five words have made more of an impact on my career. With that one sentence, Berry turned a passive daily ritual into an ecological, political, and moral mission. For the average person, this is probably the last thing you want to think about as you bite into your burrito (and I have been guilty of it myself), but because I am a purveyor of gourmet food, part of my job is to deliver food that not only tastes good but also has a link with accountability. I ought to be able to trace our ingredients back to their source and ensure that every stage along the way has been scrutinized to a standard that makes me, the chef, comfortable—not just the FDA. This is the driving message behind the movement called “farm to table.”
If there is one thing about this current feel-good movement that makes me uneasy, it is the gaping hole in the middle between the farm and the table that is oftentimes ignored. That missing link is the abattoir, or slaughterhouse. It’s not a place we want to think about as we cut into our pork chops, but how else would that happy, tail-swishing pig turn into porchetta? It had to go through an FDA-certified slaughterhouse, a place so abhorrent that the word itself has become synonymous with torture. It is a place entrenched in secrecy and invisibility, in order to give us the privilege of enjoying our dinner guilt-free. What horrors must lurk inside! Things we are better off not even knowing about. There is a neighborhood in Louisville called Butchertown. I figured the name was some quaint carryover from a time past when men with handlebar mustaches owned butcher shops that supplied the immigrant population. But it is actually where JB Swift operates a large commercial pig processing plant today. There are certain times of the day in Butchertown when the smell from the pigs will sit in the air and permeate every fiber of your clothes. It is the smell of commercial death. This is not a place where they give tours. It is not an agricultural act.
I get my pigs from a couple of farms around Louisville: Red Wattles from Kathy Botroff in Horse Cave and Durocs from Ashbourne Farms in LaGrange. And today I am going to help Jim Fiedler slaughter the black heritage-breed pigs that he brought down from Rome, Indiana. I am driving to Boone’s Butcher Shop in Bardstown, Kentucky. Most of the local farmers here process their animals at Boone’s. It was surprising to me that when I asked if I could help with the slaughter, all Jim had to do was put a call in to Boone’s, and they were open to the idea. Jim is a kind, affable man with a dinner-table’s-worth of stories behind him. He raises a breed that is hard to find and even harder to make money from, but they are his: stubborn pigs for a stubborn man. Jim is never on time, because he tends to do the herding, driving, and unloading all by himself. He drives a white pickup truck with a red trailer rigged to the back. Today he’s bringing twenty pigs, and the morning chill will slow him down for sure. It’s a two-hour drive from his farm. I leave Old Louisville at five a.m. to meet him at Boone’s. It’s a pretty drive, the road flanked by uneven hills interrupted by evergreens and the Jim Beam distillery pumping steam into the sky. The houses along the freeway are simple and sad. Every time I breathe, I fog up my windshield: it’s that cold.
I smell Jim’s pigs before he arrives. They live on unique soil: more loam, more grass and clover than most. They get to play around in mud, and it cakes onto their quill-like hairs. Their ears are so large they drape over their eyes, so all you see are their quivering snouts. They smell like shit—a rich, fecund, herbaceous shit. Our first order of business is to move the pigs from their trailer to the holding pens. I’m new at this and am slowing down the process. The workers at Boone’s are baffled, if not annoyed, that I’m here slowing down their day. I’m thinking the same. Until today, I’ve enjoyed the privilege of turning processed pigs into pretty food. I’ve never killed a pig. Will doing so make me a better chef? Does a carpenter need to cut down trees? Probably not. But if killing is a ritual, it’s one that I need to experience. What I find is that it’s less a ritual than a process.
From the pens, we bring in the pigs, one at a time, to the kill floor. There they meet an electric rod that shoots 1.5 amps into their necks. It takes two to three minutes for the legs to stop kicking. Once dead, the pig is hoisted by its rear legs with a chain onto a conveyor belt, where its throat is slit and the blood drains out. The tricky part is making sure the animal is dead. If it is not, it endures the pain of the hoist and the bleed-out. This is where most of the animal rights ac
tivists’ justified outrage stems from.
And that’s what brings me to the kill floor. I need to see firsthand what happens to these animals, to take part in that agricultural act that links the farms to my table. I find the process to be remarkably mundane. The animals are handled one at a time, and death, though never the same, has a disturbing predictability to it. The animals drop, shake, and sputter out in a routine that goes from violent to quiet. After its trip on the conveyor belt, each pig’s carcass goes into a four-minute 150°F scalding bath, where rubber paddles remove most of the hairs. The entrails are removed and checked for parasites by a USDA inspector. The last remnants of hairs are burned off with a torch. Then it’s back onto the conveyor belt, where the carcass is chainsawed in half, washed, and sprayed with a lactic acid solution, then moved to a cooling room to hang overnight before being butchered. This process takes less than ten minutes and is handled by a crew of three.
When the crew breaks for lunch, I duck out back to the holding pens for a cigarette. The remaining pigs are huddled together, a soft medley of oinks in the air. They are used to humans and hardly pay me any attention. I’m sad for them, not because they are about to die, but because there is no fanfare for them in these last moments of life. These pigs will wind up at the best restaurants in the region, brined, roasted, or cured, and sliced with culinary charm. Their meat will be praised and photographed for magazines and books. But here they are, patiently waiting, quarantined and anonymous. There used to be rituals and prayers and celebrations for pigs about to be turned into feasts. Nowadays we take it for granted that these beautiful breeds are plentiful and ready for delivery at the drop of a phone call.
It’s bewildering how much we concentrate on the life of the animal but think so little about its death. For all the talk about animal husbandry, the last fifteen minutes of an animal’s life will have a profound effect on the meat. Electric prods, canes, and other instruments of force will bruise the meat of the already frightened animals, who then produce greater amounts of blood chemicals like cortisol and epinephrine, which have negative effects on the quality of the meat as well. Temple Grandin has been the most outspoken pioneer of a movement to persuade processing plants to adopt a humane standard of slaughtering. She works tirelessly to convince the slaughterhouse industry that animal welfare is inseparable from meat quality, that humane transport and kills are profitable, and that the only standard is a humane one. Animals, far from being just property, are sentient beings. Temple has a mind-blowing Web site offering free information about everything you will ever want to know about slaughterhouses. I encourage you to visit it at www.grandin.com.
