Kimchi — salted, spiced cabbage from Korea

You probably wouldn't think of somebody in France making Korean food. Much less making the "pickled" or fermented, spiced raw cabbage dish called Kimchi or Kim Chee. But that's exactly what I've been doing.

It started when our friends Susan and Simon at Days on the Claise recently went back to Australia for Christmas. Their flight involved a long layover in Seoul, where Simon worked as a teacher years back. Then Jean of A Very Grand Pressigny mentioned that she had talked to them about the possibility of having a Kimchi dinner.

Kimchi in a tin that we bought at a grocery store in Paris

Earlier than that, through another blogger — Justin, an American who lives now in Paris — we heard about a restaurant serving both Japanese and Korean specialties in the Paris neighborhood where another friend has his apartment. We've been wanting to go have a meal there for a while now, but haven't had the opportunity. We had bought some little tins of Kimchi in Paris.

Ingredients in Korean, English, and — on a pasted-on label — French

So Kimchi, a food that we like and know from the days nearly 30 years ago when we lived in Washington DC, became an idea that I couldn't avoid — incontournable, comme on dit. I had to do something about it. Kimchi is cabbage, after all, and Walt and I both love cabbage, cooked or raw. And cabbage is plentiful and cheap right now in France. It's the season. Besides, cabbage is good for you.

Here's what my Kimchi ended up looking like. One cabbage
produced a good quantity. It keeps for weeks or months
in the refrigerator, and improves over time.

I went to SuperU the other day to buy some other things, and I happened to notice big heads of Savoy cabbage — un chou pommé — on sale in the produce section for 90 eurocents apiece. That did it. We had all the other ingredients in the house. I had looked at recipes on the Internet and seen that I would need salt, sugar, garlic, ginger, onion, fish sauce, and red pepper flakes or paste. Check.

Savoy cabbage salted down and draining for 24 to 48 hours

I found a French recipe posted on a blog with the title « Kimchi maison » — home-made kimchi — as well as several recipes in English. The French one looked like the best candidate. Savoy cabbage wasn't really the kind of cabbage most of the recipes called for when it came to making kimchi, but it was what I found. Most recommend what is called chou chinois or Napa cabbbage.

Anyway, I had a project that was perfect for these cold, gray winter days. Needless to say, there aren't any Korean restaurants in Saint-Aignan, and I've never seen Kimchi in the supermarkets either. The French version of salted, fermented cabbage, of course, is choucroute — sauerkraut. I've never made that from scratch, but it would be another good project.

Here's a link to my second topic about making kimchi.

Mixed emotions

All winter long, come rain or snow or bitter cold, they're out there. There are two of them, a young woman and a young man. How young, I don't know — maybe 30? 35?

They arrive at 8:00 a.m., they knock off at noon, and they come back at 2:00 for the afternoon shift and, in winter, stay until dark. The woman has been out there every winter for years now. The man replaced another who left last year.

They are the vine pruners. They work for the Domain de la Renaudie. Their wintertime work is pruning the vines — cutting back last year's tangle to make everything ready for the new growth of springtime. I don't know whether to admire them or feel sorry for them for having to work outdoors, every day, in such miserable conditions.

Pruning the vines in January

They are dressed in bulky hooded coats, hats, and gloves. They carry little battery-powered clippers that make the work go faster. They chat and banter as they go up and down the rows — sometimes I hear them before I see them — cleaning up nature's mess. And they always wave and shout out « Bonjour ! » when they see me.

They know Callie, but she is afraid of them. Dogs are funny. Callie loves old Monsieur Denis, the retired owner of the Domaine de la Renaudie operation. When he's out there, she runs to greet him, jumping up and kissing him on the face. He loves it. « Elle vient toujours me trouver ! », he told me one day, obviously pleased — "She always comes and finds me!" He's not out there in really cold weather, though.

The apple trees are almost prettier in winter
than they are in spring and summer.

Callie also goes down the rows as far as necessary to greet Bruno Ledys, another grape-grower who has vines out there and who does his own work. Bruno always comes to work in the vineyard with at least one dog, Max, and sometimes with a second dog too. Callie and Max are old friends now — as are Callie and Bruno Ledys. He shows her affection by rubbing her head.

The afternoon walk starts around sundown this time of year.

