Like many of us, I enjoyed some much-needed downtime last week. I got to do many of the things I've been putting off for a while. I changed the oil in the car. I gave the dog a bath. I cleaned out my freezer.
Two generations of Knauers give Ian's Punxsutawney confit
a taste. Photo: Celio Salgueiro
My freezer is chock-full of all sorts of unlabeled body parts. Some are recognizable, like the venison shanks or the quart of rendered duck fat. But back behind the rabbit livers I found a Ziploc full of dark pink something-or-other. I picked up the bag and looked closely. "Ok, this is an animal," I thought. "But which one?" I turned the bag over and found a clue: a few blades of grass were frozen into flesh. Aha! This was the groundhog I shot last fall.
Groundhog tastes like rabbit, but it's dark meat, and when it's cooked properly it is succulent and silky. Usually I stew it, but I've become bored with the same old groundhog recipes. I sat down on the couch with Tomas Keller's Bouchon cookbook hoping to be inspired while I waited for the meat to thaw.
Inspiration came on pg. 135 in the form of confitduck legs slowly cooked in their own fat until they completely give up the fight. Keller, in a footnote, explains that he uses the same technique with rabbit.
Hot damn.
Confit of anything is a bit of a process. It's not difficult, but it does take,
like, two days. Once the meat thawed (and I removed the blades of grass) I
followed Thomas' lead and blended herbs with salt, then rubbed the salt into
the meat and let it sit overnight in the fridge. The next day I rinsed off the
salt and let the meat slowly simmer, covered in my quart of duck fat for four
hours. The meat was melting. The whole apartment smelled like a Parisian
Brasserie.
I brought a small amount of the confit to a cocktail party later that evening. I placed a few slices of bread next to the meat. When I returned to check on the groundhog, it was gone. It had crawled into a new kind of hole: the mouths of the guests. I still have most of it at home, buried in duck fat, waiting to melt its way off the bone and into my mouth.
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