Pho Nai!!! (Vietnamese style noodle soup with deer?)

One more reason to save bones from wild game.

I love to tell others about the benefits to home cooking of saving long bones from the wild ungulates we hunt.  When we add store-bought stock to our dishes, I always feel as though we are about to consume some industrialized byproduct of the big meat business.  While I doubt there is truly much difference in cooking processes, other than scale, homemade stock looks, smells, tastes, and feels more wholesome.  Usually, I go to the effort of making stocks so that I can use them in snotty French sauces, but not this time.  This time they are going in the southeast asian comfort food, pho.  I suppose it makes some sense that bones are making appearances in French and Vietnamese cooking... those two cultures do share substantial colonial history....

Emily and I fell in love with pho at the Vietnam Noodle Bowl Restaurant in Missoula, Montana.  Admittedly, that establishment has little in the way of atmosphere, but what it lacks in atmosphere it more than makes up for in flavor and service.  I would rather eat great food in a strip mall than help some pretentious restaurateur pay off the mortgage on his granite pillars and back-lit liquor shelves any day.  Have I mentioned I hate back-lit liquor shelves?  Rarely does the deliciousness of food live up to any price paid for atmosphere.

Back to the soup.... Pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup whose broth is a stock built from the bones up specifically for the dish.  Pho is definitely comfort food, as the flavorful and nourishing broth warms from the inside out.  Soft noodles and savory chunks of beef are garnished with cilantro, bean sprouts, lime juice, hot pepper, and maybe a dash or two of fish sauce.  Some like to mix in hoisin, but I don't prefer it this way.  Usually, beef or chicken are used, but why shouldn't venison and elk be right at home?  Let's bring a little of the flavor of South East Asia to the mountains of Idaho.

Like all of my favorite dishes to cook, pho is all about cool techniques.  First, to reduce the bones to a manageable size, I have come up with a pretty nifty approach that doesn't require an expensive meat saw.  Go out into your garage and find a crosscut or similar saw and your hammer.  Make sure they are clean of nasty petroleum oils, paints, or other chemicals.  I don't worry too much about bacteria on the tools... the bones are handled frozen and are about to be boiled, simmered, then the stock will be boiled again.  Score the bones with the saw (this is easiest to do when the bones are frozen), then flip them over and whack the spot opposite the scoring with a hammer.  The bone should break off fairly neatly.  I broke my bones down into 2-4 inch pieces, which not only makes them easier to deal with and submerge, but it also gives the young stock more access to a greater surface area of bone, meat, tendon, and marrow, all of which give body and flavor to the finished product.

Mmmm... Elk Knuckles

The second nifty pho technique is that the ginger and onion should be charred over an open flame before they are pealed and put in the stock.  This was certainly the first time I ever through a big chunk of ginger root on my Weber.  When I pealed said ginger to put it in the stock, oh, what an aroma filled the kitchen!

The third and final nifty technique is that the soup is largely cooked as it is being served.  In many soups, the ingredients are simmered together in broth. for most of the cooking process.  Not pho.  For pho, you bring your finished (strained) and delicious stock to a boil, but only after you assemble bowls with a layers of noodles, thinly sliced onion, green onion, chunks of tender meat and tendon from the stock making process, cilantro, and very thinly sliced raw meat.  We used a nice piece of mule deer steak for this component.  We partially froze the steak which facilitates paper thin slicing.  Once the bowls are assembled, you ladle boiling, steaming stock over the whole kit and caboodle.  Your meat and other ingredients are cooking literally as you set the bowl down in front of your dinner guests.  Pho always has a nice plate of garnishes to go with it.  Ours were cilantro, basil, jalapeno, bean sprouts, and green onion, and (importantly) lime.

From raw to cooked as it goes to the table.  Don't forget to pick the savory bits of meat and tendon from the bones before you give them to your chickens.  They are tender and delicious!

Somehow, this mixture of ingredients does magical things.  Comfort food that makes you sweat.  Pho is always a go-to when somebody in the family has a bad cold.  Hot, steaming, nourishing broth that is infused with herbs and jalapeno heat.  It clears your sinuses out in a hurry while at the same time satisfying your belly with warm comfort.  Not many foods can do that.

So there you have it... one more fantastic reason to save game bones and make stock.  Truly, this is one of my favorite uses yet.  And yes, it really was if we had gone to the Vietnam Noodle Bowl Restaurant.  It really was that good.

I didn't make up my own recipe... I essentially mixed and matched from these two, and I definitely didn't use any beef:
http://www.flashinthepan.net/?p=992
http://www.vietworldkitchen.com/blog/2008/10/pho-beef-noodle-soup.html

Goose Confit: What the heck is it, anyway?

