Friday, February 17, 2017

D is for Denmark



Last meal, my daughter was visiting from Los Angeles.  This time, my youngest son Josh (a senior at Penn State) was in town to participate in a Mock Trial competition at Georgetown Law.  I spent Saturday morning (January 28)  watching Josh compete with his team, where he was one of the lawyers (the case was an age-discrimination suit; I also saw him give the opening statement as plaintiff attorney on Sunday – quite a treat!)  The afternoon was spent cooking and preparing for dinner – guests included Josh and his teammate Larissa, my eldest son Noah and his girlfriend Emily, my partner Davida’s daughter Hannah and her friend Peter, and my mother-in-law Brenda.

I chose Denmark for this meal mainly because Davida has a good friend, Hanne, from Denmark (who now lives in Sweden), and we figured she would be a good source for recipes and ideas.  She did not disappoint, pointing us to a great website (http://www.danishnet.com/food/) and providing some of her own personal favorite ideas.  Most of the main dishes were pork (not kosher) or red meat (not our favorite), but one dish caught my attention: roast goose stuffed with apples and prunes, a Danish holiday favorite.  I had never in my life eaten goose, and I don’t even recall ever seeing it on restaurant menus.  What a unique opportunity, I thought.  All I needed to do was find a kosher goose.  This proved easier said than done – none of the local DC kosher butchers carried goose, and a recommended butchery in Baltimore said they sometimes had goose, but currently had none in stock.  A Google search yielded a few hits for kosher goose, but only one of the sites was active – Aaron’s Gourmet, of Queens, NY.  They have an amazing array of exotic kosher meat (bison, venison, quail, pheasant, turducken) and, of course, goose.  Ordering was easy and they ship overnight (the 9 pound goose arrived frozen in a very well packaged Styrofoam container). 

Once I found a source for the goose, my aims were two-fold: (1) find good accompaniments; and (2) don’t ruin the goose - it was definitely the most expensive single food item I’ve ever purchased, although I don’t feel that the price per pound (~$13.50) was unreasonable.

The Appetizer:

Hanne had written that Rugbrød is a quintessential Danish food that cannot be readily found outside of Denmark, and one that all Danes crave.  Rugbrød is a very dense sourdough rye bread, filled with seeds.  I had never made bread before, but figured how hard could it be?     

The recipe calls for combining rye and wheat flours, adding a combination of seeds, using yeast and a dark beer as fermenting agents, and letting it ferment for 24 hours, or more.  I was not able to find rye berries, as called for in the recipe, so I just increased the quantity of flax and sunflower seeds.  Other than that, I followed the recipe strictly (using the suggestion of substituting almond milk and vinegar for the buttermilk, to make it pareve, and sprinkling oats on top).  The beer that I used (Alewerks Coffeehouse) imparted a nice sweet, nutty flavor to the bread.  The recipe needed only part of a bottle, and I was sure not to let the rest of it go to waste.  It was a lot of fun kneading the bread and watching it rise during the course of a day to almost overflow the bowl.  The recipe called for baking for 90 minutes.  I had thought that sounded like a long time, but checking after 75 minutes it was still fairly raw in the middle.  I kept checking every 10-15 minutes, and ended up baking for almost two hours.  The outside was nice and crusty but the inside was still a bit soggy.  I let it cool down, according to the recipe, but it was still quite hard to slice.  Over the course of a few days, however, it firmed up nicely.  If I were to do this again, I would bake the bread a full day in advance.

 

Inspired both by Hanne’s email about how Rugbrød is often eaten and some of the images on the recipe website, we prepared a bit of a Smörgåsbord, consisting of lox, cucumber, and pareve cream cheese, along with gluten-free crackers for Hannah.  It was a big hit!  The bread has a very unusual taste, with rye sourdough, seeds, and beer flavors.  Initially it was off-putting, but it really grew on all of us, and in the days that followed we really enjoyed it, especially toasted.  The reviews were very mixed – 3 people gave it a 7 (the top rating), 2 gave it a 5, and two gave it a negative rating.

This turned out to be the major commonality of the dinner – a very wide range of ratings, with some people really liking one aspect and disliking another, and others with the opposite reactions.  Very different from any of the previous meals, where, by and large, the ratings were relatively consistent.

The Soup:

Usually, I make just one appetizer, but I really wanted to try both the Rugbrød and a split pea soup recipe, topped with caramelized onions and fresh dill.  It sounded like a perfect dish for a winter meal, and seemed to be fairly simple to make, consisting of just green split peas, some vegetables, and a little bit of seasoning.  I did not have fresh thyme, as called for by the recipe, so used dried.  The soup tasted a bit bland, so I added quite a bit more thyme and dill than the recipe called for.  It ended up being a luscious, thick soup.  The caramelized onions were a great addition – they added a flavor and texture that made the soup really special (at least, for those of us who like caramelized onions).  I always underestimate, though, how long it takes to caramelize onions – I should have started a bit earlier, and reheated the onions to finish them off right before serving.  The Rugbrød and the soup went very well together – they could have been a meal all by themselves.  The soup was the one exception to the wide variation in ratings – all were positive, average 6 (out of 7).  A clear winner, and one to put in my “keepers” file.

