• Soak when starting recipe: 70g raisins with 80g rum/water
• 4 large eggs or 5 small – whisk egg whites separately until stiff and fold in at the end
• 40g sugar
• 70g butter melted
• vanilla extract
• pinch salt
• 400g milk
• 200g flour

Cook pancake on medium for 4min, add raisin, cook for another 4min or so (should be golden on the bottom, still quite messy on top). Cut into 4 pieces and flip them individually, keeping it roughly pancake like. Cook another 5min or so, then slice into pieces, add butter and sugar to caramelize.

For caramelizing:

• 40g sugar (3 tbsp sprinkled on)
• 60g butter

• 500g farine (white bread flour)
• 375g eau

4min vitesse lente, puis autolyse 60min

• 100g levain rafraîchi
• 1-2g levure sèche (dry active yeast)
• 7.5g poudre de malt
• 10g sel

1h30 pointage, diviser en 15 (ballons) our 3 (baguettes). Pour des ballons, les rouler immédiatement, pour des baguettes laisser reposer 30min après avoir fait 3 pâtons ovales.

1h30 apprêt.

230C avec vapeur pendant 20-25min (ballons 20min – 25min baguettes). Sortir quand à peine doré.

Test: 10min a 135C chaleur tournante pour une croûte plus conséquente.

• 300g? (500g seemed like too much) bread toasted (20min at 180C convection)
• 3 litres of water, boiling

Combine and let sit over night (to extract sugars from bread). Filter out the bread.

The next morning, add:

• 200g sugar
• 7g dry active yeast
• Handful of raisins

Let sit at room temperature about 8-10h in covered pot, until foam on top goes away.

Put in a bottle (filtering it), loosely put on lid, put in fridge overnight.

In the morning, tighten lid. Ready the next day. There could be a lot of pressure in the bottle…

• Handful of finely chopped prunes
• Small onion finely chopped
• Salt, pepper, etc (e.g. thyme)
• Broth (a cup or so)
• Balsamic (a few tbsp)
• Dijon mustard (a few tbsp)
• Pan grease

Saute onions in pan grease, season. Once transparent, add balsamic, then prunes, stir. Then add broth and let it reduce by half or so.

• 20g lemon juice
• 70g oil
• 20g mustard
• 50g mayonnaise
• 20g parmesan
• garlic, salt, pepper

• 1.5 kg pork belly, skin off
• 37.5g Kosher salt (2.5% of the weight, be precise, 3% is a bit salty)
• 75g sugar (optional, this makes it quite sweet). Maybe about 10g to help with the color without making it sweet.
• Pepper, Bay leaves, flavours

Make a dry rub with above and rub it in really well, not wasting salt. The exact quantities matter and are based on weight of meat.

Put meat in a sealed ziploc bag and refrigerate 10-14 days, turning once a day and rubbing it in. A liquid forms in the bag (the brine…). The brine works better if it’s vacuum sealed.

Take the bacon out, wipe and pat dry, no need to rinse. Better to also leave one night in the refrigerator to dry out the outside, on a rack. Could just prepare and cook it now without smoking, but there’s still a lot of water so it takes forever to cook. You can also dry it in the fridge or a better controlled temperature and humidity at this point (to lose 30-40% of weight).

Smoke – took about 7h to bring the temperature in the middle to 153F (aim for 150F-155F, 65C) smoking at 175F to 180F. Don’t exceed ~200F/95C for too long so that the fat doesn’t render. Hot smoking should be above 150F/65C, cold smoking needs to be below 80F/25C and should be a light smoke.

You don´t need nitrites but use good hygiene, good quality meat and good temperature control, it’s particularly important not to put the meat in contact with things that have touched vegetables, etc, since those have more of the botulism spores on their surface, although you should assume there are spores on the surface of the meat. You need to avoid putting the spores in the environment where bacteria will grow and produce the neurotoxin. The food can´t be warm (out of the fridge or cold smoking) and in a low oxygen environment at the same time. Curing in the fridge is low oxygen (sealed vacuum bag), but cold so ok. Hot smoking is fine, as long as above 140F/60C, even if low oxygen, the spores on the surface won´t grow. Cold smoking, you have to be careful to have a light smoke, so that there’s still enough oxygen circulating on the outside of the meat. You can also just dry hang it.

The nitrites really only make the color pink and you’re much more likely to get colon cancer from the nitrites than botulism from not using them. Parma ham is nitrite free and mass produced, nobody has died from botulism from Parma ham… Nitrites are only really used in mass production so that industrialists can use crappy meat and speed up the curing time (and time is money, hence the lobby to make people think you need nitrites and not to worry about the third most common type of cancer!). If you make salami, it’s a different story, then you can still avoid using nitrites but you have to pay attention to acidity (pH level), since salami will be warm and low oxygen… For entire pieces of meat (a whole muscle), then it’s quite safe without nitrites if you are careful with hygiene (good quality meat, clean tools, not warm and low oxygen at the same time).

• 2 rabbits cut into ~3 pieces
• Marinate in oil, salt, pepper, herbs, mustard for a couple of hours
• Cook 250g of bacon bits, then remove the bacon
• Sear the rabbit pieces for 2min on each side on hot in the bacon grease
• Turn to medium high, fry an onion (not burning it)
• Add some garlic for a couple of minutes
• Deglaze with white wine (about 1-2 cups)
• Add chicken broth (2 cups)
• Add milk (~1 cup)
• Add more Dijon mustard (1/2 cup)
• Add the rabbit back in
• Simmer with lid on for an hour

• 250g levain prêt
• 195 g lait tiède (65%)
• 370g farine blanche (pour 500g total – ou avec un peu d’épeautre)
• 80g beurre
• 8g sel

Badigeonner d’oeuf+lait pendant le pointage, puis à l’enfournage.

40min à 400F/200C