Jambon à la chablisienne

I've been to Chablis, in Burgundy, twice over the past three or four years. I was glad to get a chance to see the village, not only because it's pretty but because the Chablis area produces one of the best Chardonnay wines — one of the finest white wines — in France.

I even had a very nice meal at a restaurant in Chablis, and I blogged about it here. I also wrote a blog post about Chablis wines. Chardonnay wines as made in France are some of my favorites, which is too bad since the premier white wine grape here in the Loire and Cher valleys is Sauvignon Blanc. Luckily, one winery that I like (but only one) also sells locally grown and vinified Chardonnay.

Jambon à la chablisienne

That said, I'd never heard of this special ham dish made in and named for Chablis — jambon à la chablisienne — until just a few days ago. I found it on a food blog, of course. A Canadian blog, from Edmonton, Alberta, called Eating is the Hard Part. Maybe you know it. Thanks to The Celiac Husband for introducing it to me.

Here's a link to the YouTube video where I first saw Chablis-style ham. It's a segment the American food personality Tony Bourdain taped in Burgundy, featuring local specialties including Oeufs à la meurette, Jambon à la chablisienne, and very runny Epoisses and Chaource cheeses — as well as a French chef named Ludo Lefebvre and his grandmother.

I've made eggs in meurette sauce before and blogged about that too. Bourdain said on his show that he'd never eaten Eggs Meurette before, which surprised me. His family was French, even though he seems thoroughly American.

Yesterday I bought some thick slices of good "white" or "Paris" ham — called jambon blanc or jambon de Paris — from our mobile butcher and made the jambon chablisienne for lunch. If you can get good French ham, buy that rather than packaged sandwich ham. You want thick slices. Here's the recipe, which is pretty simple:

Jambon à la chablisienne

4 tranches de jambon blanc coupées assez épaisses
1 échalote
20 cl de chablis (ou d'un autre vin blanc sec)
1 feuille de laurier
50 cl de crème fraîche épaisse
1 c. à café de fécule de pommes de terre (ou de maïs)
1 petite boîte de concentré de tomates

Dans une poêle, chauffez tout doucement votre échalote émincée dans très peu d'huile ou de beurre.

Lorsque l'échalote est translucide, ajoutez le vin blanc. Faites réduire à feu moyen de moitié (ou même plus).

Ajoutez le concentré de tomates et mélangez bien. Ajoutez ensuite la crème fraîche et mélangez à nouveau jusqu'à ce que la sauce soit homogène. Salez un peu et poivrez.

Ajoutez les tranches de jambon roulées, recouvrez-les de sauce et laissez sur feu très doux 5 minutes avant de servir.

Walt and I both thought the ham was delicious prepared this way. You end up with a lot of cream sauce, so it's good to plan a side dish that is good with such sauce — steamed potatoes, rice, or pasta, with a green vegetable like broccoli — if you want to make a whole meal out of it. We had savory rice pudding and braised lettuce and radish leaves with our ham.

The cream sauce, thickened with just a small amount of potato starch, is gluten-free.

One extra ingredient I added to the sauce was a tablespoon of the North African hot pepper paste called harissa, because we both like our food a little spicy. The harissa gave the cream/tomato sauce a nice little boost.

Puddles and clouds

That's our lot in life right now. It's been raining for more than two weeks. All told, 2012 will be remembered as the year of weather extremes. Want cold? You got it. Want dry? Wet? Windy? Well, at least we haven't been bored.

It's raining again this morning. Yesterday, we got the day off as far as falling rain was concerned, but we had plenty on the ground from the weekend deluge. Tomorrow's forecast: wind and rain — much worse than today, according to the weather woman on TéléMatin. Life goes on.

Yesterday we pulled most of the vegetable garden out. We got a few more red or almost-red tomatoes, and we got a bucket full of green ones. Any ideas? We also picked about a dozen small, hard eggplants. I hope they're ripe enough to cook — there's only one way to find out.

The garden plots were a muddy mess but the job is done. And not a moment too soon. Of course, the collard greens and Swiss chard are thriving — their only enemies right now are snails and slugs. They too are thriving.

The gardening contractor we've hired sent out a two-man crew yesterday afternoon to start the job of trimming that long tall hedge. They got about half the job done before darkness fell, and they said they'd be back this morning at 8:00 — rain or shine. It's rain.

