Roast Confit Leg of Rabbit

(Many thanks to Richard Knight and James Silk at Feast (www.feasthouston.com), whose similar dish inspired me to try this.)

Many of you likely know that rabbit is about the healthiest meat out there - leaner, and with more protein and fewer calories than chicken or any other peer I can think of.  Of course, given the leanness, it is also difficult to cook properly.  Leg cuts in particular have a bit of connective tissue and require long, gentle cooking to tenderize.

Enter an ancient cooking technique, updated for current technology:  confit.

Dry cure rabbit legs (2 hind, 2 front) in a puree of garlic, sage, rosemary, thyme and peppercorns, and kosher salt.  Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Remove cure and pat legs dry:

Now, cryo-vac in a food-saver bag with a couple tablespoons of mangalitsa lard (or duck fat, if you have it).  Here is where your sous vide machine saves you money and mess - the traditional method would involve submerging your rabbit in a pot full of lard or duckfat and poaching in the oven.  This cuts back on the fat, and prevents you from being murdered by your wife for making the house stink of lard.

And don't panic - the fat just provides the cooking medium.  We remove it before serving.

Sous vide at 175 degrees for 10 hours.  Chill in an ice bath immediately.

To Serve:  Remove from bag, scrape off fat and confit jelly (save the jelly for later!! - think of it as super-concentrated rabbit stock).  Flash roast at 450 or broil - the office toaster oven worked for me.

I served on top of a garden salad.  You may serve with bread and German or Dijon mustard.

Flakes apart with a fork - tender and rich, and lean.  Tastes like the best chicken you've ever had.

Not bad for an office lunch.  What are you having today?

Bacon

So here comes the first of the really fun stuff - dry-curing. The belly and jowls went into a cure of salt, sodium nitrite (just a touch to ward off botulism), sugar, and various herbs and spices. They sat in the cure for almost two weeks, giving off water that had to be drained daily. At the end of the two-week period, they were hung to mature. One of the jowls I rubbed with a paprika/marjoram mix before hanging, to give a slightly Central European flavor to counter the more Italian cure mix. (The herbs and spices in the cure are consistent with pancetta. I just didn't roll the bacon.)

Here hang the guanciale:

And here hang the belly bacons (note that the one at front still has its ribs):


For those of you who haven't obsessed over this for years, I should point out the critical difference between this and store-bought bacon. The dry-cure method is the original peasant approach to making bacon - the idea being to protect the meat from microbes, and preserve it in a form that can hang indefinitely to be used as a staple. The initial curing process leeches water from the meat, and the hanging process dries the meat further. The result is a piece of meat that weighs significantly less than when it was fresh.

The makers of store-bought bacon abandoned this practice many years ago, as it lowers the weight and takes too long. The bacon you get in the store has been injected with brine to give it a "cured taste". Not only has it not lost weight, it has actually gained water weight from the injection. That's why when you throw it on the skillet, it immediately starts warping, crinkling, and spitting water. You paid for that extra water (they charge you by the pound, remember?). You should feel ripped off.

The proper dry-cured bacon will not do this. It will not shrink or spit; instead it will render copious amounts of fat while still maintaining its integrity. It is a thing of beauty.

I don't have pictures of it cooking, but hopefully the following pics of the finished product will tell the tale. The thin end of the belly, after hanging, I decided to make into breakfast bacon. Accordingly, I basted it in maple syrup and smoked it over apple chips for a couple hours. Fresh from the smoker, it looked like this:

Stiff as a board, with just enough moisture and none to spare. I sliced it up for future use:

Beautifully streaky, but mostly dry to the touch.

You could eat this raw like prosciutto. As it happens, a couple minutes in the toaster oven and they crisped up for the best BLT I ever had (to be bested when we harvest our tomatoes).

I'll follow up on the guanciale later, when I slice it up for pasta carbonara. Right now I'm still resenting the guanciale for the finger thing.