Archive for the ‘Cooking w/ Fire’ Category

Although the blog’s been quiet, my life has not been. Januaries here suck, for the most part. They’re darned cold. And snowy. And cold. And usually a do-nothing-kinda-month. I’d planned on taking January to get the shamozzle of incorporations and business setups done, and then out of the blue, piles and piles of production work fell atop my calendar. Plop. Add to that much Shovel & Fork action. In January.

Example. Saturday morning, the Game Butchery Epic ran out at Sangudo. Super interesting. Jeff Senger killed 3 animals, walking through 3 very different approaches to field dressing an animal in the field – the afternoon spent on butchery. My instagram feed has some interesting photos from that morning of dead things that look like tauntauns from Star Wars. I then ran [drove] to Calgary a mere 400km away to shoot #charpopluck for Alberta Culinary Tourism, found a hotel to rest my head for a few hours, then drove back to Edmonton bright and early for Shovel & Fork’s bread baking workshop to do some press interview stuff and get in the way. The whole time through the weekend we had a production crew shooting the Shovel & Fork gigs – we were approached re: having them pitch a trailer to broadcasters for a show about S&F. We’ll see. Interesting to not be the one behind the camera.

Anyway, this is no complaint. Not even close. And yes, perhaps I feel a bit badly for the silence upon this domain. But with the seasons, that will soon change. Part of the production schedule is 20-30 episodes of KevinTV that are lined up, shooting starting in a few weeks. More on that soon. This site is getting a rebuild from somebody who actually knows what they’re doing, so once that’s done, there will be lots more info on the crazy 2013 in Kevin-land. And it’ll look prettier too. Here’s to busy Januaries.

There are photos kicking about of me when I was 3-4 years old, holding grouse. I think there was talk of this hunt the first week my first daughter was born – an excited grandpa eager to get little ones out hunting again. As she grew up, she increasingly wanted to leave with me when I set out moose hunting. This year was her inaugural hunting trip. It was a lucky one, with a lengthy black bear adventure, mule deer, white tailed deer, a weasel, and lots and lots of grouse. We came home with our possession limit of 15 ruffed grouse. Interestingly, not a single spruce grouse – all ruffed. Don’t remember it rolling that way when I was a kid.

An artsy diary-esque episode this one is. A point of interest for me is that it shows how to break a grouse down with your hands into the breast on breastbone with the necessary wing attached to be able to legally transport the bird – preserves identity of species – and also shows a grouse being plucked. Grouse skin is super fragile, tearing easily relative to waterfowl, say. Whenever I skin a bird though I have Hank Shaw in the back of my head, he having spent ample time a number of years ago pre-him-being-a-rock-star prodding me in the comments on this very site. Skin-on wasn’t a revelation like I had expected. Seemed to deliver more value on the waterfowl front, for me. More research required.

Confession: I packed in waterfowl hunting for a number of years for a few reasons. First reason – the more I learned about appropriate practices around animal slaughter in general, the less it made sense to shoot a hundred+ pellets at any and all of the prime cuts of an animal, have it fall from the sky to bruise on the ground, not necessarily killing it immediately, and not to be bled. I would not do that to a pig, say. Second reason – I had yet to prepare it in a fashion that I could really get excited about in the kitchen. There are a million ways to screw it up, and it took half a decade for me to realize that it’s kind of like squid – needs proficient quick preparation execution, or very, very, very long cooking time. Skip absolutely everything in between at your own peril.

Having been served some really nice goose a couple months back by Danny VanCleave – the guide in Episode 52 – I was re-inspired to give waterfowl another chance. And I’m glad I did. Turns out my displeasure with it in the kitchen was simply due to my inefficacy around its preparation. I admit it. Still think the slaughter method is crazy and wasteful, and that plucking in the presence of any shot hole in the body is insane though…

I’m not sure quite what to say about the fact that I’ve had this lovely oven for months now, and today was the first time I actually intentionally baked bread. In my defense, I shall say: pizza, roast and braised meats, pies, loaves, deep frying, and smoked bacon. It’s interesting that a lot of folks think wood oven and think ‘bread’, yet it took me so long to get to it. It speaks to the over-performing-versatility of the thing. I know many of your are convinced, and I tip my hat to those of you who either have built one since I built mine, or are going to, due to my constant prodding. It makes me deeply content to know a few cob ovens adorn our city that didn’t before, simply because I shared my experience with mine.