Amboise

Here are two photos that I took in Amboise a couple of weeks ago. First, the château.

I'm posting these photos at a larger size that I normally upload to the blog. Click on them to see them at a larger size, and click on them again if you see the little magnifying glass cursor on the larger image.

The château in Amboise, on the Loire River

The weather this past weeked was nothing like what you see in my Amboise photos. Much of the Loire Valley got two inches — 50 mm — of rain on Saturday and Sunday. There was some flooding over in Chissay-en-Touraine, near Montrichard and Amboise. It was mostly basements and garages catching a lot of runoff from higher land during hard downpours.

Walt admiring the cakes and candies in the window of a well-known shop in Amboise

There were two "mini-tornadoes" reported on the news last night  — one in Vendée (west of us by a hundred miles or more, near the Atlantic coast), and the other near Marseille. There were injuries but no fatalities, and there was quite a bit of property damage consisting of fallen trees and big signs, along with roof tiles ripped off.

Luckily, we didn't have anything like that here in the Saint-Aignan area — at least not that I've heard about. We wanted to go to the L'Art et Lard festival (a food and art weekend) down in the village called Le Petit-Pressigny yesterday, but it was a wash-out. We were down there staying with friends Saturday night, but we just drove back home in the morning — an hour driving through heavy rain, with a lot of water standing on the roadways — to make sure the house was weathering the storm. It was — no leaks (good news!) and no power outages.

Chenonceau... again?!?!?

Isn't it easy to become very blasé about nearby sights and wonders?

Now there's an interesting "English" word. According to the American Hertitage Dictionary, it means:

blasé adj. 1. Uninterested because of frequent exposure or indulgence. 2. Unconcerned; nonchalant: had a blasé attitude about housecleaning.

How many other English words have an accent on one of their letters?

Can you say "blasé"?

It's a word that's used a lot more in English — at least in American English; I can't speak for the Brits or the Aussies, for example — than it is in French. It's hard for me to think of a time I've heard a French person describe somebody as blasé. Some synonyms are émoussé, dégoûté, désabusé, désenchanté, désillusionné, fatigué, flegmatique, insensible, las, lassé, and sceptique.

The free river walk at Chenonceau, on the left bank of the Cher River

In mentioning blasé attitudes, I was referring to the Château de Chenonceau, one of the most instantly recognizable French buildings, and one of the most visited by tourists. I can't count the number of times I've been there, especially since I discovered the free (no fee) river walk a few years back. If I had to stand in line and pay 10 euros or whatever each time, I wouldn't go to Chenonceaux so often.

My no-entry-fee, no-crowds view of the Château de Chenonceau from the river walk

Did you notice that final X on the name? The town is called Chenonceaux. The name of the "castle" is the Château de Chenonceau. How confusing is that?

Loire Valley tourists

But tourists aren't confused about wanting to see Chenonceau castle — with 850,000 paid entries per year, it's the most popular tourist site in the Loire Valley. And they're not even counting me, because I don't go in through the main door. Anyway, sometimes it feels like 850,000 is too low an estimate. On many summer days, you'd be convinced there are several million people in the château and on the grounds at any given moment.

Another river-walk view of the Château de Chenonceau

Gâteau aux pruneaux

Yesterday I went down to the garage to look for my silicone savarin mould (Br.) / pan (U.S.) — we have a cabinet full of kitchen things down there. They're things we don't use very often. I think I'm going to start using the savarin (Fr.) / bundt (U.S.) pan more often.

A few days I bought a kilo bag of pruneaux d'Agen — prunes from the Agen area in SW France — at the supermarket. So I thought about a prune cake recipe that I used to make and always liked. It was time to make prune cake again.

It just dawned on me that I also have a package of dried apricots down in the pantry. I bought those when I bought the prunes. Now I wish I had made an apricot cake. Oh well... next time. Now that the moule à savarin is back in the kitchen, I'll make more cakes.

I did a whole post about making this kind of prune cake in 2008. I just found it by doing a search on the blog. If you've never done a search, just type a keyword ("prunes" for example) in the search field (with a magnifying glass icon) at the top left-hand corner of the main blog screen. Try it.

