For an easy take on French cassoulet, substitute fresh chicken for duck confit, build flavor in the beans, and add gelatin to form a crisp crust.
Chicken used in place of the traditional duck picks up tons of flavor from the cured meat products and comes out meltingly tender and meaty.How many times have you seen someone post a photo or recipe of a delicious-looking dish online only to see responses like"If you aren't from [insert locality X], then you can't possibly understand much less make food from [locality X]I mean, I get it. Food instills passion. Food has history. Food is culture.
Here's the truth of the matter: Cassoulet is not cheffy, prescriptivist stuff. It's a medieval peasant dish designed to make do with whatever was around. In Languedoc, that happened to be dried beans, preserved duck, and preserved pork.The first time I had cassoulet in its home turf it was a revelation: The cassoulet I'd known for nearly all of my professional career islike the cassoulet found in Languedoc.
Here's another thing: Most of the distinguishing flavor in a particular type of meat comes from the fat. Cook a beef steak in lamb fat and it'll taste like a lamb chop. Seriously.Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt I decided to start my cassoulet by rendering the fat from the pork belly and using it to brown the rest of my ingredients.Browning it as a whole piece before slicing it into smaller chunks for slow cooking seemed like a good way to go about it, but in the interest of saving time and streamlining, I settled on cutting it into chunks before browning. This gave more surface area for rendering fat to escape, as well as more surface for browning, which led to deeper flavor in the finished dish.
As for those beans, I tested my recipes using a few different types of dried white beans from actual lingot I brought back from Languedoc to cannellini to small navy beans. Cannellini were the best domestic option. I tried cooking them a number of ways, from canned to non-soaked to soaked-and-cooked to completely pre-cooked before adding to the rest of the ingredients.Bean skins are held together by pectin, a sort of organic glue. Buttressing this pectin are magnesium and calcium ions.
The second problem is the store-bought stock I'd been using. Homemade chicken stock tends to be very high in gelatin, a result of the high amount of connective tissue in the bones and cartilage used to make it. Store-bought stock, by contrast, is thin and watery. It's this gelatin that forms the crusty raft on top of the cassoulet, giving it both crust and body.
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