IDEAS IN FOOD

If It Can Be Done Better, Do It

Through our own evolutions and exposure to ingredients and techniques, I am constantly amazed at how often we could do something better.  From finding a new method for cooking pork, to getting an exact temperature for cooking duck ham wrapped in nori; every day I realize something to refine our cuisine.  What is important is adapting and putting into action these processes, techniques and approaches.  The key is wanting to find better and put it into action. 

Today our pork belly got better.  We captured the crispy skin (a new purveyor supplies the belly) and refined our cooking temperature and time (71.1 degrees C for 24 hours.)  The dish is rounded out with smoked huckleberries, sweet onion puree and shiitake mushroom confit.

Caramel Icing

I have always loved the idea of caramel cakes.  Yellow cake with a creamy caramel coating, it marries two of my favorite sweet indulgences so what could be better?  I should confess that I am not a frosting person.  I am one of those people who loves cake but scrapes every iota of the icing off before devouring the soft, moist cake.  The fillings and frostings are necessary because they keep the cake from getting stale but there are very few of them that I will deign to eat.  Although, the ones that are actually good enough for me to eat, I consume with great pleasure.  Caramel frosting has been one of those elusive recipes that I've never quite conquered.  Burnt sugar icing recipes abound, but they're never exactly what I want, they're always too...burnt.  Caramel frostings are usually buttercreams and I loathe buttercream.  For our wedding cake we were supposed to have a caramel pecan filling, it was a compromise because I don't like pecans but I love caramel, Alex loves both of them together.  Anyway, I knew exactly what I wanted because caramel filling is one of those things that hasn't eluded me.  I can make a caramel filling like no other, but what I got was a bloody caramel buttercream with very few nuts in it, a compromise that worked for neither of us in the end.  We went to at least a dozen bakers before settling on the one to make our cake.  Frankly, we could have gone with the first one and saved ourselves the trouble because although our guests enjoyed it, we were pretty unimpressed.  But it was our wedding and you can't let a little thing like the cake ruin your day, even if you are incredibly picky and have spent days trying to find the right cake.  I could mention the fact that many (though not all) caterers bank on the fact that events are usually special occasions and that people will be determined to enjoy them so that no matter how bad the food may be, the host will be unwilling or unable to admit it or to do something about it that may cause an unpleasant scene.  But I'm digressing.  After the wedding I was determined to bake my own caramel cake.  It wasn't a mission that I worked on every day, rather something that hovered in the back of my mind and popped up whenever one of us or our guests had a yen for old fashioned cake.  We've been married for over five years now and I've finally gotten it right.  This cake was a triumph, everyone loved it.  More importantly, I loved it and have eaten large pieces of it for breakfast for the last two days.  It will be gone soon but that's okay because I can reproduce it and now so can you.  Here's the recipe for caramel icing,  adapted from Bert Greene's Kitchen Bouquets.  By the way, Bert Greene wrote some wonderful cookbooks and if you ever come across them in a used bookstore they are definitely worth checking out.

Caramel Icing
1 cup whipping cream
2 1/4 cups light brown sugar
2 tablespoons butter (I used 1/4 cup)
2 teaspoons vanilla (I omitted this)

Combine cream and sugar in a heavy bottomed pan. Boil over low temperature till a 1/2 teaspoon of the mixture forms a soft ball when dropped in cold water, approximately 20 minutes.  Place pan in cold water and stir in butter and vanilla until thick enough to spread.  Use immediately.  If the icing becomes  too thick to spread beat in a few drops of boiling water.

A Few More Dishes

As the day unfolded a few more dishes fell into place.  We were fortunate to have some incredible peaches so we decided to poach them in chestnut honey to highlight their flavor.  We felt a tea sauce would accentuate the peach flavors and a malt chip adds some earthiness and crispness.  Our second dish is crispy lamb belly with a papaya puree, hot yogurt and  ramp bulbs preserved in honey and rice vinegar.  The yogurt and fruity papaya help to balance the rich lamb and the allium flavor of the ramps rounds out the dish.

Fluke Fins

I was first introduced to fluke fins a number of years ago at a Japanese restaurant where they were lightly dressed and served as part of a delicate salad.  From that point onward, I began to covet these fine ladder like delicacies with their fatty richness and melting texture.  I have since savored these fins cooked, a state in which the richness is accented by a decadent stickiness like a braised meat.  In both scenarios the minor place of the fin is highlighted and envied by its flavors and its scarcity.  Today we had a large fluke to work with.  Because of its size we were able to put together a small chilled dish--its still quite hot out here.  We dressed the fins with hot garlic oil flavored with lemon juice, soy sauce and crystal hot sauce.  The fish itself is adorned with dill and served alongside diced bing cherries.

Miso Marmalade and Preserves

We make a fair amount of our own preserves, marmalades, jams and chutneys.  These elements enable us to capture seasons, flavors and memories in jars.  Similarly, being a bit off the beaten path, it is necessary to have a larder of ingredients which we may draw from, because sometimes ingredients just do not show up or the quality is not to our liking.  We have had to work within our environment.  And we have learned from our environment.  We now utilize more of individual ingredients as well as look for means to combine--what in the past would be compost--into a key element in a dish. 

