Food doesn’t get much more comforting than confit.
As explained in this week’s A la Carte edition of Since You Asked, the technique was likely the original way of preserving meat by cooking and then packaging it against contact with air and subsequent spoilage.
I’ve always loved the dark meat of poultry and rich flavors in general, so confit is pretty hard to resist when it’s on order at a restaurant. One of my first brushes — like many people, I imagine — was in the French classic “cassoulet,” a hearty stew of beans, winter vegetables, sausage and confit.
But because confit is slow-cooked before storing, little effort and cooking time is needed to make it the star of your plate. This week’s Since You Asked suggested using it to top winter salads, which is exactly the approach I took last week after a chef friend selflessly shared some homemade confit duck legs she had distributed among family and friends for the holidays.
The first salad utilized a cache of root vegetables that had been exhumed from my garden more than a month prior and had been languishing in my refrigerator awaiting a little TLC. I couldn’t imagine eating such neglected veggies in their raw state, but roasting put an entirely new shine on the beets and baby carrots.
I also roasted half of a golden nugget squash and piled the slightly cooled assortment of cubed beets and squash (I left the carrots whole) atop some crispy leaf lettuce. The confit, my friend told me, only needs to be seared for a few minutes on each side in a cast-iron skillet. A warm cider vinaigrette pulled all the flavors together.
I planned to savor my last duck leg but couldn’t resist pulling it out the following night for another salad, this time of an entirely different sort. I had purchased a jumbo pomegranate, which yielded a good cup and a half of gleaming seeds. Trying to find uses for a 5-pound box of mandarin oranges, I peeled two of the small fruit, sectioned them and tossed those with some of the pomegranate seeds, some toasted walnuts, salad greens and raspberry vinaigrette.
In both cases, I left the duck legs whole. Many people might prefer the meat shredded atop the salad, but because confit is so tender, it just falls off the bone.
If you don’t fancy duck, the confit technique can be applied to just about any meat. I plan to adapt the column’s Turkey Confit recipe to rabbit. With the meat in hand, I’ll be on my way to more simple, seasonal salads.
