We decided that France simply couldn’t be just one meal, so we planned one more.  This one was substantially less complex than the first one, but still consisted of dishes that (we hoped) were quintessentially French.

For our entrée, we decided to go with Magret de Canard, or “Duck Breast.”  As we’ve mentioned in the past, we are far from the first people to have the “cook the world in alphabetical order,” idea.  There’s a number of blogs dedicated to similar projects, probably the most famous of which is “United Noshes.” We consult the various blogs for ideas, but try hard not to simply copy any one of them.

That said, when that blog describes a dish as “I’m not sure I’ve ever made anything this delicious before”, we decided it was definitely worth a try.

So we headed back to our favorite butcher where we got the demi-glace and the ostrich, and bought ourselves a duck breast.  The recipe calls for first scoring the fat in a crosshatch pattern:

Next a marinade in honey, orange juice, and thyme.  A quick trip outside to the planter box for some fresh thyme, and the duck was ready for its overnight soak.

The next day, the duck was dried off, and then tossed into a skillet to render off much of the fat. One duck breast produces a LOT of fat.  This picture is still early in the process – there was plenty more coming.

Which is fine – duck fat is amazing, and we used it to make potatoes later in the week.

What is SUPPOSED to happen at this point is that you flip the duck breast over, and the other side is a lovely golden color.  What ACUTALLY happened is that the other side was pitch black.  Oops.  The good news is, we’re moving soon, and our new place has a gas range, which should allow for better heat control.

Either way, once flipped, the duck gets seared briefly on the meat side, then tossed into a hot oven to finish.  Once again, a thermometer is your friend.

This is a Bluetooth grill thermometer we picked up last year, and let me tell you, it’s amazing.  Especially when your oven sucks and takes three times as long to get things to the proper temperature as the recipe says it will.  Did I mention we’re moving?

At any rate, once the duck came back out and was sliced, it was absolutely gorgeous inside, and the slightly (ok, very) singed crust didn’t hurt the flavor at all.

For a side dish, we went with a very simple mushrooms provençal. What makes something unambiguously provençal?  Well, obviously, Herbes de Provence.

I’ve made various versions of this blend in the past, but they had it at the duck store, so we decided to just get it pre-made.  The actual recipe couldn’t be simpler – sauté mushrooms in butter and herbs until done.

And here was the meal, including a cheese plate that probably looks awfully familiar if you read last week’s entry. We also bought a nice French Pinot Noir, since that’s the wine everyone says you should drink with duck.

And it was pretty darn good.  Not life-changing like last week’s meal, but better than a lot of things we make.  The duck, in particular, while it didn’t pick up as much of the flavor of the marinade as one might hope, was a lovely texture.  The herbs did a nice job of accenting the mushrooms.

We did also make a classic French dessert, tart au citron. The crust for this is a pate sucrée, or “sugar crust.”  It’s got a LOT of butter, so it gets rested for a while in the fridge before you roll it out, and then rested for ANOTHER half an hour afterwards, because you don’t want the butter melting out too soon.  It needs to be COLD when it goes in the oven.

We didn’t take any pictures of mixing the dough, because it’s not very exciting, but here’s the crust all rolled out and ready to bake:

And here it is filled with random desi chickpeas, because we don’t have any pie weights.  Sorry, chickpeas, but you were rendered inedible for a good cause!

The chickpeas are part of a process called “blind baking”, where you weigh down the crust and bake it first in order to stop it puffing up too much.  You also want to bake it before you put the filling in so it doesn’t get soggy.

About that filling.

The filling for this tart is technically a custard, so it used eggs.  LOTS of eggs.  Four whole eggs, AND four more yolks to boot.  Plus butter, a metric ton of lemon juice, and the zest from two whole lemons. (It’s French, it HAS to be metric.)

This gets cooked until it’s thick, and then poured into the tart crust for a final bake.  And here’s the final product.

It was SUPER tart and delicious.  If you’re looking for a dessert to impress people once it’s safe to once again impress people in your region, this is an excellent choice.  Also, it looks like Pac Man once you’ve cut a few slices out, so there’s that.

And that’s it for France!  We could obviously cook for months and never finish exploring the whole country, but we do need to move on.  The pace may slow a bit here as we get ready to move, but we HAVE finished the Fs, so next up, Gabon!

Recipes:
Magret de Canard
Mushrooms Provençal
Tart au Citron

I have to admit – we were intimidated by France.  It’s hard to think of a food culture with more of a reputation for being challenging.  To some extent, that’s definitely Western bias – Thai food, for example, is easily as complicated in terms of balancing of different types of flavors.  But hey – we’re westerners.  We grew up with French cooking held up as the epitome of sophistication and precision.

How to even know where to start?  Well, two weeks ago we consulted with Puppy Shredder.  This week, it was clearly time to call Princess Beetch.

She was gracious enough to make a lot of great suggestions, and based on her input and some other research, we decided to make two meals.  No particular sorting by region or type of food – just two collections of dishes that sounded good to us.

So to start out this week’s adventure, we went shopping!  Unlike for Asian cuisines, we don’t need to visit a specialized “French” store for any special ingredients.  Instead, we visited a number of stores specializing in the ingredients themselves: a cheesemonger, a meatmonger, a chocolatemonger, and a coffeemonger. (I choose to assume that you can mong anything, not just a short list including iron, war, and whores.)

From left to right, top to bottom – cheese, chocolate, coffee, cheese, cheese, demiglace, and cheese.

Our first dish was to be Entrecôte à la Bordelaise, a pan fried steak topped with Bordelaise sauce.

