Tomatoes

its that time again!

Fennel Soup

We are currently serving this soup chilled with a smoked fig and little lemon foam.

I love it conceptually because its made of 3 different elements that come together cold. The triad reminds me of bass, mid and treble applied to music. I prepare each element of the soup seperately and mix them like a technician moves levels to create the perfect sound.

Bass:
This is the cooked element. The fennel bulbs are cooked for a long time with butter, water, pernod and fennel seeds. After 5-6 hours or whenever it starts to completely fall apart - puree and strain. The result is a rich, silky fennel puree.

Mid:
This element is nothing but the fresh juice of the fennel bulb with vitamin c to prevent oxidation. This is most mild and pleasant of the three. Light and sweet with an off-white color identical to the bulb itself. I could drink a glass of this with ice on a hot day.

Treble:
This came about because the chef wanted the soup to be green. Originally I planned on blanching the fronds and pureeing them into the soup for color. I found the fresh juice of the stems and fronds is a lot more interesting. This is the most intense and abrasive bit of the soup. It is vibrantly electric green in color and tastes almost sickenly sweet of licorice candy.

Once the three are prepared and chilled, I mix them, taste - too much green, too much cream, etc. The balance is simply beatiful. The only downside is it takes a case of fennel to make a little over 1/2 gallon of soup.

Confusion

"Barbeque" is not a device, it is a style of food. You might even go so far as to call it a method. A "grill" and a "smoker" can be used to create barbeque but you cannot "throw something on the barbeque" anymore than you can throw something on the remouillage.

"...be generous, be extravagant. Without generosity there's no love, and without love there's no understanding. A mean cook is a failed cook."

-Marco Pierre White

Banana Fritter with Coconut Crust, Tamarind, Spiced Rum Ice Cream

The beauty of bananas is you really don’t have to do anything to them to make them pop - both on your palate and on the plate. The flavors are naturally vibrant and intensely floral. I can’t think of anyone who could say they don’t like a fresh banana. We use them right now with the lamb dish. We simply puree the raw banana with a little vitamin c and xanthan gum to thicken. No sugar, no salt.

In flavor and execution the banana fritter dessert was quite nice but the presentation was definitely lacking – brown, darker brown and off-white. Unfortunately we didn’t get a picture since it was a one time dessert.

For the Fritter:
Take very ripe bananas and mash them with a whisk in a large bowl. We wanted the fritter to have some texture so we didn’t puree the bananas. Add brown sugar, vitamin c, banana liquer and .24% dried agar flake by weight. Heat the mixture while whisking over a double boiler to 32C. Pour into molds and set overnight. In our case it was a sheet pan since we didn’t have rectangle molds for 150. Once they have set they can be sliced but are fragile. When you’re ready to bread them, unmold or slice as desired. We cut them into flat rectangles. The result is sort of a warm flourless banana cake.

Process equal parts panko crumbs and rice crispies. Add to that 50% chopped unsweetened coconut. Bread the fritter using standard procedure.

For the tamarind coulis:
Pour hot water over dried tamarind pulp and work with your fingers until everything but the hard skin is dissolved into the water. It should be a thick gloppy consistency. Add brown sugar, coffee, dark rum, lemon juice, salt. Pass through a fine chinois.

The rum ice cream was the only component for which a proper recipe was developed.

Rum Ice Cream

750ml whole milk
750ml heavy cream
14 egg yolks
100g white sugar
150g brown sugar
600g gold rum
½ tsp vanilla extract
1 (1”) orange zest
2(1”) lemon zest
¼ tsp nutmeg, ground
11 whole cloves
2 cinnamon sticks

Our test batch was made with dark rum which had a nice flavor but intense. The gold rum is a little more rounded and showcases the spices a little more. If you use spiced rum, omit the vanilla.

Set the rum aflame and allow to burn out. Cover and refrigerate. Whisk the egg yolks and sugars together. In a pot, heat the milk, cream, vanilla, orange and lemon zest and spices to 50C. Pour over egg mixture while whisking. Add back to the heat and bring up to 70C for ten minutes. Remove from heat. Its best to let the custard cool with the spices overnight or at least 4-5 hours before straining. Add the flamed rum to the cold ice cream base and churn.

We plated these on a rectangular plate with the fritter at one end and the sorbet resting on shredded coconut at the other. A painted stripe of tamarind sauce connected the two.

