Kentucky · Main
Kentucky Hot Brown
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, char used as punctuation, lifted green at the very end.
Ingredients
- 8 thick slices toasted white bread
- 500g roast turkey, sliced thick
- 8 rashers bacon, cooked crisp
- 2 tomatoes, sliced
- For the Mornay: 55g butter, 55g flour, 500ml milk, 100g Pecorino or Parmesan, 60ml cream, pinch of nutmeg
- Paprika and parsley
- Salt and white pepper
Equipment
Grill
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
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
- Make the Mornay: melt the butter, cook in the flour 2 min, whisk in the milk, and simmer to a thick sauce. Off the heat stir in the cheese, cream, and nutmeg. 2 min
- Set two pieces of toast in each gratin dish and pile the turkey on top.
- Cover the turkey completely with the Mornay: it must be sealed or it will dry out.
- Grill under a hot broiler until bubbling and browned in spots.
- Top each with tomato slices, crisp bacon, paprika, and parsley and serve at once.
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.
The broiler: heat from above 22 recipes
- The element is fully lit and the compartment is hot before anything goes under it. A broiler switched on with the food already in place browns nothing for several minutes and then burns it in one.
- The distance was set before the dish went in, not adjusted afterwards with a hot dish in one hand: how close it sits is the only heat control this method has.
- Somebody stayed with it for the whole time. The window between pale and bitter is tens of seconds, and nothing under a broiler is ever safe to walk away from.
- The surface has coloured evenly right across, having been turned at least once; every grill has a hot corner and none of them say where it is.
- What is underneath is no further cooked than when it went in. Top heat is there to finish a surface, and anything that came out hotter all the way through was reheated rather than glazed.
Where it goes wrong It was treated as an oven setting: food in, timer set, cook walks away. Radiant heat from above has no gentle phase, so the surface goes from pale to bitter inside a minute while the inside is untouched, and there is no stage in between to catch.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chenin Blanc (Vouvray sec)
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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