I have traditionally thought of bread or rice stuffing as the Base for injecting savoury floavours into my festive roasts. But a post I just came across is helping me broaden my horizons while making my Holiday mains healthier…
Classic Rolled Roast: ‘Stuffed’ with aromatic pesto – using no starchy binders…
Specifically, I’ve lived to this point in my life under a typically British misconception that the only way to ‘properly’ season and flavour a festive roast is to stuff it with a bread-crumb or rice mixture redo-lent with herbs, spices, and aromatic root veggies. What a fool I’ve been!
And I hasten to mention that this time-honoured approach has been hammered into me by a lifetime of cooking at my mother’s knee as well as in culinary school.
But the post Sister Erin recently submitted for my approval reminded me that there is – and always has been – a whole wide world of other options out there for flavouring meats and even veggie mains.
Now, the blinders are off!
My first realization as I read the comprehensive, and at times surprising, list of ‘things you can put in your turkey that aren’t stuffing’ was that my classical training in the French Tradition had actually more than touched on the idea of alternatives.
The idea. however, was always approached via implication, never through direct, frank discussion. Witness the classic French Bouquet Garni, the notion of the Herbs de Provence blend, and even the most basic of European flavouring tradition: the Mirepoix.
And don’t forget the close cousins of Mirepoix, the venerable Cajun Holy Trinity, the Asian Trinity, Spanish Sofrito and Germanic Suppengrün. Looking farther afield, we see the bold masalas of India, the spicy Szechuan, Hunan and other regional traditions of the Far East, and the New World Chili blends.
All those are just as ancient and authentic in their way – some massively more so – than the crumb- or rice-substrate method that’s proven so popular in the West for the past few hundred years.
The clean, bright dozen…
One distinct advantage of the ‘naked flavouring’ approach is, there’s no fuzzy, starchy background flavour to interfere with the blending of the flavouring and the natural, earthy umami sensory ex-perience of the meat, itself.
You can also get along with less of the most-pungent – often the most-expensive – herbs and spices you may want to employ.
But it’s the clarity and intensity of the added flavours and aromas that’s the real advantage of the direct method.
How you use it
Its ‘instructions for use’ are simple. If your featured main has a natural cavity – such as a whole fish or poultry item, or something small such as a rabbit, you can simply place the whole herbs or gauze-wrapped bundle(s) of herbs and spices inside.
If there’s a natural fat cap on a roast or its natural skin left on, you can tuck the flavourings under that layer to great effect. There’s also the pan-cultural tradition of the ‘spice rub’.
And if you’re prepping a roast with no skin or fat cap, you can take the roll-up approach. This basically involves flattening a traditional roast and coating it with a sofrito, rub or pesto before rolling it up in roughly its original shape, and tying it with sting so it doesn’t unroll during roasting.
Tomorrow…
We’ll take a closer look at some of the suggestions from the post that triggered this discussion – specifically the ones that were less than obvious to me…
~ Maggie J.