Waterzooi - doing it Flemish-style
It's a gorgeous afternoon. I've just had a slice of excellent pizza from the newly-opened Norfolk Street Bakery. Their bread and butter pudding cake looks astounding. I'm in a great mood, and I'm putting off playing Pokémon for the OneMetal Podcast. So it's time to crack open a St. Idesbald Tripel and build a Waterzooi recipe.Waterzooi is the most interesting thing I came across on a recent trip to Belgium. The most interesting edible thing, anyway. There were some fucking splendid beers, and a lot of interesting art, too, but gastronomically it was the Waterzooi that stood out. So I'm going to have a crack at recreating it.
Waterzooi - WTF? Sounds like some kind of piscine menagerie
Waterzooi is a stew having an identity crisis in the general direction of soup.
The pronunciation is something like "vatter zoy", and you may see it spelled: Waterzootje.
Julia Child likens the dish to a Bouillabaisse, and that's more or less what Elisabeth Luard's recipe is. Etymologically, the name is something like "boiled stuff", and as near as I can tell it's just what a rustic fish stew has evolved into in Gent, although chicken variations are now common.
I can't tell you much that five minutes on Wikipedia won't, but basically it's a very wet stew, originally made with freshwater fish and now thickened with eggs and dairy. For me, it's the last part that makes it interesting. The egg and cream thickening adds a richness that makes the broth a joy even without the chicken and stewed-down vegetables. I tried it at the restaurant attached to Het Waterhuis aan de Bierkant in Gent, where they served it in intimidatingly giant tureens with plenty of crusty bread. It's warming, satisfying, and just slightly unusual.
Like many provincial specialties (see: cassoulet and Bouillabaisse) arguments rage about authenticity or the right ingredients. Should it be a blend of fish? Should it only be river perch? What of shellfish? Is chicken even legitimate? I do not care. I'm using chicken because I suck at cooking with fish, and Cambridge sucks at providing it.
Child and Luard and bloggers, oh my.
The easiest waterzooi recipe to find online (excluding the endemic fuckery of content farms) is Julia Child's as printed in the New York Times. Most of the food bloggers I found have re-cooked and tweaked this, and finding another was surprisingly hard. The two I used as reference points were Nami-Nami and Savour FareEven finding a Belgian cookbook to flip through was tricky. Granted, there are a handful on Amazon, and I have access to a copyright library, but both of those felt like overkill. There's nothing in Leith's fish bible, the River Cottage Fish Book, Elizabeth David, Delia, McGee, or most of the books I flipped through. Julia Child's is subtly different on the page, and Elisabeth Luard has, as ever, come up with some kind of deep evolutionary ancestor that while intriguing and probably authentic, is not what I want to cook today.Luard's stew is a dairy-free, unthickened fish broth, made with scraps and oddments. Potatoes are boiled in a stock of shellfish and offcuts, with celery, herbs, butter, and beer. It does sound pretty good.
Wine, beer, citrus and vermouth
Available recipes disagree, too, on what goes into the broth. It seems like something at least is needed to cut through the eggs/cream richness, but what? Citrus sounds risky, and I think this is going to enough of a curdling risk already. The version I tried in Gent was almost certainly made with a small dash of wine, and definitely not with lemon juice or beer. I just can't see the beer thing working, the balance would be way off and the colour all over the place.
I'm using wine because, well, the vermouth is for martinis.
Cornflour and thickening
Julia Child and most of the bloggers whisk the egg and dairy together with cornflour. This must be a thickening/stability thing. I don't object per-se, but something about thickening with cornflour has always rankled a little. The food network recipe - which I don't much like the look of - uses potatoes and omits the cornstarch. That might work, but I worry about a grainy texture. Thickening with potatoes really has to be something you do on purpose, chasing a coarse, brothy vibe. But then, the Luard ur-waterzooi has potatoes all over it.
Allrecipes uses flour, but it’s Allrecipes, and the less said about the food.com version the better.
Egg quantities vary, too, and not just linearly with portions. All taken together, this is confusing. I think I'll stick close to the Julia Child variation, but go with wine, crème fraîche, and decide about the cornflour on the spur of the moment.
Ingredients:
Chicken thighs (six in this case)
A large leek
One or two carrots
Two sticks of celery
An onion
Garlic
Chicken stock
Parsley
Tarragon
A couple of bay leaves
Seasoning
Three egg yolks
Crème fraîche
A glass or so of white wine
A little cornflour
Instructions:
This is basically just the Julia Child recipe, with a couple of minor differences.
Julienne the vegetables and slice the garlic. Toss them together with the herbs and seasonings. Bone the chicken thighs, and layer the lot up in a heavy casserole pan. I'm not wholly certain of the precise purpose of the layering, but it seems to go: veg, meat, veg, meat, veg.
Pour over the stock, and a glass of wine. I used a feisty new-world Riesling because I wanted to drink the rest of it. There are probably better alternatives. The liquid should cover the vegetables and chicken.
Bring it all to a gentle simmer and cook uncovered until the chicken is done. This really could go either way - just-cooked and juicy or well-cooked and flaky. I'm guessing it's a taste thing, but in Gent they went with well-done.Once the chicken is done (about the length of an episode of Babylon 5 in my case), remove it and strain the broth. I basically just tipped everything into a colander over a large bowl. But here's where it gets a bit ticklish, and where a few recipes are a bit instructionally light.
The general directions go a bit like this: slowly work the broth into the egg and cream mixture, then mix everything back together and reheat. That's true, but do it too fast and you've got a kind of sloppy, insipid, plate of curdled chicken custard. Nobody wants that.
So, I put the broth in one bowl, and let it cool just a little while separating out the egg yolks. The eggs, crème fraîche, and cornflour mix in another (large) bowl, and then I started whisking. Slowly whisk the cream mix, and very gently add in a ladle-full of the broth. Keep it all moving gently, and gradually add more broth. This gets called "tempering", and basically warms and homogenises the sauce so that it doesn't curdle.
As the temperature comes back up, and the whole thing coheres, you can start to get a bit more bold with adding the rest of the stock. Towards the end, I also added a bit more crème fraîche.
Once the sauce is fully mixed, pour it back over the other ingredients in the casserole, and slowly bring the whole thing up to temperature. I let this take 5 minutes or so, periodically stirring in mad, pop-eyed curdling paranoia. Do whatever works for you here, but don't let it boil. The idea is that it'll thicken as it cooks, but don't expect roux-sauce style thickening. It'll just stiffen slightly and become creamy and glossy.
To serve, just slop it all into a bowl, with a generous helping of broth and plenty of good bread.
I was decidedly impressed with the overall result. The egg and crème fraîche combo gives a creaminess you don't get with just dairy on its own. The vegetable and herb flavours permeate the broth, and if the cooking time is right then the veg retains a little firmness and bite. Watch the tarragon, though. It's a big dominating flavour, and although it should be prominent, it oughtn't to barge everything else out of the way.As ever, I made about an order of magnitude too much, so I guess we'll see how it reheats.