The secret to making the prune cake successfully is to cook it in a ring pan. It cooks evenly. In a loaf pan, it's hard to get the inside to cook through without burning the outside of the cake. If you don't have a ring pan, use a wide cake pan and cook the batter in a thin layer (or two thin cakes for this amount of batter).

Notes: If the prunes you have are as tender and moist as the ones I bought, you really don't need to soak them before making the cake. Also, I added 1½ teaspoons of baking powder to the French recipe, to make the cake rise well, and I beat the egg whites just lightly before adding them to the batter — which means the cake is easier to make.

The church at Montrésor

At Montrésor, which is just south of Saint-Aignan and is recognized as one of the plus beaux villages de France, the church was built in the first half of the 16th century (1519-1541). A lot of construction and renovation was going on around the Loire Valley during those heady years of the French Renaissance. Big projects were under way at Chambord, Chenonceau, Blois, and Azay-le-Rideau, for example.

The "disproportionately splendid" church in the small village of Montrésor

At Montrésor, the royal advisor and chamberlain Imbert de Batarnay (sometimes spelled Bastarnay) was building his own fine logis next to the ruined fortifications that still stand today, and he was putting up a gothic-style church where he and his family would be interred after their death.

The restored tombs of the Batarnay family in the church at Montrésor —
"they look rather like a family tucked up in bed," says the Cadogan guide.

Some of the stained glass in the Montrésor church, which is dedicated to St. John the Baptist, dates back to the French Renaissance, as do the old wooden choir stalls with their carved miséricordes and médaillons. The Cadogan guide says the church "looks disproportionately splendid for such a small village." Here are some more photos of the interior.

Medallions and a misericorde on the old wooden choir stalls

Montrésor's church is dedicated to St. John the Baptist

Deux gâteaux : le « savarin » et le « baba »

My old friend CHM and also Bob R. asked about my savarin recipe, and differences between a savarin and baba au rhum. Now, I don't have CHM's 80+ years of experience of French food — my experience only goes back 40 years, and only a part of that is direct experience with home cooks in France. He grew up with a French mother and grandmother who cooked the classic French way, from what I understand.

A savarin cake I made in a real savarin mold back when

we first arrived in Saint-Aignan nine years ago.

Here's some information about the savarin from my point of view, based on what I have been reading in two classic French cookbooks, the encyclopedic Larousse Gastronomique and the home cooking classic Je sais cuisiner (by Ginette Mathiot, 1970 ed.).

Ginette Mathiot says: « Le baba se fait comme le savarin, mais on incorpore au dernier moment les raisins de Corinthe qui ont été lavés et épluchés. » — "The cake called a baba is made the same way as a savarin cake, but at the last minute currants (tiny Corinthian raisins) are added to the dough." So Mathiot implies that the savarin came first, and the baba au rhum was a version of it. (Raisins épluchés might sound like "peeled grapes" but I think it must mean raisins without any of the little hard bits of stem that might be left attached to them.)

 This time I baked the savarin in a pyrex ring pan.

The Larousse food and cooking encyclopedia says just the opposite is true. The baba was the original recipe, and a Parisian pastry chef developed the savarin much later:

Baba — Gâteau fait avec une pâte levée mélangée de raisins secs et imbibée, après cuisson, d'un sirop au rhum et au kirsch.

...un maître pâtissier parisien, Julien, en supprimant les raisins de la pâte, en donnant une autre forme à l'entremets, et en modifiant le sirop de trempage (sirop qui resta longtemps un secret de sa maison), créa le brillat-savarin, qui devint le savarin tout court.

Baba — A cake made with risen dough mixed with raisins and imbibed, after it's cooked, with sugar syrup flavored with rum and kirsch.

...a master pastry chef in Paris named Julien, by eliminating the raisins from the dough, giving the cake a different shape, and modifying the soaking syrup (the recipe for which long remained a trade secret), created the brillat-savarin cake, which came to be called, simply, the savarin.

My ring pan made a cake with a gigantic hole in the center. Scroll down a ways
to see the good picture of the cake that I posted yesterday,
where it looks like a big doughnut.

