Have you ever tasted a really bad risotto? One that is mushy, overcooked and just terrible? Well, I have to confess that we managed to make such a risotto in our cooking club last friday.. Ofcourse I can also tell you that I did not personally cook this risotto and in fact a couple of us (including myself) were very sure that we should wait with the risotto… But that is just excuses right, since ultimately we were all responsible for the end result.

Filet of beef with tarragon sauce and juniper berries

We had an interesting menu this time with the main being wild duck with garlic risotto and red wine sauce. The entire menu was:

• Goose liver cappuccino
• Beef tartare with tarragon sauce and juniper berries
• Wild duck with mushroom risotto, red wine sauce and chanterelle puree (whatever happened to that puree by the way??)
• Spicesicecream with orange syrup and mango

Gooseliver cappucino with mushrooms on toast

Ofcourse the first item was immediately cause for discussion as goose liver is a controversial topic and a few people refuse to eat goose liver which is fine. I’m not a big fan of duck liver and/or goose liver but I did want to taste this cappuccino so I did eat it. I read this entire article the other day on goose liver and the fact that it can be sustainable and animal friendlier then it is currently produced but still… it remains a difficult one. I’m glad that a lot of the practices we have seen in the past have improved when it comes to animal cruelty and food production but there are still a couple out there, that really should be changed. In the end it is also for a large part down to the fact of what we are willing to eat and what we are not willing to eat. If no one buys it anymore, what’s the point of producing right?

Saskia, Mike, Tom. Winfried and myself were assigned to both the starter cappuccino as well as the main. The boys started on the starter while Saskia and I – for some reason – decided it would be a good thing to start to clean all the ducks… I had never used a wild duck before but there is a noticeable difference between a wild one and a tame duck. Usually when you buy duck breast it would be from a tame duck with a very thick fatlayer on the breast. Wild ducks don’t have such a layer unless it is shortly before winter.

Yep that is me not paying attention while Mathijs is showing us how to dissect the duck.. Ofcourse I had to ask him again later..

I also thought the taste of the wild duck was much ‘gamier’ then the tame one.. I definitely prefer the taste of the tame one to the wild one, but then again it could have been our preparation that was wrong. I just didn’t like the entire dish one bit… Bleh… And it was sooooo much work! We cleaned the ducks, removed the breasts from the karkasses as well as the legs. Then we started braising the legs slowly in duckfat, and the karkasses went into the stockpot. In the meantime we had to cook whole garlic cloves in milk for about ten minutes and then transfer to the oven to slowly roast to become soft and tender to go into the risotto. We chopped and we cleaned and we did lots of stuff and ended up with a shitty dish… O

Saskia looking so thrilled to clean the duck..lol

hahaha… Well we did learn a lot of stuff in the process but I was slightly disappointed by the outcome. The risotto had been on far too long. It takes only 20 minutes or so to make a risotto but we put it on before having the second course (of which I will give you the recipe below) and then it had to be kept warm in between meaning it was on the stove way too long. Then Winfried decided not cleaning the chanterelles was a good thing (…) so there was sand in them.. I didn’t like the taste of the duck and that was the end of our work..

Remco and Janis doing the filet of beef

For me the real winners were the filet of beef (see recipe below) and the dessert which was delicious (even though the spices in the icecream got sort of left out..lol and the composition split so it had to be reheated to come together again (which worked by the way) but was still very delicious! I might share that recipe some other day cause this post is already becoming very long.

All in all, we had a great time, lots of laughs and well not all food was as good as we hoped but that is what we’re there to learn right? (that and to drink wine and have fun…)

Beef tartare with tarragon sauce, horseradish and rocket

Print recipe

• Print with all photos
• Print with main photo
• Print text only

Serves:	10
Prep time:	30 minutes
Cook time:	15 minutes
Total time:	45 minutes
Meal type:	Appetizer
Misc:	Serve Cold
Region:	Worldwide

Ingredients

• 600g Filet of beef
• 3 tablespoons Olive oil
• 1 bunch tarragon
• 1 piece sjalots
• 1 clove garlic
• white wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon chicken fond
• olive oil
• 8g juniper berries
• 3g caraway seed
• 1 teaspoon horseradish (from a jar)
• rocket
• 2 slices dark rye bread
• butter
• seasalt
• pepper

Directions

Chop the filet of beef. Don't make it too fine, add a little bit of olive oil and leave in the fridge, covered until ready to use.

