Archive for the ‘From the Cellar’ Category

Yes, episode 1. Don’t get it? Don’t blame you.

This series [Field to Fire] is going to strictly be about exploring regional ingredients, and preparing them a couple ways outdoors. Same format. Every time. I liked the idea, but a major problem with it is that it excluded other fun content that I’d normally shoot and get involved with. So rather than kevinTV being one ‘thing’, it now is multiple ‘things’. Multiple ‘shows’. This will be one of them. More about this switch-up here.

Instagram feed watchers have been witness to my posts about ice fishing. Action went from absolutely dead in Dec/Jan to limiting out in an hour in late Feb, so I had some whitefish to work with for this episode. They’re a strange species – one that I had no experience with until lately. I hardly feel bad about it though, as while showing off some instagram photos recently to chefs, I got some questions about what species they were. They just aren’t solidly part of our food culture beyond certain niche pockets. Hence my interest in featuring them. Many more ‘Field to Fire’ episodes on deck. Enjoy.

Once upon a time, I built a wine cellar. In order to make decent wine from the grape vines in my back yard, I was advised to practice on other fruit. I practiced on apples. Now my wine cellar’s really a cider cellar. Perhaps cider/charcuterie cellar would be most appropriate. If I call it a wine cellar, it’s only because I’m lying or getting old and am forgetting what is in fact stashed down there. It’s cider. Apple ciders of various blends/batches. Pear ciders of various blends/batches. A couple types of Pommeau [an apple and apple brandy desert wine]. And if you look hard through the bins, you will find some actual grape-based wine. If you were to turn around from this view of the west wall of bins, you’d see kegs. Full of bubbly cider. Awaiting an epic party. Above them hangs odds and sods of dry cured meats. Refreshing that meat stash is on my to-do list.

Edmonton is an apple [and pear] city, and we just haven’t figured it out yet. Maybe I’m reading too much into things or it’s just the circles I spin in, but cider seems to be slowly creeping into our psyche. Maybe it’s just me. I’m starting to think ‘coq au cidre’ instead of ‘coq au vin’. Starting to pair every pork dish with some kind of apple booze. Give me cheese, I now think ‘pear cider’ instead of ‘pinot gris’ [which I still love, btw]. Is part of it frugality? Partly, especially indirectly in that it’s so abundant that dumping a litre into a braise doesn’t phase me, whereas dumping a $20 bottle into the dish does. As a result it creeps into your daily life. But there is also a dominant thread of simple beauty around the harnessing of what ‘where we live’ offers. I don’t think that bit will ever get old.

Pork workshop [Ep 50] went so well that there wasn’t much question about whether there would be more. This time around: beef. The kill was an old cow whose new destiny laid in Jeff Senger’s family’s freezer, while the cow we cut was a beauty of an organic cow from a local farmer. So the day: kill, skin & gut, break down into primals, cut into retail cuts, afternoon of charcuterie, followed by dinner and wine. Epic days, they are. And yes, we ate thinly sliced raw heart sandwiches for lunch.

Had lots of positive feedback about the pork butchery music track by the AwesomeHots, so this one features a shiny new track of theirs: Wayfaring Stranger. I love the vibe – really well tracked piece – and it gives this edit a somber side that made some of the gorier footage work in editing. If it’s too gory for you, blame Daniel Klein over at the Perennial Plate – he advised I go for it. Yeah, that’s a massive passing of the buck. Fact is, this is still tame relative to what goes down behind the scenes of a fast-food hamburger, say. Daniel’s work is extremely cool, btw, if you haven’t checked out his work, do. Here.

Just fyi, the trial of workshops this season was more successful than anticipated, but since my time doesn’t allow me to pursue it alone, I’ve teamed up with a bunch of rad people to start a company called Shovel and Fork. We’re essentially trying to do some good by offering folks a chance to engage with food in ways they wouldn’t normally get a crack at. These workshops will be a part of that. Should be a fun gig.

Pig Day. This was my 5th annual pig day – the one day a year we spend putting up all the pork we’ll eat for the entire year. If we run out, one waits until the next pig arrives. This site is long enough in the tooth to have documented the 1st annual Pig Day. I’m sure it will document many more.

