Cassoulet - French White Bean & Meat Gratin - Cassoulet de Toulouse Recipe

hello this is chef john from food wishes calm with cassoulet that's right i'm going to show you my take on the world's most famous and also most complicated pork and beans recipe and because this recipe is kind of involved and uses lots of ingredients in many steps i don't want to waste time during this intro with the usual lame jokes and vague references so instead of wasting my breath let's just get right to it and speaking of hot air we're going to start with the star of the show the beans so we're going to start with 1 pound of white cassoulet beans and this specific variety is called tar bay which is the official bean for this dish but no matter which bean you use we're going to want to soak those in cold water overnight and you can just let them soak you don't have to swish them around like this with your hand I only did that because I thought it'd make a cool shot and I was right but anyway we'll let those soak overnight at which point they should look something like this and at that point those are ready to drain and use so our beans are soaked and we can move on to the second most important feature in this dish lots of flavorful meats and I generally use 4 different types some type of smoked and/or cured pork this time I'm using pancetta I also like to use some fresh pork seen here in the form of a nice fatty chopped we're also definitely going to need some sausage preferably to loose style and then last but not least I have two legs of duck confit so that's going to be my selection but of course that can really vary depending on what you're into and once we have all that stuff together we can move on to the first major step in this dish which is cooking our beans and for that step I do like to add the cured or smoked pork I'm using to the bean pot and then besides our smoked or cured meat I also like to remove the bones from the duck confit because if we're going to simmer beans in a stock why not add any bones we have to it that just makes sense so anyway we'll want to liberate any bones we have access to at this point as you can see I decided to cut my pancetta and even smaller pieces and by the way this was kind of an experiment I usually use much less and kind of dice it but for whatever reason I decide to use larger chunks and more of it which ultimately I didn't like as much as my usual method but that's just one of many things we'll talk about on the blog so what we'll do when our bones have been picked and our meats cut up we'll head over to the stove where we will add our drain beans into some nice flavorful chicken stock along with any of our cured and/or smoked meats and reclaim bones and then to this we'll also be adding some assorted herbs and spices but we're not just going to throw them in we're going to make what's called a bouquet garni which simply means tie all those seasonings up in a little piece of cheesecloth we'll just wrap it up tie it with a string and that way this stuff can flavor our pots and once it served its purpose we can remove it all at once and I don't have time right now but of course I'm going to tell you what I put in there that'll be on the ingredient list so we'll go ahead and toss that in and give everything a stir and then what we want to do is bring this up to a simmer on high heat and as it comes up to temperature foam will appear which you are free to skim off I usually do and then what we'll do is we'll lower our heat and simmer this for about 45 minutes or until those beans are almost tender like about 90% of the way and while those beans are cooking we are not going to take a break we have things to do first - which would be to brown up any of the fresh pork we're going to use over medium-high heat in a skillet and a little bit of vegetable oil and I did season that with salt and pepper so we will cut our fresh pork up in chunks and Brown it up nicely and once that's been accomplished we'll remove that tool bowl and go ahead and brown the sausage in the exact same pan and as I mentioned I'm using a Toulouse sausage which is a famous French variety that features pork garlic and wine and then once our fresh meats are browned we will move on to the critical breadcrumb topping so don't wash that pan we're going to use it in a second because what we're gonna do is break up all that duck confit meat saving any of the skin and fat and what we'll do is we'll transfer that fat and skin into that hot pan they cook it over medium heat in those pan drippings until it's pretty much all rendered out and once that's happened we'll just transfer everything into a mixing bowl and believe it or not we're actually going to use that duck fat infused pork fat as the base for our topping and you're probably thinking wow pork fat and duck fat soak bread crumbs it doesn't get any better than that oh but it does because we're also going to add some melted butter because France to complete the Holy Trinity of animal fats at that point we can go ahead and dump in our breadcrumbs as well as a generous handful of freshly chopped to tell me parsley and we'll take a spoon and we'll mix that up until it looks sort of like damp sand and then speaking of damp once that's mixed up I do like to a little splash of chicken stock from our bean pot to sort of moisten those crumbs up just a little bit so they Brown a little more slowly in the oven so we will mix that up and if everything's gone according to plan it should look something like this and once that set we'll go back over and check our beans which by now should be just about perfect and what that means is the bean is almost cooked it's not quite perfectly creamy and tender but it's almost there and once we get to that stage we can go ahead and drain our beans reserving any and all cooking liquid repeat reserved all the cooking liquid so we will carefully separate beans and meat from stock we will also of course extract our bouquet garni and then in this next shot you see me removing my pancetta from the beans and adding them to my bowl of meats but you know what that's probably unnecessary I only did that because when I do final assembly I like to have complete control over my meat distribution and then once all that set we're finally still not even close because before we can put this together we need to prepare our aromatic vegetables so in that same dirty flavorful pan we've been using all along we will add our mirepoix our carrots celery and onion mixture