For several days, I took photos of piles of duck and goose fat, salted goose legs, and cooked goose meat sitting at the bottom of a vat of fat and oil.  I posted these photos on the HHMM Facebook page, alluding to the dish that would be the prize at the end of that journey: confit.  The few comments I did get were mostly along the lines of "ok, gross, what the heck is it anyway?"  I'll be the first to admit I had no idea what confit was a couple of years ago, but I stumbled across it in a search for what to do with the piles of duck legs I had after a successful hunting outing.  So what the heck is it, anyway?

Confit is, at it's core, a food preservation process.  It is also a way to get more mileage out of the ducks we harvest. Essentially one renders the fat from a duck or goose, then very, very slowly poaches the legs from that same duck or goose in that same fat, completely submerged, for many hours (like 10).  Really, this is only the beginning of the process.  Then the whole kettle o'duck is chilled, such that the legs are sealed in the congealed fat.  In my 'research' on the subject, The time the meat sits sealed away is the time that full flavor develops.  Makes sense; the meat is cured before the cooking process.  This cure subsequently flavors and salts the fat in which the meat is cooking.  After a few weeks of resting, it is easy to imagine flavors balancing and evening out in the dish.  Apparently, the dish is ready after a week or two of resting, but it can be preserved for months this way.  As another stroke of gourmet genius, the fat used to cook the initial batch of legs can be used over and over again to confit subsequent batches.  This stuff is at the pinnacles of rustic haute cuisine and practicality at the same time.

 

 

Let's back up a few weeks.  Pop Pop and I were several hours into what was already one of our most memorable and successful hunts on the Clark Fork Delta.  Between us, we had harvested nine ducks, and whilst I had been on a walkabout, Pop Pop had managed to scratch a goose from a low flying flock.  Now that I was back in the blind the wind had picked up and riled up lots of flocks, and a few came within range.  On one occasion a flock few by closer than the rest.  I picked out the closest and unluckiest bird, swung through and kept swinging and pulled the trigger.  The big bird folded and hit the water hard.  Jocko waited for the command to retrieve the bird but not patiently.  He powered out, expecting to find another pint sized bufflehead.  You could see he was a little taken aback by the size of the bird as he neared it, but the dog has heart and he clamped onto a leg, made the long swim back, and delivered the bird to hand.  Not bad for a pocket sized lab.  It was an awesome moment.  We don't normally kill a lot of ducks, and we rarely get a shot at geese, let alone hit them.  Something special was going to need to be done to commemorate our great hunt, and it seemed that a batch of confit would be just the thing.  Now I had both the inspiration and raw material to conduct this experiment.

 

Classically, confit de canard is made from the same ducks that give up their inflated livers for fois gras.  As a means of getting more product for their effort, duck farmers made confit.  When a duck is fed such that its fatted liver has exquisite flavor, one might assume that the rest of the bird, including the fat would have the same quality.  Not surprisingly, duck fat is all the rage as a cooking medium these days.  It is easy enough to buy duck fat (and confit, for that matter) from several online purveyors, but I wanted local flavor.

 

My raw material differs a little from theirs.  I saved fat and skin from one of the geese and most of the buffleheads and rendered it.  This is a simple process.  Put the fat and skin in a heavy sauce pan, add a small quantity of water, a cook on low heat for several hours.  Apparently, if it boils, it is bad news, so go slow.  Turns out you can render a pretty good quantity of fat from a limit of buffleheads and a goose, but it isn't quite enough for the four goose legs I saved.  I made up the remainder needed to cover the legs in the bottom of a cast iron dutch oven with olive oil, which is considered by some cooks to be an appropriate substitute for the duck fat.  Ten hours of cooking and two weeks of storage later, we pulled two legs from the fat, put them on a drip pan, and roasted them in a hot oven until the skin started to crisp.

 

 

 

Perhaps I didn't roast the skin crispy enough, but we did without it in the end.  The flavor of that component alone was subpar.   Everything else was spectacular.  Rich is certainly a word that should be applied to wild goose confit, but it doesn't end there.  It is fork tender meat, and it has all of the flavor that makes waterfowl delicious and unique, but with none of the harsh liver flavor.  Only this was special.  The cure penetrated evenly to the bone and corned beef was slightly in the back of my mind, but it was moist, never too salty, and really like nothing I had tasted before.  Succulent.  Really, really good, and worth the effort.  And remember, I made it with bufflehead and Canada goose fat.  The fat was in no way flavorless, but it sure wasn't nasty, either.  Bottom line, I'll be saving that treasure trove of blended goose, bufflehead, and olive fat for the slow poaching and preservation duck legs next season.