December 5, 2023 Serious Eats Cassoulet
J. Kenji López-Alt had his first taste of real Cassoulet in Carcassonne, France. There are three towns that all claim Cassoulet originated there, Toulouse, Castelnaudary, and Carcassonne. His article Traditional French Cassoulet is an amazing tale, so we, of course, had to try it. We almost got it right the first time, we skimped on the sausage and the dish requires really great sausage, so we’ll shop a lot harder next time.
We do have a big disagreement with Kenji on the beans. Cook’s Illustrated did a taste test of canned beans vs dried beans and they discovered that all of the common dried beans are way too dry, at less than 10% moisture level.
Mine en place part 1, Sausage at front left, Pork shoulder and duck fat at back left, bone-in, skin on chicken thighs at from right, salt pork at back right. This is another of our disagreements with Kenji - bone-in chicken thighs are simply too much tedious and finicky work for the table.
Mine en place part 2, 6 Madagascar cloves and 2 California bay leaves. Instead of trying to fish them out, we put them into that tea ball.
Just getting started browning everything with some help from the chief quality control inspector.
Livingstone wears many hats! Now he’s the supervisory psittacine.
Finishing the browning.
At 6:25 pm, it’s ready to go into the oven. You can see all the white garlic cloves. Turns out we didn’t need to go to all the trouble of peeling them. All that’s really needed is to break apart the whole head of garlic. After the long oven bake, the cloves have no flavor of their own.
At 5:56 pm we pulled it from the oven to do the 1st breaking of the crust.
At 7:17 pm, the second breaking of the crust, the liquid level has dropped, but not by enough to need to add more. Zoom the image by clicking on it to see the crust that has formed.
At 8:06 pm you can clearly see that we’ve got a fair amount of crust at the finish of the bake. You have to zoom the image to really see the crust.
Yes, Livingstone is a portable disaster area, he throws crumbs everywhere! Cassoulet is parrot approved+