Clarification of stock into consommé has been around since the Middle Ages, but the classic method involves using a raft of ground meat, mirepoix and egg whites. There’s considerable room for failure as the stock won’t clear if the raft doesn’t form well, and it’s expensive as the clarification also takes away a lot of the flavor from the stock unless you use a lot of meat for the raft.

Enter syneresis, the phenomenon of liquid leeching out from gel matrices and the chemist’s answer to classic clarification: the impurities that cloud the stock get trapped in the gel matrix, while the clear filtrate flows out. Syneresis is another one of those phenomena that people have seen for a long time (e.g. cheese production, blood clots), but no one has really paid close attention to. You can see this really easily at room temperature in the lab with acrylamide gels, but it’s impractical to use in the kitchen because of the tiny issue of neurotoxicity (that and the extra problem for Y-chromosome bearing individuals who happen to like fully functional little pals).

The specific application of syneresis in food preparation for clarification purposes was first presented by Professor Gerd Klöck at the 2004 Inicon conference, and further modified by Heston Blumenthal (who makes stocks with additional gelatin content) and Wylie Dufresne (who added gelatin to liquids which didn’t have any). A variant using agar instead of gelatin was posted in 2008 by “Maestro@ forero“, and has since replaced gelatin to become my favorite method for clarification.

The advantages of syneresis over classical raft clarification is that it’s easy, it works with any liquid (Dufresne’s first success was with carrot juice), and it doesn’t take away any flavor from the liquid. It’s also economical in that you don’t have to spend the extra $ for meat, eggs and mirepoix. The disadvantage? Mouth feel, but that is easily corrected by the selective re-introduction of gelatin or other thickener to the clarified liquid.

I haven’t decided on what to use the quail juice for, but it’ll either go to quail “tea” or be further reduced to become the basis for a quail jus.

Ingredients

• quail carcasses (I used 60 quail carcasses for this demonstration)
• gelatin sheets (if using)
• agar (if using)

Preparation

Make a quail broth with the quail carcasses and water (carcasses + water, 6 hours or so of simmering). Aromatics are optional depending on what the broth is being used for. In this demonstration, 60 carcasses made up 1.5 L of finished broth, and no aromatics were used.

If using gelatin, weigh out enough gelatin to make a 0.5 % gelatin solution with the available volume of broth (5 g gelatin for 1.0 L liquid). If using agar, weigh out enough gelatin to make a 0.18 % agar solution with the available volume of broth (1.8 g for 1.0 L liquid). If the broth already contains adequate gelatin to set when cool, skip both additives and proceed with clarification (FYI – quail bones on their own do not have enough collagen to do this).

Make the gel matrix. For gelatin, bloom gelatin and add to heated stock and mix well. For agar, heat agar and stock until agar dissolves (> 80ºC). Pour the gel mix into small containers (e.g. no more than 125 mL / 1 cup) and let cool. Once cooled and set, freeze portions until fully solid. Place a fine mesh strainer into a container and line strainer with a coffee filter. Place frozen block of gel matrix into filter and let melt. Clear liquid will filter through while a semi-solid matrix will remain in the filter.

Notes

Agar filtration will take approximately 8-12 hours per block to melt and filter, while gelatin filtration will take approximately 1.5-3 days per block to melt and filter. Due to the time required, it’s imperative for food safety reasons to melt the blocks in the refrigerator (and use a fresh bowl/filter/strainer between blocks!). The gel matrix percentages are the maximum that one should use, and I recommend lowering the percentages slightly if the starting liquid is viscous. A fine balance such as a Tanita 1579D mini-scale (what I use) is a requirement to accurately weight out the gelatin or agar.

There will never be 100% recovery (because there is material trapped in the gel matrix) but in terms of yield, I generally get more liquid per block with agar than I do with gelatin. This is something to consider if the available starting material is limited in volume.