This one was particularly memorable. Twitter made me aware of rock-star-in-hiding Elyse Chatterton, a Master Butcher from the UK with some serious meat cutting skills. A half bottle of wine made me brave enough to invite her. After that, a number of invitations went out to friends, and we all of a sudden had a crew of 12 and 10 sides of Tamworth for 2012′s Pig Day – including the farmers that raised the pigs. A full day of sharing, cutting beautiful pork, hard work, eating, drinking, with the air wafting with wood smoke and conversation. Not sure there’s more one can ask for.

The video features Elyse talking through how she’s accustomed to breaking down a pork, UK-style, and Shannon Ruzicka speaking to how the pigs are raised. And yes there was some roast tying race action. And yes, she won with ease.

So I built a big cider press. Or rather, I had one built. A metal fabricator built the steel frame, and @landonschedler crafted the oak tray. It didn’t take long in test-phase to be in awe at the faucet flow of fresh juice pouring out of it. It works well.

Cider season, having happened the first part of September, feels like a blur. Chad Moss and I spent nearly every day for two to three weeks [don't remember, the blur thing] either in a fruit tree, under a fruit tree, in a vehicle finding a fruit tree, or in my garage crushing and pressing the yield of the fruit tree. We did take breaks to light a fire and prep a meal here and there. And slept. But that was pretty much cider season. If it takes 100lbs of fruit to fill a carboy, I estimate we saw 5-6000lbs of fruit, marked by roughly 400-600lbs of 3-4 different varieties of pears in the mix. Everything from little red crabapples tasting like watermelon jolly rancher to huge baking apples, to apples with bright pink flesh – we saw a lot of apple. Need to keep better records next year, but I’m confident we cracked the kilo-L this year, and likely made it into the 1200-1300L range. Not all for me, of course. And that’s what makes this cider season an epic one. Spent a lot of time with good friends having a lot of good times, revelling in the wealth of fruit, dipping glasses under the tap of fresh juice, sharing meals and drinks and the satisfying fatigue of hard work. A memorable stretch of life, this cider season was. And the cider will now penetrate into our homes, affecting how we’re cooking and drinking, etching itself more deeply into our food culture. Love it.

After a successful first go at ‘Pork Butchery Workshop‘, and due to loads of demand, we’re now taking a crack at an inaugural ‘Beef Butchery Workshop‘. In case you’re wondering, I deleted the workshop page from my site because my inbox was getting inundated with inquiries. Still figuring out what to do about that exactly. In the meantime I’m posting details of coming workshops here.

Date: October 20th

Location: Sangudo Custom Meat Packers

THE GAME PLAN

8am. Kill a cow. Then, gut and skin cow, taking the necessary time to harvest and chat beef offal. Speed tour of the layout of the meat shop. We’ll then break down a side of certified organic beef and talk through your cut options with each primal. Eat some beef lunch. Spend the afternoon doing some beef charcuterie preparations, this time courtesy of chef Chad Moss. Then, we shall dine on beef and red wine. The end.

Everybody will go home with a minimum 5lb box of beef goodies – bones for stock, some fun off cuts and offal, etc.

Buy-in for this one’s higher because a head of certified organic beef costs the same as about 10 pigs in this case. That, and quite frankly the food and booze at pig day was largely donated, and we are trying to price this to be a financially sustainable endeavour. To keep costs manageable, we’re doing a price point of $250 for the whole day, meals and booze included, and you go home with the 5 lb box referred to above as a party favour. If you want in on the meat we’re cutting that day, which certainly would be a wise move, we’re going to be dividing a side into 10 equal boxes and you can take home one of those boxes [1/10 of a side of beef] for an additional $100, which is essentially at cost. So $350 w/ a meat share, $250 w/out. Up to you.

This one is a long way to selling out after a couple tweets that it’s going down, so if you want in, you’d better act quick. I’m taking registrations via email: kevinatkevinkossowan.com.

Deal will be the same as before: cash day-of. We’ll hold you to your word on you being there if you’re going to have us reserve a spot for you.

ps. a game butchery workshop is in the works too. november. elk.