Remove the tarragon leaves from the stalks. Chop the shallot, put both into the magi mix and grind finely. Put in a bowl. Add the vinegar and chicken fond. Mix until well combined. Add the olive oil little by little until it starts to resemble a cream. Keep at room temperature until ready to serve.

Roast juniper berries and caraway seed in dry pan and ground once they cool down in a pestle and mortar.

Cut the second shallot into thin rings. Crumble the rye bread and bake until crispy in some butter.

For presentation: Use a big cold plate and either make a ring or square of your tartare. Divide rye bread, horseradish and shallot rings over the meat. Briefly drag the rocket through some olive oil and put 5 rocketleaves in a half circle around the meat. Drape some of the tarragoncream at the foot of your circle. Sprinkle some of the white spots on your plate with the juniper berry powder

Note

Delicious little dish which is great if you have a beautiful piece of beef. The horseradish here really adds to the dish so while you still have to use it sparingly (it's strong!!) it does bring out the flavors.

And here it is... the terrible dish from hell..

Related Posts:

• What would the chicken be without the egg?
• Potato cakes and cooking club #6
• Tarly salad with orange hazelnut dressing – living leaner
• Moo Shu – Daring Cooks October 2011
• Yogurt and pomegranate dessert

Grilled duck breast with madeira sauce, glazed turnips and potatoes

Due to all sorts of different circumstances it was so much longer then we planned before our second black box experiment took place. Number one was Tom’s turn to make something, but now it was my turn! I got to open the Black Box on thursday, one day earlier because of the Queensday celebrations and the fact that not all stores would be open on saturday. So it made more sense to check the contents a day earlier. For those that do not know; the black box is all about cooking with surprise ingredients. Tom and I take turns; I either pick ingredients for him or he picks them for me. We don’t know upfront what will be in the box and we get to hear about the contents a day before we’re expected to make a menu out of it. We’re allowed to buy additional ingredients at this point but we might chance the rules in the future!

So what was in the box?

Me opening the box

First of all there was a duck breast fillet, turnips, roseval potatoes, a bottle of Madeira and to top it of there was this white cloth… Hmm, what’s with the cloth? Well apparently that is for passing liquids and clarifying them where needed. The contents did not shock me (thankfully) but there were two ingredients I had never used before; one being the duck breast and the other being the turnips. O well and the Madeira but that was pretty straight forward. For some reason I had never really thought about duck breast other then the Peking duck you can get at the Chinese restaurants here and which tend to be… less then perfect. I didn’t really think I would like duck… Don’t know why exactly but it’s just one of those ingredients where you have a certain idea without really knowing if it is true. And boy, did I turn out to be wrong when it comes to duck breast!! I absolutely and totally loved it! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It didn’t take me too long to figure out what to make. I wanted to roast the duck breast and marinate it in some spices and herbs. (I used a mix of thyme, mandarin zest and ginger) Having never tasted turnips I had to do quite some searching on the internet and then decided I wanted to glaze those after having cooked them for a bit. The roseval potatoes would be grilled in the oven and with the madeira I was gonna make a sauce to serve with the duck.

But what to do with that strainer? I was gonna use vegetable stock for the sauce but that didn’t require straining. So in the end I decided I was gonna be using it for straining rhubarb.

Rhubarb?? I hear you think… Well yes… maybe not the most logical choice and on hindsight also not the best but hey, it kind of worked! My idea was to make a pannacotta (my all time favorite dessert) and make a little layer on top of clarified rhubarb. I had already made the pannacotta in the morning so it could stiffen a bit before adding the second layer.

Not so appetizing looking rhubarb mush

I made fresh rhubarb compote, took half of that and put it in the blender to make it as fine as possible. I then put that odd colored mixture and put it in the strainer. Ofcourse thinking back it might actually have worked better if I hadn’t put it through the blender and overall the mixture was still a bit too thick to pass through a strainer so it took forever to form some sort of reasonable amount of liquid but I ended up having enough for my pannacottas.

