French · Main
Cassoulet de Toulouse
- Advanced
- 75 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, warm spice humming through the middle, on a drift of smoke.
Ingredients
- 700 g dried lingot or cannellini beans
- 200 g fresh pork rind, in wide strips
- 1 ham hock, about 800 g
- 500 g pork shoulder, in 5 cm pieces
- 150 g unsmoked pork belly, diced
- 4 Toulouse sausages, about 400 g
- 2 confit duck legs
- 40 g duck fat
- 1 onion, stuck with 2 cloves
- 4 garlic cloves
- a bouquet of thyme, bay and parsley
- 1 litre light pork or chicken stock
- 12 g fine salt
- 3 g black pepper
The skills inside
ConfitSoaking dried goods back to life
The words inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Soak the beans overnight in cold water, drain, then simmer them 15 minutes in fresh water with the rind, hock and clouted onion. Keep that liquid. 15 min
- Brown the shoulder, sausages and diced belly in the duck fat in unhurried batches, taking each piece out at the colour of a chestnut. The confit legs stay pale. Refrigerate the browned sausages and the confit legs while the pot bakes: they do not go in until the last stage, and warm browned mince left on the bench for two hours is the worst hold in the dish.
- Layer the beans, rind, hock, shoulder and belly in a wide earthenware pot with the garlic, bouquet, salt and pepper, pour in the reserved bean liquid and enough stock to cover by 2 cm, cover, and cook at 150C (300F) for 2 hours. 120 min
- Press the sausages and duck legs down into the beans, wipe the rim clean, and cook uncovered for 90 minutes more, pushing the skin under the surface each time it firms and topping up with the reserved bean liquid, then with hot stock once that is gone, whenever the beans look dry. 90 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Soaking dried goods back to life 69 recipes
- Fully submerged with room to swell: the level is well above everything at the start and still above it at the end.
- Given the full time, and judged by what is in the bowl rather than by the hours on the clock.
- Tested at the CENTRE of the largest piece, cut or pressed. Anything with a hard dry core will still have one after cooking, because the outside softens first and stops the water getting further in.
- The soaking water was dealt with on purpose: kept because it holds flavour, or thrown away because it holds what should not be eaten, but never simply left undecided.
- Drained before it is used, so the dish does not silently gain all the water that came with it.
Where it goes wrong Too little water, or too little time. The pieces swell until they are packed tight against each other and the ones in the middle never fully take up water; they will not soften later in the dish either, so the finished plate has hard pieces scattered through it.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Pinot Noir (the classic)
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais (Morgon)
- From the Taps
- Belgian dubbel
- Zero-Proof
- Black cherry spritz
Acid and silk against duck fat: the oldest marriage in Burgundy, with Gamay as its cheerful younger witness.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.