Often, replicating a dish you've eaten in another country is near impossible. We usually chalk that up to the experience, plus availability of ingredients.
Sometimes, however, it's the equipment.
Take, for instance, the flambadou (pronounced flahm-bah-DOO), and if you knew what flambadou could do for you, you would go cuckoo.
Imagine a 5-inch cast-iron cone with a long handle of the same metal. Kind of like a small metallic funnel with a stick.
The way flambadou works is interesting and peculiar. Before I explain, a disclaimer: Do not try this at home with a makeshift version, as flambadou is French slang for flambe. And flambe it sure does.
Flambadou is exclusively used to finish and perfect a whole piece of meat that has been roasted, for example, on an outdoor rotisserie. (Emphasis on "outdoor.") You leave the cast-iron cone in the white-hot charcoal long enough to ensure extreme heat. Then you'd take it out of the coals using the extension, drop a piece of fat in it, and let the fat drip over the roasting meat.
You can flambadou almost any meat. Chicken, turkey, beef, lamb but also rabbit, pheasant, or squab. Flambadou is flexible, as long as you can get meat fat in it. Each time, you would use the fat of the same animal you are roasting.
So what does flambadou do, you ask?
Well, that's the magical part. It allows the fat in the heated cone to melt, drip through the tiny hole at the bottom, catch fire, and splash on the roast. Air meets the hot, fatty drops, causing them to flambe instantly. As they hit the meat, the flaming drops create a tasty, marvelous crust that no one can resist.
The origins of flambadou are simple but obscure. The French came up with the idea, but its use is ultralocalized and limited to the small, rural region of Aveyron in southern France.
I was introduced to flambadou by my cousin Jacques, a hunter, while roasting an enormous rabbit on an open wood grill, just before an eight-hour family meal. I was a teenager at the time, and I thought all the flaming and fat dripping was cool.
The taste that followed made me a flambadou lover for life.
Now, don't go rushing to the Williams-Sonoma Web site to order yours. I think I have the only one in America.
If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, a good lawyer and great liability insurance, I think you can make good money selling flambadous on Home Shopping Network. What do you think?
- Chef Gui Alinat welcomes questions about cooking and will respond to those of general interest in future columns. Sorry, he can't take phone calls or answer individual requests. Send questions to him in care of Taste, St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731, or e-mail him at chefgui@chefgui.com Please include your name and city of residence.
