Roasted Guinea Fowl en Crèpinette de Byaldi with Pan Jus

One night, when I was 9, my best friend's mom made ratatouille for dinner. I'd just had warm ambrosia salad the night before, which made me gag because it tasted and smelled like my bottle of Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific threw up into my bottle of Coppertone, so I wasn't really all that excited to try yet another new dish in such a short timeframe. I mean, c'mon, I was NINE. Being culinarily adventurous at that age was having my daily peanut butter sandwich on wheat bread instead of white. But, I knew I had to be polite and try whatever that globby red mess was on the plate in front of me, and not spit it into my napkin when no one was looking and run to the bathroom to dump it into the toilet. Not that I've ever done that. Ahem.

I remember how great the ratatouille smelled, but I remember not really liking it at all. I didn't like tomatoes back then, and the eggplant was gooey. I'd always liked zucchini and summer squash, so I picked out those pieces and chowed those down. Ditto for the onions. Everything else, I kind of pushed around on the plate until it looked like I'd eaten a lot of it. I remember wiping up the sauce with some bread, which was really good, but the rest of it kind of looked like it had already been eaten when it was served to me, if you catch my drift. Luckily, the adults opened another bottle of wine, so my friend and I snuck into their pantry and swiped a few granola bars (they were far healthier than my family, which really sucked that night because some Oreos would've hit the spot) to get rid of the lingering hunger pangs.

I waited another twenty years until I tried ratatouille again, and have had it a few times since then, too. You know what? I was never blown away by it. It's always too tomatoey or overly thymey, or just not balanced or good enough for me not to be bitchy about it. I've never made it myself (which tells me that I should), but when I bought The French Laundry Cookbook and Bouchon, I was intrigued with the Byaldi dish, and actually have been looking forward to making it ever since I started this project.

Byaldi is described by The French Laundry Cookbook as "a refined interpretation of ratatouille." Additional research shows that Byaldi is a derivation of a Turkish eggplant dish called "Imam Bayaldi" (meaning, loosely, "the imam fainted, it was that good"). You know that I don't post recipes from the book on this site, but I'll direct you to this link to the LA Times web site, which offers the Byaldi recipe in case you want to try it.

So, how about I stop with all the rambling and start writing about how gross, yet utterly fascinating, caul fat is, and why you should always have stunt tomatoes waiting in the wings.

Wanna see some pretty vegetables?


I heated some oil in a large skillet and lightly cooked the onions and peppers (which I'd sliced) and the herb sachet for about 20 minutes.


I then took my next batch of lovely vegetables...


... and sliced them on my new, bitchin' Benriner mandoline.


What I don't have is a photo of what happened when I tried to slice the lovely Roma tomatoes I so carefully picked out to ensure they were the same diameter as the zucchini, yellow squash, and Japanese eggplant. One slice in, and they were complete and total mush. Has that ever happened to you before? It's happened to me once or twice -- you buy tomatoes that look and feel great, and then a day later, you slice them and the insides are gloppy and foul-smelling. Thankfully, I had some regular-size tomatoes I was planning to use in a dish the next night that could fill in at the last minute. I was kinda bummed that the dish wouldn't be as pretty and perfect as I'd hoped, but them's the breaks, I suppose.

I took the vegetable slices and tomato chunks and started covering the cooked pepper and onion mix, beginning at the outside of the pan, layering them, and working toward the center:




I can hear you judging me and my chunk-ass tomatoes. "Oh Carrrroollllll, even a freakin' cartoon RAT can get this right, but you couldn't?"

Bite me.

I sprinkled some minced garlic and thyme with a little olive oil on top, and covered the pan with aluminum foil. I sealed it tight and put it in a 275-degree oven for 2.5 hours. At that point, I removed the foil and let it cook another 30 minutes, until the vegetables were so tender I wanted to eat them right then and there. But, alas, I did not. I let the pan of byaldi goodness cool to room temperature, and then refrigerated it until I was ready to serve it with the rest of the finished dish the next evening.




If ever there was a case for Smell-O-Vision, that was it. I, however, am using my best squinting skills to try and make the tomatoes look like they're just as pretty as all the other vegetables. Poor things. I suck.

The next day, I got the guinea fowl ready, since I knew the sauce would be a pain in the ass to make. I will admit that I kind of... well, more than kind of half-assed this part of the dish. I probably should've taken more care to clean the bird's bones in making the sauce, but I was so ready to get everything done so I could spend time with my dinner guests, that I did not pay as much attention to detail as I usually do.