For a guy who’s far from obsessed with perfecting bread, I’m pretty pleased with this one. Overnight ferment of 50% Gold Forest Grains’ hard whole wheat. About 80% hydration. That’s all there is to say about it. It’s bread. Baked in a wood oven. The one thing I did that some would scorn is I baked it with the last of a fire in the back, with the door open. Most would pull coals and close the door for more even heat and a higher humidity bake. That would have removed the pleasure of watching it and turning it as I saw fit. Really solid oven spring, nice toast. Now to get to eating it.

Last year’s Rge Rd 135 farm-to-table epic at Nature’s Green Acres [Episode 19] is still engraved into the minds of everyone that had the pleasure of being involved, making me more than slightly trepdatious at the prospect of trying to duplicate, nevermind top that farm-to-table extravaganza. But as far as I see it, they pulled it off.

Maybe I’m biased. It was a menu heavy on grass fed free-range meats, fresh garden veg and a splash of wild foods, all cooked on fire. I’m into that kind of thing. It also was the true maiden voyage of the 2nd cob oven build of the year, the first being mine. Add a lucky card-draw on the weather [again], a crew that busted their butts to make it happen, a few bottles of wine, a farm tour, and a few beautiful dishes for a large crew of happy guests – what’s not to like? The cob oven performed fabulously, I’ll add. It was a joy to watch it shed the last of its moisture from the build, get insanely hot, and cook some beautiful food. I wish I’d shot a video about the build, but was soaked to squishy-socks-in-my-shoes-stage and muddy as all heck.

This event is a labour of love, and for that I adore it.

My, mushrooms are pretty.

It so happens I was chatting with my buddy Travis yesterday about an unexpected advantage of the urban greens growing project - that it pushes us both to get our act together and do stuff far more diligently than we otherwise would. Turns out that applies again today. Ryan at BTV Edmonton asked me to be on morning TV to chat about blogging and food stuff, which led to me actually having to get my act together to see if I could get something cool to blog and talk about while on the show. So I took my oldest daughter out to a city ravine park, and hooked ourselves up with a cool array of wild mushrooms: red cap [leccinum boreale], comb’s tooth [hericium coralloides], and agaricus.

The mushroom situation this year is vastly different than last. Last year was wet and cool and an epic year for fungi, this year not so much. I wouldn’t say this year’s dry, but the intense heat seems to be playing a factor, at least for the agaricus. They seem to be maturing quickly post emergence – which results in vastly smaller size and lower quality overall. The Comb’s Tooth and Red Caps were in gorgeous shape and didn’t seem to exhibit the same issue at all.

So the salad. Sauteed the mushrooms with some nodding onion and wild thyme, in butter, in the cob oven. Man they smell good. Those will go atop a mix of Lactuca greens, which in turn will be dressed with a saskatoon wine vinaigrette and aged Cheesiry pecorino. Too hot to cook, mushroom salad it is.

Writing about bacon. Again. Just when I thought there wasn’t anything additional to add to the conversation I have with myself here, there was something else to add. A simple conclusion: wood ovens are fantastic smokers. Different than a commercially manufactured smoker that generally involves automation, an element, and some wood chips, it still requires some finagaling in the way of fire management, making it an enjoyable creative process. Not only does it contain smoke as intensely as you’d like, it’s also well suited to creating smoke, as it’s easy to shut down its O2 supply such that it can’t ‘catch’ flame, and instead smoulders and smokes prolifically. I still maintain that an external fire source is critical to successful smoking, so I had a fire in an old baking pan off to the side to fuel the oven with heat when it started to cool off too much to hot smoke, or generate smoke at all for that matter. As usual, the wood of choice in my yard is apple wood, this time supplied by a friend at Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton. A future project of mine: many of the hundreds of trees OFRE has signed up for fruit rescue need some serious pruning + a local meat shop is interested in smoking their meats with said wood = cool.

