The Escoffier Series continues. Chapter 12: Roasts
At least once a year most of us roast some meat. Roasts are also for the second Tuesday of the month. There is no special reason to have a roast. Getting it right can seem unnerving. This episode will help remove some of that concern so your next roast is the best it can be.
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Chapter 12 is pretty short. The principles are pretty simple. Let’s just jump in. This is the opening of the chapter.
Wild game and lean cuts of meat, all tenderloins and pork and veal loins, can benefit from barding or larding. I’ve discussed that in the various meat chapters and will revisit it here.
Barding is placing thin slices of fat, usually pork fatback, on the surface of the meat, usually pork or veal, and game birds, to protect the outside from becoming too cooked and hard to cut or eat. There is an intended effect of also allowing some of the fat to be absorbed by the meat. I am not fully convinced this achieves the intended goal. Barding to protect the outside of the meat from being too charred absolutely works. Barded meats should be allowed at the last minutes of cooking to sear and develop that crust and flavor and that means removing the fat.
Larding is sewing pieces of fat back into the lean piece of meat. Venison and wild boar are two very lean meats. Larding, like barding, is intended to allow some of the fat to melt into the meat. Larded meat also has the added effect, a good one, of having some fat to eat with each lean meat bite.
About spit roasting Escoffier offers this. {read 3883}
It’s almost like how do you get to Carnegie Hall: Practice practice practice. He also offers these tips.
Red meat should be seared quickly and then roasted over embers, with no flames, so the heat penetrates without charring the outside.
White meats should be cooked well done and over a sufficient heat to develop a good crust and complete the cooking at the same time.
Game birds should be roasted over wood with a small amount of flame instead of glowing ember heat. Escoffier offers what woods to avoid for spit roasting and those are resinous woods. So, pine. Juniper smells grand in the fireplace but I’m not certain I want that flavor on my food.
Oven roasting is something more of us are familiar with. The biggest concern for the roast is that it be elevated off the bottom of the roasting pan. This can be managed with a rack or by placing metal skewers over the edges to hold the meat. If that’s not possible, long strips of carrot and celery and leeks will keep the meat off the bottom of the pan and add extra flavor to the pan gravy that will be made from the drippings.
Oven roasting is by its nature going to create pan drippings and gather rendered fat. Spit roasting will also create dripping and rendered fat. How to catch them is the trick. At one job we had a gas-fired rotisserie cooker which produced the heat from behind and allowed the juices and fat to drip down. Home cooks probably don’t have that. Any pan used to catch the drippings will first block the heat and second, risk burning whatever falls onto it.
The process to start making the gravy is to deglaze the pan. That’s a rather simple matter of putting the pan on the burner on low heat and adding water to the pan, enough to just cover the bottom, and with a wooden spoon scrape the drippings free as the water loosens the protein and caramel bonds. Stock of the thing roasted or veal stock may be used instead of water.
One challenge is the amount of pan gravy produced is going to be small. In some cases, have a stock of the thing and add the strained deglazed liquid to the stock. Bring it to a boil and thicken it with a corn starch or arrowroot slurry just before service. That is not the Escoffier suggestion which takes several hours.
Escoffier offers two steps or procedures which I don’t agree with. The first is basting. Basting, done properly, is pouring bits of the liquified fat over the meat. Never stock or water. Only the fat. The intention is the fat will penetrate the meat in the mere seconds of contact before gravity pulls it back to the pan. I’ve discussed this previously. I think the result is not worth the effort. The other suggestion he makes is to serve the roast or game bird immediately. Meat benefits immensely from a rest. If you’ve ever seen the serving tray of a Thanksgiving turkey after the bird has been carved too soon, it is full of juice that should be in the bird. So too with a prime rib or crown roast or leg of lamb. And my tri-tip. A resting period is crucial to keeping the moisture in the meat. Everything about the eating experience is made better.
Escoffier goes into a few sides and presentation ideas. He discusses some cuts I doubt any of us can or would buy at the store or butcher shop. Mostly what we have is a whole tenderloin, a whole strip loin, a tri-tip, which is a pretty small piece of meat. I suppose you could find a steamship, the whole rear leg of a cow if you really wanted it.
Roasting a piece of meat properly starts with understanding the relationship between the roast’s size and heat. The smaller the piece of meat, the higher the temperature and shorter the cooking time will be. Large pieces of meat, or really large such as that steamship, start out moderately high, then go low for a long time.
The goal in both cases is to keep the meat medium rare, for red meat, beef, and lamb, and a sufficient crust on the outside. A steamship left to roast at even medium heat, 350, will be far too crusty on the outside and overdone, too. Conversely, slow-cooking a small roast will not develop that desirable crust and it will have less flavor. At a high temperature, 450, for only a few minutes, then turn down the heat to 350 to continue the cooking will make a fine crust on the meat and keep it evenly cooked throughout.
One advantage we have that Escoffier did not have was oven-safe thermometers. They even have a kind of thermometer where the probe is on a cord and it connects to the reader which is outside the oven. No need to open the oven to check what the temperature is.
Since we are going to allow our roasts to rest, that means they will continue to cook even when they are out of the oven. A turkey will increase by about 15 degrees. A tri-tip about 10 degrees. A strip loin or prime rib may increase 15 degrees as they rest.
I know why, or at least I think I know why, Escoffier said to serve the meat immediately. The crust developed will not get better as the meat rests. I see that with roasted chicken. The skin is all crispy and inviting and then it gets just a bit less crispy while I’m waiting for the chicken to reach its final carry-over temperature. The trade-off is crispy skin and dry meat or slightly less crispy skin and delicious meat. Easy choice for me.
Roasts are pretty easy and, for the most part, are spared the Escoffier treatment of a lot of labor. Google Escoffier procedure 3914, Truffled Young Turkey for the epitome of the Escoffier treatment.