The Prison Food That Became a French Classic|@FallowLondon

Hachet Parmentier might just be the best French potato dish of all time. It's rustic, rich and hearty. Probably sustained enough to get you through a stint in a Prussian prison, but more about that later. I'm going to walk you through this simple recipe so you can make this at home. We're going to use one of my favourite ingredients today to make an awesome dish, Hachet Parmentier, which is basically a French cottage pie but with just a little bit extra finesse. Beef cheek is an amazing cut to use because it's obviously one of those hard-working muscles on a cow that does lots of work chewing grass all day. If you were to eat this raw it would be very, very tough, very chewy, but the best way to cook it is to braise it. You can easily use any other braising cut. To be honest, this is a very versatile technique and actually the name comes from the potato rather than the actual meat. So I'm just taking off the main bits of silver skin from there. What we call silver skin is this really white, almost translucent layer and it's essentially what holds a muscle in place. I'm going to season them up liberally for the English audience. I think the closest version of this dish that we would recognise is cottage pie, not shepherd's pie, crucially as that's normally made with lamb. It's one of the staples that I had growing up. This technique works 100% for cottage pie as well and there's just a slight difference in the way that you do the mash on top. What we're going to do is just before we braise the meat, we're just going to sear it off in a pan. I've got an onion, carrots and some celery and we're just going to make a very simple mirepoix. It's kind of like the foundation of flavour in most stocks and sauces and you know you get a soffritto in Italian cooking, mirepoix is just French for it. We can leave this really chunky because this isn't actually going to go in the finished dish. So just leave the root on because then when it cooks it won't fall apart and then just cut it for even wedges. So add some carrots as well. Carrots are going to add sweetness. Typically you're always adding carrots for sweetness to things and that's the purpose, 100% the purpose in a mirepoix. And then just roughly chop some celery as well. Okay so we've got a really nice crust and colour developing on these. Angle the meat to get a really nice sear on every part. All the searing is going to do is just give you an incredible flavour and depth. So once you've got a really nice even colour all over your beef cheek, delicately lay them in our beautiful bed of mirepoix and you can kind of use the cheeks just to make sure that you're getting that fond off. That's the absolute pinnacle of flavour. Yeah these have been searing now in total for about eight minutes. We've got our fond here, it's a Bordeaux style wine but you can use any any sort of red wine. I think people always bang on about use a good quality red wine but I'd rather drink a good quality red wine. Just buy anything that's not like overly sweet. This is just stock that we bought from our butcher so it's good quality stock. You can tell it's good quality because it's solidified rather than some of the stuff you get in the supermarket which is always really really thin. But that's sort of like solidified stock just means that it's got a good amount of collagen in it. If you're using the slightly thinner stock from the supermarket just use more and reduce it more. So roughly about two litres of stock, lightly turn it over just to make sure that all that fond is gone. Just make sure that the meat is submerged. The lid goes on and that goes into the oven for about four hours at 160 degrees. Watch the rugby, go for a jog, drink the rest of the bottle of wine. One of the things I absolutely hate in life is the invention of the slow cooker because I always, I never, my parents used to use this slow cooker incessantly and I always used to be really confused about it because I was just like well why don't you just use a pot with a lid and everything no matter what you do everything in the slow cooker ends up tasting exactly the same. Celery, carrot, onion again but you know the ones are going to in the oven are going to braise so long that they'll lose all sort of integrity. Interestingly enough Parmentier has a you know has a whole knife technique named after him. Antoine Parmentier was a very important figure in sort of the revolution of using potatoes in France. Potatoes in France were thought to have caused leprosy so they were actually banned and it was Parmentier who led the fight for the potatoes to be used again in mainstream cooking. So the Parmentier cut which is attributed to him is just a one to two centimeter dice cut them into quarters. So the story goes that the French when the potato plant first arrived they mistakenly were eating the tops instead of actually eating the root at the bottom. It has no nutritional value and doesn't fill you up and is slightly toxic to do so. Right so we dice up our onions and this is all of the base vegetable that's going to go into the stock and then we're just going to do what we call a duxelles so nicely sliced mushrooms. So we've got our duxelles of mushrooms you don't sort of want big chunks of mushroom in this you know it's just an element of the sauce. So four hours 160 degrees. Look at those bad boys. Crucially I've taken this out and I've let it cool down in the stock. If you take braised meat out of the stock it actually dries out because all the steam escapes the meat's been out the oven for a bit but like essentially what you want is just this just awesome gelatinous meatball. I don't want to pull it apart too much but I don't want it to turn into a like almost like a hash texture. I just want it to be like gently pulled apart and then this is the foundation and the basis for the sauce. What I'm going to do is just pass this off because I don't really want any of those really like stewed vegetables in there. What we can see here is it's obviously quite thin but the flavour is actually really really good. What we're going to do to thicken this is we're going to make a beurre manier exactly the same way as