A 1998 Tokaji, a Thanksgiving Table, and Three Days of Foie Gras
My husband came home with a bottle of 1998 Gróf Degenfeld Tokaji Aszú 5 Puttonyos. We met in 1998, just about an hour from the Degenfeld estate in Tarcal, in Hungary's Tokaj-Hegyalja region. He had clearly been thinking about this bottle for a while.
I, meanwhile, had to decide what to serve with it.
A cheese plate wasn't going to cut it. Not for this one.
Gróf Degenfeld Wine Estate and Castle Hotel | The Terézia Chapel (Theresa Chapel), Tarcal, Tokaj-Hegyalja region, Hungary
have written about my foie gras obsession before. More than once, probably. So when the question of what to eat with this Tokaji came up, there wasn't much deliberation. Foie gras it would be.
Only this time, instead of buying it ready-made, I decided to make foie gras torchon myself.
This seemed like a good idea until I was standing in the kitchen with a very expensive duck liver, a pair of tweezers and absolutely no certainty that I knew what I was doing.
Torchon means cloth in French. The foie gras is seasoned, rolled into a cylinder, wrapped in cheesecloth, cured and briefly poached. The finished torchon can be sliced into neat rounds, with a texture that's quite different from a pâté: smooth, delicate and firm enough to hold its shape.
I followed J. Kenji López-Alt's recipe for Serious Eats, with a few adjustments of my own.
Making the torchon
You need good foie gras, a scale, cheesecloth, kitchen twine, patience and, as I discovered, a bamboo sushi mat.
The first job is the fiddly one: separating the lobes and removing the veins with tweezers. The liver needs to be soft enough to work with, which makes the whole operation feel rather like handling very expensive Play-Doh. Mine looked a bit of a mess by the time I had finished. Apparently, this is normal. You can push it back together.Then come the salt, sugar, pepper and a little brandy. This is not the moment to improvise wildly with the quantities, so I stuck to the recipe.
Rolling it into a cylinder was another matter. The bamboo sushi mat turned out to be surprisingly useful, helping me coax the liver into something resembling a proper torchon rather than a lumpy sausage. I wrapped it in cheesecloth, tied it tightly with butcher's twine, tightened it some more and put it in the refrigerator.
A day or two later came the brief poach, followed by an ice bath. Then more tightening, back into the refrigerator and another night to set.
By the next day, I could finally unwrap it and slice it. A thin knife warmed in hot water did the trick.
It looked good. More importantly, it tasted good. Rich, smooth and delicate, with just enough structure to make those lovely little rounds.
I served it with toast, a little relish and some jam. Nothing complicated. The foie gras had taken quite enough of my attention already.
The final result
And then there was the Tokaji
The 1998 Gróf Degenfeld Tokaji Aszú 5 Puttonyos was deep gold in the glass, with honey, dried apricot and a touch of orange peel. At twenty-eight years old, it had developed beautifully without losing its freshness. The acidity was still there, balancing the sweetness and giving the wine plenty of life.
With the foie gras, it was exactly what I'd hoped for. The wine's sweetness worked with the richness of the liver, while its acidity kept the combination from becoming too heavy. A little toast, a slice of torchon, a sip of Tokaji.
There's something lovely about opening a wine that connects so directly to a place and a time in your own life.
And there is another little piece of history in that bottle. When this wine was made in 1998, the Degenfeld family had only recently returned to Tokaj. After losing their estates after the Second World War, Count Sándor Degenfeld returned in 1994 and acquired an estate in Tokaj; the family rebuilt the winery and produced its first harvest in 1996.
So this was still a young estate finding its feet, making a wine that would eventually sit, twenty-eight years later, on our Thanksgiving table in Calgary.
Not a bad journey for a bottle.
As for the romance, my husband gets full credit.
I just made sure it had foie gras.
Egészségedre! - To your health. Cheers!
Happy sipping and savouring!
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