The savarin I made was based on Ginette Mathiot's recipe:

Here's my translation/adaptation of the savarin recipe, with both grams and U.S. measures. I've slightly increased the flour (by rounding up) and the sugar, and I've reduced the amount of yeast (the amount I used was plenty). Tablespoons and teaspoons are level measures using U.S. measuring spoons:

Savarin

250 g flour (2 cups)
125 g softened butter (9 Tbsp.)
30 g sugar (4 Tbsp.)
3 eggs
20 ml lukewarm milk (7 Tbsp.)
8 g salt (1 tsp.)
15 g baker's yeast (I used just 1½ packets or about 8 grams)

Pre-heat the oven to 375ºF / 190ºC.

Put the yeast into the lukewarm milk to proof. Sift the flour into the bowl of a stand mixture and then pour in the yeast/milk mixture. Mix at low to medium speed with the paddle attachment, adding the eggs one at a time, until all is well blended. Let the mixer run for about 5 minutes. Cover the bowl and leave the dough to rise for two or three hours in a warm place.

When the dough has doubled in volume, add the softened butter, sugar, and salt, and mix everything together for another 5 to 8 minutes. The dough should be perfectly smooth.

Pour the dough into a buttered ring or bundt pan, filling it about two-thirds full. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes (the French recipe doesn't specify a cooking time) or until the cake has risen and browned nicely.

While the cake is cooling, make a syrup with 2 cups of water, half a cup of sugar, and a cup of rum, kirsch, Triple Sec, or some other alcohol or flavoring (you could make a vanilla syrup, for example). Poke some holes in the warm cake with a skewer and gradually pour the hot syrup over it so that it all soaks in (I took the cake out of the ring pan before imbibing it). Serve warm or at room temperature.

I'll leave the baba recipe for later. I guess next time I should make that — after I've gone and bought some good rum.

Practicing for winter

Autumn is upon us, but it's the part of autumn that is damp and warm — muggy, in other words. We're due for some cooler weather, according to the weather reports. Maybe we'll get it this coming weekend.

The view out the back gate yesterday afternoon

But first there will be more rain. Clouds and dampness haven't stopped the vineyard crew from continuing the vendanges. They harvested the Cabernet grapes along the north side of the house yesterday. "Cabernet" here in the Loire Valley means Cabernet Franc, as in Chinon and Bourgueil, not Cabernet Sauvignon as in Bordeaux.

A moment of soft light and wispy clouds over the Renaudière vineyard

About the only red-wine grapes left on the vines are bunches of Côt, which is the Loire Valley name for what is called Malbec in other wine-producing regions around the world. There's a big parcel of Côt right outside our back gate. Côt grapes produce the densest, biggest-bodied red wine here in Touraine, followed in order by Cabernet and Gamay down the lightness scale.

Clouds building up over the hamlet

When I went out to walk with the dog late yesterday afternoon, I took a hundred or more photos. The sky was gorgeous. Unfortunately, most of the photos were too contrasty or a little blurry. The light conditions were to blame — clouds and sun, sun and clouds, alternating. Besides the fact that it was just too late in the day, with fading light.

Rain moving in at sunset

Callie and I didn't get rained on, but the drops really started coming down a couple of hours later. Rain fell hard, off and on, all night. I was conscious of hearing the sound of drops on the roof and Velux windows through the hours of darkness, even though I feel like I slept well. It's supposed to rain all day today too, intermittently.

Quiche au fromage blanc et fromage de chèvre avec blettes et lardons

Yesterday Walt made a quiche with Swiss chard from the garden, along with onions, lardons, eggs, and fromage blanc from the supermarket. And some local goat cheese, which just happened to be hanging around in the fridge. (Over the next few days, I'll start harvesting collard greens from the vegetable garden, and I'm happy about that.)

The savarin, a yeast-leavened pastry, is even richer than brioche.

Meanwhile, I made a cake called a savarin, which is leavened with yeast and includes softened butter, eggs, and a little milk, but only a quarter cup of sugar. The dough rises for two to three hours and then gets baked in a ring pan. While the cake is still warm from the oven, you "imbibe" it with a light sugar syrup flavored with rum, Triple Sec, kirsch, or some other alcohol. I used Triple Sec and eau de fleurs d'orangers, in equal proportions. Maybe I'll post a recipe later.

It feels like we are practicing for winter.

