French bars

I guess that the only thing that I miss with London is its pubs, which is not something that you can find in France outside the major cities. Growing up in Sweden during the 80s meant that a pub was a place where alcoholics and losers met up, but no normal people. No-one spent a Friday night in a pub unless you were really, really desperate. This all changed during the 90s when Irish pubs and better drinking establishments started to pop up and it was actually quite nice to hang out there. So living in London it naturally grew on you even more, the habit of going out for beers, or as we called it during workdays, "lunch". So living in France nowdays, there are times when you get the urge, and today was one of those days. You wake up, it's gray and cold outside and you have nothing better to do. Well, you have, but you don't feel inclined to do anything else. Our closest local is what the pubs in Sweden looked like in the 80s, and it's actually quite general for the rest of France, meaning it looks like somebody's living room. My problem with that is that the person who owns that living room has no eye for design or decoration. It's white walls, cold lightning and a distinct lack of atmosphere. But oh! theres a TV in the corner, which really makes it a whole lot better, no? So knowing that we drove to one of the villages surrounding us, and we actually managed to find a place that was open (Sundays are Closed! day in France), which actually wasn't too bad design wise (nice dark wood bar, but still hospital green walls) and it was quite full of people who managed to hide their alcoholism quite OK. As you can see our standards have sunk quite a bit, but once you do realise that you will never find a cosy pub with an open fire populated by trendy young professionals, you have to do with what you find. So we did have a very good time and now it's time for a sallad with thin slices of beef from Friday's steaks and then it's time to paint again.

Brisket #1 - Part Deux

Brisket is a piece of meat that needs long cooking in fairly low temperatures. It's mostly used in stews but is apparently perfect for smoking in your barbecue, low and slow stylee. To acheive that in my Weber OTP I've cut a piece of metal that covers most of the bottom of the kettle and is then folded 90 degrees to form a pocket for the charcoal. This creates a better airflow where all the air that enters from the bottom vents is directed up through the coals and into the kettle, while still giving ample space for the meat to be cooked
indirectly.

Minion method with Oak chunks.

In order to keep the heat for such a long time (5+ hours) without refilling, I use something called the Minion Method. Fill up with unlit charcoal and a few pieces of wood to create the smoke, light a third of a chimney and pour over the unlit coals which will then slowly ignite the rest of the coals, giving you a long nice burn.

After 2.5 hours.

Since this was my first attempt at brisket, I went for something called a "high heat brisket" which means that you run the brisket in the barbecue for 2.5 hours until the meat reach a temperature of about 75 degrees Celcius. You then wrap the whole brisket in tinfoil in order to keep the juices and put it back on the grill for another two hours, until the temperature inside the meat reaches 95 - 100 degrees. Off with the brisket and wrap it in a few towels and put in in a cooler, so that the meat can rest. A normal steak should always rest for about five minutes after cooking, so a large piece of meat like this should rest for about an hour, hence the towels and eski to keep the temperature.

Less smoke ring than expected.

Finally, unwrap the brisket, dodge the wife's angry looks because the meat sauces leaked out and stained the towels, cut it up and *tada*!

A lovely meal.

Or was it? It tasted rather good, but a cheap roast in the oven also tastes rather good and it doesn't take six hours to cook. The meat looked rather dark compared to pictures I've seen, and the smoke ring (the red ring around the edges caused by the smoke) was less then expected. So I will of course try it again, after I've done more research and asked around what can be improved. As someone wrote on a BBQ forum, it took him 50 briskets until the 51st tasted like Heaven. Mine's still in Bedford...

Brisket #1

Today is brisket day! It's also plastering, sanding and painting day, but that's a bit lower down on the fun-scale of things. I do love my DIY, but I've discovered that plastering probably belongs more as a separate ring of hell in Dante's Inferno than on my list of things I enjoy doing.

Not fun.

So hence the theme for today is brisket (and nothing else!). The current status is that I've rubbed it with spices, which is the same mixture as I used for my ribs, but I also gave it a thin layer of Dijon mustard so that the spice rub would stick better. I have to admit that I'm not 100% sure that my butcher cut the brisket properly, since the brisket concept seems to be more of an American cut than a French one. But if today's brisket turns out well, I'll bring more printed out pictures to the butcher next time.

Fun.

Vintage sausages

We dropped by J.C. the butcher the other day and picked up a couple of steaks and my brisket, weighing in at 3 kilos. This being France we also got a nice bottle of Bordeaux wine for free, which I always consider a bonus. So this weekend will be my first experiment in barbecuing a brisket, which seems to be the holy grail of low and slow BBQ, so that will interesting. I'm still not sure if I'm going to spend X amount of hours on it and the end result will be "meh" or not, but that's why I'm doing it.