The Main Dish:

Roast goose!  Sounds so exotic, and it was!  The recipe calls for stuffing the goose with apples and prunes.  I used a combination of Granny Smith and Gala apples (the idea was for a sweet and tart combination).  The goose is stuffed and then trussed – had to go out and buy trussing pins and string.  I actually found it easier to stuff the goose than turkey, as it seems to have a much wider, longer cavity and a lot of fatty skin to keep everything inside.  The recipe is actually fairly straightforward – the goose is roasted on its side in chicken stock, to keep the meat moist.  A 9 pound bird is supposed to cook for nearly 4 hours.  After just over 3 hours, I checked the temperature with a meat thermometer, and it seemed to be done (175 degrees in the middle of the thigh).  I was not confident that I had measured the temperature correctly, since it was so much less time than the recipe called for, that I cooked it another 20 minutes.  Big mistake – by that time, my goose was really cooked.  It sure looked beautiful, though! I found that it tasted much gamier than either chicken or turkey.  In addition, it was all dark meat, the wings and the neck bone were huge, and the wishbone was completely different from a chicken or turkey wishbone.

I actually liked the flavor of the goose meat quite a bit, although I was disappointed that I had overcooked it.  Most of the guests were muted in their responses – four 4’s and two 3’s – but one person gave it a 7 (I gave it a 5).  I felt that the apple and prune stuffing was not at all special – to me, it was fairly bland and the mushy texture was not appealing.  But, the guests’ reactions to the stuffing was the most varied – it got one vote each from 2 to 7, except 3 got two votes.  As I said before, the biggest commonality was the wide variance in the ratings.

The Starch:

Every recipe that I read for Danish roast goose said to serve them with caramelized potatoes.  The recipe calls for boiling the potatoes, cutting them up, and then mixing them in the caramelized sugar.  I used Earth Balance instead of butter, to keep it pareve.  This was my first time caramelizing sugar; I’ve seen on cooking shows how easy it is to burn sugar, so I was extra careful.  Even so, it was a real disaster – rather than good caramelization, I ended up with a soupy, goopy mess that was overly sweet.  I thought the potatoes were just horrible (because of my technique – I am sure that, properly caramelized, they would have been amazing).  Most people agreed with me, rating the potatoes in the neutral to negative range, although one person (apparently with a sweet tooth) gave them a 6.

The Vegetable:

The rest of the meal was mostly brown and mushy, so I wanted to brighten things up and add a bit of crunch.  A recipe for Rødkål, Danish pickled red cabbage, did the trick.  The pickling ingredient is balsamic vinegar and red currant jelly – yum!  When Davida and I were in London last fall, we went to a food market and ended up buying white balsamic vinegar, which is much sweeter and more intense than regular balsamic.  I decided to use a combination of the white and black vinegars and used Earth Balance instead of butter, again.  I really liked the result – it was sweet and acidic, with an intense flavor from both the vinegars and the allspice, and the color just popped.  Two of the guests didn’t like it (giving it a 2 and 3), but most of the other guests liked it a lot, averaging a 6 (which was my rating, too).  I made a lot of it (we bought a really big cabbage), and I enjoyed eating it for days afterwards.

The Dessert:

I usually don’t make dessert with the meal, but Hanne had sent a recipe for an intriguing looking apple parfait, called æblekage and Davida decided to give it a try (instead of buying her favorite chocolate cake balls at the bakery around the corner).   The dish consists of apples (we used Macintosh) cooked with lemon and honey, and a meringue folded into it.  The apples are layered with toasted breadcrumbs and topped with hazelnuts.  I really don’t know why, but it just did not turn out well.  The breadcrumb mixture was dry, the apples combined with the meringue were not appealing (other photos of æblekage show the apples and meringue as separate layers – which may have been a better idea), and overall it was cloyingly sweet.  The average rating was 2.7, and no one gave it a positive review (and I was the only guest who actually finished their portion).  Given this disaster, and the disastrous dessert from the Cuban dinner, I think we will stick to the main part of the meal, and serve something chocolate (and bought) in the future.

Addendum:

Every time I make turkey, I use the carcass to make soup.  I love turkey soup with vegetables and barley.  The goose carcass was so lovely, that I wanted to do the same.  I looked for a while, but didn’t find anything I liked better than my mother’s turkey soup recipe.  I altered the recipe below slightly, to use celery root, instead of parsnip, and fresh dill, both of which I had left over from the split pea soup.  The goose carcass is so much more fatty than a turkey carcass, so the soup ended up being even more luscious.  I found the same with the juice from roasting the goose – after being in the fridge for a day, it separated and the top third was all fat.  I briefly considered making schmaltz and gribenes, like my mother used to do on occasion, but could not bring myself to making a dish that was basically all fat.

Turkey soup recipe:
-        Cook the carcass and skin in 2½  quarts of water with ½ cup barley and salt for 1-1½ hours
-        Remove bones from soup; remove meat from bones and add back into soup
-        Add 2 stalks sliced celery, 4 sliced carrots, diced parsnip, whole onion
-        Cook 1 hour longer

Up next: Ecuador!  Back to South America!