Montrésor, alors

Here are seven more photos taken the morning we walked around in Montrésor, south and west of Saint-Aignan by 15 miles or so. It's one of the most beautiful villages in Touraine.

On the left above is the building occupied by the Montrésor mairie, or village hall. It's a 16th century residence called le logis du Chancelier. That turret on the corner of the building is called an échauguette (in French) or (in English) a bartizan or guerite. It's a watchtower built onto the building instead of being built from the ground up.

In the photo on the right above, and the one below too, you can see the thousand-year-old fortifi-cations of Montrésor, in ruins, just to the east of the Renaissance logis (residence).

From many points in town, you get views the château and the old fortifications towering over the houses of the village (as in the photos above and below). As the Cadogan Guide to the Loire says, "Montrésor exudes charm from every stone... The feeling is late medieval, although the village was much developed in the early 16th century..." (at the beginning of the French Renaissance).

Why is Montrésor called by that name? There are various legends, one involving a lizard covered in gold dust that supposedly emerged from the rocky promontory that the fortifications were built on. The Michelin guide says the real origin of the name is this: one of the first lords of the town was the treasurer of the cathedral in the nearby city of Tours. Montrésor was the "mount of the treasurer."

Above are pictures of several houses in Montrésor, in styles ranging from the modest to the grandiose. The village is picturesque and pretty quiet. Fewer than 400 people live in Montrésor — half the number who lived there in the mid-19th century.

More oven-dried tomatoes, and the wisteria

Here's what I did with those little tomatoes Walt showed a picture of yesterday in his blog post. By the way, those particular tomato plants were volunteers. They just came up, and we just let them grow, without really tending them.

I ended up with two trays of tomato halves like these.

They're called Juliets, and they're larger than cherry tomatoes but a lot smaller than Roma tomatoes, which they resemble. The scientific name is Lycopersicon esculentum 'Juliet' and you can find a lot of sites of the web with information about the variety.

These have been drying for an hour or two.

To dry them, I cut each little tomato in half the long way and arranged the halves on oven trays lined with parchment paper (papier de cuisson). I put them in the oven at about 200ºF / 90ºC for several hours, watching them to make sure they were drying and not burning. I use a convection oven.

The two trays of tomato halves produced this amount
after drying for hours in a low oven.

The idea is to dry the tomatoes without cooking them, so it's important to keep them below the boiling point. Lower the heat as necessary while they are cooking to get the result you want, and leave the tomatoes in the oven after you turn it off to let them cool down slowly and continue drying. I left them in the oven overnight.

These are dried as much as I wanted them to be dried —
they're still slightly moelleux (tender).

Today I'll put the dried tomatoes in jars and heat the jars up in the oven to near 100ºC (the boiling point) before putting the lids on. Then I can keep them in the downstairs pantry over the winter.

* * *

A couple of days ago, we put the wisteria plant (glycine) back up on the wall of the house. It had blown down in a storm — one of the support wires broke under the weight of the plant's plentiful, wet leaves.

Avant

Après

Walt put up a new, heavier-gauge support wire. Putting the plant back up was an opportunity to prune it back pretty severely. Above are two pictures, before and after the fall, as it were, and the pruning. So that all worked out.

Bœuf aux carottes

Taking a break from tourism, going back to food. The other day I noticed that the supermarché had nice "chuck" roasts — at least I think that would be the translation — at a good price (about seven euros a kilo). The French name is basse-côte and the cut, from the shoulder, is boneless — sans os. "Chuck roast" seems to be a U.S. term that's not even used in Canada (can anybody confirm?), where it's called a shoulder roast or blade roast.

When I was growing up in North Carolina in the 1950s and '60s, chuck roast was a frequent dinner. I bet it still is there. I think my sister makes it the way my mother did. It was a two or three pound beef shoulder roast, not cut into pieces but left whole and cooked in a pan in the oven with onions, carrots, celery, and potatoes. What else, I don't know, but not wine — water. Walt says his mother made the same dinner in New York State in the 1970s and '80s — that means that it was not a regional dish.

