My only advice on the sauce is to make it really well in advance. The recipe says it should reduce by half before it’s done, and that the process should take about an hour. I found it was more like two hours + before it thickened up nicely. But the taste was amazing. And the sauce prep itself is super simple, it’s just the waiting that was hard!
So hey, check these beauties out.
I only noticed this tonight, barnacle dude has a barnacle growing in his eye socket! ouch!
Broke the tails off, placed to one side. De-veined. Softened some garlic and shallots in a pan. All the rest of the langoustine go in the pan with a big glass of white wine. Add tomatoes, seasoning. Cook for at least 20 mins. Render it down. When nearly done add tails. 2 mins or so on the tails and off to one side. Push the shells and sauce through a sieve into pan. (Add butter if you want). Boil up some pasta, pour it in. Season to taste. Mix. Serve.
I screwed up, the sauce was far too watery. I ate the tails and then poured sauce back into pan and rendered it down properly until thick and sticky.
Here’s a blurry pic with a clothes peg for size.
Where’s the veg I hear you cry? We picked up some ridiculously expensive heritage tomatoes from the farm shop, so made a carpaccio with one of them. Salt, pepper, EVO. Room temperature. That’s it. At a quid a piece I wanted to maximise the ripe, fragrant, soft fruit, it was lovely. (the rest were treated in a similar way, but on toast for a meal after work)
And don’t forget:
Holy crap, langoustine. STOP POSTING THINGS I CAN’T HAVE.
I remember being introduced to langoustine as a teenager, in a tiny little hotel restaurant in Normandy. The sudden, dawning awareness of what people were going on about when they babbled about French food.
In the UK langoustine are big expensive things in French restaurants, or small cheap things in pub meals, because changing its name to scampi makes it cheaper. It’s an oddity. I bought a carrier bag of cooked scampi tails (prawn sized) at end of market for a fiver once. Those 5 were £12 but would be £20+ at in a posher area.
Can you eat the claws on this things?
So what do you guys know about schnitzel? I’m in the mood for German food. Do I just get boneless pork chops and pound them flat? Does anyone have an awesome old school family recipe I can borrow? How about one for mushroom gravy for jagerschnitzel? :)
Sorry. The only thing I know about schnitzel is how to order it at Oktoberfest. :)
Yes. I know no-thing!
Amazing looking food. I have to say I was confused at Tomato Carpaccio. I’d never heard of it, nor that there was honestly a veggie take on the Carpaccio method. That. Looks. Fantastic.
Now I’m three recipes in looking at them on the internet. This will be made very soon.
That looks and sounds disgusting. People eat that? Is there part of the crab that’s slightly toxic or is that old wive’s tale?
Oh man I found this and I’m definitely making it soon
I’ve made schnitzel several times, although it’s been a few years. What I remember most is the task of pounding it out. Ahem.
I tended to use chicken breasts, but pork is fine. The thing is to be careful with your technique no matter what you choose, because it can be easy to tear them up. You want to sandwich the chicken (or pork) between a couple of squares of plastic wrap. I used to spray a little non-stick on them to lube them up. And you want to pound carefully–ahem–working from the center to the outside in each motion to dissipate the force. If you go straight down it can shred and tear the meat if you’re too forceful. Imagine you have one of your hands palm up, flat, and the other in a fist, then hit your palm with the fist hand and move the energy out to the fingertips in one motion. That’s the kind of action you should use on the meat as you pound it out. Ahem.
This takes a bit of work, but it’s worth it, because you want it to be thin (like a quarter inch) and tender. So it cooks fairly quickly and crisps up nicely.
Then you dredge the meat in flour, egg, and breadcrumbs–in that order–and fry it up in your favorite pan. I always used a mix of olive oil and butter, but use what suits you. I only used enough oil to coat the bottom of the pan, so this was not a deep fry situation. Should take about five minutes a side, depending upon your pan. Seasoning varied based on the consumers.
My favorite accompaniment was rotkohl, which is a sweet and sour preparation of red cabbage. Somebody else is gonna have to help you with prep for that, because I never did it myself. It’s kind of sauerkraut-ish but so much better. I love sauerkraut, but I love rotkohl so much more, and I’m now starting to get hungry thinking of it. I also loved having spaetzle with the meal as well. Nothing fancy like what Eric links to above, though. Just with butter and salt.
Also I found a couple of slices of lemon accompanied the schnitzel rather nicely. Again, consumer discretion.
-xtien
I know, crazy right?
Yup, the meat inside is more or less matchstick sized though.
The traditional way the French eat is cook and eat hot or cold with mayo and lemon although they are ingredient favoured in Michelin restaurants and ive had then done many different ways.
The gills (dead men’s fingers) are the only inedible part inside.
Brown crab meat is lovely. I have it on toast (+mayo+mustard), or if I bought a dressed crab I used to gratin it in a cheesy sauce. (I’m on a cardiac patients diet now no cheese sauces - sadface) or combine both in a rarebit… Or roll it up bread it, fry it and make a crabby Kiev, hmmmm
Dressed crabs can also come with egg mayo on top of the brown then white meat it’s a lovely dish.
So basically you take a pork cutlet to pound town but you need to do it gently and use the proper skilled motions?
Ahem.
Veal schnitzel is my favourite, rose veal of course. The original Wiener Schnitzel is veal. Is there a market for rose veal in the US?
Rose veal are the male calves from the milk herds and ethically a better choice than white veal, as the males in milk herds end up as fertiliser or pet food if not eaten. White veal are calves deliberately raised on milk and trapped in crates and it’s an industry with a unpalatable reputation.
… and capers. @ChristienMurawski is on point! You put a butter sauce across the top of schnitzel and the lemon/caper combo is the bomb on top. They cut through breading/butter as part of the flavor experience. As someone who never appreciated capers in the past, they are a go-to now. I do not know if it is typical German variation, but it is amazingly good.