I have been unfair lately. While it’s been fun brewing feet in malt beverages and fashioning cakes into thinly-veiled approximations of lady bits, the authenticity that makes Salty Seattle Salty Seattle has been lacking. You see, I don’t really eat like that, I eat like the food in this post, and it’s not nice of me to keep it from you for so long. I hope you haven’t forgotten about the part of this site that brings you wildly-experimental yet lustily edible food, because it’s back with a vengeance herein.

goose in cranberry sassafras brine

I am a fortunate girl. Whenever a spate of emotions crescendoes, I’ve always known I could turn to the kitchen to assuage the overflow that threatens to seep out. The holidays are a naturally-stressful time, and that, coupled with the fact that my heart feels like it’s been pummeled by a lathe the past few months, have made for a season of jejune spirit.

There is a good chance many of you feel similar, while the sources of our angst may be different. We would all do well to take a moment and remember the things that add meaning to our lives, because it’s easy to forget. You are someone’s daughter or son, and they love you, no matter where they are. You are a mother, a lover, a trusted friend, or a resident nut job, and someone appreciates and admires you for it. There is a whole lotta unconditional love floating around this world, and whenever it fleets out of grasp, figure out a way to tap in- it will help immeasurably.

My tap-in is cooking, and I had forgotten that what with all the smoke and mirrors around lately. Thankfully I found this feast- its inspiration- somewhere inside myself, and I think smoke and mirrors is a very appropriate theme. Life can be smoke and mirrors- relationships, jobs, moments forced to crisis, the social milieu, a facebook status update that doesn’t tell the whole story, or a tweet that decocts a life-changing moment into 140 characters. It’s our job to extract truth and beauty from the surface and to distill the undercurrent of veracity beneath.

I want my food to speak to the world. I want to execute the perfect bite that not only causes a deluge of pleasure, but also changes the way we think about life. The relationship between food and life is intrinsic; as time passes, tastes change.

This meal reflects my soul laid bare of smoke and mirrors as a 33 year old woman who has made mistakes, caused pain, endured dissonance, birthed, married, cried, lied, told the difficult truth, and who welcomes the future- whatever it may bring.  I know I can handle it and I will do so with strength and grace, and maybe the occasional f-bomb thrown in to keep it real.

The basis of this meal is Stella the Goose, whom I bathed in cranberry sassafras brine then smoked using sassafras wood. I used elements of root beer because what roots in life surely roots in food, and also because it is the perfect liquid to toe the tightrope between sweet and savory.

smoked goose with mache

Root beer is an old-school beverage made from an amalgam of several roots- sassafras, sarsaparilla, and licorice along with wintergreen and birch bark. I also added star anise. It is so satisfying to make- I will go into greater detail in a later post. The roots infuse and ferment along with molasses and yeast over the course of several days to produce a rich, complex flavor profile that changes over time (much like the human palate-hence applicability to the crux of this meal).

parsnip gnocchi with root beer cranberries

Root beer and cranberries marry very well; in fact I made a cranberry glaze using root beer as the liquid and I’m not sure I’ll ever visit classic citrus-cran again. The cranberry glaze basted Stella as well as provided a tart counterpoint to the light-as-air parsnip gnocchi I paired with it.

smoked hay-infused parsnip gnocchi

In keeping with the smoky theme, I vacuum-packed parsnips with smoked organic hay and allowed them to cook slowly en sous vide so that the hay would impart a woodsy, austere aspect that balances the natural sweetness of the parsnips. The resulting gnocchi was texturally delicate yet robust flavor-wise with a heartiness that transcends potato gnocchi, perhaps due to the hay-infusion.

brioche rising

Because this was a holiday feast and I would be in the kitchen for days anyway, I baked brioche both so I could use it in the dressing- it is THE PERFECT stuffing bread- and so wayward starving souls could have something warm, buttery and gratifying to keep hunger at bay while I masterminded my meal.

goose organ stuffing

The dressing was simple, made by sautéing goose gizzard and neck, deglazing with vermouth, then tossing in brioche, goose heart and liver, and a classic mirepoix with thyme. A little smoky goose fat and duck stock pulled it all together in the oven, though it is largely a stovetop dressing if there ever was one, making it an easy dish to augment an oven-heavy meal.

brioche stuffing with cranberry root beer foam

I served the dressing in parfait layers with cranberry-rootbeer foam. This is a great example of something many consider to be firmly embedded in the realm of molecular gastronomy (foam) blending with traditional fare to create an amalgam that is transcendent of either style of cuisine.

