Salt Cod Pie -- Dill and Bacon

Another salt cod pie recipe? You betcha. Can there ever be too many? This recipe adds in cream and bacon- very traditional complements to salt cod- and dill, which you'll sometimes see Gaspesians pairing with salt cod fish cakes.  


The Filling

2 Onions

4 cloves garlic

2 large russet potatoes

1 tbsp black pepper

1/4-1/2 cup diced bacon (szalonna pref.)

2 lbs salt cod

1 carrot

1 celery

1.5 cups fish stock (dashi)

1 cup cream

5 sprigs thyme

1 bay leaf

5 sprigs oregano

1/4 cup dill

2 green onions

optional 1 tbsp rice flour (sub. cornstarch)

Bake your potatoes on a bed of salt at 425F. The flesh under the skin, when done, should be browned. Scrape them out and mash when done. While the potatoes are cooking, cook down your onions, bacon, and garlic in a lightly oiled pan. Once the onions are soft, add reconstituted cod, pepper, carrot, and celery. Continue to cook for a few minutes. Add dashi, thyme, oregano, and bay leaf.  Hold at a simmer and add the mashed potatoes. Cook until thickened. Add cream, dill, and green onion and continue to cook, while stirring for another 2 minutes. If the filling is too soupy to fill a pie, add in some rice flour or corn starch to thicken it. Salt to taste, but it should be salty enough from the cod.

Double pie crust recipe (leave out the sugar, sugar)

Makes 2 pies.

Troubleshooting Tips

• Always taste your filling before you put it in your pie
• If it is too salty, dilute it with more mash or some reduced cream (yes, you can reduce cream as you would a stock)
• If  you've overcooked  it, some of your ingredients were of poorer quality, or generally you find your filling is not tasty enough:
• Add a shot of wine to the sauce at the end
• Add some fresh herbs to the filling (they may have been overcooked in the court bouillon)
• Add some pan roasted fennel seeds to the filling (1/2 tsp max)
• Add a tbsp of mustard to the filling
• Crumbly Pie crust
• Overworked dough
• Soggy Pie
• Your filling was too wet
• Always taste your salt cod before you put it in your filling
• If it is too salty, soak it a bit longer
• If it is not salty enough, you will have lost some of the flavour while you're at it, but you can't re-salt it.  Just add a pinch of salt to the pie.

Sour Green Plum (Goje Sabz) Salad

Normally eaten with a healthy dose of salt, these delicious Iranian plums are in season for the next 6 weeks.  I whipped them up Thai-style with rock salt, garlic, maple sugar, habanero, lime juice, fish sauce, scraped coriander root, and plenty of fresh cilantro and mint.  Party in my mouth?  It was like a green papaya salad on steroids.

Pinch of coarse salt
2 cloves of garlic
1 habanero
1 tbsp dried shrimp
1 lime
2 tsp maple syrup
1 tsp fish sauce
2 coriander roots, scraped
2 dozen sour green plums

Grind the garlic into the the salt in a mortar and pestle to make a fine paste.  Next, smash in roots, half of the habanero and the shrimp, until they are equally mashed in with the garlic.  Squeeze in the juice of a lime or two, mix in the maple and fish sauce.  Quarter the plums and toss them in the sauce.  Garnish with remaining habanero.  All ingredients can be adjusted to taste and, since they will vary in quality and character, they absolutely must be adjusted to achieve a true balance of sweet, spicy, salty, and sour.  

You really want to have fun with it?  Toss in more shrimp, finely sliced shallots, maybe a tablespoon of  tamarind water, spice the heck out of it with bird's eye chilies.  That's where I'm going next, after that I'm going down to spicy hell with a basket of green sour plums and a quarter pint of shrimp paste relish.  

Roast Pork

Berbere spice paste

When you spend as much time as deep in vegetarianism as I have, there is one truism: North American's (us white-bread redneck country folk, anyhow), don't generally know how to make veggies taste good.  When I returned to Gaspe from the city as a vegetarian, my mother didn't know what to offer me beyond bread.  As much as I have always loved bread, if you really want a healthy, balanced, and tasty diet, you usually have to get creative and look beyond our sea-bound borders.  While spices are not local and arguably at variance with my locavorism, they're a small part of the global food trade that I can live with.  After all, they are the progenitor of the globalization, so we can tolerate them for the sake of nostalgia, right?  

Ethiopian curries were the first to be made in my kitchen and large jars of fermented berbere paste were the first to sit patiently in my fridge, awaiting their application.  Berbere is the heart and soul of Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine, the way that garam masala is the heart of Indian cuisine.  Don't tell my Indian friends this, but berbere takes the cake.  I even drop dollops of berbere into lamb meat with a bit of salt to make merguez sausage, it's very versatile.

But, I should say the recipes were Eritrean, since the family of restaurateurs who taught me their recipes hailed from that state.  We met at a backyard BBQ in Dorval and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.  

Berbere Paste

2 tbsps onion seed (nigella)
1 tsp ajuwain (bishop's seed) optional
1.5 tbsp cumin
2 tsps all spice
1/2 tsp cloves
1 stick cinnamon bark
1.5 tbsps Hungarian paprika
1 tsp tumeric
1 tbsp coriander
6 black cardamom pods
4 green cardamom pods
1 tbsp black peppercorns
1/4 cup cayennne pepper
2 bulbs garlic
1/3 cup fresh chopped ginger
2 french shallots
3/4 cup red wine (something full-bodied and dry; spicy and fruity)
1/2 cup good olive oil
1/2 tbsp salt optional

In a heavy skillet, roast all of the spices in batches - necessarily in batches, since they roast in different amounts of time.  Grind those roasted spices.  Put the onions, garlic, ginger in a food processor with the oil and red wine. Add in the spices.  Let sit out of the fridge for up to a week to ferment.

Note  I change this recipe almost every time I make it, swapping ingredients in and out and changing the quantities.  It almost always still imparts the same amount of flavour.  The key is a heckuva a lot of hot pepper.  I generally also keep a solid base of cumin, coriander, and onion seed, upon which a healthy dose of aromatic spices floats.

Other Optional Ingredients: fenugreek, nutmeg, chilies, sweet basil seeds, mustard seed

Sea-buckthorn Sorbet with Réserve 1859 Domaine Pinnacle

In the past 10 years Sea Buckthorn or argousier production has really ramped up in Québec (the local industry association, APAQ, has been around for the past 12 years).  I made the discovery of these lovely tart and citrusy little buggers in Knowlton, when we were out there for their annual duck festival.  While their astonishing tartness makes them an unusual recipe ingredient, they are wonderful when they're doused in a healthy dose of sugar (if still quite powerful).  

I added a good shot of Réserve 1859 Domaine Pinnacle, the Pinnacle estate's exquisite blend of Ice Cider and Apple Brandy.  The only way I can describe this product is as an Apple Port.  The brandy not only adds a kick to the otherwise light cider product, it mellows the sometime over-bearing sweetness of the product.  

Sea Buckthorn Sorbet

1 kg Sea Buckthorn berries

1.5 cups of sugar

1 cup water

1/3 cup Réserve 1859 Domaine Pinnacle

Bring the berries, sugar, and water to a boil and hold at a low syrup, until it's a thick syrup and the sugar is completely absorbed.  Load the syrup and berries into a blender or food processor and puree them.  Strain the mixture through a fine sieve or cheesecloth.

Process the mixture in your ice cream maker, as you would normally.