And yes I will share the pannacotta recipe including the recipe for the rhubarb compote with you later.

The madeira sauce was delicious with the duck and the duck itself.. Wow… I couldn’t believe it was so tasty. It had the perfect pink color and the skin was nice and crispy. If you want to give duck a go… I would urge you to do that. It is so much better then what they serve at the downtown Chinese restaurant!!

Roasted Duck breast with Madeira Sauce

5.0 from 2 reviews

Print

Recipe type: Main

Author: Simone van den Berg

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 20 mins

Total time: 35 mins

Serves: 2

Roasting the duck breast on it’s fatty skin gives it a lovely crispness and the madeira sauce is perfect for the duck!

Ingredients

• 450 gr duck breast
• zest of two clementines (mandarines)
• 1 tsp of ground ginger
• 3 sprigs of thyme
• Madeira sauce
• 1 onion
• butter
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tbsp of tomato puree
• 700 ml vegetable stock
• 2 tbsp of all purpose flour
• 3 tbsp of madeira

Instructions

1. Put all the spices for the duck together.
2. Slice the fat on the breast of the duck in deep but not into the meat.
3. Rub the spices into the duckfillet and let it marinate in the fridge for at least two hours or up till 24 hrs before roasting.
4. For final preparation heat some oil and butter in a frying pan until hot. Put the breast in at the fat side and let it bake for 10 minutes on that side. Once the fat is crips, turn the duck around and bake for another 5 minutes on the meatside.
5. Take out of the pan and let it rest (covered) for 10 minutes before slicing.

MADEIRA SAUCE

1. Finely chop the onion.
2. Melt the butter in a large saucepan and slowly cook the onion together with the bay leaf for about 5 minutes. The onion should be soft and golden but not too brown or burned.
3. Add two tbsp of flour and continue baking until the flour starts to brown. Be careful not to burn the flour!
4. Add the vegetable stock a little bit at the time and make sure it is smooth before adding another bit of stock. Continue until all stock is used up and leave to boil until it thickens. Add the tomato puree and continue boiling until it has the consistency you prefer. Add the madeira into the mix.
5. You can make this sauce in advance and heat up when you want to use it.
6. Season with salt and pepper if you want.

Notes

The recipe for the sauce makes much more then what you need for 2 people. I haven’t figured out what to do with the leftovers but if you have a suggestion let me know!

Google Recipe View Microformatting by Easy Recipe

1.2.4

Rhubarb pannacotta

 

 

Related Posts:

• Veal shanks, Jerusalem artichoke, daikon and Dutch eggnog; Black Box #4
• Punjabi chicken curry
• Salmon en croute: Daring Cooks december 2009
• How not to cook risotto – cooking club!
• What crayfish and melons got to do with eachother…

Pheasant wrapped with coppa di parma ready to go in the oven

Let me first start by saying that this post is not for the faint of heart as some of the photos are quite bloody. If you are a vegan or vegetarian probably best not to read on! If you are – however- interested in finding out how to skin a hare then please read on..

I was a little anxious about this lesson as we could have gotten just about anything here and my fear was of walking in and finding an entire deer lying on the kitchen counter. It wasn’t a deer, but instead we had two hare, two pheasants and two wild ducks lying there completely intact as you can see below. There was also some pieces of wild boar meat and some deermeat, but that was both already processed.

Now I like to think of myself not being too squeamish, but hmmm, not sure about all these little furry and fluffy creatures on the table as I knew what would be coming next! You see; I grew up with a friend whose parents owned a farm and as a kid I used to be at that farm almost every week. If you live at a farm you know that chickens eventually get slaughtered and since they lived close to the an area with lots of bunnies you even realize that bunnies get shot too. So I had killed and cleaned chicken before and I had even seen someone skin a bunny before. Still…. that was all different from the experience of last night! Probably a good thing too that it was the last lesson and not the first. Someone even suggested of starting with this lesson in the beginners course; you’d would – for sure – not have any people left after the course..lol..

