Why confit meat

You can also use olive oil or vegetable oil for confit but please read the next section where I tell you why vegetable oil is a bad idea. Once you get a feel for confit, you can branch out into non-traditional confit options. Note that this recipe calls for one litre of duck fat as the confit fat, not lamb fat!!! Vegetable seed oils—called soybean, canola, peanut, safflower, cottonseed, vegetable oil, etc.

By comparison, vegetable oils are highly processed industrial products that were only introduced to the American diet in the early s.

So for reasons of practicality and health, a higher fat diet should include animal foods. You can confit a variety of vegetables including garlic, onions, tomatoes, potatoes and other root vegetables , mushrooms and zucchini.

Except the bacon and grape confit. Confit is preserved in three ways. This keeps the meat moist and tender, yet also removes excess moisture from the meat. To store confit, you put the confit meat in a non-porous container and pour your melted fat over top of it until the meat is completely covered.

I use lidded stoneware storage jars of the kind sold widely in household bazaars in France, of a size to hold about six or seven pieces of meat, or even less. Jane also recommends packing the meat until two inches from the top of the jar, filling the jar with fat right up the brim and placing a layer of tin foil onto the fat after it hardens. This seems to be instead of a lid. You can probably just use a lid so long as the meat is entirely covered by the cooled fat.

Confit is preserving technique invented long before the refrigerator. In Gascony, confit was more than a great way to prepare goose and duck—it meant survival. In more modern times, this approach still works. Especially in the fridge! One was aged four weeks and one was fresh. Four out of the six participants chose the aged confit. Crispy and non-crispy skin are the same fattiness but crispy is more enjoyable. Confit is meat cooked in fat and served whole.

Rillettes are meat and fat cooked with a little water that magically evaporates , shredded and served as a chunky spread. Probably why I love them! Rillons—also known as rillauds and rillots—are similar to confit but not quite the same. With rillons, you brown the pork belly unnecessary for confit , then cook slowly in fat like confit or fat and wine unlike confit. Rillons can also be caramelized with a bit of sugar before serving.

As with confit, rillons are typically served hot. Confit is great because you have fully prepared food on standby. When you have confit in the fridge, and someone drops by unexpectedly, you can whip up a quick batch of rillettes by warming the meat and some of the fat and then mixing them together with a wooden spoon or with your stand mixer and paddle attachment. Serve with crackers and gherkins for a quick snack. For instant dinners, you can warm the confit pieces, crisp them up under the broiler and serve with some crusty bread.

And a salad if you like. Or open a can of white beans, add some onions, tomatoes and spices, and mix in some shredded confit. The options are limited only by your imagination and your pantry.

But whatever you have on hand, adding some confit meat to it increases the impressiveness and deliciousness of your thrown-together snack or meal. As I mentioned earlier, confit is easy to make. Mix your salt, spices and aromatics together and massage this mix onto the meat. Put the seasoned meat into a Ziploc baggie or a lidded dish and refrigerate for eight hours up to three days, preferably a full 24 hours of marinating. When your meat is finished marinating, scrape off the excess marinade or rinse the meat off under the tap.

Confit is to deep fat frying what barbecue is to grilling. While confit is most commonly seen with duck or goose legs—it makes sense, considering it's a technique that stems from southwest France—as a cooking method, it's ideal for any number of meats that are suitable for low and slow cooking.

That is, any meats with a good deal of connective tissue that begs for tenderizing. Pork belly is wonderful cooked confit, particularly if you finish it with a deep fry to crisp the exterior like finishing your slow-cooked ribs over the grill to give it a crust.

Animal tongues of all makes are great. Mexican carnitas are essentially confit'ed pieces of pork shoulder that have been shredded and crisped. Even chicken wings can benefit from being cooked using the confit method, turning extra juicy and tender in the process. Cooking vegetables confit will achieve similar results—ultra tender texture, concentrated flavor—but takes far less time. Alliums—garlic, onions, and the like—make for a great confit condiment, and take about an hour to prepare, for instance.

One common misperception many folks have about confit is that it is necessarily a fatty food. That food is submerged in fat for hours, so that fat must make its way inside, right?

Not so. Indeed, the fat is largely a surface treatment for muscles. While it is true that it may find its way between the larger muscle groups and will cover the entire piece of meat in a thin layer of fat, it will not penetrate very far into the meat itself. This is easy to see simply by cutting open a large muscle group and examining the inside.

It looks virtually the same as meat cooked through any other low-and-slow method, such as braising or steaming. The fat's true purpose in a confit is twofold: temperature regulation, and creating an environment inhospitable to bacterial growth if preservation is the goal.

In Modernist Cuisine , Nathan Myhrvold et. Simply by steaming a piece of meat until tender and coating it in a thin layer of fat, for instance, you can get a product that is indistinguishable from a true confit—at least, a confit that is eaten immediately after cooking. I have not replicated this end-result myself, but it seems quite logical to me. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data.

Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. You can simmer the confit on the stove or in the oven. You can do a lot when you have a couple of jars of confit in the fridge. You can take out some pieces of confit and warm them up in only a few minutes while you prep the rest of your dinner.

You can shred confit to add protein to a salad. Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn mentioned earlier also suggest shredding the confit and rolling it into a crepe or using it to stuff ravioli. What a versatile dish! Many references to cooking confit also reference using the confit fat to fry up potatoes.

I use it to fry up veggies for my husband. You can use this fat in many of the same situations that call for butter or oil. This confit jelly is like having a jar of flavour at your disposal, with none of the questionable ingredients that come in stock cubes.

You can melt a little to pour over the confit meat and add it to sauces for a flavour boost. As mentioned earlier, the meat is marinated with salt and seasonings before cooking. Depending on your recipe, this marinating time can be from six hours to three days. Some recipes call for wiping off excess salt or rinsing the meat before cooking. At the end of the process is the storage time where, as we saw earlier, flavours gel together.

Also, if you use leftover bacon grease basically flavoured lard as the extra fat in your confit recipe, that adds more salt than plain lard would. These three elements can leave your confit too salty for your tastes. And use plain lard instead of bacon grease for the extra fat. Your collection of grease will increase, I guarantee it! But then again, it might be hard to find duck and especially goose. BHT or butylated hydroxytoluene also stabilizes fats and is used to retain food smell, color and flavor.

It too appeared on the synthetic chemical scene in the late s and was used as a food additive beginning in However, you can also buy these specialty fats on Amazon and in fancier grocery stores for a Canadian grocery chain example, probably not at No Frills but yes at Loblaws.

The first alternate method for confit cooking is sous-vide confit cooking. With this, you season your meat, put one chunk of the meat for example, one duck leg and some fat into the sous-vide bag, seal it, let it marinate overnight and then cook the baggie in a water bath on low for eight or more hours.

This way, you use less fat and more plastic or silicone. Another alternative for confit cooking is faux confit cooking. In Gascony, confit was more than a great way to prepare goose and duck—it meant survival. Plus, the general bacon grease container on the counter.