IDEAS IN FOOD

Peanut Custard

The flavor of peanut is delicious. The tongue drying that goes along with the nuts is not that pleasing. We have been working on delivering peanut flavor with an aggressive intensity that quickly leaves the palate wanting more. The rectangular shape is just an additional bit of fun we are hoping to integrate into the finished product.

 

Sea Smoke

Sometimes a fog rolls in. You may not see it coming. A fog clouds your vision. It also forces you to use your other senses in ways you may not have foreseen. A fog can be good if you are willing to pay a bit more attention.

 

Butter

A golden orb which illuminates our kitchen.

 

Texas toast and butter steamed eggs have never had it so good; neither have our palates.

Veal Flat Iron

When you have an idea or theory it is better to test it than wait to get around to it. All to often, I wait to get around to it. One idea was about the flat iron steak and its availablity from other animals beside the known steer. It turns out veal flat iron steaks are becoming readily available at local grocery stores; question answered. The second connected theory (pun is not intentional) was about the sinew or connective tissue in hangar steaks and flat irons. The ideas grew from work with pressure cooking the fat and silver skin from a sirloin and remembering a conversation with Wylie about his work with venison silver skin. The theory was that we could tenderize these connective tissues, generating a delicious gelatinous treat from the connective tissue and extracting gelatin into the cooking medium. Yesterday, the store had veal flat iron steaks un-butchered which allowed us to work with a new version of a cut of meat we enjoy while testing the idea about connective tissue. It turns out both ideas work. The connective tissue is better than bone marrow once we pressure cooked it for an hour. The flat iron is juicy, meaty and easily bonded to itself to create a thick veal steak.

 

As Aki likes to say, you are never going to know unless you try.

New Arrivals

 

I love the Amazon pre-order function. Not only do we get the latest books at a discount, shipped via two day Prime, because we use it that much, but once the books are ordered we can forget about them. Then on rainy Tuesdays like today we get a special delivery from our local UPS man. Today three great looking books arrived on our doorstep. Momofuku, The Craft of Baking, and Artisan Breads Every Day. It's an abundance of riches that we have no time to read at the moment, those who follow my Twiiter know that my computer crashed and burned last week and I lost the entire hard drive, but neither of us could resist taking a few moments to flip through the pages of all three new additions to the library. Maybe we'll take them with us to Hawaii in December to read. Of course then we'd have to carry them on the plane...maybe they will just be something great to decompress with after a long day of cooking, writing and entertaining Amaya. No matter when we delve into them, it's nice to have something so intriguing to look forward to.

Smoked Brown Sugar

 

The oatmeal cookies never saw it coming.

Shrimp Rigatoni

Years ago we attempted to make shrimp rigatoni. The results deflated me and the idea and our pasta extruder were put on the shelf. Now, with a bit more knowledge and a faded memory of past failures we decided to tackle the task again. The newest results showe promise and present new questions. We were able to make true rigatoni with shrimp which were delicious. The questions were about whether or not the results were better than the original and worth the effort in making them? As I type I realize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Our rigatoni is shrimp. The snap remains as does the intense flavor.

 

With rigatoni getting there it is time to reveal. My real goal is to make shrimp shells. Unfortunately inexpensive and slightly expensive pasta extruders do not come with a die for shells. For now we will continue refining the rigatoni and perhaps venture into fusilli and macaroni. If anyone is up for sharing a pasta extruder for proteins feel free to drop a note, it would be great to be able to say we ate a bowl of shrimp shells.

What Lies Beneath

We have continued to work on aerated scrambled eggs from cooking medium, to time, to temperature. What is equally exciting is how they are dispensed and the cloud-like feeling they bring to a dish. We can now serve what appears to be a simple bowl of, well they do not quite resemble, scrambled eggs. Bare with our the poetic license. The surprise is what lies beneath the eggs. What have we hidden? What will balance the decadent cloud of eggs: caviar and creme fraiche, smoked salmon or steak tartare, bacon and brioche, corned beef hash, lobster fried rice? The savory ideas are relatively easy, what about if we sweetened the eggs: stewed fruits, maple pudding, french toast croutons? In this presentation we have not even touched upon the final topping: a gratin of crumbs, herbs, something lighter, a fine film, a crisp.