Here's the guinea fowl:


I removed the breast meat from the bird, as well as the thigh meat, since that's what was going to be used in the final dish. The rest of the carcass and the bones I threw into the pot to start the sauce. I know. I suck. Don't remind me.


I browned these meaty bones for about 10 minutes on each side, then poured off some of the fat from the pan. I deglazed twice -- once with water, a second time with chicken stock -- then added carrots, shallots, onions and leeks to the pot:


After the vegetables had started to caramelize, I added some more water and chicken stock and simmered until the liquid had reduced by about a third. I removed it from the heat, took out the giant chunks of guinea fowl bone, and strained the sauce through a chinois, twice, into a small saucepan. I had about 2.5C of liquid, which I then reduced to about a third of a cup -- it smelled soooooo good. Wow.

I preheated the oven to 350 and got the final steps ready. I'd soaked a sheet of caul fat overnight, and at this point in the process, I removed it from the water and blotted it dry with a wad of paper towels.

Here it is soaking:


You'll see the caul fat in action in the next few photos. It's kind of gross, but I was fascinated by it. It's just slimy and fatty enough to be kind of squicky, but its texture is also so strange that it's cool to hold it and stretch it out a bit.

I laid it flat on the counter and made four small packages of guinea fowl and vegetable byaldi. I seasoned each piece of meat before adding it to the mix, and folded the caul fat tight under each package so it would stay together while I heated it.

I put a small amount of canola oil into an oven-safe skillet on medium heat and placed each little packet of fowl-n-veg into the pan, vegetable side down. I cooked it on that side for about 4 minutes, then gently turned it over to cook on the meat side for 3 minutes. I left the servings meat side down, and put the entire pan into the oven for 15 minutes so that the meat could cook the whole way through, and the vegetables could reheat.


I stirred a little bit of olive oil into the sauce I'd made earlier, and began plating. I'd reheated the rest of the byaldi in the oven, as well, so I put a bit of veg onto each plate and topped it with the guinea fowl and byaldi packets, topped with a little bit of sauce:


I will be the first to admit that it's not really the most appetizing thing to look at. However, it was scrumptious, and I wish I'd made double the amount because I think we would have finished it all tout de suite! The smell of it alone was intoxicatingly good, the bird was cooked just right, and the vegetables were succulent and tender... all in all, a homerun, despite the tomatoes that did not match the rest of the dish (clearly, I can't let it go). Everything tasted great, and from the first bite everyone at the table got silent as they ate. That always makes me nervous -- I'm never sure if people are actually enjoying the food, or wracking their brains to come up with at least one nice thing to say: "Well, it certainly looks like you put a lot of work into it" or "Hmmmm, I can't quite place that one ingredient I keep tasting. What IS that?" In this case, they were enjoying it. I know. They said so. So there.

I'd make that byaldi a hundred times over. The guinea fowl? Eh. It was fine, don't get me wrong. It's just that the vegetables were so damn good. I stashed away a small portion of it so I could have it in an omelet the next morning, which may have been the smartest thing I have ever done. Not like the time I ate huevos rancheros before a big meeting and had a giant wad of black bean skin stuck between my two front teeth. That wasn't too smart. Or the time in 1993 when I started to regale my co-workers with the key moment from an SNL skit and realized much too late into the retelling that the punchline involved the word "vagina" and the president of our company was standing there listening. Also? Not so smart.

Up Next: Artichokes Barigoule

Resources:
Guinea fowl from D'Artagnan
Produce and aromatics from Whole Foods
Caul fat from Niman Ranch

Music to Cook By: NERD ALERT!!! George Michael; Faith and Ladies & Gentlemen. Dude. George Michael is touring the U.S. this summer. How can I NOT go see this show? The thought of thousands of people (okay, well, 3 or 4 of us at least) singing "Careless Whisper" and "Father Figure" at the top of their (our) lungs is just too good to pass up. I'm secretly hoping he'll do some of the old school WhamUK stuff like "Club Tropicana" and "Wham Rap (Enjoy What You Do)." Let's just hope he stays off the pipe long enough to make this happen because I need to re-enact the "Freedom" video with my girls at the show. That would make the evening complete. Maybe I'll even get the Linda Evangelista haircut for the occasion. Well, goodness me. See how enriched you've become by visiting my blog? We start out with lovely, delicious food and we end up talking about a drug-addled former pop star AND my next haircut. You can't find that kind of range in just ANY food blog, now can you?

Read my previous post: Gewürztraminer-Poached Moulard Duck Foie Gras with Gerwürztraminer Jelly