French sauces are, of course, a large part of the terror (not terroir) associated with the cuisine.  Bordelaise, for example, is a reduction of Bordeaux wine with shallots and bone marrow.  So far, so good, right?  Then you look more carefully at the ingredient list, and there’s one line: demi glace. Well, OK, let’s make demi glace.  What’s that?

Demi glace, is a mix of Espagnol sauce and part brown stock.

OK – what’s Espagnol sauce?

Espagnol sauce is made from brown stock and roux.

But what’s brown stock in particular?

Brown stock is made from veal bones, ham knuckles, pork rind, aromatics…

…oh my god.

Proper demiglace involves boiling pounds of bones and gallons of liquids for hours, as it turns out.  And there is just no shortcut to getting that extreme depth of flavor.

Except – we did find a shortcut: we just bought some.  Turns out our friendly neighborhood butcher where we bought the steak and the beef marrow bones (and the ostrich a few weeks back) makes their own and sells it in frozen cubes.

The other key ingredient in a Bordelaise sauce is, of course, Bordeaux.  Hilariously, we found one called “Château Canada.”  Yes, it’s from France.

OK, let’s make some sauce.  Once you have the demiglace in hand, the sauce itself isn’t too bad.  You start by extracting the marrow from a few beef bones.

This gets boiled for just a little while, until it turns a really unattractive shade of grey.  Who cares? Marrow is delicious.

In a pan, you sauté some shallots in butter, then add the wine and some thyme.  Happily, our little garden box has been producing thyme like crazy, so we had some right off the stalk.

I promise the actual sauce was less blurry.  We’ll just call this an action shot and move on.

And move on we do – after this cooks most of the liquid off, you add the demiglace, cook some more, and finally add the bone marrow and cook THAT together.  You’re left with a dense, dense sauce, full of shallots and luscious flavor.  It also foamed a bit yellow for some reason – no idea why. The final sauce didn’t stay that color when it was taken off the heat.

What are we PUTTING this sauce on, anyway? Well, a steak!  The cooking process is so simple and so fast, that I didn’t remember to take a picture of it before it was done.  Just sear the heck out of a good quality ribeye steak for a few minutes on each side, use a damn thermometer instead of guessing, and you’re done.  Here it is topped with the sauce.

One dish down.  What else did we make?  To go with our steak, we decided to make tartiflettte, which is a potato dish made with cheese and bacon.  Traditionally, the cheese to use would be Reblochon, which is usually pretty hard to come by in North America.

The good new is that the cheese shop we visited did have authentic Reblochon in stock.  The bad news is that it was $40 a kilogram, and the recipe called for a full wheel’s worth.  Cheese is EXPENSIVE in Canada, y’all.  We opted to sacrifice authenticity in the name of not paying more for the cheese than for the steak, and got a lovely Quebecois cheese called Fou du Roy instead.

The tartiflette is not too tough to assemble.  You boil some potatoes, and while they’re going, you also fry some lardons, which is a fancy way of saying chopped bacon.

The bacon fat (never waste bacon fat) is then used to fry some onions and garlic, and the pan is deglazed with vermouth.  Then you just stack everything up in a casserole – potatoes, bacon, onions, potatoes, bacon, onions.

But now then the magic happens.  First you pour on heavy cream:

And then the cheese.  So much cheese.

This gets baked in the oven until… well, words don’t suffice.

Please do not lick the screen.  It sure does look delicious though, doesn’t it?

So this was our main course – Entrecôte à la Bordelaise and Tartiflette. Served with the remainder of the Bordeaux, of course.

Rather than render a verdict yet, I’m going to continue to describe the rest of the meal, and give our overall impressions at the end.  Next up – cheese course! (A traditional French meal might have been preceded by a soup, and followed at this point by a salad, but we only had so many brain cells available.  Cheese involves nothing more complicated than unwrapping cheese.)

Upper left, Roquefort de Papillon, described by cheese expert Steve Jenkins as “The reason god invented caves.”  Lower left Tomme de Savoy, and right side Bouche de Lucay.  We were COMPLETELY full at this point.  So of course it was time to eat dessert.

And for dessert, it was time at last to turn to Julia Child, who we had managed to avoid consulting up to this point.  (I mean, technically, we made this first, but let’s not break the narrative flow here any worse than this parenthetical already has.)

Julia Child’s chocolate mousse recipe is complicated, but worth it.  Step one: butter, good chocolate, and coffee.

Melt in a double boiler, set aside.  Step two: egg yolks, sugar, and rum.

Whip over a double boiler, then continue to beat in an ice bath. We’re at three bowls and a saucepan and counting so far.

Next step – egg whites, vanilla, and a pinch of salt. (Didn’t get a separate picture of those.) Fold everything together, being extremely careful not to knock the air back out of the egg whites.

That’s two more bowls, one for the egg whites, and one for the folding.  Finally, the whole mixture gets transferred back to the fridge to set up.  Returning to our meal already in progress, we pulled the mouse out of the fridge to see if we had succeeded…

We had.

So what was our overall assessment of this meal?

This is not only one of the best meals we have ever made, this is reasonably high on the list of the best meals we have ever eaten, full stop.  There is, as it turns out, a reason French food is held in such high esteem.  All the steps are overwhelming, but there is a purpose behind each and every one, and that purpose is maximizing deliciousness.

The Bordelaise sauce was dark and rich and fruity and intense.  It perfectly complemented the steak, which we managed to cook to perfection.  The tartiflette was cheese, potatoes, bacon, and cream – just heaven on a plate.  All of the cheeses were amazing.

And the mousse was so good I may actually cry just remembering it.

We’re may not do this very often, but we’re definitely going to do it again.

No cheese for you, Wren!

Next up, more France!

Recipes:
Tartiflette
Bordelaise Sauce
Chocolate Mousse