parfait

The job of truly great food is not to make you wonder how it was done, but to be so good it doesn’t matter- all you can do is relish it. This is why many who practice modern cuisine object to the “molecular gastronomy” label. If you like it, just eat it- don’t be preoccupied with how it was made.

salsify root, unpeeled and peeled

With a further nod to roots, I treated salsify root like the bonnie prince it is and sous vided it then caramelized it in vanilla-laced fat. I cut it into matchsticks and served it “poutine-style” smothered in root beer gravy and goose fat pop rocks made to resemble cheese curds. I made the rootbeer gravy by sautéing mirepoix in goose fat, creating a roux, then adding my fresh-brewed rootbeer along with some duck stock until I’d reached the ideal viscosity and flavor tone.

"poutine" of salsify, root beer gravy and goose fat pop rocks as "curds"

Neutral pop rocks are available through willpowders.net and to make the goose fat pop rocks I just combined them with powdered goose fat, made by mixing maltodextrin with the fat. The pop rocks provided an effervescent antidote to the rich caramel muskiness of the salsify, not to mention adding an element of surprise. Life is full of surprises, curveballs- it’s an accomplishment if you can mirror that in a dish to great effect.

Losing myself in the kitchen is the transglutaminase that binds the mechanically-separated chicken nugget that is my life.

The success of the elements of root beer juxtaposed with smoke and mirrors has been an enlightening reaffirmation that cooking is my best therapy. Writing is a close second, so no matter how murky the waters, at least I know I’m doing what I love. Now let me show you how to brine and smoke a goose:

Sassafras-Cranberry-Brined Smoked Goose

• 1 young, organic, fresh goose (Stella was a 9 pounder- this is enough brine for a bigger bird too)

To brine:

• 6 liters water
• 400 grams Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt
• 1 pint cranberries
• 20 grams sassafras
• 3 lightly-crushed star anises
• 40 grams roughly chopped ginger with peep on
• 20 lightly-crushed black peppercorns
• 2 kilos ice (plus more for an ice bath)

1. Bring all ingredients but ice to a boil in a large pot with lid on. Remove lid and stir occasionally. Boil for approximately five minutes, or until the cranberries have popped.
2. Remove from heat and pour into a container large enough to hold the brine plus the ice. Set the container in an ice bath. Add the 2 kilos of ice to the brine and stir until dissolved and cooled. You may have to put in the refrigerator to cool completely, though I find that the ice bath works fine.
3. Either in a container large enough to hold the bird, or in a food-safe plastic bag, combine the goose and the brine. Allow to brine for 24 hours for a 9-12lb goose, slightly more if the bird is larger, slightly less if the bird is smaller.
4. Remove from brine, rinse, and let goose dry for 6-10 hours before smoking.

To smoke:

1. Stabilize smoker at a temperature of roughly 200°F. I used sassafras wood, but I imagine apple or cherry would work very well also. It is very important to place a grease catcher of some sort on a lower rack under the goose, since geese have so much fat.
2. Smoke the goose, maintaining 200°F for two hours, periodically re-stoking with wood. You don’t need to bother with an internal temperature thermometer with goose, since you will be finishing in the oven. After two hours, remove the goose from the smoker (be sure to keep all the lovely fat) and transfer to a 400°F oven to finish the bird. For a 9lb bird, one hour was sufficient, but basically finish until the bird is 165°F internally. Let rest for ½ hour before carving. This will give you time to do something lovely with all that goose fat.

No giant feast is complete with some kind of contest, be it an attempt to float gummy bears in a river of Pabst or a quest to determine who can eat the most twinkie-weiner sandwiches in five minutes while whistling. On American Thanksgiving (a holiday you might’ve heard of but more likely you know about the holiday the day before entitled Wild Turkey Wednesday which involves drinking Wild Turkey shots until poker matches involving betting socks and Tablewater crackers ensue) I was mindful of the contest credo.

Contests are improved if they are labeled with the word “off” following the type of action to occur, such as a “bake-off,” a “dance-off,” or the ever-popular “jerk-off” which has participants all attempting to be the biggest jerk (sheesh, what did you think I meant!).

