French · Main
Lapin à la Moutarde
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, on a drift of smoke.
Ingredients
- 1 rabbit, about 1.4 kg, jointed into 6 with the saddle cut in 2
- 90 g Dijon mustard
- 40 g butter
- 15 ml sunflower oil
- 120 g smoked bacon lardons
- 100 g shallots, sliced
- 200 ml dry white wine
- 250 ml chicken stock
- 150 ml double cream
- 20 g wholegrain mustard
- 3 sprigs thyme
- 1 bay leaf
- 6 g fine salt
- 10 g tarragon leaves, chopped
The skills inside
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · mustard · alcohol
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
- Salt the joints and smear 50 g of the Dijon over every surface.
- Colour them gently in the butter and oil with the lardons and shallots over medium heat, turning often, because mustard scorches in a fierce pan, then lift the two saddle pieces out onto a plate and leave the legs in the pan.
- Pour in the wine and stock, add the thyme and bay, cover and hold at a bare simmer for 35 minutes. 35 min
- Return the saddle pieces and simmer 12 minutes more, until the loin reads 65C (149F) and the leg meat yields at the bone, then lift everything out. 12 min
- Reduce the liquid by a third, take the pan off the heat, whisk in the cream, the remaining Dijon and the wholegrain mustard, then return the rabbit and scatter the tarragon.
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 bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes
- The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
- It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
- The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
- Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
- The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.
Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- 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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