Like many people, much of my own cooking involves personal classics. Comparatively simple things, cooked well, perfected over time. Often I start with a recipe and make it a couple of times, and then start fiddling with it to make it my own. I won't necessarily say better, but more reflective of my personal taste.
When I want complex or outside-the-box food, I can usually get it in a restaurant or a speciality shop. I have never made my own sausage because it involves expensive equipment I don't (yet) have. I have access to top notch artisan sausages here in Ottawa. Pork belly confit, one of my favourite things on earth, is a 4 day process, and it is almost always available on Play's menu. Despite this, sometimes I have a hankering to try my hand at something involved, something complex, maybe even something daunting.
Last weekend, I started the process of making sweetbreads. Sweetbreads are the thymus or pancreas gland of a young animal - calf or lamb. Flavour-wise, they are among the least objectionable organ meat. Pale in colour, creamy in texture, they don't have that pronounced offal taste you find in liver, or the strong muscle meatiness of something like heart. Most often served either pan-fried or grilled, they are a beginner's introduction to the off-cuts, and with recent trends towards nose-to-tail eating, they are becoming easier to find on North American menus and in quality butcher shops. When I saw them in my favoured shop, I decided that, labour intensive or not, making them was worth a try.
Here, you see the raw, uncooked, uncleaned product. They look a little like pieces of chicken breast, although a closer look reveals the differences - a lot more membrane. My research revealed several methods. Soak in multiple changes of water, soak in milk, remove membrane right away, wait to remove membrane. I decided to go with the more classic approach of soaking for hours in milk. after which I rinsed the sweetbreads and then simmered for about 5 minutes in acidulated water along with a couple of bay leaves.
After the simmering, we are not done yet; this is a 2-3 day process. The next step is pressing the sweetbreads under a weight. I put them on a plate, another plate on top, and used my trusty 5 lb saltbox to press them.
The next day is the most daunting part: trimming. Sweetbreads are covered in a membrane of varying thickness - to me it is similar, but less troubling to deal with than the membrane you find with rabbit. Surprisingly, it was not a difficult as I had imagined to remove the membrane that will interfere with your enjoyment of the meat. Any fat or non-meaty tissue pulls away fairly easily, and the membrane, once slit, is also not that difficult to remove. Also, you don't have to remove all of it. The thicker bits that will produce a chewy product should be removed. Thinner bits that merely hold the various chunks of creamy gland tissue together don't have to be removed. After they're trimmed, dredge in seasoned flour and pan fry in a mix of hot oil and butter.
The cook fairly quickly - maybe 4 minutes per side. At the end, you have a crisp exterior, and a soft, creamy interior. For me, sweetbreads are more about texture than taste. The texture is so different then what you expect of beef, with its grain and structure. The sweetbreads are rich, but not aggressive in their flavour.
My dinner that night, sweetbreads with soft polenta and pickled beets:
Experimentation in the kitchen is important. It is how we perfect new techniques and bring interesting foods from the restaurants into the home. It is how we gain confidence to move away from the childhood classics and break new ground. Sweetbreads, were, for me, a particularly successful first attempt. It took me 3 tries to get a good result with pork belly confit, and the polenta pictured above, although adequate, is still not what I had in mind - and attempts to make polenta fries with the leftovers were a complete failure. No structural integrity:
But I will keep trying, and someday, hopefully this winter, I will add the full range of polenta to my repertoire. Stay tuned.
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