Knowing I needed an “off” to elevate my contest to a classier plane, I decided to call it the CranberryRelishSousVideVersusStovetop-Off. Catchy, isn’t it? If you weren’t able to ascertain by the moniker, the goal of the contest was to determine which cranberry sauce brings all the bees to their knees. And by “bees” I mean party guests and by “knees” I mean near-orgasmic state.

The parameters were simple: use the exact same ingredients, but prepare them two different ways. I went classic in style, both because I didn’t want to add any offending flavors that might confuse the surely untrained palates of the random lot of revelers and because I wanted a basic litmus on which to expand in greater detail once a consensus was established.  The single decisive factor in the test is the method of cooking.

Alcohol doesn’t do well en sous vide because it doesn’t have anywhere to go/burn off in the sealed chamber, so sadly, no booze allowed in either batch of cranberries this year. As you probably surmised, I made up for the lack of port in the cranberry sauce by filling my own internal saucetank with it (via secret nips off the bottle all morning and afternoon in addition to my public wine consumption). The basic recipe for both sauces follows these findings if you care to exact a precision “off” of your own.

foreground to rear: sous vide, stovetop, placebo

No great scientific experiment is possible without the inclusion of a placebo of some sort, and folks, this was truly a “great scientific experiment.” Thus, I included in my taste test one honest-to-gelatinous can of Ocean Spray Cranberry Slop just to make sure to get an accurate reading from my unsuspecting test subjects (formerly known as friends before this “off” occurred and they demoted me to nerdy lab tech status).

I know you’re wishing I’d just shut up and present the findings, so, my *new friends* (I’m hosting a corndog-off at my house next week, btw, wanna come?) drumroll please…………………………………………………………………………..

Most guests (shockingly!) were able to ascertain the placebo sample right away and all but one stalwart of the Swansons Turkey Dinner Days dismissed it out of hand. The reviews came flying in fast and fervent on the real competitors, and they were initially mixed. The sous vide style retained more of the original form-factor of the fruits (both the cranberries and the clementines) whereas the stovetop method broke down the individual components into a more uniform sauce. Most preferred the texture of the sous vide because of this, but, like the great crunchy vs creamy peanut butter debate, this is likely a matter of personal taste.

Next we evaluated acidity, or, tartness as we called it ‘round the table. After a meandering discussion on who was the biggest tart at thanksgiving (guess who won?!) I extracted from people that the sous vide sauce was more tart. It may be because the sugars did not break down as fully as with the stovetop sauce. Reviews were mixed in terms of preference on acidity- half liked the tarty sauce better, half liked the sweet. If it weren’t a room full of gay men I would have made a correlation to that being the way they liked their women: either girl-next-door-sweet or tawdry like a Mad Men secretary.

The game changed when we introduced turkey to the milieu. Nearly everyone preferred the sous vide sauce with the turkey because the other sauce came across as cloying with the savory flavors. Remember- this is a sauce composed of the exact same ingredients, so I find this particular result quite intriguing.

The final judgment factor was viscosity. The stovetop berries were cooked just to the point of forming a cohesive sauce and much of the natural liquid present in the fruits had a chance to evaporate. This made for ideal viscosity, whereas the sous vide sauce had nowhere for the liquid to disappear (since it was entirely cooked in a bag) therefore they were slightly liqueous for most tasters.

The ultimate verdict is that the sous vide sauce is superior in taste and texture, and it pairs better with traditional Thanksgiving dishes, however the stovetop method killed it in viscosity. The simple fix to that would be to pull the bag from the water bath and dump the contents in a saucepan to reduce for just a few moments before service. Of course this would kind of employ both techniques, but not for long, and it’s what I will do in my house in the future.  Here’s the recipe I used- hope this great cranberry debate inspires you to perform a few strategic “off’s” of your own in the coming year.  xo, linda

Cranberry Sauce

Serves 8 as a side dish

• 2 c cranberries ( I used local & organic)
• ¾ c sugar
• 3 clementines, peeled and sectioned
• ½ tsp freshly-grated ginger
• Dash cinnamon
• Pinch salt

Methods:

Sous Vide: takes 2-3 hours inactive time

1. Heat the water bath to 185°F. Place all ingredients in a food-safe bag and seal. Cook in the water bath for 2-3 hours, depending how soft you like your fruit (I prefer 2 hours). Remove bag, open, and serve.

*at this point I would have poured the contents of the bag into a saucepan and reduced over medium heat on the stovetop for 3 minutes to thicken the sauce if I had it to do over.

