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!
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