Tjälknöl

This is a dish from Northern Sweden, and translates roughly to "frost lump".

It is a piece of meat, most often moose, but other meats are OK too. It is roasted at a very low temperature, under 100 degrees C for a very long time and from frozen! It is then left in a salt solution for several hours and is sliced very thinly and served cold with potato gratin or such.

Doctor Cutie made this for us when we went to visit them last Christmas and it was wonderful!

So when my Mum was clearing out the freezer and spotted a nice size of inner thigh from moose, that's what I said I'd do.

And so the frozen piece of meat went into the oven which I set to 80 degrees C, at the bottom shelf at around 20:30 on Friday night.

Some 3 hours later, when my parents came home from a concert, Mum helped me push a meat thermometer through it and set the oven to keep cooking until the centre had reached 70 degrees C. It had reached 35 degrees C, so based on my very random calculations, the final temperature would be reached around 4 am. And I wasn't sure the cooker would stop as I'd told it to do - there was no info about this feature in the manual.

But having a built in worry alarm, I woke up just after 4 am and wandered off to the kitchen for a check-up. The inner temperature was now at 55 degrees C. OK, cool, so another couple of hours to go. I turned up the heat to 100 degrees C, to be on the safe side. We were planning to eat it for lunch after all.

Actually I got up at 7 and started on the Danish pastries, and the thing was still not ready. My Mum got up and I quickly turned down the heat to 80 degrees C again. It was another hour and a half, when the cooker bleeped and switched off.

Then it looked like this

Thus, I quickly boiled up the brine:

Ingredients

1 l water

1 dl salt

2 tbsp granulated sugar

1 bay leaf

1 tsp crushed black pepper

2 tbsp crushed juniper berries

Method

1. Bring all the ingredients to the boil.
2. Place the piece of meat in a lidded container or a heat tolerant plastic bag, like a roasting bag.
3. Pour over the brine and close the lid or tie the bag.
4. Let stand for 4 - 5 h.
5. Remove from the brine, pat dry and slice thinly.
6. Serve with potato gratin or a warm potato salad. The meat should be cold.

Specialised contraption to ensure the whole piece of meat is covered during the soaking period.

What it looks like inside.

But unfortunately, I should have had more faith in the cooking instructions and not fiddled with the temperatures. I also thought that 1 dl of salt was way over the top and only used half, so very little had penetrated through. So less fear salt-wise too.

What we ended up with was something with a very spongy texture and that tasted of over-cooked liver. I didn't like it at all. Must ask Doctor Cutie how she did hers, because the one she made was fantastic. The only positive thing was that it was very easy to cut, but that really isn't the main point of food, is it?

Now the piece of moose was around 1.5 kg and the brine was just about enough to cover it. For a bigger piece, the brine needs to be scaled up.