Desserts

Desserts have been a constant struggle since we opened the dining room. In previous years all the pastries were outsourced from a company who is as mediocre as ubiquitous in the area. There is no room physically or in the budget for a pastry person. Neither myself or the chef have any real pastry training and the result is a lot of time wasted and a lot of frustration. Just as I'm about to give up, I look through the desserts we've run so far, and think about how much I've learned in a desperate attempt to make salable pastries.

sorbets:
green apple
red plum
cucumber
lavender
kirsch
banana
banana-lavender
espresso
spiced rum
blueberry
gazpacho
celery leaf
grape
saffron
croissant
green tea-mojito
black olive-root beer

Next week we'll try a mango dessert with a lychee bavarois and rosehip jelly. Quebec strawberries are nice right now. I'm thinking it would be nice to marinate them in strawberry juice and serve with a white grape-vanilla mousseline and tarragon syrup. Cherries - always on the brain.

Cornish Hen

I've had to sit two weeks on my awesome new rebel xti without having anything of which to take pictures. Last night was slow so I packed up some mep and cut out early for a quick photoshoot.

I'm really glad I got a picture of this because we recently stopped running it due to lack of sales.

We connect the supremes and skin with activa. The leg meat is made into confit and stuffed into the raviolo which is glazed with port wine reduced with spices and fresh plum juice. We roast the carcasses to make the chicken jus. There is a little bit of silky parsnip puree in the background. Not a bad dish - but nothing really special.

I managed to get about 3 pictures of the lamb dish before the camera battery died. Argh.

Roasted Halibut with White Beans and Chervil

In a mad effort to create some "beauty shots" for the upcoming menu, I did something I've never really done before - this photo is somewhat fake. We are opening the restaurant very soon, but not soon enough to have any of the mise en place to make these dishes, or access to the plates for that matter.

We got the word we needed some pictures at about 11:30 yesterday. By 12:30 we were knee deep in Atwater market hunting for truffle oil, quail eggs, and any picture-worthy produce we could get our hands on. We were unfortunately unable to secure proper lighting equipment. It makes me cringe just to think this picture was lit with energy-saver flourescent lights, which accounts for the overall badness of the photo. We now have a picture of a tomato salad that sadly looks like vomit. Since my computer died I no longer have access to photoshop to attempt to fix the green spike from the light.

Without the time to braise the beans properly we hastily resorted to the canned version for the sake of the photo. The "chervil emulsion" is a honest to goodness herb oil (not chervil) folded into egg whites. The rest is real, the fish, the crudite salad, the snap peas. By 1:30am we had about 5 photos...I'm tired.

Whisky-Peach-Tea Sauce

Maybe a few times a year I return to the idea of bbq sauce. This turned out well but lacked the tang needed for a good bbq sauce. The addition of tamarind, malic or ascorbic acid will probably round it out nicely.

Whisky Peach Tea Sauce

630g peach nectar
6g worcestershire
6g sriracha sauce
85g cider vinegar
60g ketchup
50g brown sugar
25g jack daniels whisky (flamed)
20g lipton tea
1/4 tsp allspice
25 grinds black pepper
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground mustard
1/4 tsp ground clove
1 clove garlic

Cold infuse the tea for two hours.

Combine everything in a pot except the whisky. Reduce mixture to 250g. Remove from the heat. Stir in the whisky.

Salmon Tartare

Salmon Tartare, Black Pepper Coulis, Meyer Lemon Curd, Avocado Ice Cream

The black pepper coulis really ties together the crisp acidity of lemon at the same time as it complements the floral qualities. It cuts through the fat of the salmon and avocado. I pressure cooked the peppercorns in water for 2 hours. The result was less tender than I would have liked. The puree was a thick paste but even when passed, contained a lot of solids. Tenderizing a dried peppercorn to the point it can be pureed is an ongoing search.

The ice cream base is made from of 3 parts fat free milk to 1 part heavy cream, and sugar. I added .15% iota carrageenan. The avocado is pureed into the cold base raw with citrus.

The meyer lemon is preserved in salt and sugar, blanched, pureed and set with carrageenan.

Musings

In case anyone has become as distraught as myself searching for a creme anglaise recipe in the CIA Pro Chef textbook - fear not. It is listed under its proper english name, "vanilla sauce."

