Three ways to make rustic French dish cassoulet
Cassoulet - a French peasant dish named after the clay cassole pot in which it is baked - has inspired heated debate, dreams of perfection and endless variations on the simple theme of pork and beans.
Although the dish has made occasional forays onto haute cuisine menus, cassoulet at its heart is a rustic dish that marries simple ingredients with an array of techniques.
“Cassoulet is a labor of love,” said Peter Janiak, chef at Seghesio Family Vineyards in Healdsburg. “It should not or cannot be rushed into. At its heart it is a rustic bean and meat stew. However, its complex use of multiple cooking techniques solidifies its spot at the apex of French home cooking.”
For her breakthrough 1983 tome, “The Cooking of Southwest France,” Paula Wolfert of Sonoma searched every nook and cranny of the Langueduc region - from the Dordogne and Garonne rivers south to Gascony and the Basque country - for the best-tasting cassoulet.
“Like bouillabaisse in Marseille, paella in Spain, chili in Texas, it is a dish for which there are innumerable recipes and about which discussions quickly turn fierce,” she wrote. She settled upon two of her favorite recipes: a Fava Bean Cassoulet made by Chef Andre Daguin, a legend credited with putting Gascony on the map; and a Cassoulet in the Style of Toulouse, made by a woman who learned to make cassoulet at her grandmother’s knee.
Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo New World Specialty Foods in Napa believes the dish probably originated as a way to use up leftovers, just like ribollito, chilaquiles and many of the world’s other comfort dishes.
At a recent Rancho Gordo cassoulet workshop, the chefs from The Fatted Calf of Napa created an Italian, American and French version of the dish. You could also do a Mexican version, he said, using Mexican sausages and oregano instead of thyme.
Once you know the cassoulet rules, you can always bend them. But in order to stay true to the one-pot wonder, you really need to serve it around a big table filled with friends.
“This is the perfect dish on a weekend to come home to and have a garlicky salad and a big pot of love and some great wine,” Sando said. “It’s a home dish, and the house smells so great.”
Sando, who grows and sells the big, white Tarbais beans traditionally used in cassoulet, recently published a cookbook dedicated to the dish: “Cassoulet: A French Obsession,” by Kate Hill, a longtime “bean person” who attempts to demystify the dish.
“Kate pulls it apart and helps you deconstruct it so you know where to fudge and where not to,” he said. “People think it’s going to take three days.”
Sando sourced his West Coast seed stock from the classic French Tarbais bean of France but decided to call it a “Cassoulet Bean” out of respect for the French farmers who grow the creamy bean in their own terroir. Tarbais, however, is not indigenous to Europe
“We believe the bean probably came from Oaxaca, went to Europe (in the 16th century) and was bred there,” Sando said. “Before that, they were probably using dried favas (in cassoulet.)”
The hearty cassoulet casserole tends to incorporates all kinds of pork products, from pork fat and skin to sausages and smoked pork shoulder. It’s hearty meats make it the perfect winter dish to share after a day or skiing or snowshoeing.
Cassoulet with?Italian accent
In the winter, Janiak creates an Italian version of cassoulet to serve on his Chef’sTable tasting menu, which pairs four wines with four dishes. His twist on cassoulet is made with a cannellini bean ragout and lots of pork, then finished with garlicky breadcrumbs.
The cannellini beans have a nice, creamy texture when they cook,” he said. “We make housemade fennel sausage - that’s important to us here - and we fire up the smoker and make some pork shoulder hams … we also use some pancetta that’s cured in our salumi room.”
The Seghesio bean dish lands somewhere between a homemade and a haute cuisine cassoulet.
“We do cook a lot of the ingredients separately, and we take advantage of what we do best,” Janiak said. “Almost every kitchen in France has its own version. The villages and communes all do different things. Some mix in the duck, and some have mutton as well.”
To improve his wine pairing, Janiak adds some Dijon mustard to the vegetables before deglazing them with wine.
“We needed a little acid in there,” he said. “And it makes it taste lighter on the palate.”
Cassoulet inspired ?by M.F.K.
In the town of Sonoma, chef Sheana Davis of The Epicurean Connection has been making cassoulet for the past 30 years, ever since she worked as a teenager for the venerable food writer M.F.K. Fisher.
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