Hoosier Cassoulet

The “Hoosier Cassoulet” that I was cooking and wrote about in my previous post turned out so incredibly good that I’m going to provide the details of the recipe here. I’m no cassoulet expert, but I’ve been around the cassoulet block a time or two both cooking and eating, and this Hoosier cassoulet I cooked tonight was easily the best I’ve ever eaten.

Cooking cassoulet today was a spur of the moment decision. We didn’t have lamb, garlic sausages, duck confit, or dried tarbais beans, so I’m not sure what I was thinking. With a gray sky and blustery winds, a hearty stew sounded good, so impulse won out over reason or ingredients.

We had two cans of Progesso cannellini beans and plenty of chicken broth. With a foundation like that I was off and running.

I went to Egolf’s IGA in Churubusco to get meat. If you’re from around here, and you’re buying your meat at a chain grocery store, or even worse, at Wal*Mart or Meijer, you need to stop doing that and start going to the IGA. I got a country spare rib, an Ossian bratwurst, and a chicken leg quarter. It’s a great meat counter where you can buy one spare rib, one sausage, and one chicken leg!

After getting the meat I went across the parking lot to the CVS to pick up a bottle of white wine for the dish. As you can imagine, the CVS doesn’t have a broad or deep selection of wines, but if you need something quaffable in a emergency, they do just fine. I was happy to find a Monkey Bay Sauvignon Blanc. I took it up to the counter to pay, and the young lady behind the register (who looked much too young to be selling booze) giggled and said, “I thought the label said ‘Monkey Butt’!” I had to admit I was thinking the same thing.

Meat and wine procured. Now the details of the preparation.

I took a cast iron dutch oven and under very low heat cooked two strips of bacon. This took a while, but I wanted all the bacon grease. After they had rendered all their fat, I took them out, cranked the heat to medium, and browned the spare rib, then the chicken, and then sausage in the fat. I had to add a little olive oil. I took each piece of meat out after it was browned before doing the next.

I chopped up about a cup of onion and a cup of celery and cooked them in the same pan until they were soft. I would’ve added some carrot too, but I didn’t have any.

After the veggies were soft I added a cup of the Monkey Butt wine and two cubes of frozen tomato paste and a sprig of rosemary. When that boiled and the tomato paste had melted I put the meat (except the bratwurst) back in, poured in enough chicken stock to almost cover, covered it with a lid , and put it in a 300 degree oven for 3 hours.

After 3 hours I was getting delirious from the good smells coming from the oven, but I gathered myself and took the meat out of the pan. It was falling apart tender. I deboned it and removed the fat and skin and so on and returned it to the pan. I sliced the bratwurst and added it. I drained the beans and added them.

We had a heel of stale bread in the fridge. I buzzed that up in the food processor, tossed a cup of it with a tablespoon of melted butter and some thyme and sprinkled that over everything (everything in the pan, the counter, the floor, Owen the Wonder Dog. All got a fair covering of bread crumbs.)

Back into the oven it all went at 350 now to get everything heated through and to brown the bread crumbs. About an hour later I pulled it out, let it cool briefly, and we dined.

I’m not an instinctive cooker. I like a recipe, and I like to follow it. But today all those random ingredients and spur of the moment compromises somehow came together and resulted in an almost magical supper.