Stovetop:  takes 25 minutes

1. Combine all ingredients in a saucepan along with 4 tbsp water. Bring to boil over low heat, place lid on saucepan, and continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until all the cranberries burst and the sauce is thick and syrupy, about 20 minutes.

There are a passel, no a fat lot of words you should avoid when discussing food, and revelatory is one of them, as are all its forms: revelation, revelatory et cetera. But WTF is a girl to say when she truly, unmistakably has a REVELATION when she puts something inside her mouth? How can you describe a dish that has revelatory qualities WITHOUT using the word revelatory? Let’s try and skirt it, shall we? This is gonna be AWESOME, or as someone I recently blocked on facebook often says, AWSOME sans the center “E”. As in, “this voodoo doll I just made of Mariah Carey is SOOOO AWSOME.” Gag me.

So I wanted to make really succulent, disintegrating pork tenderloin and I knew slow and low was the name of the game. You know me, if it’s slow and low, it’s en sous vide, right? Sous vide pork tenderloin, however, needs a little somethin’ somethin’ to get the juices flowing, so for a moment I pondered sauce. The bed of sunchoke gnocchi I planned to serve it on was non-negotiable, and in terms of complementary flavors to sunchokes, I tend to like something earthily sweet.

Agrodolce came to mind, which is an Italian sweet and sour sauce. Italians often prepare rabbit in sweet and sour sauce, or coniglio in agrodolce.  I once dined on this dish in the wine cellar of an elderly woman who had painstakingly prepared the rabbit the same way she had been taught by her mother, who had learned it from her own mother and so on. The bella nonna looked pleased but pained when I complemented her on the succulence of the rabbit. She explained that she loved making it, but couldn’t really eat it anymore because of all the tiny rabbit bones that inevitably infiltrate the sauce.  Trying to be ever-helpful, I suggested she substitute chicken for the rabbit instead, since the bones were larger and easier to avoid. Her eyes grew as big as figs and she shuffle/stomped off.  I ran the conversation through my head trying to figure out if I had misspoke, in my shaky Italian.

She avoided me for much of the night, sending her husband to our section of the table with any subsequent courses. Befuddled about my apparent lack of manners, I drowned my sobriety in bicchiere after bicchiere of Barbaresco. The wine must have fortified me- and slackened my tongue- for I cornered the sweet little woman and accosted her in ubriaco Italian asking her what I had done. She was either a kind soul or a pious one, as her eyes softened and she apologized for the abrupt end to our earlier conversation. She explained to me that it would simply be unthinkable to use any other meat in coniglio in agrodolce because that was just how it had been done forever. Why was I, some enterprising New Worlder, waltzing into her country, her region, and telling her how to prepare her food? Even if it made complete sense it was still an abject imposition on tradition.

And now would you look at me? Obviously I did not learn my lesson, because not only am I making an agrodolce sauce for pork tenderloin, I’m MAKING IT WITH CRANBERRIES- the horror! The cranberry element adds the perfect element of tart piquancy you want in a sweet and sour sauce, thus enabling me to use Verjus instead of vinegar for a slightly sweeter take on the acidity factor. Here’s the thing about this sauce though. It’s fucking revelatory. I can’t help it, there are no other words to describe the lip-licking delight that is this sauce.  Older readers might remember sunchoke gnocchi has appeared here in a previous life, so I won’t post the recipe, but rest assured, if you’re looking for a clever use for sunchokes, there is no other place you’d rather be.

Pork Tenderloin Cranberry Agrodolce

Serves 4-6, 8 hours inactive, ½ hour active time

• 1 pork tenderloin
• 2 cups cranberries
• ½ c honey
• 3 bay leaves
• Salt
• 2 tbsp butter
• 1 medium shallot, chopped
• ¾ c Verjus

1. Heat the water bath to 185°F. Place the tenderloin, cranberries, honey, bay leaves and salt in a food safe vacuum bag and seal.  Immerse in the water bath for 6-8 hours.
2. Remove the tenderloin bag and separate the tenderloin from the berry liquid.
3. In a medium saucepan, saute the shallot in butter for 3 minutes, until just softened. Add the contents of the tenderloin bag as well as the verjus, minus the tenderloin. Reduce for 6 minutes, or until the sauce thickens slightly. Just before service, add the tenderloin, which should be in pieces. Stir to heat through, and serve over pasta, such as sunchoke gnocchi.