along with a big pinch of salt and we will cook that stirring over medium heat until the onions turn translucent and everything starts to get a little bit golden at which point we're going to stop and add some tomato paste and we will stir that in and we're going to want to cook that for about three or four minutes until the tomato paste starts to caramelize onto the bottom of the pan all right so let it cook until you see this happening so you let starting to form a fond on the bottom of the pan when that happens we're going to go ahead and deglaze with our white wine and of course that's going to release all that goodness off the bottom and then all we're going to do is cook this stirring for I don't know about five or six minutes until most of that wine evaporates leaving us with a beautiful thick mixture you see here and once those veggies are done a long last we can move to final assembly which means adding our drain beans an aromatic vegetable mixture to whatever we're going to cook this in which as you can see for me is my large deep cast iron pan so I'm gonna go ahead and add a few ladles of our cooking liquid and give those beans and veggies a mix and once that's been accomplished we can go ahead and dump in our bowl of pork along with of course any accumulated juices and then do because I'm a little bit OCD with this stuff make sure you distribute the meat evenly and then once our pork has been placed down we can top that with our broken up duck confit it's just like the pork will even that out the best we can and by the way I should mention if you can't find or you don't want to make duck confit I've actually made this with chicken thighs and it's not bad so that's an option and of course up to you you are after all the Jean Tutte of your cassoulet and then last but not least we will place in our sausage and don't just stick them in I want you to nestle them and as you may have noticed I did cut those links in half thereby doubling the number of pieces of sausage available and then what we'll do to finish this off is to fill that up almost to the top with our cooking liquid and by the way I should mention you're going to have extra liquid left over which is on purpose but anyway we're going to transfer in our cooking liquid just ladle it in too right up about there at which point we're going to cover everything with our beautiful buttery duck fat bread crumb mixture and spread that evenly over the top but don't press it down too much okay we don't want too flat of a surface so what we'll do before we bake this is take our fingertips and give it the old polka polka to give it a little irregularity in a crease surface area and as I've taught you before extra surface area equals extra flavor and once that top is done we are finally ready to cook this so let's go ahead and transfer this into the center of a 350 degree oven for two hours and two hours later theoretically your should look something like this all right it should look fairly gorgeous and you'll notice especially around the edge that a lot of that liquid has been absorbed which is exactly what's supposed to happen so what we'll do at this point is make a little well in the middle and add in a few more ladles of our cooking liquid to sort of rehydrate this and once we've done that we'll take our fork and kind of make sure that liquids mixed in without wrecking the top okay so a little bit of our crust is going down into the cassoulet which is good but we really don't want to mess up that entire surface so I kind of go around with the tip of my fork making sure everything is just so and at this point we will transfer that back into the oven for another 45 minutes or so or until done quote-unquote if for me what done means is that surface is crispy and caramel as well as our meat underneath his fork-tender and our beans are perfectly creamy and tender which don't worry they will be another than my chunks a pancetta being too big for my liking this came out absolutely perfect and assuming the years has also come out perfect we can go ahead and spoon this up into a hot bowl and then I'm going to show you one trick I like to do here and that's topping this with a few spoonfuls of our flavorful cooking liquid so you still should have some extra I just keep that hot on the stove and for me that's a great way to lighten up the texture just a little without diluting any of the flavor then we'll finish that off a little more freshly chopped Italian parsley and our cassoulet is finally done and ready to eat it sure it took like three or four hours but it was totally worth it this is just an incredibly delicious thing to eat I know we started to post some lighter spring type recipes but they're still going to be plenty of cold rainy days ahead and for that type of inclement weather there is absolutely nothing better than this and I'm always amazed that even though they cook for hours and hours those beans still retain their shape and feature an incredibly creamy texture just an absolutely amazing bean and by the way you think you've had sausage before but until you've had two loose sausage cooked in a cassoulet he really haven't so not only do I hope you find those beans somewhere but I hope you find some Toulouse sausage also but anyway that's it cassoulet yes it takes a long time requires a ton of ingredients and almost as many steps but once you make this and taste it it's all going to make sense okay so I really do hope you give this a try soon head over to food wishes comm for all the ingredient amounts and much much more info as usual and as always enjoy you

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 1,005,072

Rating: 4.9022889 out of 5

Keywords: Cassoulet, Cassoulet de Toulouse, French, Bean, Meat, pork, duck, Gratin, casserole, chef, john, foodwishes, dinner, winter, hearty, comfort, food, cooking, recipe, recipes

Id: uOL-IgFC61c

Length: 10min 51sec (651 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/bobbythecorky]

Ohhhhh baby, le bon miam miam for my tummy.

[u/HydroRaven]

I've never made this recipe and to be honest, I don't think I can find the ingredients to make it, but man-o-man is cassoulet an absolute delight! I have eaten cassoulet many times before but never made it, and I strongly recommend it to anyone on the fence about trying this. If you can, don't hesitate; you won't regret it.

[u/conductive]

I watched the whole video. I know if I made it my gout would speak up, but, just watching it satisfied me. Thanks.