Eating Around / Olympic Provisions

Olympic Provisions SE on SE Washington St. in Portland

Portland is a food town, local food is akin to a religious phenomena there.  A few years ago, when the the travelling pig extravaganza Cochon 555 visited Portland, a local chef got into a fist-fight with the organizer of the cook-off because some of the pigs used in the cook-off were not locally sourced.  There was a broken leg, a concussion and the police had to use pepper spray and a taser to break up the fight.  Portland people are very serious about local food.

For a city of its size there are uncommonly many cutting edge restaurants.  In addition to the restaurants, there are excellent specialty food shops, high end grocery stores and innovative food carts everywhere.  Safeway in Laramie is only a poor second cousin to those same stores in Portland. Whenever we travel there we try to find the time and money to eat a meal cooked by someone else, someone who is hopefully more skilled at the stove than we.  This time we went to Olympic Provisions SE on SE Washington Street in Portland.  The chef at OPSE is Alex Yoder. According to their web-page, they were Portland's first salumeria - specializing in charcuterie and cured meats with a menu inspired by rustic Spanish and Mediterranean cooking.  In Portland, if you want excellent European style charcuterie you don't import it (you might get beat up) you make your own, and that's just what they do at OPSE.  You can see the meats hanging in a cure room behind the main counter.

Note window into the meat curing room.

The restaurant itself is a modern loft space in a old renovated building.  Having spent part of my youth in NYC renovating lofts in SoHo when it was still the art district, I am a sucker for these industrial spaces. With the high ceilings the space initially feels large, but it's not really. The dining area is narrow giving it an intimacy that feels just about right for sharing a meal.

Olympic Provisions menu - 22 December 2012

The dinner menu was perhaps not quite as interesting as I might have liked but the wine menu was exceptionally so. There were five adults and two children in our party.  Among the five of us we shared two bottles of wine. One was a nice Chardonnay from Jura: Domaine Labet “Fleurs” Côtes du Jura, 2010. We also shared a very special red from Provence, a bottle of Domaine Tempier, Bandol, 2008.  This is the wine made by the Peyraud family.  Lulu's Kitchen at Domaine Tempier has been extensively written about by food writer Richard Olney, wine importer Kermit Lynch, American chef and doyenne of the local food movement Alice Waters, iconoclastic food writer John Thorne and writer/poet gourmand Jim Harrison.  Lulu is an instinctive cook, never measuring ingredients but working by taste and feel; Richard Olney recorded her recipes and introduced her to America.

Domaine Tempier 2008

The wait-staff was knowledgeable, friendly and efficient. The children happily supped on frankfurters and fries (not on the menu).  Among the adults, we shared a charcuterie French Board which I insisted we order, mainly for the rillettes.  Rillettes are a kind of potted meat - usually pork but also made with other meats as well: duck, hare, salmon. If you've not had them, think of a home-made version of deviled ham.  The rillettes were fine and the salamis and other items on the board were very good.  I have tried my own hand at making cured sausages and the result, while not bad, was nothing like this. We shared a lot of the food - I tried the Baby Octopus that Tom ordered - it had an rich chickpea and aioli sauce that smelled and tasted of the sea  - a discordant note to the other flavors I was enjoying. I ate most of a Belgian endive salad which was light, sweet and refreshing and not something I would have made myself - I might try to duplicate it at home soon.  Others at our table enjoyed the braised cardoons but I did not taste them.  I also ate the braised short rib, a favorite of mine. It was delicious with a rich thick slightly sweet gravy but was no better than I make at home.

All-in-all we had a very good meal with exceptional wines.  With so many interesting places to eat in Portland I'm not thinking I'll be heading right back - though on our next visit we might just buy a selection of Olympic Provisions charcuterie as a prelude to a home cooked meal.  Mainly, when I go out to a restaurant like this I hope to eat something astounding, something I'd never though of or that I can not easily reproduce at home. Though the food was very good - I did not really find that at Olympic Provisions. I enjoyed a very good meal with family in nearly perfect space served by a competent wait staff.

Merguez, Sausage and Chorizo making with Carlos

Carlos and I occasionally hunt together; he is a pheasant/grouse/duck fanatic and is generally obsessed with gathering wild meats.  When he sees a deer or antelope or elk I can almost see the little cartoon bubbles floating up from his head with images of steaming roasts and other dishes.   His regular hunting partners are named Teal and Lola;   Teal is a Pointing Griffon, and Lola is an accident, a mix of Pointing Griffon and a German Wirehair that turns out to be a great bird dog.