Note that the resultant liquid from any meat broth (poultry, beef, veal, pork, rabbit, mixed meat etc) will be a pale to dark yellow color. It’s an inherent property of the broth as you will still get this color if you don’t add any vegetables when making the broth. In comparison, the resultant liquid from seafood based broths (fish, shellfish) will be almost devoid of color unless you’ve added something with a tint (e.g. kombu, aromatics). Fruit and vegetable juices will have varying colors depending on what they are in the first place (e.g. I’ve made a grey-green asparagus juice and a pale pink radish juice), and their clarification works better with gelatin than with agar.

If you’re doing pineapple or papaya, you need to use agar.

butter (term)

From Wikipedia: butter (bŭt’ər) is a dairy product made by churning fresh or fermented cream or milk. It is generally used as a spread and a condiment, as well as in cooking applications such as baking, sauce making, and frying.

Butter is an emulsion of butterfat, water and milk proteins which remains a solid when refrigerated, but softens to a spreadable consistency at room temperature, and melts to a thin liquid consistency at 32–35°C (90–95°F). The density of butter is 911 kg/m³ (1535.5 lb/yd³). Most frequently made from cows’ milk, butter can also be manufactured from the milk of other mammals, including sheep, goats, buffalo, and yaks. Salt, flavorings and preservatives are sometimes added to butter. It generally has a pale yellow color, but varies from deep yellow to nearly white. Its color is dependent on the animal’s feed and is commonly manipulated with food colorings in the commercial manufacturing process, most commonly annatto or carotene.

Interesting definition, n’est pas?

Wikipedia fails to mention that butter is an item that makes other items tasty, much in the way that salt (the forbidden seasoning), duck fat, foie gras, and a whole host of umami-rich foodstuffs do.

I know someone who avoids butter like the plague because it’s the one invention in the history of the world that has brought on unmeasurable pain and human suffering by being the root cause of all human disease.

Okay, so that’s quite a bit of an exaggeration on my part, but he does avoid butter like the plague because he feels that it will significantly and negatively impact his cardiovascular risk, render his LDL-cholesterol uncontrollable, shorten his lifespan and leave him morbidly obese. And yes, my nose is continues to grow longer: the first two are more-or-less correct (they’re somewhat embellished versions of the actual reasons) but I made up the last two just to keep you reading.

My butter pal is actually the only Francophile I know or am aware of who 1) doesn’t like butter, 2) didn’t train at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and 3) cook. He does do the bicycle thing but I have yet to successfully convince him to agree to do the classic Elliott Erwitt “provence 55″ pose.

Of course, “I avoid butter” is pushes all the right buttons to trigger my perseverative behaviour to have me need to serve butter. Lakes of butter. The “must-do-this” urge wasn’t as bad as the time I heard ”I don’t eat foie gras because I’m a vegan”, but… lakes of butter. Lakes.

Butter as the heart of darkness transmogrified into eleven keywords:

• golden arches
• bittersweet
• butter
• tige
• rice
• oink
• thon
• autumne
• cinnamon
• crémeux
• crystals

That’s it. Eleven.

The Menu

So. Eleven keywords. Eleven dishes. One actually mentions butter. In reality, all of them contained butter. Accidentally omit this small detail until the entire meal has been consumed. Hilarity ensues.

Golden arches: two-component amuse-bouche (an amuse-bouche is one bite! one!) consisting of spiced golden pineapple and my version of Mickey D’s Big Mac. (recipe)

Bittersweet: tomato salad in the isakaya tomato tradition. (recipe)

Butter: osumashi; a clear soup make with fish and shellfish and agar-clarified lobster dashi. (recipe)

Tige: uzura-yaki, a grilled quail kebab. (recipe)

Rice: Chilean sea bass mushimono (sake-steamed Patagonian toothfish with enoki mushrooms). A great stupid-simple dish that’s always consistently good unless you use industrial sake. (recipe)

Oink: foie gras on an apple compote with a blowtorch pancetta-wrapped seared scallop. (recipe)

Thon: a deceptively-simple white risotto that in hindsight would take at least seven months of preparation time if I had to do it again. Risotto plated onto a painted anchovy reduction and instant coffee granules and topped with grated dried mojama de atun and Tanzanian dark chocolate. Did I mention that the chicken stock was made with chicken only (no mirepoix) and was agar-clarified before it was used to avoid adding color to the risotto? (recipe)