In having a pantry full of essences, our next step is in combing and juxtaposing flavors.  That has led to the savory application of our preserves, beyond the simple jam with foie gras.  We have begun enriching, finishing and complimenting our pantry staples with a varriety of miso.  We cook rose hip jam with a white miso and make smoked tomato jam with a dark miso caramel.  Other current combinations consist of turnip confiture with a pale miso and plum conserve not with miso but rather preserved salted plums.  While many of these marriages take the sweet and shift to savory, with other proportions and variations the reverse is equally achievable and enjoyable.

Seaweed on the Mind

I have many fond memories--many sparked by the sea-- which bring an internal smile: the smell of the ocean, a cool breeze, sea foam, sandy beaches.  With these visions pulsing through my mind, seaweed is as close to the ocean as I can get.  It is external influences like the weather and internal influences like childhood memories which seem to directly influence our cuisine.  Today several factors came into play, and they all tied into my days near the beach.  I looked to the nori for the smells and tastes of the sea, and I also remembered eating ripe cantelope on the porch while on Fire Island so that became incorporated in a cantelope confiture.  My favorite meal, eaten any time of day, is breakfast.  Scrambled eggs with country ham is pretty tasty and since I was traveling memory lane I looked to our pantry for ham--in our case duck ham.  The dish became complete with a few balancing flavors like leeks marinated in a kimchee vinaigrette and a cherry miso which captures summer.  I can still smell the sea breeze, distant in nature, close in the mind.

When It's Hot

My environment has a direct effect on the food we prepare.  As the temperature rises my thoughts constantly wander towards cool and cutting flavors; sharp, brisk, anything to stave off the heat.  With this attitude guiding my palate, we arranged an intensely flavorful and refreshing dessert.  We dressed watermelon with salt, pepper and maple vinegar and served it with a sprinkling of spruce-yogurt sorbet.

The Vanilla Conundrum

    Growing up I was never that fond of chocolate.  Given a choice of flavors I always picked vanilla or some variation thereof.  Plain vanilla custards, puddings and ice creams were the comfort food of my childhood and frankly I adored them.  But times change and as I grew older I moved away from vanilla.  I became a fan of different fruit flavors, different chocolates, and sweet cream edged out vanilla as my background canvas of choice.  I became oversaturated with vanilla, it was everywhere I looked, seemingly in everything that I tasted.  Vanilla had lost it’s magic.
    Then one day I was reading about seasoned salts.  We began discussing the idea of infusing sea salts with sweet spices and so of course we though of vanilla.  I was hesitant at first, our bottle of vanilla extract had grown dusty and dark, vanilla sugar languished on the shelf, our beans untouched in their baths of whiskey or sherry on a dry storage shelf.  Instead there is a bottle of vodka infused yes, with vanilla beans, but also with whole cardamom pods, dusky brown things that are more earthy and pungent that their lighter green counterparts, black peppercorns, blades of mace and a solitary stick of cinnamon.  The vanilla flavor was there but as part of a whole, a single note in a symphony of flavors to be used whenever the mood strikes.  My mood for straight vanilla had faded so far as to be a shadow of a memory but vanilla salt, that sparked my interest.
    There are classic savory dishes made with vanilla.  The most well known is probably vanilla with lobster first remembered as a dish by Alain Senderens.  For the most part though, vanilla is relegated to the sweet dishes.  A chance to pair it with savory and marry it to sea salt was a fresh challenge to spark my interest.  Unsurprisingly, the first place we used it was with foie gras.  The exotic floral notes of vanilla were the perfect foil to the liver’s rich earthy flavors.  Candied kumquats and minus eight vinegar completed the profile, a teasing reminder of the classic pairing of foie gras and Sauternes.  We married vanilla with smoky chipotle peppers and black rum to create a braising liquid for short ribs, served with a creamy potato puree, lightly smoked cippolini onions and glazed carrots.  We threaded baby bay scallops on spent vanilla beans and grilled them with a quick squeeze of lime.  We infused brown butter with vanilla beans to be brushed over lightly broiled oysters served with champagne.  We roasted beets and tossed them with olive oil, lemon juice, horseradish and vanilla salt for a cold salad on a warm evening.  The list could go on and on.
    It was a bittersweet reunion.  Although I enjoyed every moment and each dish, we moved on relatively quickly.  Vanilla is still too much around us.  It’s very inevitability in the world around us makes it less fun to play with.  We see it all around us and taste it in almost every dessert, heralded or not, needed or not.  It has become ubiquitious and that is a pity because it is still one of the very best flavors in the world.

Smoked Toast

Today we smoked toast.  I was looking to make a flavored bread crumb for a coating and it just sort of happened.  I made a bunch of texas toast and smoked it.  The offspring are even more exciting than the original idea of flavored crumbs.  First, I took the crusts and cooked them with milk, pureed that, dried it out and sprinkled it with ginger-cinnamon sugar.  Smoked cinnamon toast; more on that later.  The next dish is simple, straight forward and comfortable for our arriving guests.  We are serving chicken on smoked toast with braised leeks and creamed maitake mushrooms.  The smoked crumbs will be for later, flavored with garlic powder and espelette pepper.

We put the smoked cinnamon toast right to work with chartreuse glazed banana, sour strawberries, and bulghur-chipotle-dried fruit ice cream.  A mouthful, and tasty too.