Carlos and I made sausages and chorizo last Sunday at his house.   I took a fresh loaf of no-knead bread, a bottle of Rioja and 7 pounds of elk meat.  Carlos provided a large pork shoulder, back fat, spices and the fermentation agent and nitrites for the salami.  While we stuffed sausages, Martha cooked us a nice linguine with shrimp and truffle oil.   It certainly is more fun to undertake a sausage making project with a friend, good food and a bottle of wine (a Rioja).  We made a spicy Italian sausage and a Merguez using a mixture of elk and pork. The recipes were adapted from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's book Charcuterie

I should have paid more attention to recipes, ratios  and ingredients but that's part of the pleasure of working in someone else's kitchen, you're not in charge.  You can just relax and do what you're told.  As I recall, and I know that we didn't write it down anywhere but maybe Carlos remembers,  we made the Merguez  following the recipe except that we substituted elk for the lamb.  The Italian sausage was a mixture of  about 2/3 elk and 1/3 pork.   The chorizo, which is cured with nitrites and salt and fermented salami is not cooked but aged for a couple of  months and we made it following the recipe in Ruhlman.

This the first attempt for either of us making a dry aged fermented salami. Carlos is a real scientist, he labels himself  a physiological ecologist, so I was quite content to following his lead on this somewhat more technical form of charcuterie.  In my incomplete understanding, you add sodium nitrite as a preservative to prevent the growth of botulism and add a fermenting agent to get the curing process going.  I don't own a copy of the Ruhlman book and now I can not recall if is it sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate or possibly a mixture of both. I really should have been paying more attention.   The Chorizo recipe  is one point where I understand the Ruhlman/Polcyn book contains a rather serious typo regarding the amount of fermenting agent  to add.  There is an explanation buried somewhere here.

On all sausage blogs there are such fine photos of the salamis hanging to cure.  They often are hanging on metal racks in white tiled rooms.  It turns out to be a more difficult than you might imagine to find a clean, cool, dry  place to hang a salami to cure.  Carlos put his in the crawlspace under his house, not as bad as it might sound, but still not a white tiled room.  I hung mine in the utility room which does stay cool, but which is open to the kitchen.  A few days after hanging them I discovered that the dog had uncharacteristically nipped of the bottoms of two of the links; so much for sterile conditions.  Matt Wright who writes the Wrigthfood Blog has some really interesting  plans for an inexpensive home curing setup.

I used some of the Merguez in a paella and it was great.  Haven't tried the finished Italian links yet and we're still waiting for what's left of the chorizo age.

Game Meat Charcuterie

For a number of reasons I butcher my own game meat. It's hard work and usually takes me two days to butcher and wrap an elk for the freezer, this is after it has been quartered, skinned bagged and hung. I am  a slow butcher.   One benefit  of hiring a butcher is that they will typically offer to make sausages as part of the order.  Until now, I have not done so for myself.

Aside from the sausages, there are a number of downsides to hiring a butcher. For one thing, it's expensive.  Last time I checked, it would have cost me $250 to have an elk butchered that had already been skinned, quartered, bagged and hung (that price did not include sausages.) For another, there's really no telling whose meat you'll get back.  This is an issue because there is CWD in the deer and elk herd here in SE Wyoming.  Even though there is no known risk to humans, I have my animals tested at the Wyoming state vet lab before eating them.  I only want the meat from my own animal.  Also, and perhaps most importantly, the local butchers never have enough space or time during the rush of hunting season to hang the meat as long as is needed.


Here is my recipe, sort of cobbled together from sources on the internet and an article in Saveur No. 31 (December 1998).

2                           Natural Sausage Casings (about 4' long each)
2 1/2 lbs                Elk (ground)
2 1/2 lbs                Pork shoulder (ground)
1/2 lb                    bacon (ground)
paprika                 cover and mix 4 times
fennel seed            cover and mix 3 times
oregano                 cover and mix 3 times
garlic                     10 cloves (finely chopped)
red-pepper flake   sparsely cover and mix 3 times
black pepper         cover and mix 4 times
                             (coarsely cracked with mortar and pestle)
salt                        cover and mix 4 times
cayenne                 lightly dusted and mixed 1 time (optional)

Some things I did not have were fatback which would have been better than bacon  and I would have used hot paprika instead of the sweet variety, but I was out.  Choose a pork shoulder with as much fat on it as you can find.