Autumne: a multi-component “ha-ha” dish, comprising confit de canard with pommes de terre à la sarladaise and cassoulet (one of the heaviest dishes in the French culinary repertoire), served as micro-portions because well, it wasn’t autumn and this was a tasting menu. (recipe for confit) (recipe for cassoulet UPDATE: this one is better than mine)

Cinnamon: five-spice “roast” duck, which is actually isn’t roasted. Sous-vide duck magrets served with super slow-roasted duck skin, hoisin reduction, baby bok choy and wild asparagus. (recipe)

Crémeux: cheese of course. Creamy cheese (one of them anyway). Look to the pralined almonds.

Crystals: melon granité, because it’s always nice to have something nice and refreshing to end a meal. It’s also cold enough not to be able to detect the flake of butter hidden within.

Wines

• Canard-Duchêne Grande Cuvée Charles VII Blanc de Noirs
• Kuromatsu-Hakushika Gouka Sennenju Junmai Daiginjō

The sparkler and the sake accompanied the first five elements. The remaining six were served with wines served as blind head-to-head pairings.

Why is that you say? I don’t drink a lot because of the lack of alcohol dehydrogenase and the intake limits means that I don’t adhere to the quality-price-ratio arguments. Well, I am lazy, but the reasoning is if I don’t drink that much in the first place, why waste effort hunting for something cheaper that tastes “almost” like what I like when I can just simply buy something that I like? I have had significant discussions over how spending more than $15 for a bottle of wine is a waste of money as there are no significant discernable qualitative differences between a sub-$15 “value leader” and something costlier. Ergo, because the wines I buy generally average in the $40-80 per bottle range, I’m technically throwing my money away in the oenological equivalent to making a donation to the NDP.

I don’t say that all less-expensive wines are bad, but I almost never experiment on this end of the market. In another light-bulb moment, I decided I could make things even more interesting by putting this “value” versus “just buy it” theory to the test at the same time I was poisoning everyone with industrial quantities of butter.

This was however, harder than it looks as it is very easy to go to any liquor store and pick the absolute worst wines available (e.g. Cabellero de Chili, Jouvenceau Cuvée Héritage, Harfang des neiges etc). In reality, it is incredibly difficult to identify “the best”  for under $15 because there are lakes of wine that compete at this price point. Case in point: the SAQ inventory system lists 1155 distinct wines for under $15 for a 750 mL bottle. I had to enlist some heavy-duty help from an oenophile friend for the value leaders (his selections make my selections look like they come from the “ends” bin). To keep it fair, I selected first, taking bottles between $40 and $80 per bottle (my purchase average) and excluding ringers like a 2004 Greenock Creek Creek Block Shiraz. My oenophile pal then paired against my selection. He did a great job as he not only picked good bottles, he went out of the way to match varietal to varietal and region to region to come up with the following pairings:

• 2005 Selbach-Oster Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Riesling Auslese versus the 2005 S.A. Prüm Essence Riesling Qualitätswein
• 2004 Clos Jordanne Le Clos Jordanne Pinot Noir versus the 2006 Château des Charmes Niagara-on-the-Lake Pinot Noir
• 2002 Au Bon Climat Knox Alexander Pinot Noir versus the 2007 Blackstone Monterey County Pinot Noir

In terms of tasting, it was pretty evident which were my bottles and which were the value leaders. The Pinot Noirs were particularly easy as mine displayed significant complexity and nuances that were absent from the competitors. 2005 was definitely a great year for German Rieslings as the Essence Riesling turned out to be a surprise treat: its acidity was very well-balanced, paired well with the food and ran very well against the Selbach-Oster. The Auslese was slightly more complementary with the food, which is probably why it edged the QbA out.

Photos

Click <here> to view the event gallery without all this blah-blah.

