Gluten Free

Most Dijon mustard that is shipped to North America from France is made with seeds from Saskatchewan, Canada. Hence, it makes sense that we make our own mustard. Feel free to experiment with the types of vinegar and flavorings (tarragon, horseradish, dill).

This is our infamous rib sauce.

This is part of our mise en place at the restaurant. We mix it with mayonnaise (page 175), serve it straight up with potatoes or fish, or use it to punch up sauces, soups, stews, or anything raw like tartare. Do not use woodsy herbs like rosemary, thyme, or sage in this purée, and be sure to wash all of your herbs well.

This is a staple in pretty much every professional kitchen, and with this easy method, it could be in yours, too. We like to eat the crudités with our Zesty Italian Tartare (page 245).

We use this for our Scallops with Pulled Pork (page 30) recipe.

We made this dish because we like the “potato” de gallo idea. (In fact, you can make only the rub and eat it on almost anything, especially eggs.) Make certain that the potatoes are tiny and crisp, so you get that salt-and-vinegar potato chip taste.

A classic mayo.

Our favorite sauce is made from chicken skin. It is a delicious gravy that we use for a lot of dishes at Joe Beef—more than we would like to admit. It’s like an extraction of the deliciousness of crispy chicken skin. Ask your butcher for the chicken skin. More skinless chickens are sold out there than skin-on birds, so the skins must be somewhere other than at a schmaltz factory. Serve this on its own or as a sauce on guinea hens or other poultry.

This is Fred’s mom, Suzanne’s, recipe. It is an old Belgian Walloon standard—a quick and tasty pickle that is good with pork roast and sausages. You can also mix the “brine” with nut oil as a dressing for beets. And use it to give a welcome buzz to a bland wine sauce: just a drop or two. This pickling solution works well with almost any stone fruit. The amount of liquid you need will vary according to the stone fruit(s) you use. Here, the amount has been geared to 1 pound (455 g) cherries and/or Italian plums. You may need to adjust it if you use other stone fruits. Because we are deathly afraid of preserves gone wrong (from watching an old episode of Quincy, M.E., where the culprit was botulism), we suggest using superclean plastic containers and always refrigerating the preserves.

The spice and heat in this jam make it more at ease with meats and cheese than toast. As for the Babylon term, it’s simply in relation to the avid devotion that the world’s kitchen has for reggae music!

When Fred travels, the first place he always goes is to a grocery store. Forget the idyllic markets and the virile butchers; he has this immense fascination with supermarkets. Nothing compares to landing in Paris at 9:00 A.M. and heading to the loaded yogurt aisle of a Monoprix. He feels the same when he’s visiting western Canada, checking out the sausage sections. Far from artisanal anything, we’re sure, but the array is crazy: midget baloney, cotton-sack summer sausage, skinless Mennonite, headcheese, jerky of all kinds, and on and on. It’s a fun challenge to take an old commercial sausage and just make it honest again: good meats and real smoke. This one we made with Emma, who was chef de cuisine at Liverpool House at the time. We suggest the use of muslin bags for this sausage in particular. You might find them online, or, as a proper Joe Beefer, you can sew them yourself (see Note). The penetration of smoke is much better and you don’t need a stuffer. You just do it by hand.

The best fries are done with potatoes that have never seen the cold. It has something to do with starch converting to sugar at certain temperatures. If you’re interested in the specifics, check out Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. At the restaurant, we use a russet potato from the Île d’Orléans in the Saint Lawrence River (which Cartier originally named the Isle of Bacchus because of the native vines that covered the landscape), but you can use anything similar. This recipe really is made to work with a deep fryer. If you don’t have a small one at home, a 5-quart (5-liter) thick-bottomed, highsided pot and a deep-frying thermometer will work. We use half canola oil and half beef fat, which always makes better fries the second day. If you can get your hands on rendered beef leaf fat (the fat from around the kidneys), definitely use that. If this is all too much, you can use peanut oil. We don’t, as we can’t piss off both the vegetarians and the allergics. A few years back we started tossing our fries in escargot butter (its name comes from its use, not its contents; it’s basically garlic butter) and now we can’t stop. We also like to add a little grated pecorino as we toss.

We wouldn’t call ourselves purists (like John Bil), but we tend to agree that steamed clams served with anything other than their own broth and butter is an abomination. We also think PEI might just have the prettiest white sand–dug clams we have ever seen.

We do not have a story for this recipe. Sorry.

We cannot not dedicate this recipe to the New Dynasty restaurant in Montreal’s Chinatown. Every Joe Beef cook has woken up at least once with an odd burn in his or her gut from the MSG and a soy sauce stain on his or her mouth after eating there. At New Dynasty, the tables are covered and the lights are really bright, not unlike Dexter’s murder rooms! The kitchen serves until 5:00 A.M., and the boss is patient with drunks who are loud and drunks who fall asleep at the table (that is, Peter Meehan). Here you can find every sea crawler you dare to eat: eel, jellyfish (served with cold chicken), huge live crabs, winkles, hacked-up crispy lobster, razor clams, and more. Inevitably, we start a meal at New Dynasty with the big Vancouver oysters, steamed with black bean sauce, one or two each, and a hefty pour of cold beer from a teapot. For this recipe, we use Gigas oysters from our friend Victor McLaggan of Cortes Island, British Columbia. They are as big as my feet and a bitch to open, but they have huge meats that can be overcooked without much sorrow. This is a case, unlike real life, where it’s easy to feel inept with a big one. If possible, ask your fish guy to open the oysters. If you can’t get these big oysters where you live, use smaller shucked oysters and bake them in ramekins. You’ll probably have sauce left over, so store it in the fridge and use it on chicken, duck, or anything else that sounds good.

This great side dish has a bit of a Quebecois-lumberjack-in-Bollywood taste. It is red lentils cooked like dahl, seasoned like baked beans. It is a pork chop’s best friend, or will mate with a hefty breakfast.