Carrots cooking in beef broth, with a few white "icicle" radishes — which are good
 when cooked — because we have a lot of them from the garden

One big difference between American and French cooking styles is that in France people seem to enjoy simpler recipes rather than more complicated ones. Instead of a beef stew — because that's what Bœuf aux carottes or "beef (braised) with carrots" basically is — with many vegetables (carrots, onions, turnips, parsnips, celery, mushrooms, green beans, tomato, etc., etc.) at the same time, French recipes often call for braising beef or other meats with one predominant vegetable for flavor. So you get beef braised with carrots or with onions, or duck with turnips or with olives, or veal with prunes or with mushrooms, and so on. Of course, herbs and spices, and almost always some onion or garlic, are included too, in all the recipes. And, of course, wine.

Bœuf aux carottes can also be called Bœuf mode or Bœuf à la mode (no, not with ice cream!). The old recipes, written for cooks who didn't necessarily have an oven in their kitchen and who cooked in a fireplace, called for using a special braising pot with a concave lid into which braises — pieces of smoldering wood (charcoal, embers) — could be laid, so that the food in the pot on the hearth was heated from both the top and the bottom at the same time. Today, we just use an oven. So the dish is a stew, sort of, but it's better oven-braised, I think, rather than stewed on top of the stove.

The old recipes also called for including a calf's foot or some beef, veal, or pork rind (couenne, in French) in the pot because of the gelatin those pieces release as they cook. The gelatin enriches the braising liquid and thickens it slightly. In today's versions of such recipes, the braising liquid is thickened instead with flour or some other starch (corn, potato, arrowroot...). In France it's not hard to find a butcher shop that sells calves' feet, but in America... well, let's just say that would be a specialty item.

Here's a recipe I like, first in English and then, below, en français :

  Beef braised with carrots

2 or 3 lbs. chuck roast, blade roast, or beef stew meat
2 or 3 slices of bacon, or 3 oz. smoked ham
2 lbs. carrots
2 bay leaves
chopped parsley and/or thyme
2 onions
1 garlic clove (or more)
coarse salt and black pepper to taste
1 or 2 Tbsp. flour
3 or 4 Tbsp. olive oil and/or vegetable oil
½ bottle dry white wine

Cut the meat into one-inch cubes if it isn't already cut up. Set aside.

Chop the bacon or ham.

Peel the carrots, onions, and garlic. Chop the onions and garlic as you like, and cut the carrots into thick disks, logs, or sticks.

In a pot with a heavy bottom, heat up the oil. Brown the chunks of beef (in batches if necessary so that you don't crowd the pan). Add the bacon or ham, the onions, garlic, and carrots, and brown all for a few more minutes. Sprinkle one or two tablespoons of flour over the meat (the more flour you put in, the thicker the sauce will be) and stir well.

Gradually stir in the white wine, and add the parsley, thyme, and bay leaves. Don't forget the salt and pepper.

Cover the pot or pour the contents into a baking dish with a lid and cook it in a medium to medium-low oven (300º -325ºF) for two or three hours, stirring occasionally. Serve with steamed potatoes.

And a green salad, I might add.

Bœuf aux carottes

1 kg de bœuf (basse-côte ou paleron)
100 g de poitrine fumée
1 kg de carottes
2 feuilles de laurier
persil, thym
2 oignons
1 gousse d'ail
poivre et gros sel

1 ou 2 c. à soupe de farine
3 ou 4 c. à soupe d'huile d'olive ou d'huile végétale
375 ml de vin blanc sec

Couper la viande en morceaux d'environ 4 cm de largeur. Réserver.

Couper les tranches de lard en carrés d'épaisseur de 2 cm.

Eplucher les carottes, oignons et ail. Emincer les oignons, couper les carottes en rondelles de 4 mm environ, ou en bâtonnets.

Dans un faitout, faire chaufferl'huile. Faire rissoler les morceaux de viande, puis ajouter les lardons, les oignons, l'ail, et  les carottes. Laisser le tout cuire quelques minutes. Puis saupoudrer avec la farine (plus on en met, plus la sauce sera épaisse). Tourner.

Ajouter le vin blanc progressivement en tournant et puis le persil, le thym, et les feuilles de laurier. Saler avec une pincée de gros sel et poivrer.

Faire cuire au four à basse température (150º-160º C) pendant deux heures ou plus, en tournant de temps en temps. Servir avec des pommes de terre cuites à la vapeur.