 

All these ideas from a carton of eggs.

Potatoes and Eggs

 

Potato Chip Ice Cream

wild brook trout roe, malt crisps

Ad Hoc

I'll admit it, I was skeptical. Although Ad Hoc should be the most me of all the Thomas Keller books I still raised my eyebrows when Alex expressed his enthusiasm for it. During Jonathan Benno's reign Per Se was my favorite restaurant for a splurge. Could TK, the master of fine dining, really do down home? This book is the real thing. We paid for it ourselves, as we do with most (but not all) of the books that we've actually loved, and I'd happily spend the money again to share it with someone I thought would appreciate it. When we happen to find ourselves in Napa Valley again I'll look forward to knocking on their doors and experiencing it all for myself.

Popovers

The popover is not just a vehicle for cheese, despite what I may have wanted to believe. This morning Aki insisted on making popovers, oh what a hardship for me, and furthermore she insisted they were to have no cheese. Really, no cheese I thought? I begrudgingly accepted this horrific compromise.

 

It is a good thing too. First of all, I saved myself from having to apologize for not believing. Secondly, a number of new ideas blossomed by following her lead. Aki's no cheese policy for the popovers left them as blank slates for sweet cream butter and Kitty's strawberry jam. My first bite of this combination had me asking why popovers have been missing from my breakfast table for my whole life. While I slathered, chewed and smiled, ideas began to blossom. The first was to dig out some creme fraiche and Steve's caviar. What a wonderful vehicle the popover would become. The next was to expand on Wylie's idea of filling gougeres with aerated scrambled eggs and make a wonderful breakfast surprise. What other goodies have we overlooked and perhaps not thought enough about?

A Whey to Cook

 

Beef strip loin bathed in whey and about to go into the cvap for a spell. Our next step is to begin work on an interesting curd to go with the beef.

Tis the Season

With the chill in the air, an actual frost last night, the aroma of poached fruit is needed to help warm the house and the soul. The aroma of poached quince is a marriage of apples and pears with tropical undertones hooked up to an aroma amplifier. The one caveat is that in the time it takes to cook quince the finished fruit has given its aroma to kitchen and the fruit is lacking. We have sought to help the aroma permeate the fruit by cooking it with aromatics which remind us of the fruit. The plan is to supplement the aroma of the quince in order to keep it intact for the eating process.

 

All in the Family Style

As the cold air creeps through our bones, veal shanks and pork shoulders dance through our heads. There is something special about a family style course in a meal. It is more the perception and feeling of something prepared in a larger form which is then  broken down and served for a group of people.

 

We are lucky enough to cook for specific groups and numbers of people and continue to evolve our own preparations and presentations. In a workshop on Saturday we refined and shared the process for a skirt steak roast crusted with bacon. The roast is cooked sous vide  and then finished in a cast iron skillet to crisp the bacon and add some crusty bits to the exterior of the steak.

To Improve

We were cooking a birthday dinner and sought to bring what was on our mind to the plate. The dish was steamed cod with smoked peanut pumpkin puree and garlicky spinach. The goal was delicious and straightforward. What was missing was the sauce. 

 

We are captivated by table-side sauce, not for fanfare, rather for the application of seasoning at the last possible moment so that the aesthetic both on the palate and with the eyes is not compromised. The dish ate wonderfully as it was, however, we believe a refined sauce with a distinct voice would elevate the dish from straightforward to unforgettable.

Smoked Apples

We have taken our whole fruit cookery a step further. Now we are cold smoking gala apples in their skins, then vacuum sealing them and cooking them for an hour at 84 degrees C. The result is a smoked apple with a firm texture and the beautiful pinkish hue. The rose color sparked a visual connection to our crab apple crisps and a dish was born. We took our twice cooked scallop approach, really in this case just cooked once at 50 degrees C, then chilled and topped with a salad of smoked apples, red ribbon sorrel and crab apple crisps. The scallops and apples are seasoned with salt and lemon oil. The dish is clean, bright and refreshing. The smoked apples are not a far reach from the more common bacon and scallop combination. 