I am still unable to find a recipe for "freedom fries" however. If anyone has a good recipe please email me immediately.

Salmon with Gazpacho Sorbet and Meyer Lemon Coulis

The salmon was cured via standard gravlax.

Asparagus Soup

If you said "asparagus soup" to me, I would probably yawn and go back to searching for a good recipe for butterstoch-miso or chocolate parmesan gnocchi. At this point I have to realize I've completely lost touch and need to come back to reality. Asparagus is a wonderful spring flavor and a king among vegetables. It deserves to star in its own dish and not just take second stage to beef or chicken.

I was looking at an old recipe I wrote for a chilled green asparagus soup and it got me thinking about how I would make it today. The fact that its a green vegetable is really what drew me back to the idea, because care must be taken to preserve the color. I start to get a little more excited when I think there really is no cooking past the stock and the asparagus destined for puree.

At this point I'm engaged in a brainstorm focusing solely on my methods. It has actually been quite a challenge to completely omit, garnishes, flavor combinations etc from this thought process.

We can break it down and focus on the elements. A vegetable soup is basically a vegetable puree that has been thinned with a water-based liquid to a soup consistency.

So we have 1) the liquid and 2) the puree. So how can we infuse and preserve the flavor of the asparagus, at the same time controlling the heat to preserve the nice emerald green color?

We can infuse the base liquid or stock with the woody end of the vegetable and the peelings that we normally discard. We can steep the liquid with raw asparagus. We can use the raw juice of the vegetable.

Asparagus juice

Juice the stalks in a juicer over an ice bath. We could always juice white aspargus and reduce it down.

Asparagus Stock

vegetable, chicken or bean stock
mirepoix and herbs
parmesan rind
whole coffee bean (3 per liter)
asparagus, woody ends and peelings
thinly sliced raw asparagus

bring the stock, mirepoix, woody ends and peelings up to a boil and cook 10-15 minutes. Strain over the sliced asparagus and allow to steep another 10-15 minutes. Strain again and cool completely. Save the asparagus juice for the finished soup.

Asparagus Puree

Normally we would blanch the asparagus in heavily salted boiling water and shock it in ice water. There are a lot of aromatics and flavors lost in this process. I don't want to completely eliminate the cooked element, but how much do we really need to cook it to make a puree? Can we sous vide it for a very short time and use the pacojet? Pressure cook it? Pressure cook it sous vide? If we can boil the asparagus in a bag, we can save all those nutrients, but it may discolor before its cooked in time.

Use the asparagus stock and juice to thin out the puree to a desirable soup consistency. But we can still add more flavor. Since we are not reheating the soup, we can cold infuse it with more asparagus and herbs.

Cold infusion

thin sliced asparagus
herbs

Add the asparagus and herbs to the finished soup and cold infuse until the soup is ready to be served. Strain and serve.

Is this the best I can do? What about asparagus powder? Can we use a gastrovac to reduce asparagus juice without heating it enough to discolor?

Tokyo Stars

This isn't really news, but looking at Michelin's 2008 rating of Tokyo is pretty crazy - 150 restaurants adorn Michelin stars in this city. More than Paris or London combined? Well London, don't get me started... According to Michelin, Tokyo has around 190,000 restaurants compared to its count for NYC of 18,000 in 2005 and 25,000 in 2008. This makes sense considering most people in Tokyo don't even have kitchens in their apartments, and homecooking is not an option. But what the hell? 150 restaurants? they care less about stars than we do. At least Robuchon can tack on another three and Gordon Ramsay is dicked once again. haha, EAT IT!

New Menus

We started work this week on a spring menu for a restaurant in Montreal. The process of writing a new and seasonal menu is so challenging. We look at the same ingredients every year and try to keep them interesting to both the customer and ourselves. We think dredge up all the recent ideas and things we find interesting and write it all down. At this point I stand back and look at and think, "that's it?" What about the lamb, the morels, the fava beans, the pork belly, the zucchini, the artichokes? Oh my god the artichokes. Oh boy.