So after years with a bbq conversion setup, and a year with a dry-stack brick setup, I am now pleased to be staring down a future of smoking in the new cob oven. A friend recently asked me if the honeymoon phase is over with the oven. Nope.

Finally, a proper cob oven graces my back yard. I read Kiko Denzer‘s book years ago and was inspired by his ‘who needs expensive building materials‘ attitude. As you may know, I tend to dig frugal. He’s an advocate of using repurposed materials, and I’ll credit the base of my oven to him – it’s slabs of busted up sidewalk concrete saved from a city aggregate recycling yard. The rest of the face is bricks and cinders courtesy of kijiji. Aside from the hearth bricks, my cost on this build was roughly $30 for a load of sand and some incidentals. The hearth bricks could have been standard bricks, but I figured I use my oven more than most, so opted for a longer-lasting solution. The stand is mortared with cob [clay and sand], the facade a page from the Allan Scott book of wood-oven building. It was nearly annoyingly remarkably fun working with the mud. I’m sure I annoyed oven-building-friends Blair and David, to whom I owe many thanks, with my constant remarks about how fascinating it was to take such simple materials, and work them into something so damn cool. The video shows the step-by-step progress of the build. If you’re interested in the details, again, I’ll defer to Kiko’s book – but what I will tell you is that it was one of the more enjoyable, well-spent weekends I’ve had in a long time.

When we bought the property we’re now on I started digging up lawn almost immediately. What once was 99% lawn is now maybe 5-10% lawn. I’ve become pretty adept at destroying lawn. 5 years ago, when I started digging up soil that looked like that in the photo [currently excavating for the big-ass wood oven project] – white, granular, entirely different in texture – I thought it had something to do with the previous owners having a dog. I thought it was dog-poo-destroyed soil. Proof, once again, that I’m not always right.

As it turns out, the white stuff is mycelium [mycelia plural more appropriate?] of the shaggy parasol [lepiota rachodes] mushroom. It’s the vegetative part of the fungus that grows in the soil, the ‘mushroom’ bit we think of being the fruit. This white fuzzy, mold-looking stuff permeates the soil, decomposing things, and fruiting when and where it reaches some critical mass. The fruiting locations almost seem random to me in my yard, often fruiting a good 12-14′ feet away from where it fruited last. So far, I’ve dug out 2-3 wheelbarrows full of soil heavy in mycelia. I’ve been dumping it in other areas of my yard, covering it up, with hopes that it will produce more mushroom fruiting. I already get mushrooms in my front ‘forest garden’ due to having moved similar soil there in past years.

It strikes me as odd that me, of all people, happened to have purchased a property whose soil was rich in edible wild mushroom. Strange, no?

Some of you might remember this. 2-3 years ago, I came up with the mad idea of building a huge-assed [17+' wide] masonry wall of kitchen awesomeness in my back yard. Did all the research. Drew all the plans. Had them approved by the city and the gas company [crossing a gas line, not because anything's gas fuelled]. Then, decided that tackling it the year we had a newborn in the house was likely not the responsible thing to do. So it got shelved.

I then built ‘the temp‘, re-purposing the stack of cinders and bricks intended for ‘the big project’ to make them less in the way and more useful. Turns out the temp was a resounding success. 3 hour time investment gave me a wood oven and wood fire grill that will have lasted 15 months or so. But alas, the heat took its toll on the pavers in the design [see photo top left], which has compromised the structural integrity, as well as the usability of the temp. The temp will be seeing its last day standing today.

Which leaves me with two masonry-wood-fire projects. 1 – the big project. The shovel has hit the dirt to dig foundation. I have no idea when I’ll finish, but am taking the first steps in the journey. Keep telling myself Rome wasn’t built in a day. It’s a bit daunting, but very exciting. 2 – the temp 2.0. I need a setup in the interim built elsewhere in the yard where it won’t be in my way. I believe it will be a cob oven and smaller wood grill. We’ll see what comes of that project. I see muscle soreness in my future.