 

It's Hard Boiling an Egg

 

(the wrong temperature)

How often have you tried to get the perfect hard boiled egg? Do you start with boiling water, cold water, salted water, cold eggs, hot eggs, room temperature eggs? There are a bunch of variables which often lead to failed results. We are looking for the beautifully cooked hard boiled egg. These variables do not even take into account user error and interference, moving pots, variable heat, distraction from the mission at hand. We have been doing a lot of egg cookery recently and wanted to share some of our results.

 

The eggs viewed are cooked from cold at fifteen minute intervals. The egg on the right is cooked for fifteen minutes, the egg on the left, an hour and a half. Each egg could be considered hard boiled. The white is cooked and extremely tender, a delicious result we were not expecting or looking for. As for the temperature, the results will be in our book next fall...

haha, just kidding we cooked the eggs at 75 degrees C.

Believing this Changes Everything

 

Whole Roasted Pumpkin

 Fall is my favorite season. The days are still relatively long, the light is warm, the nights are cool and the kitchen becomes inviting once more. It's Amaya's first fall and we are enjoying every moment.  Peanut pumpkins are abundant in our neck of the woods and combined with our new smoker, they are a beautiful thing. Our technique of whole roasting was born of my personal frustration, trying to cut into large pumpkins and squash. I never could get efficient leverage (let's face it I'm vertically challenged) and it always felt as though I was risking life and limb to cut them into usable portions for cooking. So one day I popped a whole one into the oven to see what would happen. I knew enough from baking potatoes to cut a few vents into the skin but that's all I did.The results were amazing. The skin peeled away easily after cooking and the squash, while needing salt, was amazingly rich and flavorful. We never looked back. It's a great technique that easily works in an oven or on a judiciously heated grill. The results of cooking the pumpkin in its skin are everything you'd expect and more. Try it and you'll be a believer too.

Smoke and Milk

Our next evolution in making mac and cheese blends our love of the smoker and our pre-hydrated pasta technique. Today we smoked some shells and then hydrated them in whole milk. The starch enriched milk became the base for the loose cheese sauce for cooking the smoked shells. By cooking the shells in the cheese sauce, already stabilized by the starch from the soaked pasta, we are able to maximize function and taste.

 

Mac & Chz

 

Everyone has their own recipe and approach. Here we've used rigatoni with a combination of pepper jack, cheddar and gruyere balanced with some creme fraiche and bound with a touch of tapioca flour. The key is to enjoy it with good company and great wine. On those rare occasions when all else fails, good mac and cheese is enough by itself..

Crab Apples

While small and tart their role in our kitchen is not limited to our first impressions.

  

 

Harbourne Blue

We were introduced to this cheese by Hunter at DiBrunos Brothers on 9th Street in Philadelphia. Hunter's name is somehow appropriate in that he scours, well hunts, the store for delicious and shares it with us. In order to facilitate his efforts we continue to ask what impresses you, what is it, right now? When he introduced us to this cheese our thoughts, really our tastes for blue cheese evolved. Harbourne is a goat blue which is a rarity in itself. Besides the milk, the cheese is just amazing. What is really exciting is how it changes in the mouth, from crumbly to soft and melting. We try to mirror transformations like this to show a change in food. This cheese just does it. If you can get your hands on it enjoy. If not, ask your local cheese monger to impress you.

 

November 2, 2009

 

We are extremely excited to be cooking a guest chef dinner on November 2, at Blackfish Restaurant with Chip Roman and his team. The dinner will be roughly seven courses long. The price is $85 per person. To further challenge our norm, Aki and I have already designed the menu and are excited to bring these dishes to welcoming palates. That is not to say a change or two may not happen. We hope to see you there.