After Rob had explained to us the differences between the various types of game we went to the kitchen area to watch the skinning and cleaning process on one of the hares. Now before I go into that; there are people opposed to hunting and people that are ok with hunting. I will not go into the right or wrong here, just to say that I used to be really against hunting but I have come to see the other side as well and are a bit more relaxed about the whole subject. I mean; if you think about it; If you are a meat-eating person your anonymous piece of meat that you buy at the butcher used to be a live animal as well and I can bet that your cow or pig probably had a lousier life than the hare you see lying in the photo above. So in terms of animal friendly (not getting into the whole pro or con hunting discussion!!) the hare would win over the average cow anyday, right?

Skinning and cleaning a hare

But still…. I had to swallow once or twice when Rob started skinning the hare and part of that was due to the horrible stench coming from the hare. Apparently real game can smell that way when it has been hanging for the appropriate amount of time to tenderize the meat. In this case the hare was shot roughly ten days ago and you probably get used to that smell but it was disgusting! The first thing he did was cut a little slit into the hare’s neck so that you can put a finger underneath the skin. Then the process of stripping the animal of it’s little furry coat is remarkably simple. Just make sure you remove the lower part of all four of the legs otherwise you won’t be able to pull of the skin. Once skinned you can remove the head, which then makes it look a lot more like something you can buy at your butcher… But overall, a pretty bloody process! Also you can see where the hare was shot as those parts have  hematomas of where the coagulated blood is sitting. That is also where you will most likely find the little bullets that killed it, so make sure to remove those!

After the hare we got a demonstration of how to clean a duck (nightmare with all those feathers!) and then it was time to take it into practice… At which point I have to make a confession; I chickened out.

I am ok with watching someone dissecting a hare, duck or pheasant, but to do it myself I just didn’t feel like it! Instead I took photos and well, I did pluck a little bit of duck, but that is as far as it goes. I mean, the chance that I will ever be cleaning my own hare is not so big. Unless I am forced to live in the wild and will need to live of the animals that I catch with my bare hands; in which case the knowledge will come in handy.. lol.. In fact I was not the only one having a little bit of trouble with this lesson as only Arjen and Mike where brave enough to start on a pheasant and hare, respectively. Francoise cleaned a lot of the insides of the hare (to be used for something) which deserves an applause in itself as the stench was overwhelming but the rest of the group stayed with the safer meats that were already cleaned (the wild boar and deer)

The guys with their respective trophee...

And obviously at some point some of it had to be eaten. Now I found that the problem with the hare is the smell really. Once you have smelled that stench it stays in your nose and even after having been prepared in the oven we could all still smell it. And since taste is for a large part smell I had a hard time liking it! The boar wrapped with prosciutto was lovely and delicious, the filled boar was also great. The pheasant that Mike is holding on the left was delicious as well (that is the first photo of this post as well) and the coppa di parma really added a nice little crunch to it. The duck has a liver taste to it and I didn’t like the skin as that was thick and fat. Not so tasty, but the meat itself was ok. You wouldn’t expect a duck to have red meat now would you? But it does have red meat.

So in terms of our last lesson it certainly was a memorable one! It was the first time I did hardly anything in the kitchen though which is a little weird. Well I cut some veggies for a dish that we didn’t eat in the end, but that’s about it.

And now it is the end of our course again, such a shame really. There is still sooooo much more to learn, so I hope there will be another one after this.

Rob also gives summer courses in France where you spend a week cooking and/or doing other fun activities (painting, fishing etc.) as well. You go to the market in the morning and learn what to buy and then how to prepare all that in the afternoon. Sounds like a lot of fun and definitely something we will be doing next year. At the moment the farm where this will all be taking place is still under renovation to make it suitable to host guests but it should be finished beginning of spring next year. Courses start somewhere in june, but you can check the website for more details if you’re interested!

Pheasant with hare feet...

Related Posts:

• How not to cook risotto – cooking club!
• Kookstudio
• Cooking class 6; The grand finale!
• Cooking class, lesson 5; patisserie
• Cooking class lesson 3: fish