you'd use a roux to thicken something. So you're just making a paste with equal parts, I'm not going to weigh it I'm just going to do it by eye, equal parts butter to flour. Just use the back of a spoon just gently press this together. This is our beurre manier so that's the consistency you're looking for just like basically just a shaggy shaggy kind of dough. So butter in and we're just going to sweat those onions down. Okay so we don't really need any colour on these onions, your carrots and your celery and now that's cooked down slightly just add in your mushrooms. So we're just going to add our strained liquid now into the veg. I'm just going to pick some thyme directly into there. We can see it's still quite thin so we're going to add our beurre manier now once it's got nice and warm. It'll just melt gently into the sauce. Use the back of your the Maurice just to help it break down and melt. So just turn that right down you want to cook that for at least 15 minutes after you've added a beurre manier because you want to cook the flour out. A touch of salt and pepper. We don't want it to thicken up way too much because it'll be too concentrated so that beurre manier has done its job. Not to the stage where it's coat in the back of the spoon because it's going to continue to cook and gratinate in the oven. Okay and this is the most important ingredient the humble potato. They've been baking for around about 50 minutes 180 degrees so you can always tell a baked potatoes cooked just should be really nice and soft and then you just let them rest. We cook baked potatoes on salt because we're trying to draw the moisture out of the potato and salt just helps do that so we want a really nice sort of thick mash and just to help them cool down I'm just opening these potatoes up they'll cool down twice as quick. Best kind of potato for this or any mash really is called a deseret. Always use a red potato for mash. They've just got a higher starch content they're sweeter they're richer. Okay so our potatoes are cooled down now so we're just going to pass these through a tammy sieve. You can use a normal sieve at home or ricer. This will give us a really nice fine mashed potato. It might seem a little bit labour intensive doing the mash like this but I do I do genuinely think it makes all the difference. It's one of those little extra steps. A drum sieve or a ricer does make a massive difference if you're making mashed potato so I do recommend you buying one. You can use this to sift flour really effectively so it is a handy thing to have lying around. Splash of milk to this mash bring it together. A hunk of butter. Grated nutmeg. Nice and sweet nutmeg. It works really really well with potatoes. This recipe is going to be in the description so you can make this at home. You don't want to work it too intensely because there's lots of starch. Passing it through a drum sieve already sort of works that starch and you can get quite almost gloopy gluey mash if you work it too much. It'll get nice and crispy and gratinate nicely when we bake it in the oven. And we get a lot of comments to say oh how much butter have you put in there like I said that's the consistency of the mash because it's like 50 butter it's not. The consistency of a mash is simply because you've used a drum sieve which makes a massive difference. It's only about only about like 100 grams of butter went in there but it's just that beautiful consistency. Don't need to use a piping bag you can just use a you can ladle this on nicely with a maryse if you want to. Let's talk about the big man himself then Antoine Parmentier. It's weird to think of a world without potatoes but they're actually illegal at one point in French history. There was a war that happened in the mid to late 18th century called the Seven Year War and Parmentier was actually a prisoner of war at the time in Prussia. He was fed basically a diet of potatoes. When he got back to France he made it his basic mission to get the potatoes back as a main staple crop for the French. It was actually served to the Sun King King Louis the 16th at a potato themed feast which was sort of celebrating the reintroduction of the potato as a main staple crop. So this is a dish invented by Parmentier to celebrate his humble potato and what an incredible story that is. All the way from a Russian prison to the king's table you can always imagine Parmentier in his prisoner barracks dreaming of this dish. So I've just got a little bit of tarragon here just gonna chop that up nicely. So I'm just adding in some fresh herbs there just add a bit of freshness to that very rich stock. So just pipe in this mash now try and get a little bit up the side so it doesn't all bubble over when it cooks. A little bit decorative also doesn't matter because we're going to cover the whole thing in cheese. Parmentier as well is a pretty fascinating character. So there is a story that he occupied a patch of farmland outside of Paris and grew these potatoes and in order to sort of create the illusion that they were very high high value items he stationed he got Louis to station some some guards outside. So the potatoes were guarded under lock and key and then in the evenings he would take the guards away and all the potatoes would get nicked. It was the idea of like you know creating a very valuable commodity but at the same time allowing it to get stolen. So creating a demand in the market for it. Just liberally add some grated cheese. Traditionally in the recipe it's a it's a Gruyere. I'm using cheddar because it's got I think it's got a better flavour and a better tang. We're gonna bake this in an oven quite high because we don't need it to cook anymore we just need it to gratinate nice and quickly. 180 to 200 for about 15 to 25 minutes. It really depends on how how crunchy you like your top. And there we have it our Hachet Parmentier in all its glory. So that's what we want we want it to be nice and crispy on the top. Lightly caramelised around the outside as well and it might not be like the most beautiful dish but you just know that those beef cheeks are waiting there. Antoine Parmentier, you absolute f***ing legend. Absolutely delicious. Good lad, Antoine. Well done.