Chapter 326: Chapter 211: The Art of Confit_3

While refining the oil, he began preparing tonight’s main course—oil-sealed wolf tenderloin.

He took out the two pieces of deep red wolf tenderloin from his backpack, treating them as treasures; the surface of the meat was already slightly frozen and stiff.

Facing the camera, Lin Yu’an picked up the Hunting Knife, "Now, I will use the technique of oil sealing to tame this wild wolf meat, and you watching on the screen can try it too!"

He first cut the two tenderloins into evenly sized pieces, about five centimeters thick.

"The first step of oil sealing is actually ’marination.’ In a French kitchen, a lot of salt, garlic, and herbs would be used to marinate for several hours to remove the gamy taste and enhance the flavor."

"I don’t have those things here, but I have even better substitutes."

He took out some spices he had previously collected from the corner of the shelter: a small pinch of dried juniper berries and a bit of birch polypore scraped from birch trees and ground into powder.

"Juniper berries provide a pine-like fragrance, while birch polypore offers a unique, mushroom-like umami."

He crushed these spices and evenly spread them on the surface of each piece of wolf meat, carefully kneading them by hand to allow the fragrance to fully penetrate the meat fibers.

After finishing all this, the wolf oil in the pot was also refined, with the golden crispy oil residue scooped out and set aside, leaving only a layer of clear, boiling wolf oil in the pot.

He then moved the iron pot from the strongest fire, placing it on a stone with lower temperature near the fireplace, pouring some oil into a birch bark bowl.

"Here’s the crucial step."

Lin Yu’an used a clean small stick to dip into the hot oil from the pot, observing the state of the dripping oil.

"Oil sealing is slow cooking at low temperature, not high-temperature frying; the temperature of the oil must be precisely controlled."

"In a professional kitchen, a thermometer would be used to maintain oil temperature between 90 and 100 degrees Celsius; I don’t have such a tool here, but I have an older method of estimation."

Then, he threw a very thin scrap of wolf meat left from earlier into the pot.

He pointed at the piece of meat, saying, "Look, it sank to the bottom of the pot, with some very fine bubbles slowly emerging around it. The oil surface itself remains completely calm."

"This proves the current oil temperature is in the perfect range of about 90 degrees; if the bubbles become intense, even sizzling, it indicates the temperature is too high."

After confirming the oil temperature had dropped to the suitable range, he placed the marinated wolf meat pieces one by one into the oil pot.

There was no intense sizzling sound, only a light "sizzle" as the pieces sank into the oil, their surfaces similarly bubbling with extremely fine bubbles.

He poured all the wolf oil from the birch bark bowl into the pot, ensuring each piece of meat was completely submerged in the golden oil.

"Now, we have found the appropriate initial temperature, but the real difficulty lies in how to accurately maintain this temperature for two to three hours without constant temperature equipment."

"I can’t leave it on the fire all the time, as it would turn into frying. But if left beside it, it will slowly cool down." 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

"Therefore, I need to use two temperature points to perform reciprocating range temperature control."

He pointed to the edge of the fireplace, there was a stone slab heated red by the flames, where he usually roasted things.

Then, he pointed to the spot on the ground in front of him, near the edge of the fireplace, saying: "These two places are my heating zone and cooling zone."

He placed the oil-sealed wolf meat, which had reached an initial temperature of about 90 degrees, in the distant "cooling zone" first.

"The next operation will be tedious; based on my experience, such a large pot of oil, at the current room temperature, takes about ten minutes to cool from 90 to below 70 degrees."

"Once I observe that the bubbles around the meat pieces in the pot almost completely stop, it means the temperature is too low."

After saying this, he stopped talking, leaning against the wall, patiently waiting while repairing the spear deeply marked with tooth marks from the wolf.

About ten minutes later, he saw the bubbles in the pot had indeed become extremely sparse. He immediately stood up.

He lifted the iron pot, moving it to the heating zone on the hot stone slab by the fireplace, squatting beside it, eyes tightly watching the meat pieces in the oil.

Almost the instant it was placed on the slab, the bubbles around the previously dormant meat pieces became active again, steadily rising.

He did not let the pot stay on the slab too long, only about a minute and a half; when he saw the bubble density return to a "simmering" state, he immediately moved the pot back to the "cooling zone."

"Heat for one and a half minutes, cool for ten minutes; through such continuous reciprocating operations, I can control the oil temperature within the perfect ’oil sealing’ range of 70 to 90 degrees."

"This process is troublesome and requires constant attention, but it is the most precise low-temperature slow cooking that can be done without professional equipment."

For the next two hours or so, he was like the most diligent alarm clock, standing up promptly every ten minutes to complete a cycle of heating and cooling.

Inside the shelter, two distinctly different and intermingling aromas gradually filled the air.

One was the rich, greasy aroma of animal fat, particularly wolf oil heating, and coexisting with this enticing scent was another, more penetrating aroma.