![\"French](\"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/20210523_153516-rotated.jpg\")
<\/a>From left to right, top to bottom – cheese, chocolate, coffee, cheese, cheese, demiglace, and cheese.<\/p><\/div>\n
Our first dish was to be Entrec\u00f4te \u00e0 la Bordelaise, <\/em>a pan fried steak topped with Bordelaise sauce.<\/p>\n French sauces are, of course, a large part of the terror (not\u00a0terroir<\/em>) associated with the cuisine.\u00a0 Bordelaise, for example, is a reduction of Bordeaux wine with shallots and bone marrow.\u00a0 So far, so good, right?\u00a0 Then you look more carefully at the ingredient list, and there’s one line: demi glace.\u00a0<\/em>Well, OK, let’s make demi glace.\u00a0 What’s that?<\/p>\n Demi glace, is a mix of Espagnol sauce and part brown stock.<\/p>\n OK – what’s Espagnol sauce?<\/p>\n Espagnol sauce is made from brown stock and roux.<\/p>\n But what’s brown stock in particular?<\/p>\n Brown stock is made from veal bones, ham knuckles, pork rind, aromatics…<\/p>\n …oh my god.<\/p>\n Proper demiglace involves boiling pounds of bones and gallons of liquids for hours, as it turns out.\u00a0 And there is just no shortcut to getting that extreme depth of flavor.<\/p>\n Except – we did find a shortcut: we just bought some.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n The other key ingredient in a Bordelaise sauce is, of course, Bordeaux.\u00a0 Hilariously, we found one called “Ch\u00e2teau Canada.”\u00a0 Yes, it’s from France.<\/p>\n OK, let’s make some sauce.\u00a0 Once you have the demiglace in hand, the sauce itself isn’t too bad.\u00a0 You start by extracting the marrow from a few beef bones.<\/p>\n In a pan, you saut\u00e9 some shallots in butter, then add the wine and some thyme.\u00a0 Happily, our little garden box has been producing thyme like crazy, so we had some right off the stalk.<\/p>\n I promise the actual sauce was less blurry.\u00a0 We’ll just call this an action shot and move on.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 You’re left with a dense, dense sauce, full of shallots and luscious flavor.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n What are we PUTTING this sauce on, anyway? Well, a steak!\u00a0 The cooking process is so simple and so fast, that I didn’t remember to take a picture of it before it was done.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Here it is topped with the sauce.<\/p>\n One dish down.\u00a0 What else did we make?\u00a0 To go with our steak, we decided to make\u00a0tartiflettte,<\/em> which is a potato dish made with cheese and bacon.\u00a0 Traditionally, the cheese to use would be Reblochon, which is usually pretty hard to come by in North America.<\/p>\n The good new is that the cheese shop we visited did have authentic Reblochon in stock.\u00a0 The bad news is that it was $40 a kilogram, and the recipe called for a full wheel’s worth.\u00a0 Cheese is EXPENSIVE in Canada, y’all.\u00a0 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\u00a0<\/em>instead.<\/p>\n The tartiflette is not too tough to assemble.\u00a0 You boil some potatoes, and while they’re going, you also fry some lardons, which is a fancy way of saying chopped bacon.<\/p>\n The bacon fat (never<\/em> waste bacon fat) is then used to fry some onions and garlic, and the pan is deglazed with vermouth.\u00a0 Then you just stack everything up in a casserole – potatoes, bacon, onions, potatoes, bacon, onions.<\/p>\n But now then the magic happens.\u00a0 First you pour on heavy cream:<\/p>\n And then the cheese.\u00a0 So much cheese.<\/p>\n This gets baked in the oven until… well, words don’t suffice.<\/p>\n Please do not lick the screen.\u00a0 It sure does look delicious though, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n So this was our main course – Entrec\u00f4te \u00e0 la Bordelaise\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Tartiflette.\u00a0<\/em>Served with the remainder of the Bordeaux, of course.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Cheese involves nothing more complicated than unwrapping cheese.)<\/p>\n Upper left,\u00a0Roquefort de Papillon,\u00a0<\/em>described by cheese expert Steve Jenkins as “The reason god invented caves.”\u00a0 Lower left\u00a0Tomme de Savoy<\/em>, and right side\u00a0Bouche de Lucay.<\/em>\u00a0 We were COMPLETELY full at this point.\u00a0 So of course it was time to eat dessert.<\/p>\n And for dessert, it was time at last to turn to Julia Child, who we had managed to avoid consulting up to this point.\u00a0 (I mean, technically, we made this first, but let’s not break the narrative flow here any worse than this parenthetical already has.)<\/p>\n Julia Child’s chocolate mousse recipe is complicated, but worth it.\u00a0 Step one: butter, good chocolate, and coffee.<\/p>\n Melt in a double boiler, set aside.\u00a0 Step two: egg yolks, sugar, and rum.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n That’s two more bowls, one for the egg whites, and one for the folding.\u00a0 Finally, the whole mixture gets transferred back to the fridge to set up.\u00a0 Returning to our meal already in progress, we pulled the mouse out of the fridge to see if we had succeeded…<\/p>\n We had.<\/p>\n So what was our overall assessment of this meal?<\/p>\n 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\u00a0eaten,\u00a0<\/em>full stop.\u00a0 There is, as it turns out, a\u00a0reason<\/em> French food is held in such high esteem.\u00a0 All the steps are overwhelming, but there is a purpose behind each and every one, and that purpose is maximizing deliciousness.<\/p>\n The Bordelaise sauce was dark and rich and fruity and intense.\u00a0 It perfectly complemented the steak, which we managed to cook to perfection.\u00a0 The tartiflette was cheese, potatoes, bacon, and cream – just heaven on a plate.\u00a0 All of the cheeses were amazing.<\/p>\n And the mousse was so good I may actually cry just remembering it.<\/p>\n We’re may not do this very often, but we’re definitely going to do it again.<\/p>\n No cheese for you, Wren!<\/p>\n Next up, more France!<\/p>\n Recipes: I have to admit – we were intimidated by France.\u00a0 It’s hard to think of a food culture with more of a reputation for being challenging.\u00a0 To some extent, that’s definitely Western bias – Thai food, for example, is easily … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThis gets boiled for just a little while, until it turns a really unattractive shade of grey.\u00a0 Who cares? Marrow is delicious.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nTartiflette<\/a>
\nBordelaise Sauce<\/a>
\nChocolate Mousse<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"