The casings come salted and you need to rinse them and then soak them in cold water while you prepare the forcemeat filling.    Grind the meat.   I cook by taste and feel and have specified spices in my recipe very roughly. You obviously can not taste the uncooked forcemeat  but you can fry up a bit to check the spicing as you go. My instructions "cover and mix" mean to evenly cover the meat mixture with the ingredient  (you can see the size of the bowl I was using) and then to mix thoroughly. The Saveur article recommended chopping rather than grinding the meat though I did grind it.  I did not have fatback pork to add and so used bacon.   The fennel seed gives it a distinctive sausage flavor.  The red pepper flakes are potentially hot though mine are not really.  Reading the recipe you might think these sausages turned out overly spicy, but they are not.  Of course that's a matter of personal taste,but for some reference I will say that I have never been a fan of very hot food that so many people seem to like.

Stuffing the casings was a new experience.  You slide the casing onto the stuffing tube and then tie a knot in the end.  I removed the cutters from the grinder and just used it to force the meat into the casings.  As you go you twist them into the length of sausage you want.  It is almost a three handed operation, pushing the meat into the grinder, cranking and holding the casing as it fills.  After the first 4 feet of sausage, I added the cayenne and made a second batch that was hotter.  Packing the second batch I realized the casings were more elastic than I'd thought at first and I packed them more tightly.

In the end I think the sausages  would have been better if I'd had more fat in them, but leaner sausages do tend to be more chorizo like.   When I cook them I usually just slice them open and pour in some olive oil.
The spicier batch is a bit more popular, though the less spicy ones are excellent  for breakfast.

Jack Rabbit Cuisine

Stéphane Reynaud's beautiful book Terrine contains a number of recipes for Rabbit and Hare terrines. My own terrine was based on his Hare terrine with Marc de Bourgogne. Having no European Hare, I substituted Jack rabbit. Having no Marc, I generously substituted Cognac.

My Jack rabbit, killed the day before, was hung undrawn overnight in a cool (but not freezing) room. I skinned and butchered it the next morning saving the liver and heart. Rabbits and hares may carry Tularemia so inspection of the liver is required. It was beautiful. In my own experience, hanging game meat is a crucial step in bringing it to the pot, or grill, or oven. In the excellent  River Cottage Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall discusses hanging meat and game.   Fearnley-Whittingstall is a leader of the locavore movement in the UK and runs a farm called River Cottage in Dorsett.  He notes, that for any meat, a period of hanging relaxes the meat so it will be more tender. I am convinced this is a must for deer, elk and antelope.  He recommends hanging hares (undrawn) with a plastic bag over the head to collect the blood for the sauce.  I did not collect the blood (and have had bad luck with it curdling when added to a hot liquid in the past.) Oddly, he recommends gutting rabbits in the field (and thus not hanging them undrawn.)  Also, he recommends not marinating hare in alcohol because it pickles the meat.  I did marinate mine following Reynaud's recipe.

 

Mostly, I followed Reynaud's recipe. I have no kitchen scale so I was guessing at weights.  The body of the dish consists mainly of about 1/2 hare and 1/2 pork meats. I marinated the meats: Jack rabbit saddle and haunch, liver and heart, pork shoulder and bacon (pork belly) overnight in the Cognac, wine, and herbs (rosemary and thyme.) The next day I drained and dried the meat and mixed in the cream (seemed like a bit much) and added an egg hoping to get better results in terms of how it holds together.  This was a warning from one reviewer; that many Reynaud's recipes fail to hold together with American ingredients.

I do not own a terrine so I used a bread pan.  I especially like the black cast iron Staub terrine shown in the photo above from Reynaud's book, but it is not available in the US. Le Creuset makes one that is sold here.  Terrine's are cooked double boiler style, by placing the terrine pan half submerged in boiling water in a roasting pan.

The finely chopped meat was layered into the bottom of the pan with the Jackrabbit saddles (whole) laid in the middle and then another layer of meat with the top covered with bacon strips. Some terrines are covered for cooking, this one is not.  It is baked at 350F for two hours. As it cooked quite a bit of liquid built up in the pan and I siphoned that off with a turkey baster at one hour and again at 1 1/2 hours. Once cooked I put it in the refrigerator to cool. It is served cold.

After chilling I unmolded the terrine.  It held together reasonably well, not as well as I might have liked, but it could be sliced and served cold. We ate it with a fresh loaf of bread and a sharp blue cheese, some pickles and a glass of  Chardonnay.  I thought it was quite good and although I was worried that Penelope might not care for it, she declared it to be excellent.

Next time, I will use a bit less cream, add another egg, and perhaps add a dash of Cayenne to give it a bit of a bite.