Smoked Pumpkin Ice Cream

wild char roe, cranberry, brittle walnuts

 

Potato Chip Soup

black fish tempura, tartar sauce

 

Bacon and Bay Scallop Risotto

gala apples, cheddar, jalapeno

 

Grouper en Brodo

sausage and chestnut tortellini, buttermilk biscuit broth

 

Veal Cheek Bourguignon

onion soup mashed potatoes

 

Powdered Brie de Meaux

white chocolate sheets, bourbon cherries, pistachio gremolata

 

Fluffernutter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brook Trout Roe

We used to mark the changing of the seasons by falling leaves and dropping temperatures. Now in addition to these signs, we note the arrival of Steve Stallard's handcrafted roes. The first of the season is always wild brook trout. Ours arrived the other day and we took some time to work out the first dish. We usually pair ice cream with Steve's roes. In fact, this is the first roe-centric dish that we have created without ice cream in longer than we can remember. The seasonally available ingredients and the delicate flavor of the roe set the structure for the dish.

 

We made a white chocolate sheet flavored with nutmeg and cumin. This flexible white chocolate gracefully puddles and bends creating nooks and crannies to cradle both the roe and the garnishes: crab applesauce and parsley puree. The dish is clean and bright, the sweet and savory white chocolate being a fine vehicle for the roe, with the applesauce adding a balanced tartness and the parsley a clean herbal note to round things out.

Flavored Fat

The idea of rendering fat is not new. The idea of flavoring fats is not new. The idea of flavoring fats as they are being rendered is just a way of saving some time. Smoking beef fat and then rendering it was a life changing experience. Since then, anything goes. A go to for infusing tallow with flavor is the spice mix vadouvan. When the smoker is not easily accessible, the spice cabinet must surely be. Beef, by the way, is not the only animal with fat. These ideas may be spread across a wide range of ingredients from lamb to chicken.

 

Once the fat is flavored, we have a new building block to create with. Over the weekend we brushed hiramasa with the vadouvan tallow and then warmed it in the cvap. In looking at the dish today, and being out of hiramasa, we made a another discovery. Use flavored fats for searing as opposed to gently warming and seasoning adds depth to the ingredient being cooked. Today we seared scallops in the vadouvan beef fat and paired it with an eggplant puree, aerated olive brine-cider and a couple of nasturtium leaves. The intense flavor of the vadouvan is tempered in the cooking process and adds a beautiful savoriness to the scallop. The fact that the medium was beef fat does not hurt. Perhaps tomorrow we will be a bit more traditional and make horseradish flavored tallow. It would be great to confit a beef heart or sear a few more scallops.

Apple Pie and Coffee

 

There is a reason why the diner pairing of pie and coffee is a cliche. It is because the combination works so well. We have been working on new ways to get the flavors we want into a variety of mediums. We decided to turn our pie and ice cream inside out and upside down. Think apple pie ice cream, coffee flavored cake and loose streusel topping. Aki complained that the ice cream eclipsed the cake, to which I responded that in any self respecting diner the pie is always better than the coffee, although where we come from pie without coffee just doesn't work.

The Colors of Fall

 

an autumnal color swatch

crab applesauce

red cabbage-marmalade

parsley

eggplant-tallow

Dinner Last Evening

Shola brought his traveling photo rig with him to dinner. So if you're curious about what last night's menu looked like, you can check out the photos here.

IDSK III

October 2, 2009

Hiramasa

broken icicle radishes, crab applesauce

Peanut Pumpkin

roasting jus, doña engracia

Matsutake Mushrooms and Bartlett Pears

hot and cold, raw and cooked

Chestnut Soup

gala apples, bacon bits

 

Warm Hiramasa

vadouvan, eggplant

 

Russet Potato Gnocchi

parsley, tender garlic, powdered raclette

 

Twice Cooked Scallop

chorizo, black cabbage, beef fat consommé

 

Whey Poached Beef Strip Loin

braised shank, red cabbage: raw and cooked

 

Adelegger 17 Month

yellow tomato jam

 

Apple Pie and Coffee

Matsutake

 

So simple.

Like boiling water, if you miss the details you might as well not bother.