Le journal intime de cassoulet III

Left shows ingredients for the beans, on the right the ingredients for preparing the meat.

Sunday October 4

I drained the soaked beans, dumped them in to my pot and covered them in water. While I brought the beans to a boil prepared the salt pork and the other ingredients used to flavour the beans. The salt pork turned out nicely, since it had a relatively short curing time it as not terribly salty. I took all the rind from the whole piece of belly I cured to cook with the beans as you're supposed to use rind to line the base of  the pot when cooking the assembled dish,  I probably needed even more rind that I had. The beans took about one and a half hours to get to the undercooked stage (still a bit grainy and hard in the middle) needed for baking the completed dish on Monday.

Once the beans were ready I cooked the meats; the Strang recipe instructs you to brown the sausages, then simmer the meats in stock for 50 minutes and then assemble the cassoulet in layers with the cooking liquid from the meats, topped up with the cooking liquid from the beans if required. One of the sausage casings had spilt so we had it with brunch, it's a very tasty sausage with large chunks of pork, appropriately seasoned with black pepper. After all the cooking was done the house smelled amazing.

Confit de canard from La Belle Chaurienne

To assemble the cassoulet I had to prepare the confit to add to the beans and meats. Despite the best intentions, I have never gotten around to making my own duck confit. Mostly because I never have a surplus of duck fat, any duck fat I do collect is rapidly recycled into roast or fried potatoes; but it's also because I have had a 1.25 kg tin of duck confit sitting in the can cupboard. The confit was sent to me by the Archivist's mum a few Christmases ago, it will provide duck legs for the cassoulet, a few more legs to eat with salad, and I can reserve the fat to make more confit. I extracted three duck legs from the creamy fat and broke them up to add to the cassoulet, cutting my fingers several times. Instructions for making confit from scratch can be found here; now that I have about 2 cups of fat I will be making some soon.

I guessed that I probably would be able to fit the cassoulet in my pot after all; but it's very full and very heavy. If I had a bigger oven I would have done it in two pots to increase the amount of delicious bean crust. I lined my pot with the rind, added a layer of beans, then meat, beans, duck, meats, and beans on top and poured in all the liquid from cooking the meats. Tomorrow it just needs to bake for at least three hours to finish cooking the beans and develop the crust.

Labour Day cassoulet is looking like it's going to be a success. Friends are bringing wine, I will make a very simple green salad and get some baguettes, and for dessert we will have tarte aux pommes.