But Callie acts like she's afraid of the Renaudie employees who spend most of the winter out there working. Maybe it's those hooded coats, or the clippers they always have in their hands. Callie is curious about them, and when they try to make nice she does her doggy thing of running around them in circles, barking and wagging her tail.

When I told the woman I didn't understand why she behaved that way, she said: « Elle veut jouer, c'est tout. » — "She just wants to play." Maybe it's that simple.

The big news in France...

...is cold weather. I just came in from a walk with the dog. We cut it kind of short this morning. There's a very fine, light snow falling, and the temperature is -4ºC, or +25ºF. Luckily, there's no wind.

This is proving to be a very cold winter by Saint-Aignan standards. Like last summer, which was consistently warmer and sunnier than most, this winter is colder and snowier than what we have gotten used to.

Today's lows — ours is the -5ºC toward the center of the country,
between all the minus ones and minus fours. That's +23ºF for us.

The forecast for this morning — Saint-Aignan is on the
leading edge of the snow that's moving in from the west.
It started snowing at about 8:00 a.m.

I really ought to go down to town and take some pictures of the snow-covered rooftops of the houses, the church, and the château. But it's too cold, and the hill down to the main road is too steep and slippery. So you'll have to use your imagination.

Afternoon temperatures inland will be right around freezing today.

The snow will move on inland, but we're under it all day.

Today I'm trying my hand at making that Korean cabbage specialty called Kimchi or Kim Chee. More about that later.

Walt is making a Galette des Rois, the special almond-filled, puff-pastry cake that people in France eat on January 6, which is a religious holiday called The Epiphany. It celebrates the day, in legend, when the three kings or wise men arrived in Bethlehem from the East to bring gifts to baby Jesus.

Here's Thursday: more snow.

We are all closed in and the furnace (boiler, actually) is running on high to heat up the big cast-iron radiators that warm all the rooms of the house. Once the house warms up again, after the overnight chill burns off, we'll turn off the boiler and start a fire in the wood-burning stove. That will heat the part of the house where we spend afternoons and evenings.

And Friday doesn't look much better.

The cold weather is supposed to last through the weekend, with snow about every day. But then the weather forecasters often predict snow (or rain) for days after it snows (or rains) just once. Half the time, they are wrong, it seems to me, and the weather improves.

To think we used to come to France for vacations in January!

It's not easy...

... to take an attractive and appetizing picture of a dish like Southwestern France's cassoulet. Maybe you've never tried — okay, I'd feel pretty safe betting that you haven't. LOL as we say. I've tried and this is the best I've been able to come up with. That was an unfortunate choice of words, probably.

Cassoulet is the meal we have been eating on New Year's Day for the past few years. It all started, I think, because of the Southern U.S. tradition of eating black-eyed peas for good luck on the first day of the new year. I decided the best way to cook the black-eyed peas was in a cassoulet. And that's what I started doing. Here's a link to my blog post about it.

Cassoulet with lima beans, duck, sausages, and breadcrumbs

This morning the temperature is -6.4ºC — +20.5ºF. Yesterday it got colder and colder all through the day, dropping from just below freezing when I went out with the dog in the morning all the way down to -4.5ºC by bedtime. Snow is supposedly moving in from Brittany and Normandy.

It will be a good day for a hot lunch of leftover cassoulet. And that's what we are going to have. To go with it, I'm thawing some collard greens that I cooked with duck fat a few weeks ago. By the way, I wonder if my collard greens and Swiss chard plants are going to survive this hard freeze... My fingers are so cold this morning that I'm having trouble typing.

Anyway, how do you make cassoulet? It's easy, but there can be a lot of ingredients and some long waiting times. The indispensable ingredients are beans and the slow-cooked duck called confit de canard (or goose — confit d'oie). As for the beans, the classic cassoulet is made with large white beans called lingots or tarbais beans. Cannellini beans are similar, or you can use great northern or navy beans. Or, as I said, black-eyed peas.

Big lima beans after cooking, with a teaspoon for scale

This time I used the giant lima beans that I think might be called Fordhook limas in parts of the U.S. I'm not talking about green "baby limas" but white, very large dried beans. When Jean and Nick were over for a cassoulet lunch on New Year's Day, Jean reminded me that these beans are called "butter beans" in England.

If you use dried beans, you just need to cook them in water with aromatics like bay leaves, pepper, herbs, onion, garlic, and carrot — but no salt. To keep them tender, salt them only after they have cooked. You can also use beans out of a can/tin to make a cassoulet.

