Dear Tamar:
Can I use and reuse and reuse the fat I used to make confit of gésiers a/k/a chicken gizzards? It's too delicious to throw out, and the gésiers—also ridiculously delicious— are disappearing fast so it won't be needed to preserve them for more than another few minutes.
-Getcher Gizzards Here
Dear Getcher Gizzards,
I’ve been sitting on this question, approaching it in my mind from different angles. Is it a scientific matter, about the molecular makeup of fat, and how quickly it degrades? Speaking of degrading: should this be simply a celebration of cooking an animal part that is often ignored—or worse, maligned? I badly want to know the rest of the menu. Was there bread? A light red? A boisterous salad adorned with violets? Francoise Hardy on the speakers? In the garden, a game of pétanque…?
I’ve landed on all of those, and also none. Basically: I was turning off my oven, which was full of half sheet trays of roasting zucchini. The zucchini had a little more roasting to do, but it was caramelized enough—really it just needed its own residual heat to cook through. As I turned off the oven, creating exactly the right circumstances for the zucchini to finish cooking, it occurred to me what an important technique it was—and that it’s rarely, if ever, taught.
The skill of using a recently extinguished oven reminded me of your reusing fat question. Reusing cooking fat is a genuinely important cooking skill. Miles more important than sous vide cooking, or another way to cook salmon. Another one I thought of: Turning leftover boiled eggs into sauce gribiche (see below.) Or boiling potatoes in really salty water in advance of dinner, then turning them off just before they’re done and leaving them in the water. Or the entire-torah-on-one-foot axiom: If you wonder if it’s done, it’s not; if you wonder if it needs salt, it does. Those are all legitimately helpful and useful. Why are they not among the first things cooks learn?
It’s tempting to draw an accusatory and trite conclusion from the omissions. Like: They teach us everything we don’t need to know, and nothing we do. But I think it’s more nuanced. I think it’s that the resources from which most Americans learn to cook don’t teach us the skills that would help us most in cooking.
In my mind, basically all cooking instruction should focus on: delicious ways to use all of everything we buy; simple procedures for cooking our everything with as little of our and the grid’s energy as possible; and methods and strategies that increase the probability that we’ll do it again tomorrow.
Each life is long, in its way—with many meals in it. Sustaining them, while sustaining ourselves, and sustaining the earth—the very soil and water and animals and sun and air—which produces our food is itself a substantial assignment, requiring substantial skill. That assignment alone—which is certainly the most basic culinary priority—requires knowing a lot. How to reuse fat, for example. How to use heat efficiently, how to truly transform leftover food so we want to eat it.
I’ve been cooking for decades and I’ve never made it much further. Why, I wonder, again and again, can’t each new recipe that’s published teach a bit more of what we need to keep going? Rather than other techniques, which may be relevant once we all know how to do the things that matter?
Dear cook, you’re already cooking gizzards, and cooking them the best way—I’ve had good fried gizzards, but they’ve got nothing on confit de gésiers. You are reading from a different book already. Strain your fat through the finest sieve until it’s completely clear—twice if you need to—then taste it. If you’re seasoning your gizzards well, the fat will, at some point, get too salty, and need to be thrown out or recycled. At some point, it will get a tired, burnt flavor—too many volatile compounds will have settled into the fat. This will probably be after two or three uses. Maybe four, if you diligently lower the heat under your confit as soon as you see a single bubble. If you ever have something in the oven that’s almost done, turn the oven off. If you have a leftover boiled egg that doesn’t appeal in its current state, make sauce gribiche—which will be delicious alongside your gésiers. And for god’s sake, keep making gizzards. Please send me your recipe! Here is mine for gribiche:
Gribiche sauce
-1 leftover boiled egg
-1 tsp Dijon mustard
-⅓ c olive oil
-1 tsp finely chopped cornichons
-1 tsp drained capers, chopped if big
- ¼ c chopped herbs like parsley, chervil, tarragon, celery leaves
-¼ tsp salt plus to taste
-freshly ground black pepper.
Finely chop the egg. Add the mustard. Add the olive oil, combining with gusto. Add the vinegar and mix. Add remaining ingredients, mix lightly, taste for salt and pepper, and adjust. This is a delicious dolloping sauce, or a replacement for mayonnaise on any sandwich or burger or, or, or.
Thanks for that delightful contemplation of my problem. You asked, so I send. Actually I have a small collection of confit de gesiers recipes and sort of read them all and then merge them without a second glance each (infrequent) time I acquire gizzards to cook. I offer this recipe because it is the most charming of them, and more or less how I do it, except for the first paragraph, the most charming part, which I don't bother actually doing "the cure." Just reading about it surely has the desired effect. Don't have any idea where I found this recipe, other than to say it came from above, a/k/a the Internet.
1 1⁄4# chicken gizzards (1 pack from the market)
1 1/2T Kosher salt
10 sprigs of fresh thyme
1T black peppercorn
3 bay leaves
2 cloves of garlic sliced thinly
1 quart rendered chicken, duck or pork fat
All proper confit should start with a cure. Take the gizzards and rinse them with a little water. Gently pat them dry as you would your forehead while wagering on horses and place into a small bowl. Add the salt, peppercorns, thyme, bay leaves and garlic to the bowl. Toss all the ingredients together and cover the bowl. Place the bowl into the cooler and let the gizzards embrace the cure for 8-12 hours.
Preheat your oven to 225 degrees. Remove the properly cured gizzards from the cooler and place all the ingredients into a colander and rinse with a slight bit of vigor. Pat the gizzards dry. Place a pot of medium size onto the stove with your fat of choice. Add the gizzards to the pot and turn your stove top’s flame to a medium-low. When the gizzards start to be nudged around a little by the increasing warmth of the fat, place the pot into the oven and let the mixture slowly roll around for 3 hours. Remove the gizzards from the stove and let cool in the fat.
P.S. This recent time I couldn't find any duck, pork, or chicken fat so I threw caution to the winds and used mostly butter and some olive oil. The result was transcendent. As was the resulting fat which was quickly reused.
Thank you for the positively enriching read. It definitely beats reading about what "the one that shall not be named" has done since yesterday. 🤷🏼 I don't eat confit or gizzards- only plant-based. Can I make a plant-based confit? But I do reuse stuff all the time. Lukas Volger was thrilled about my feta brine infused tofo. My parrot (and my husband ) loves my healthy kombucha snacks (strain the fruit from the second fermentation jar; bottle the kombucha, and mash up the fruit with an apple, pear or banana & chia & flax seeds and dehydrate spread thin for 7 hours @165F). And I love beans soaked overnight in whey which I end with, if my kefir sits out a bit longer. Not wasting anything here. Even the spent grain from my husband's beer brewing hobby goes into my sourdough bread. But then--I'm retired and have time to think about this stuff while everyone else is zooming through life. 😁