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52 Foods Week Three: Chicken

The French are, in a word, sérieux about where things come from. Whether it’s wine, cheese or lentils, there are rules—sorry, laws—and they must be heeded. I like rules. Rules are good. Rules beget constraints and constraints beget challenges and challenges beget intrigue. I like intrigue, too.

Calvinball is an example of what’s great about rules. Calvin Ball is fun, intriguing if you will, not because any action is possible, but because any rule is possible. Changing the rules changes the game, and infinite rules provide infinite possibility.

At last week’s Farmer’s Market, I was hipped to another rule the French have. It concerns chicken, namely the Poulet de Bresse. The Poulet de Bresse has blue feet and is the only chicken with AOC status. It is raised in one region under strict guidelines. The appellation is protected to the point that one is forbidden from removing the live birds, their eggs or even dressed birds from the country. What does this have to do with California?

Poulet Bleu is an American equivalent to the Poulet de Bresse. It was bred in British Columbia in collaboration with California producers, and introduced in 2004. We purchased one from Cache Creek Meat Co., where they are raised as free roaming animals. Ours weighed about two and a half pounds without the head and feet. It’s a slightly slenderer bird than a typical U.S. chicken, with the characteristic blue coloring visible on the tips of the drumsticks.

Poulet Bleu Ready to Roast

We were cautioned that indelicate cooking might dry the bird out, so I selected a recipe I was confident would maintain plenty of moisture. Turning to the Silver Spoon, I noted their recipe for Pollo Arrosto, which calls for cooking the whole bird in a large pot atop a layer of carrots, onion, celery and rosemary.

Fresh Rosemary

I followed their recipe quite faithfully, with only the addition of a Meyer lemon in the bird’s cavity and a little white wine in the pot along with the vegetables.

The recipe calls for searing the bird on all sides before reducing the heat to cook it slowly. In the future, I’ll try to use a little more oil, because the skin stuck and tore a bit. It didn’t impact the final product in the least, but for appearances sake, intact skin would be nice.

Seared Bird

Speaking of the final product, this was one tasty, tasty bird. I’m usually 100% dark meat when it comes to my poultry preferences, but the white meat on the Poulet Bleu was absolutely transcendent—light, juicy and flavorful. We will definitely return to the Poulet Bleu in the future.

We served the bird alongside some butter roasted orange cauliflower and carrots.

Carrots and Cauliflower with Butter

Please check out all the pictures.

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52 Foods Week Two: Oranges

Story time: Every summer growing up, our family would pile into an often comically overstuffed car and drive 5 hours North of the Bay Area for Feather River Camp. The final 45 minutes of the drive were awesome: A tight, winding road cut into the sides of the Sierra Nevada mountains with multiple bridges that seemed to soar over the rocky river below. The four hours before this were pretty dull. One of my favorite diversions during the interminable drive was passing the many orchards. I loved to watch the perfect grids of fruit trees converge into straight lines then scatter back into a wall of leaves as we passed them at 60 MPH. It’s an effect that can still distract me on long drives.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the orchards I marveled at as a child belonged to Sparks Ranch, in Winters, from whom I recently acquired 10 pounds of oranges.

Oranges

I love oranges, and especially fresh squeezed orange juice. It’s one of the few citrus drinks I enjoy. Similarly, about the only cocktail I’ll order that’s made with citrus is the Blood and Sand, a classic cocktail made with scotch, sweet vermouth, orange juice and cherry brandy. Most recipes call for equal parts of all the ingredients, but I prefer mine heavier on the scotch and lighter on the cherry brandy

The Blood and Sand is great, but I wanted to come up with something new, so I set to work tossing 3/4 ounces of orange juice into a cocktail shaker with a vast conspiracy of ingredients before arriving at this lovely thing. Since one of my favorite things about ordering a Blood and Sand is the way it conjures Camus’ L’Étranger, and since it contains the French apéritif Lillet, and since this cocktail is basically a Blood and Sand with a couple of ingredients out of place I’m calling it L’Étranger. See how I did that?

L’Étranger:

1.5 oz. London Dry Gin
3/4 oz. Lillet Blanc
3/4 oz. Fresh Orange Juice
1 tsp. Cherry Heering

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

L'Étranger Cocktail

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52 Foods Week One: Beets

I went to the Farmers’ Market yesterday to find a candidate for the first week of Fifty Two Foods. Being winter and a Wednesday, the market did not have a lot of vendors with fresh produce. After a quick survey, I settled on beets for this week.

I bought one bunch of organic beets from Fiddler’s Green Farm out of Brooks, CA.

A Bunch of Beets

I was asked to bring a salad to some friends’ home for a dinner, so I also grabbed some organic salad greens.

My plan was to cook the beets, and toss them in the salad with some goat cheese. I really like roasted beets, but sometimes I find the denseness of their flavor and the sweetness a bit overwhelming. I wanted to do something that would cut the richness a bit, and decided to salt roast them, figuring that the salt would balance the sweetness.

After washing the beets and slicing the ends off them. I poured a little pillow of kosher salt onto foil squares. I positioned each beet on the salt, then pulled the foil edges up to make a sort of sack. Then I poured more salt in each sack to cover about 3/4 of the beet.

Cover it Up

I finished wrapping the beets in the foil, and shook each one upside down a bit to distribute the salt. They sounded like little maracas.

I baked the beets for 35 minutes at 350ºF. Upon removing them from the oven, I unwrapped the top of the foil to let them cool a bit. The salt absorbed the beet juice, and had formed a sort of crust that broke away when the foil was opened.

Opening the Foil

Once the beets were cool enough to handle, I peeled them and sliced them for the salad. They tasted lightly salted with some of the sweetness cut, just like I had hoped. I finished the salad with a some crumbled goat cheese and a dijon-balsamic vinaigrette.

Salad is Served

You can view more photos here.

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Fifty Two Foods

One of California’s quality-of-life advantages is the abundance and variety of the state’s agricultural output. Here in Davis, we have a very large farmers’ market that runs year round and features many tables laden with fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as some terrific meats. We also have a great grocery store and a top-notch co-op. While Davis lacks Portland’s brilliant chefs and incredible food scene, it has a key foundational element—great raw ingredients—in spades.

In honor of our abundance of good food, and because I’ve been meaning to do some kind of food series for a while, this year I’m going to choose one food each week and try to make something interesting with it. My rules are going to be pretty simple:

  • Foods must be grown in California.
  • They must be minimally processed. Cheeses and sausages will be okay, usually, while canned chili would not be.
  • They must undergo some transformation in the preparation process. It won’t be enough to simply toss some nuts on a salad.

I’ll try to get the where, what, why, how on each food and share that along with an account of what I made. I’ll post new entries once a week, and I hope you enjoy them. The complete series will be listed on this page.