Whenever I buy and trim a big ol’ beef chuck roast to make stew,  I am left with big ol’ pile of this:

So what to do with all that fat and gristle?  Throw it out? NO! That’s my fat and gristle! I paid for it! And in these troubled economic times, I need every I you can get. No, the only answer to a big pile of beef fat is to render it.

The first step is to chop it into smaller pieces. When I did this I just used a knife to roughly chop the fat as is, but I would suggest a different method: put the meat in the freezer for a half hour or so to stiffen it up and then chop it, preferably with a food processor. The finer you chop the fat, the more liquid fat you’ll be able to render out.

That’s right, liquid fat. The chopped fat goes in a small saucepan with a little bit of water, over low heat. And then you go do something else, enjoying your brilliant economy and the wonderful beefy odors wafting about your house. This is meat potpourri at its finest.

After a few hours, it will start to look like this:

It’s done once the bits of meat are crispy and brown. In the pork fat rendering world these are known as cracklins. You can eat one once they’ve cooled; I am afraid to say that they are pretty delicious and guarantee an almost instant heart attack.

But enough about the crispy bits, what about that sweet golden fat? Strain/filter it to get rid of as many impurities as possible. I first poured the fat through a mesh strainer to remove the big meat chunks then decanted the fat off of the remaining small flecks of beef. The fat will solidify at room temperature or after a few minutes in the fridge.

And there you have it, beef suet! What to do with the stuff? Basically, you can use it like butter or shortening, or any other fat for that matter. I used some of it to brown the beef chunks for my stew (beef browned in its own fat is a beautiful thing) and the rest I cut into pie dough, which I used to make pasties with the leftover beef stew. And thus the circle of life was complete.

I’m pretty sure one could get vertigo by scanning over this for too long with a scrolling trackpad or mouse. But I love it! It’s fun to see so many bright, classic (and new) objects together at once. I’d like to post about the changes in our office soon. We too have a rather small nook, and since I rearranged the bedroom/office much has improved.

Making crackers is frustrating. In fact, making anything with a rolling pin is pretty damn vexing, but crackers especially so. Good crackers require two things: really thin dough and perfectly uniform dough. The thinness helps make crackers crispy, rather than chewy or, worse, brick-like (tooth-shattering). The uniformity of the dough is related: thin crackers will burn to a cinder while their thick brethren are slowly baking into breadish mediocrity. If there’s any saving grace to bad crackers its that you didn’t spend much time making them, but that’s hardly a consolation.

I am fairly experienced with rolling pins since I make a lot of flattened breads, but  I have never liked using them. It seems like my pin is always getting stuck to the dough, tearing it and ruining my shape. I also find it difficult to roll to a consistent thickness, especially when rolling very thin. I know you can buy little rings to attach to the end of your rolling pin that help control thickness but they sound like more trouble than they’re worth. And why use a rolling pin at all, when we have our friend, Signore Norpro:

Pasta has many of the same requirements as crackers in terms of shaping, so a pasta machine is a natural for making crackers. My working dough recipe is the Lavash Crackers from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, consisting of:

• 6 3/4 oz AP Flour
• 1/2 t salt
• 1/2 t instant yeast
• 1 T honey (I am just reporting this for accuracy’s sake; I omitted the honey)
• 1 T veg oil
• 3-4 oz water

Very simple. After all, it’s just bread! To make the dough, you proceed as you might imagine, mixing all the ingredients and kneading until the texture is right. Then let the dough rest so the gluten can relax. And you can relax too.

After an hour or less of resting I used my handy-dandy pasta machine to lay down a silkysmooth sheet.

I then divided each sheet into large rectangles then covered them with toppings before sliding them onto my pizza stone in a 400° oven. A lesson I learned with the first batch was that you have to remember to dock the dough (prick it all over with a fork), lest you get this:

Not that puffy crackers are a bad thing, but a one-ply cracker is almost too thin. For the next batches I almost always remembered to dock, whick gave a much more uniformly flat look.

Still pretty big sheets. To actually eat them, I used a knife to break the crackers into chaotic shards. I ended up with quite a few varieties. Here’s a family photo:

Top row from left to right: Vindaloo, Sea Salt, Chili Powder, Aleppo Pepper. Bottom row: seeds,  sesame-soy, garlic-dill.

Besides the lesson about docking above, I learned two things about dealing with toppings. For these crackers I rolled out the dough unflavored and then sprinkled the toppings on before baking. This resulted in toppings that weren’t very well integrated into the dough. In the case of the seeded cracker this meant my carefully placed caraway, poppy, nigella, and sesame seeds almost all rolled off the cracker during the cracking process, never to be tasted and enjoyed. Next time I will try to integrate the flavorings into the dough before rolling.

The other lesson is one about salt: you need a lot of it. Salt is the reason we can taste other flavors; in this batch of crackers the most flavorful ones were dill-garlic, loaded with garlic salt, and the soy sesame, soy sauce having plenty of sodium. The vindaloo and chili-pepper crackers had very subtle flavors since I failed to add salt with the spices.

I am excited to make crackers again. The pasta machine really took the effort out of rolling them, and they can be thrown together very quickly as a result of not really needing to rise. I have a lot of ideas for other flavorings to try, especially if the flavorings can be integrated into the dough. I also want to play with other flours and incorporate some whole grains.

When I was looking for a recipe for spinach lasagna, Tom’s archival memory located the exact back issue from his collection in which such a recipe appeared. This one comes from the March & April 2004 issue of Cook’s Illustrated magazine. 

My lasagna didn’t come out looking quite so spinach-y as the picture in the magazine, but as anyone who complains about a CI recipe will ultimately reveal… I didn’t follow the recipe exactly. I changed things up a bit by making two smaller, square lasagne instead of one big 13×9. I usually do this when making lasagna as it is basically the same effort, and I get two dinners out my time instead of one. Lasagna #2 is already in the freezer waiting for the next time I don’t feel like cooking.

A few last words…

As it says in the article, “…use Italian fontina rather than bland and rubbery Danish or American fontina…” I found Italian fontina at the Wedge and I was glad I did. I passed up the Wisconsin variety (Don’t be fooled by Bel Gioso’s name… it’s Americano.) at Rainbow for the good stuff and it smelled sooo good when I took the cheese out of the plastic wrap today. No more non-Italian fontina!

Tom’s first words when coming in the door after work: “Smells like shallots!” I used to think “5 shallots” meant five of the shallot-shapes that come lumped in twos sometimes. I have known since I got some schooling from Tom a while back that 1 shallot is whatever the unit is BEFORE you take the skin off. I’m glad I know this now as my 5 large shallots that I picked out equalled exactly 1 cup—just as the recipe said they would when minced. 

Giving no-boil noodles a soak for 5 minutes in hot tap water makes for a WAY better end result. I used Barilla as CI suggested and did this soak that they talked about in a “Key Step” caption with photo. What a difference. As they said, “A five-minute soak… dramatically reduces the baking time for the no-boil noodles, allowing the spinach to remain fresh looking and tasting.” Try this the next time you use no boils… and don’t forget the foil on top!

Freshly ground nutmeg is awesome. I was reminded of nuez moscada en croquetas as I was grating it into the béchamel with my Microplane grater. If you don’t have one of these already (I know that most of you do), you should get one. Nothing is better for ultra-fine parmesan grating, chocolate shaving, nutmeg grating, and citrus zest creation!

The hardest part? Waiting the 10 minutes after it came out of the oven for it to cool before I could cut it and EAT.