If only 2002 Kevin knew this was coming in 2012. 10 years ago I lived in a condo, fondling my tattered copy of ‘Charcuterie’, longing for an opportunity to get my hands on a whole hog to do even just a few of the myriad of possible delicious preparations pork offered – many of which you can do at home but money can’t otherwise buy. But I had no space to do it. I had nobody to show me the way. I’d never met a pork farmer who I could ask to hook me up. In the spring of 2008, I had moved into our current home, and the previous winters’ pent up porcine desires meant its garage was pre-destined to witness many a pig butchering. 4 years on, many sides and porkventures later, and after a few pints of beer with Jeff Senger tossing around the idea, here we are putting on a pig butchery workshop. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no master at breaking down a side – but mastery was not the objective here. Instead my hope was to give folks that were in a position I recall all too well a crack at breaking the ice. To give them a shot at seeing pig go from live on the hoof to wrapped and packed in the freezer, largely by their own hand. Pig Butchery 101, down and dirty.

Huge thanks to Jeff Senger and Allan Suddaby for putting their heart into it and sharing their expertise throughout the day. An equally huge thanks to those who came, who took the leap. I think it was a day all involved will remember for a long, long time. And yes, we’re talking about maybe doing more. Maybe even a beef butchery workshop. Maybe.

I dearly wish I could show you via video rather than photos and writing, as I had lined up a video episode for this wonderful place, and realized I forgot my DSLR setup on the lower mainland as we left the dock on the ferry towards Victoria. I don’t think I’ve ever claimed to be smart.

I’ve known about Merridale for a while, and had tasted some of their ciders prior to me falling in love with the stuff, but it was an eye opener seeing first hand the cider gold-mine of awesome they’re sitting on, and taste the gamut of their production. The only cider operations I’ve been to have been in Normandy, so it was nostalgic to be there. Nostalgic, and a little piece of me hopes: prophetic. I think there’s opportunity in this industry in Canada. Big time. All those varietals that grow here in abundance but folks don’t get excited about because they’re not good out of hand translates into cider potential. My nostalgia though was a little mis-sited, as the varietals they use are base more in the British cider culture. It’s all good in my world.

As with most new world producers, the methodology here is based on past winning formulae, with many a contemporary innovation. They make pommeau, for example, but not the way the French do – the french just mix 1/3 apple brandy to 2/3 juice and age it in oak 18 months. Merridale’s is actually based on cider to bring some of that flavour to the party, and they age it in oak a lot longer. Their cider product line is deep with variations on the cider theme – all of them interesting, my favorites being their dessert ciders and Normandie cider.

As with all new ag ground that need be broken, their operation is plagued by government foot-dragging. The distillation portion of the business, an important piece of the puzzle in my opinion, gets hammered with ~170% tax by the province, rendering profitability impossible if trying to hit a price point on a bottle that the market will bear. They’re working hard to change that. Until then, barrels of apple brandies sit in french oak until it’s profitable to bottle and sell them. C’mon BC gov’t.

This place is worth a visit, and worth supporting in general. Sadly, because their product is only shelf stable under refrigeration, transportation far and wide has not been feasible. So despite this being the closest cool cidery to me [closer than France, that's for sure], I still can’t buy the stuff here. One day. Until then, I still heart Merridale. Bravo.

Long, long ago, in a former saskatoon u-pick that is now more lawn than bush, a friend and I harvested saskatoons by the 5 gal pail and I made wine. Not your usual cooler-esque cheery saskatoon wine, but a heavy, dense, rich, viscous wine, aged with american white oak. That was way back in 2009. That vintage is now 3 years old and I’m wagering is the type of wine that will rock in the 10+ year range. I hadn’t had the supply to make another vintage since – until now.

Over a year ago, I got in touch with a U-Pick grower who was on the Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton grower list, but last year the ridiculously deep snow in the winter prior yielded a crop failure thanks to the moose eating the bushes to get through the winter. No 2011 vintage in the stars, trumped by nature. This year though, it was game on. Not only did we get the grower some fruit to sell via her share, and donate a pile to OFRE and a local charity, I came home with enough to make a 2012 vintage of saskatoon wine. No time for it now, so the berries will go into the freezer for the time being until my insane schedule lets off a bit.

Surprisingly, despite the wonderful opportunity to stock up for the winter in a very win-win-win-win situation for all, not as many OFRE volunteers were chomping at the bit to get on board as I thought. We were hardly at capacity for the 2 nights we were out. Still, we managed to glean roughly 350 lbs of fruit. Then we got an email from another Saskatoon U-Pick grower, offering another glean. Saskatoons anyone? I’m done.

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.