French sailor's blanquette - 16 May 2017

La blanquette de veau is probably the most traditional French dish, which requires usually hours of attended cooking using a receipt transmitted in the matriarcal line in French families. For having lived abroad for many years, the "blanquette" becomes a reminder of the homeland. After having mastered the receipt on land, the question was how to make sure that once in a while we can have the blanquette on board of Belisama without jeopardising a full day of sailing. After a few trials, I found the solution, which I am presenting here, associating slow cooking at home, sous-vide packaging, and on board pre-serving arrangements. This changed our sailor's lives!

Here are the ingredients. From bottom up and left to right, 25 cl of cooking white wine, 2 kg of fresh veal filet (planning quite a few meals for friends), three garlic pieces, a dozen champignons cut in small pieces, fresh parsley, laurel leaves, thym, two big oignon (should be yellow ones...), four sliced carrots and two cooking bouillons... For the sauce step, you will need 150 grams butter, 4 spoons of white flour, one egg yolk, 500 gr. of crème fraiche, plus some salt and pepper according to taste. 

Ready?

The first step is to sir the meat in the Cuisinart slow cooker. I have no vested interest in Cuisinart, but I am using the Cuisinart MSC-400 slow cooker with great success, as the most versatile cooker I have tried. Around 100€investment though.  It has a function for siring, where you can set the temperature and time. I chose 25 minutes at 190°C for colouring the veal pieces.

After the 25 minutes, here is the look of the meat, with the garniture added, topped with water, ready to slow cook for 10 hours, overnight.

 I use the slow cooker at the low level, which cooks at 65°C. It can cook forever at this temperature. But anything between 8 to 12 hours is just perfect for a blanquette, a boeuf carotte, a tajine, an osso bucco, or any other stew. By the way this is unattended cooking, and you can enjoy sleeping during the cooking time.

This is the look at the end lof the process, the following morning. Now, we have to remove the laurel leaves, the thym and the parsley. Then, get the juice in a dish, for the preparation of the blanquette sauce.

For the sauce, I put same amount of butter and flower in a pot, and warm gently while continuously stirring. Once the butter and the flower are fully integrated, while stirring, incorporate the juice and continue stirring until the flower expand and the sauce get unctuous. Add a good chunk of crème fraiche, a lemon juice and one egg yolk.

Get the sauce back to the blanquette.

Now comes the difficult part where you have to poor the blanquette into a sous-vide bag, clean the edges that are very difficult to protect in the exercise, and vacuum the bag carefully to make sure that the whole sauce does not go through the vacuum pump. In fact, as the sauce should be a bit thick because of the flower, it nicely seals itself one the air has been evacuated. For this, I use an OBH food sealer which I found locally for around 60€, and which does the job very nicely. Again, no vested interests...

After 12 hours at 65°C, the blanquette should be quite pasteurised and therefore fit for preservation. However, because of the previous step requiring quite heavy handling to transfer from the slow cooker to the bag and sealing it, I run the sealed bag through the OBH sous-vide immersion cooker at 80°C for a few minutes, ensuring sterilisation of the surface of the bag, and therefore preventing any surface contamination that could have occurred during the manipulation. Another 300€ investment this time, but last one...

I put finally the bag, after marking date and content, in freezing cold water before putting it to the fridge where it can be kept for a full month (tested deliciously by François on Cybele 17 and ourselves). Tis gives a month possibilities for noice warm quick meal after a full day of sailing for a full crew...

I will provide a link to the post relating tho the evening we will serve this meal to the friends on board, ... whiten a month, obviously!