There are a few specific reasons for the seasonal defectiveness of some ingredients. However, most of these dishes need some spring-ification. Here is the brainstorm process:

mosaic of lightly-cured salmon and avocado
quail egg, horseradish, gazpacho sorbet

sauteed veal sweetbreads
spring peas, saba, bacon vinaigrette

rabbit terrine
pickled ramps

hot and cold or swirl of asparagus soups
shaved crudites, parma ham (crisped)

ravioli of braised lamb/wild boar and swiss chard
reconstituted raisins, crispy chard, golden raisin puree (cumin, tumeric)

pork cheeks braised in milk and honey
fennel pollen, shaved fennel salad, lavender, lemon vinaigrette

(Soup)
cockles, sauteed garlic scapes, wild mushrooms

hot and cold foie gras

Mains

braised beef cheek/short rib (brined and cooked at 56C for 72 hours)
rhubarb puree, madeira-coffee jus, asparagus, potato fondant

bacon-wrapped monkfish
ragout of white beans, tomato confit, "sauce bordelaise"

butter-poached lobster
golden beet puree, sauteed spinach, chorizo emulsion

tea-smoked duck breast
(or poached in french toast stock)
pain perdue, black olive caramel, pickled daikon

terrine of squab breast
chicken liver, tellicherry-currant coulis

Spice Quiz

I love cooking with spices. You can give any ingredient or recipe an instant sense of regionality as well as a fiery heat or delicate complexity. Spices can breath life into a dish and they can bog it down and remind us why we started using them in the first place, before refrigerators came into fashion.

Do you know (without looking up on google) what what makes up the chinese 5 spice? How about Arabic or Turkish 7 spice (baharat)? French "quatre epices" (4 spice)?
I started thinking about this the other day when I ran across one that I hadn't heard of before; vadouvan. What are characteristic elements of less clearly defined mixes like, cajun, pickling spices, tex-mex? Or older mixes like shichimi togarashi, zaa'tar, garam masala, ras-el hanout, chermoula, harissa, berbere?

A little while back David brought this website to my attention: Gernot Katzer's Spices. Its really an amazing resource.

I was able to find recipes I was happy with:
berbere
vadouvan
pickling spices
tex-mex

Manufacturing Deliciousness

Nowadays we can use gas chromatography and olfactometry techniques to analyze different foods and see why they go together. There are a number of commercial databases that list thousands of popular ingredients and their threshold levels of volatile compounds. For the most part, this information is best used to explain a tasty combination. However, we can look at compounds and try to predict interesting combinations with varied success. This idea is the very heart of what we refer to as "Molecular Gastronomy" - to completely deconstruct something down to its most basic elements. This can mean the physical and chemical process behind heating a dish, flavors and textures of a classical dish or aromatic compounds in a specific combination of ingredients. How we reassemble the data is the interesting part.

I've barely begun to scratch the surface of this topic personally. In the spirit of science, I've decided to post these limited findings. Most combinations are based on similarly high levels of specific compounds. Of course these are not guaranteed to work. I was really excited to find things like lavender and juniper occur so frequently, because I like them both very much and find them really hard to work with. My combinations go from simple and typical like orange, cilantro and cardamom to very strange like, asparagus, coffee and popcorn. Here's what I found.

Combination #1:
orange
lemon
dill seed
fennel
juniper berry
lavender

Combination #2:
lavender
banana
coffee
honey
gin
allspice

Combination #3:
bay leaf
cheddar cheese
gin
allspice

Combination #4:
caviar
cilantro

Combination#5:
asparagus
coffee
popcorn

Combination #6:
orange juice
cilantro
cardamom

More on this topic visit, Khymos.org, TGRWT, Leffingwell.com

Sugar as a Cooking Medium

This is just a thought... We can use syrup to cook things at a high temperature like when we pour it over nuts to make peanut brittle so why not other things? Heat a pot of hot syrup and immerse ingredients in it to cook the same as you would water or oil. You could use it too cook sous vide over 100C. We could poach scallops in honey or glaze root vegetables in hot syrup. A solution of 99% sucrose can be heated up to 154C/310F without breaking down - the temperature of a low oven. But since its considerably more dense than oil it would cook faster than in a fryer. Glucose syrup is 1.5 times more dense than water and can be heated well past the boiling point, making it much more efficient. If you cook a beef roast in syrup at a hard-crack temperature it should form a crust when it cools that will chip off. Something to think about.

