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Canadian · Main

Ragoût de Boulettes

  • Intermediate
  • 45 min
  • roughly 2 of 4 for cost

warm-spiced · nutty-toasted · rich · earthy Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, toasted, nutty warmth throughout, settling low and earthy.

Ingredients

  • 800 g ground pork, not lean
  • 1 onion, grated
  • 60 g fresh breadcrumbs
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp ground clove
  • 1/2 tsp ground allspice
  • 1/2 tsp dry mustard
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp black pepper
  • 2 tbsp butter
  • 1.2 L pork or chicken stock
  • 90 g all-purpose flour for toasting
  • 250 ml cold water

Equipment

Grater / zester

The skills inside

The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilShaping by hand

The words inside

Clove

Allergen screen

Found: gluten · dairy · egg · mustard

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

  1. Toast the flour dry in a heavy pan over medium heat, stirring without stopping, until it is the colour of milk chocolate and smells of hazelnut, 10 to 12 minutes; tip it straight onto a cold plate so it stops there. 12 min
  2. Mix the pork with the onion, breadcrumbs, egg, cinnamon, clove, allspice, mustard, salt and pepper, and roll walnut-sized balls with wet hands.
  3. Brown the boulettes in the butter in batches until they are crusted on two sides and release from the pan on their own, then return them all to the pot with the stock.
  4. Hold at a bare tremble for 45 minutes, until a boulette gives way under light pressure from a spoon. 45 min
  5. Whisk the toasted flour into the cold water until there is no lump left, stir it into the pot and simmer 10 minutes more, until the sauce is glossy and clings to the boulettes; taste for salt. 10 min

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Shaping by hand 85 recipes

  • The pieces match: weighed, or judged against each other rather than by dividing the mass by eye, so that no piece is half again the size of its neighbour.
  • Surfaces are smooth and unbroken with no cracks, tears, or dry patches, and the seams are sealed and sitting underneath.
  • The shape is defined and it holds while the tray waits: it has not slumped, spread, or relaxed back out of its form.
  • Nothing is trapped that should not be: no air pocket where filling should be, no filling breaking through the surface, and no excess flour greying the outside.
  • They finish together in the heat: no piece done while another is still raw, which is the only test that the first mark was met.

Where it goes wrong The dough was worked past its point or shaped without a rest, so it fought back: the pieces spring out of shape on the tray and bake tight, uneven, and torn along the surface.

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
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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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Ragoût de Boulettes The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Canadian kitchen