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Grains and Beans The Book

101. Cassoulet de Canard p.273


The recipe

This is The Book’s definitive and official cassoulet recipe. I wrote about the Easy Cassoulet recipe a couple of months ago, which skipped steps and cut corners, but still resulted in a very delicious dinner. This adaptation of Julia’s from Mastering the Art of French Cooking takes two days, and goes out of it’s way to find traditional steps for you to follow.

On the first day you soak the beans. But you don’ just soak them. You bring them to a boil and let them sit for 50 minutes. Then you bring them back to a boil, with a bouquet garni, onions, salt, and pork rind you spent the preceding 50 minutes ritualistically rinsing, boiling, and slicing. Then it’s simmer and skim for the next 1 1/4 hours. The beans are then left to cool overnight.

Day one’s activities continue with the skinning, defatting, and shredding of the duck legs, the browning of mutton (I used veal) bones in a whole cup of goose fat, and the caramelizing of onions in that goose fat. The duck, the bones, the onions, and let us not forget the fat are brought to a simmer with bay leaves, stock, tomatoes, garlic, and white wine. After an hour and half on the stove it’s left to cool overnight.

Day two is fairly straightforward. You brown and slice some sausage, and remove the inedible bits from the now cold beans, and the duck mixture. Then the cassoulet is assembled in alternating layers of beans and meat, then topped with bread crumbs and parsley. The recipe calls for a 10 quart enameled cast iron pot, but the biggest one I could get my hands on was 7 3/4 quarts. I managed to get almost everything into the smaller pot, but the full sized pot would have been better. The cassoulet is brought to a simmer on the stovetop, the baked for about an hour until the juices are bubbling up through the crust.

There were a lot of steps, a lot of tricky to source ingredients, and some strange cooking instructions here. It resulted in a rather delicious cassoulet though. I cheated in more than a few places, and messed up in a few others, so I’m not sure the dish came out exactly as it did in The Book’s test kitchens. For the record I had a mix up with the bouquet garni and ended up putting in 15 cloves instead of 5, which really changed the flavour of the beans. I didn’t peel the tomatoes, because I hate peeling tomatoes and I don’t find it’s really worth the effort. I didn’t make beef stock, and I did used the specifically forbidden canned variety. I used a cured garlic kielbasa instead of the fresh garlic sausage called for. I also couldn’t stand the idea of serving the dish with all that goose fat in there, so I removed most of the fat that floated to the top of the meat pot. It was still decidedly rich and fatty, but not nearly as oily as the recipe intended.

That is a long list of cheats, normally I do my best to stick to the recipe as closely as possible, but this time I just wasn’t in the cards. I made the recipe for The Boys on one of our weekend getaways, and I was cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen, with only the equipment I’d thought to bring with me (they don’t cook much, so the facilities are minimal). I couldn’t find some ingredients, some of the steps I just didn’t have time for, and there were a couple of honest mistakes thrown in for good measure. I think the final dish was pretty close to what the original intended though.

In the end the cassoulet tasted great. It was similar to the easy cassoulet, with the duck and sausage flavours predominating. However, the beans in this version were really worth all the effort. They were tender with a bit of bite left to them, and packed with flavour. Unfortunately a lot of that flavour was cloves, but the smoky bacon, and pork belly were there, with the thyme and onions adding a nice backdrop.

The breadcrumb crust was a bit of a letdown. The easy cassoulet had an amazing crust, made by turning the duck skin into cracklings, and toasting the bread crumbs in some of the duck fat and garlic. That topping was just out of this world, whereas the topping on this dish is just there to absorb some liquid. The recipe has you throw away the confit duck skin and its fat, but then add in a whole whack of goose fat. I really didn’t understand the rationale, it seems like an obvious missed opportunity.

This dish was labour intensive, and I don’t think it would have been nearly as much fun without the help of my co-chef Al. Whenever it’s time to make an excessively fatty fat fat dish, I can count on him. I should also thank the other boys for washing the seeminly endless sink-fulls of goose fat coated dishes this produced. Cassoulet is an absolute indulgence, and indulging is much more fun with friends, especially if you’ve had to work for your reward.

I feel that this recipe is one I’ll make again and again, until I get it just right. My first attempt tasted about as good as the Easy Cassoulet, but I’m sure that with practice this recipe has the potential to blow the easy version out of the water. It’s the kind of dish that people perfect and refine over lifetimes, to get just the right texture in the beans, the perfect amount of bacon flavour, the ideal thickened but still runny texture in the juices. Next time I’ll be much better prepared for some of the more obtuse steps, and counterintuitive instructions. I can see some improvements I’d like to make, but overall it was a delicious, and faithful rendition of a very classic dish.

Categories
Grains and Beans The Book

68. Easy Cassoulet p.272

No recipe for this one.

Easy indeed. I’ve made both of the cassoulet recipes in the book now. This is the easy version which can be prepared in 4 hours, plus soaking time for beans. The more authentic version takes 2 days. Both were delicious, and the differences between them were pretty subtle. It’s nice to know that you can get pretty much the full effect of the dish in 1/12th the time.

In more traditional versions lots of effort goes into getting flavour into the beans. They’re soaked then simmered with aromatics, meats, and browned bones then allowed to sit overnight. All of this works to pack as much taste into the beans as possible. It’s a bit of pain, but it does get the flavours in there. In contrast, this recipe soaks the beans without any added flavouring, then quickly simmers them a bouquet garni, tomato paste, and garlic. The beans are not quite as tasty, but still delicious. In this version browned sausage and shredded duck confit are added to the beans. The dish is then covered with a garlic laden topping which uses the duck fat to make make cracklings, and toast bread crumbs. Then the whole things goes into a 350 degree oven until it’s bubbling merrily.

In this versions the beans are not even close to being the star of the show. They’re functional, they soak up a lot of the other flavours, but they’re more or less just there. In the more elaborate version from The Book the beans were a much more central player. The quality of the duck confit and sausage is what will make or break the dish for you. Spare no expense, and travel great distances to find a really good cooked garlic pork sausage. As far as I know the best garlic Keilbasa in Montreal is to be found at Euro Deli (St. Viateur and St. Urbain next to the church). I picked up the duck legs at a little butcher shop on Van Horne (Boucherie France – Canada, 1142 rue Van Horne). She does a brisk business in duck confit, and cassoulet. You can also go enjoy the selection of Nicole Kidman photos she has taped to her fridge. As long as the duck and sausage are up to snuff this will be a no fail recipe.

The bread-crumb topping is hugely flavourful, and was everyone’s favorite part. The cracklings are made by tearing the duck skin into strips and then cooking it with any duck fat that was scraped off the legs. My cracklings never really crisped up, but they were still completely delicious. The bread crumbs toasted in duck fat are absolutely out of this world. Your cardiologist will hate me for recommending this to you, but the topping absolutely made the dish. Because the bread crumbs are so central to the dish, it would be nice to use a top quality baguette if at all possible.

The duck is torn into chunks in this recipe. Frequently the duck legs are left whole and then served on top of the beans, which makes for a dramatic presentation. The tearing strategy worked out well though, more surface area = more delectable duck flavour permeating the casserole.

I served this cassoulet to my brother and his girlfriend. Everyone really enjoyed themselves and the dish. It was rich, hearty, and satisfying. I liked that this version managed to simplify a classic without asking for unreasonable compromises in taste. I think a lot of people avoid making cassoulet at home because it requires so many obscure ingredients, and a fair bit of planning. This version makes it much more accessible, and still results in a delicious dish.