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elksperiments
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October 09, 2002
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Doing it right this time
I'm not a very experienced cook. I've never made my own puff pastry dough, prepared a meringue, or baked a souffle. And I don't have a stable of recipes ready for every occasion. What all of this means is that every time I throw a dinner party or have people over for a holiday, I must come up with a menu and try it all out first. Because even the simplest-seeming dishes are sure to have some tricky bit that can trip me up.
In addition, I'm too stubborn to just follow a recipe out of a book. Despite the fact that I have very little cooking knowledge, I have ideas that I find it difficult to repress.
This means that the weeks preceding the event are usually a flurry of cooking, testing, and revising. It also means that sometimes everyone in the house is sick of a particular dish by the time the dinner party arrives -- and we have to eat it again.
On top of it all, I've been very bad about keeping records of my dry runs. As a result, The final meal is sometimes not as good as the practice meal.
I have a dinner party planned for the Saturday after Thanksgiving, as you may already know, and I plan to do it all differently this time. For one thing, I'm starting earlier. This will enable me to spread the practice sessions out so that no one gets sick of the dishes. And I'm going to be more diligent about recording my efforts this time.
[I must admit that I've already slacked off in this respect. this entry is being written many days after the fact, and I did not take notes at the time, so the details will be fuzzy. But I'm drawing a line in the sand. I'll be good from now on!]
Elksperiments
Last week the only dish I knew that I wanted to make for Thanksgiving was a roast of some kind -- either some kind of venison or wild boar. Since I've made a wild boar roast once before -- although I daresay I could do it much better this time -- I decided to go with venison. I liked the idea of an elk roast, so I found a place with decent pricing to order from. They sell an inexpensively priced roast (shoulder, I thought) as well as sirloin butt roast. I figured I'd order the cheap one, and if it works out, get the more expensive one for the actual party.
The meat arrived on Saturday. I'd ordered around seven pounds' worth, which looked to be about nine to twelve servings, so I cut it into three chunks and put two in the freezer and one in the refrigerator for later.
Poivrade
One thing I'd decided to do was give my copy of James A. Peterson's Sauces its first outing in my kitchen. If you're unfamiliar, it's a classic reference text on sauce-making. I've used it before for general guidance, but I've never actually tried to make a sauce out of it. This is because the recipies -- in the true French culinary tradition -- are an extraordinary amount of trouble. Some of them require four whole cows, two thousand dollars' worth of equipment, and take a team of twelve more than twenty-three days to make.
Okay, maybe not that much trouble. But any recipe that takes over four hours and requires you to make a stew and throw out all of the solids in order to make a sauce is a bit heavyweight for everyday cooking, ne c'est pas? But that's French cooking. If the volume of solids that you throw away isn't at least three times the volume of what you retain, it wasn't invented by a Frenchman.
Not that I'm saying they're wasteful. Most of the time we're talking about bones, shells, and trimmings, or at worst, cheap and plentiful vegetables. It's just that the sheer volume of what you must have lying around in order to make some of these things is staggering. It's tough to find two recipes you can make without owning a walk-in refrigerator.
Anyway. After skimming the book a few weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to make a version of Grand Veneur sauce, which is itself a variation on Poivrade. Let me paraphrase the process for you:
Peterson's Poivrade recipe begins the day before you make your meal, with you marinating the roast you're to cook. The marinade has its own recipe. Obviously, I didn't have time to do that, but fortunately Peterson suggested white wine as a substitute for people lacking foresight or planning skills.
Next, you are to brown some beef or veal trimmings in a little oil in a large stockpot, then add bunch of aromatic vegetables -- carrots, celery, and onions/shallots/leeks if you're not cooking for Rebecca -- and saute. Next, you add a quart of stock, some vinegar, and some of the marinade you used for the meat (or white wine, you slacker). Cover and let it cook for three hours, skimming oil and scum off of the top as you go along.
Starting the Elk
About three quarters into that process, I decided to start roasting the Elk.
Now my primary experience with roasts has been with pork shoulder. Typically I'll braise a pork shoulder in the oven at 160-170 degrees for a few hours, depending on how large it is. So I pretty much did the same thing with this one. I used a braising liquid similar to the one I use for pork. But I figured it would only take maybe an hour and a half, because it was only a two and a half pound roast. And I'd done a little homework -- I knew that elk is extraordinarily lean and would cook quickly. I wish I'd paid more attention to that point.
Some recipes suggested that you put strips of bacon over the roast to baste it as it cooks, because it's so lean. I didn't have any bacon, so instead I poked some holes in with a knife and worked in some duck fat. Then I stuck it into the oven, intending to check it in an hour and see how it was doing.
Poivrade, part deux
So you've let three hours and 212 degrees work their magic on your beef and vegetable mixture. What you have now is something akin to a weak beef stew. And now you're ready to begin making the sauce.
You begin by straining out all of the solids from the stew and throwing them away. Add some veal demi-glace and more of the marinade to the stew. Reduce, reduce, reduce. Then add ten or fifteen cracked peppercorns to the mix and cook for ten minutes. Strain the mixture again. Then continue to reduce until the mixture has appropriate body. Expect this part of the process to take another hour or more.
And how much sauce are you expected to have after doing all that work, and adding a quart of this and two cups of that and a cup of this and 1/2 cup of that?
Two cups.
Mein Gott. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I didn't reduce it that far, and wound up with four or so cups of Poivrade. I know, I know, it probably would have been twice as good if I'd made half as much, but you know, it's also been good to have the sauce with nearly every meal I've had this week.
Elk again
After an hour I checked on the elk. Using my handy instant-read digital meat thermometer -- an indispensable kitchen tool for the omnivore, by the way -- I determined that the roast was about 160 degrees. Just perfect! Hey, stop laughing. It's not funny. It would have been perfect if it was a pork roast.
Instead, it was dry and chewy and totally gray. Later I read that elk should be cooked in the 130-140 degree range at most, leaving it rare to medium-rare. (That is, unless you're going to all the way and roast it for hours and hours in order to break down the connective tissue. And that might be an option for a shoulder roast, but there's absolutely no reason to do that for a sirloin butt roast or another good cut of meat, and I wanted to try out the method that I'd actually be using in the meal.)
Yeah, I know, I should have known this. Oh, well -- there were two more elk roasts in the freezer; I'd have two more tries to get it right.
Next was the matter of the braising liquid. Normally, with a pork roast, I make a simple sauce from it. I decided to do the same thing and see which was better, and whether or not the Grand Veneur sauce was really worth all of the trouble.
Sauce Grand Veneur
Making Grand Veneur from a Poivrade is a simple matter. Thicken the Poivrade with starch (or, as is traditional, blood). Add some currant jelly. Let it cook down some, take it off of the heat, and whisk in some cream.
And it was soooooo good.
Let me tell you friends, this is the first time I've made a sauce that could rival many a restaurant sauce. I had Rebecca and Darrell taste both sauces with the elk without telling them which was which, and the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the Grand Veneur.
Excellent. Now I just need to get the roast right.
October 9, 2002 in main_dishes, old_site, recipes | Permalink