As for duck confit, if you can buy duck leg sections and wings, it's easy. The leg sections sell for about six euros a kilo here in Saint-Aignan, at the supermarket — that's about US$4.00/lb. Expect to pay more in America, I think. Oh, you also need a lot of duck fat. Or lard. I think you could even use vegetable oil — even olive oil — to make the confit.

Confit de canard slow-cooked in the oven in ample duck fat

Confit de canard is duck pieces cooked slowly, at low temperature, in fat. In Southwestern France, where the diet is based on duck and goose, the fat used is always either duck or goose fat. What you do is put the duck or goose pieces in a pot or deep dish, pour on enough fat to cover them, and cook them slowly either on top of the stove or in the oven for about two hours.

The fat on a duck or goose, as on a chicken or turkey, is located under the skin, not mixed in with the lean meat. When you slow-cook the duck in fat or oil, the fat under the duck skin melts and blends with the cooking fat. By the way, you can make confit de dinde — slow-cooked turkey — the same way. I've done it and it was very good.

I'm not saying you can make confit with vegetable oil that will be as tasty as confit made with duck fat, but I'm sure you can make it that way. And the by-product will be a good quantity of duck-flavored oil that you can use for sauteeing potatoes or seasoning vegetables. I would try the vegetable-oil confit myself except for the fact that I have several quarts of duck fat in the refrigerator (just for cooking emergencies, LOL). It keeps indefinitely in sealed jars.

Duck pieces in their dry marinade, before rinsing

The first step in making confit is to marinate the duck or other poultry pieces in coarse salt (gros sel) and aromatics. No liquid is required. Put four duck leg/thigh sections in a plastic bag, pour in a quarter-cup of salt, add a chopped onion or two, a dozen black pepper corns, six allspice berries, and three or four bay leaves. Some dried thyme is a good idea too. Close the bag so that all the air is pushed or sucked out of it, put it in a bowl, and let it sit in a cold place for 12 hours or longer. I've marinated it for as long as 48 hours.

The duck pieces rinsed, dried, and packed in a dish
for cooking in fat to make confit

When you open the bag, rinse off the duck legs under cold running water and then dry them off. Now you are ready to put them in a pan or dish, pour the fat or oil over them, and cook them slowly for two hours. When they are done and close to falling apart, take them out of the fat with tongs and put them on a rack over a pan so that the cooking fat drips off. At this point you can brown them in the oven or a skillet if you want, or you can use them just as they are.

Slow-cooked duck — confit de canard

This way of cooking duck gives the meat a flavor and moist texture you won't believe. There's nothing like it. I've written about making confit de canard before, here, here, and here. And I've written about giant lima beans — in French, pois du Cap = Capetown peas — here. Last week when I was making confit and cassoulet again, I took the pictures in today's post.

To put together the cassoulet, cook about 2 pounds of dried beans or use two large cans/tins of white beans. Put a layer of beans in the bottom of a deep baking dish and lay the pieces of slow-cooked duck on top of them. Put the rest of the beans over those to make the top layer.

Plain Toulouse pork sausages plus
one smoked Montbéliard pork sausage,
after poaching in water for 20 minutes

Other good meats to put in a cassoulet are sauteed lamb or pork and sausages. The plain pork sausages called saucisses de Toulouse are classic. Chicken or duck sausages would be good too. Cook them first, if they are sold uncooked, by poaching them in water. Cut the cooked sausages and meats into chunks and put them over the first layer of beans with the duck pieces. Put more beans over all, as I said.

Pour just enough broth over the beans and meats to come almost up to the top. You don't want the beans covered, just kept moisten during the cooking. Chicken or duck broth is good to use, or vegetable broth. Some people put a little tomato or tomato paste in the broth, but I don't. I do like to mix some cooked carrots in with the beans though.

The cassoulet ready for the oven

Then take a cup or even two of bread crumbs and spread them over the top. Dribble some duck fat or some of the oil you cooked the duck in over the top and put the cassoulet in a slow oven (250º to 300ºF) for two to four hours. Keep an eye on it so the top doesn't scorch, and make sure it doesn't dry out completely. Add more broth as needed, in small quantities.

One more attempt at an appetizing photo of cassoulet on the plate

You see, cassoulet is not a recipe, really, but a cooking method. It will be as good as the ingredients you use to make it, if you plan ahead and cook it carefully.