Glucose Density (g/cm3) = 1.54
Water Density (g/cm3) = 1
Oils Density (g/cm3) = .91-.93

Lentils

I'm really glad I can post about these because they are a great love of mine and have tremendous sentimental value. My Indian friends would make them with spices in the consistency of a porridge with chopped tomatoes and scrambled eggs. Ruth loves lentils cooked with spices and I made them for her often.

Lentils have a natural delicious and deeply satisfying quality that is extremely easy to bring out. When I graduated culinary school I didn't have the slightest clue how to cook them. I feel they are often neglected. It is a unique quality to both add to and benefit from the liquid in which they are cooked - you can create a stock and an delicious product both at the same time, which is not the case for meat and animal protein. I think a good bean broth rivals chicken stock and is no comparison to vegetable stock for a non-meat alternative.

Because this technique is really economical, its easier to use less efficient techniques like gelatin clarification which can easily yield as little as 50%. A bean/lentil consomme is an amazing medium for poaching and braising. We braised salt cod in curry-lentil consomme which turned out very nice. I've also used lentil stock as a cooking liquid for lentils which yields great results.

At Daniel I was taught a standard way of cooking dried beans and legumes.

Soak overnight, or as needed.
Place in a pot and cover with cold water
Bring to a boil
Skim off any scum and strain liquid
place in a pot again and add cold water, this time with a sachet of standard mirepoix herbs and spices
simmer until tender
remove and discard sachet
strain liquid and discard
allow the beans to cool

This was really the first exposure I had to a proper technique of bean cookery. I'm not quite sure if there is any value to the blanching process. I later learned the value of smoked pork and salt in addition to the mirepoix. The bean/lentil soaks up more water as is comes close to being cooked so the liquid must be well seasoned. If not you have a lentil that tastes like tap water.

At Lucias restaurant in Minneapolis they have a standard preparation for braised white beans.

2-3# dried beans
1 tomato, halved
1/2 bu. thyme
1/4c. olive oil
5 garlic cloves
2-3T salt

the beans are brought to a boil and allowed to rest for 1 hour. Then they are simmered until tender.

The "hot soak" is not desirable and the method is definitely a regression from the aforementioned but it includes the tomato which completely dissolves into the water in the time it takes to cook the beans. It also includes oil which is of questionable value.

At The Fat Duck, the lentils are placed in a vacuum sealed bag with de-ionized water, mirepoix containing leek and garlic and cooked at 90C for 5 hours. This method is perfect. Using filtered water gives you more control over the water. I'm not sure if the process controls the pH, but I know that affects the texture and the way they cook. The vegetables create an acidic environment and probably add to the cooking time.

In his book titled Molecular Gastronomy, Herve This states "...the percentage of lentils that burst open during cooking increases exponentially as a function of time as the temperature rises above 80C...above 86C, the proportion of lentils that fall apart exceeds the proportion of lentils that become soft while retaining their form..lentils should be cooked at a temperature lower than 80C." I suspect my experience with the higher cooking temperature is designed to reduce the cooking time.

Here's how I cook them:

1 1/2 cup lentils
1/4 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic
1 whole tomato, peeled and chopped
1T curry spice blend
1 tsp corriander, ground
dash cinnamon, ground
1/4 tsp cumin, ground
1/8 tsp cayenne, ground
salt and water

cook the onions in oil until golden, add the garlic 5 min. Add spices and cook 1 minute. Add the tomato and cook until it starts to fall apart. Add lentils and cook 30 seconds. Add water - the amount depends on what you want as a finished result. I usually add about 2 cups of water and let most of it cook off. The cooking liquid should taste fairly salty. Simmer until the lentils are tender.

A Quiet Dinner

Most of the time my trips to the heartland are filled with unrestrained indulgence and experimentation in food. Fortunately I've been busy and enterprising this trip which - while unexpectedly lucrative - has left little room for me to play. As much as I would like a full blown 12 course plated dinner I don't have the time. But there is possibility for a more intimate and limited dinner, maybe 3-4 courses for 5-6 people.

This got me thinking about the importance and meanings of a highly complicated meal vs a simple one. You have progressions of textures, intensities and flavors to take into account. Is it harder to make a three course meal vs a 7+? With 5-7 courses, one or two can miss and the meal will still be a success. A three course can only get better with each plate or it will be a dissapointment. On the other hand with each addition it becomes increasingly difficult to create a meaningful succession.

This is all I had in mind so far:

Soup

Fresh Pasta

Braised Meat

Dessert