[View with PicLens]

Aftermath

So what did I learn? Not much of the butter front because I love butter. I was really tired by the end of the evening and cleaning was nightmarish with hand-wash everything not to mention the multiple sequential loads in the dishwasher. In hindsight, there were probably three dishes too many and the progression was not as harmonious as it could have been but every single dish was strong in its own right. And no one detected butter even when it was overtly presented.

I don’t think I would ever do blind head-to-head tastings again since it takes too many wine glasses, uses too much table space and it is really a whack-load of alcohol. There were actually two additional wine pairings (a red and a white) which I had to bail from as everyone was already loaded.

That flight to Amsterdam the next day was tough sledding.

Confit de canard avec les pommes de terre à la sarladaise (rough translation: duck slowly poached in duck fat with potatoes pan-fried in duck fat topped with persillade) is one of those classic dishes from the French South-West which has since become a bistro staple found just about anywhere.

This variation replaces the duck with quail confit because why bother with mere duck when one can make confit with micro-drumsticks; it also keeps incredibly well after it’s made (just leave it submerged/sealed in fat). A persillade is a sauce which in its most basic form consists of garlic, parsley and oil.

Ingredients

• six quail
• coarse sea salt
• turbinado sugar
• black peppercorns
• juniper berries
• dried thyme
• dried bay leaf
• duck fat
• potatoes
• garlic
• fresh flat-leaf parsley

Preparation of the quail confit

Remove the leg quarters (this is the complete drumstick and thigh) from each quail; reserve the remainder of the quail for another purpose. Wash leg quarters, pat dry with paper towel and place in a glass dish in one layer.

Add 2 tablespoons coarse sea salt, 1/2 teaspoon sugar, 6-8 peppercorns and three juniper berries to a mortar and pestle. Grind the mixture until it becomes a coarse even powder. Add 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme. Mix thoroughly. Sprinkle this mixture over the quail leg quarters, ensuring that the entire surface area of the quail is coated. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 3 hours. Remove quail from salt cure, quickly rinse in fresh water to remove excess cure, and pat dry with a paper towel.

Melt duck fat in an oven-proof pot (a small Le Creuset or Corning Vision dutch oven work well) until it is just liquid (do not boil!). The amount of fat required is the volume necessary to submerge the quail entirely in fat once placed in the pot. Add one bay leaf and one peeled clove of garlic to the fat. Carefully add the quail to the duck fat. Once all the quail leg quarters are immersed in oil, cover the pot and place in a 167ºF / 75ºC oven (use an oven thermometer) for 6 hours. Alternate method: seal quail, bay leaf, garlic and duck fat into a plastic bag and place in a 158ºF / 70ºC circulating water bath for 10 hours.

Remove pot from oven and transfer quail into a glass container in a single layer. Sieve duck fat over the quail so that the quail is again submerged in fat. Let cool until fat is cloudy, and then refrigerate. If using sous-vide, immediately ice down the bag in a container of ice water. For best results, quail confit should be left to set up at least 48 hours before service.

Preparation of the potatoes

Place the potatoes into a steamer and steam until almost cooked. Remove from steamer, cut into thick slices and fry potato in duck fat until both sides of the potato slices are browned and crisp (the inside of the potato should be fluffy and fully-cooked). Remove from duck fat and sprinkle with fleur de sel or other flaky sea salt.

Preparation of the persillade

Finely mince two or three large cloves of garlic, using a little salt as an abrasive to assist with mincing. Mince a large handful of flat-leaf parsley. Mix the garlic and parsley together, and add several tablespoons of melted liquid duck fat.

Service

Remove quail from fat and reheat in a low oven (e.g.  225ºF / 107ºC); this step will take at least 20 minutes, which should be adequate to finish making the potatoes. To brown/crisp the quail skin, pass the flame of a blowtorch over the quail skin. Plate fried potato and spoon persillade over potatoes. Plate quail over or beside potato.

Note: the number of quail leg quarters to serve depends on what this particular plate is being used for and how generous you feel (it’s still a lot of quail to section).

Wine pairing

Though the traditional confit wines are from appellations of the South-West, I am not a fan of these wines. This particular confit goes very well with something like a 2005 Quail’s Gate Family Reserve Pinot Noir (Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada).