[Sca-cooks] Report on Thanksgiving experiments...OP

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Nov 26, 2005, at 6:36 PM, Helen Schultz wrote:

> I may be asking the obvious, but I have no idea what "mirepoix"  
> is... can
> someone please explain it to me??  Is it the stuffing?
>
> ~~ obviously, my cooking knowledge must be lacking <sigh>

Named after some deceased Frenchman or other, it's an aromatic  
chopped vegetable mixture frequently used in making stocks and  
sauces. A standard formula is 2 parts onion, 1 part carrot and 1 part  
celery. There are variations such as "white" mirepoix, which  
substitutes the white of leek for the carrot, and "dark" mirepoix,  
which uses carrot and/or the green part of the leek (I like both when  
making that, myself, but had none on Thursday). Typically this  
mixture would comprise about 15% of the total contents of your stock  
or saucepot. You strain it out when you're done, as a general rule,  
unless you take special care to cut it into little perfect 1/8th-inch  
cubes or some such (this is sometimes used as a garnish for  
consomme). Mine was rough-shopped.

It's also good the way I used it, which was as a pan liner. Like some  
of the others who did a turkey and mentioned it on this list, I did  
the "breast side down" thing, but had been concerned about the breast  
skin sticking to the pan and tearing (I didn't have a roasting rack  
large enough), so I put about four cups of mirepoix down in the  
bottom of the pan, then laid my bird down on top of it.

And, as others have also mentioned, there came a point where I wanted  
to turn the bird over, and the mirepoix did a fine job of keeping the  
bird from sticking to the pan, and also flavored the pan drippings  
quite dramatically. The only [minor] problem was that the cooked bird  
showed little dents in its breast surface shaped like the bits of  
carrot, onion and celery.

Under certain circumstances, when you have a roast that isn't killer  
juicy (say, an eye round of beef), you can take the cooked roast out  
of the pan, put the pan with the vegetables back in a hot oven to  
brown a little more, then remove the vegetables from the pan to a  
serving plate, and do the gravy-making boogie in the pan, and the  
vegetables will have flavored the meat, flavored the gravy, and still  
serve as a secondary side dish of pan-roasted veg...

In my case my lady wife stole some of them to add to dressing.

HTH,

Adamantius




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04