We then stopped by E & J, who are the nice old couple that we buy eggs and chickens from, and picked up two capons. I've recently read somewhere that creating capons are illegal in England nowadays, but it seems like there is a big loophole for that since you can simply import them instead. Yay! for toothless laws. Anyway, you can't visit someone and not have some snacks while you're there, and snacks make you dry in the mouth so you simply have to have some wine, and... Yep, life's hard here in France. So we sat around the table and discussed ... sausages. Yep, life's wild here in France. They put sausage after sausage on the table, all were home dried but some where only three weeks old, others were almost a year old and the pièce de résistance was a big jar filled with oil and sausages who had been submerged in there for more than two years. Comparing them all I think that the taste became wider(?) the older the sausage was, but that's probably nothing that we could tell if we didn't have all of them to compare. Seeing how much sausages, mushrooms and frozen animals they had more or less everywhere in the house, we asked them for how long they thought they would survive without going shopping. Around two years apparently. So when the war comes, we'll bring our tent.

But an interesting thing is that we've tried to explain a few times that they have so much knowledge when it comes to food, and that there are actually lots of big city people who would pay money to be able to take part in turning a live pig into lots of jars, fillets and sausages, but for them it's like "everybody knows how to do that, so why would anyone be interested"? But fingers crossed that we've managed to talk our way into the next time they get a pig.

Having a local butcher

When ever you read a meat related cookbook, you'll notice that they always recommend you to find a proper butcher, one of those that actually enjoys his work and finds joy in discussing meat with his customers. Finally are we actually part of those lucky few that have one, ours is Jean-Christophe Sansuc in St Martory, and yesterday we put him to the test.
I've been reading Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Meat book and there was a chapter about the local butcher, so we cunningly applied that wisdom on Mr Sansuc and he started to explain that all of his meat comes from local farmers (slaughtered in St Gaudens), he pointed on the wall where he displayed the birth certificates from each of the animals that he sold meat from (the cows are of the Limousin breed) and he went on about how to cook the different parts of the animal. Of course, he explained, some of the sausages are not local due to the AOC, i.e. you can't sell locally made Champagne outside of Champagne. In the end he ticked all of the boxes and we are confident that Hugh would approve of J-C Sansuc.

Ribs. In the barbecue. For five hours.

I have a relationship with cooking, although I guess that most people do. But my interest is based on something I haven't really defined yet, so my solution is to drink beer while I ponder that question. What I do know is that I like barbecueing and that I'm slowly working my way up the ladder of great meat on the fire with even better results. I got my first proper grill (Weber OTP 22.5" for those in the know) last year and suddenly realized how I've been doing it wrong all those other years. Indirect is the answer and if you have a question, there are websites for that. Now we had some friends over for the weekend and I was told that one of them really liked ribs. Haha! I thought and did the following (although the pictures are from another occasion).

1. Clean up the ribs, remove excess fat and membranes to allow the rub to get into the meat. Proper pincers helps with the membranes and it's always cool to include your toolbox when cooking.
2. Do a mix of salt, black pepper, sugar, chili powder, dried garlic, bell pepper powder and Caynenne pepper and rub that into the meat.
3. Get the BBQ going with some Oak wood pieces among the charcoal, keep the temperature low around 120 degrees Celcius and on with the ribs, indirect heat. I'll do a post about this soon.

As can be seen, multilayer is the way to go. On with the lid and wait. Do not peek, just wait and keep the temperature steady.
4. After three hours, I slather the ribs with a mix of ketchup, honey and chili sauce and turn them over.
5. Another hour on and they are starting to get ready. Depending on the size of the ribs, they might need another hour but the tear test will help there. If the meat is easy to tear apart, serve and enjoy.

That redish colour around the edge is known as the smoke ring, and as the name implies, the more smoked the meat is the redder the ring around the edges.

So yes, ribs were served to our friends and yes, they were among the best ribs they've ever had. Mission accomplished.

That was probably the most complicated item so far...

... the naming of this blog. Actually, that's where I most often get stuck, when I have to name something, be it in naming variables while programming or naming characters in online games, although in the latter case I usually cheat and use the same name I started using back in the mid 90s. So when I met my gaming namesake at a party, a woman named Casey, I thought it was an amusing anecdote. She on the other hand gave me a strange look. I tried to save the situation by telling her that the name came from a doll in the movie Aliens, but I can't say that it improved her fake smile. Anyway, I name thee "Things I do while drinking beer". Cheers!