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Napa: Dinner at The French Laundry

Posted in Food, Travel, tagged French Laundry, Napa Food, Thomas Keller on April 28, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

There really is no shortage of reports on the web about The French Laundry and it’s food. I’m sure many are very thorough and detailed, especially on sites like eGullet.org. My post here will be more on the short side word-wise. Last time I enjoyed a meal that I had been looking forward to for a very long time at a three-star restaurant that was elBulli and I had chosen not to take any pictures. I have since regretted not having a set of pictures to share here and keep as a souvenir. So this time around I asked our very professional and nice waitstaff if it’s ok to snap flash-free pictures and documented our memorable 4-hour meal as best as I could.

It’s been probably more than 10 years since I first heard about Keller’s French Laundry on Anthony Bourdain’s episode-dinner on his first show, “A Cook’s Tour”. If you do a search on my blog for “Keller” or “The French Laundry” or “Bouchon” you’ll have a pretty good idea that I am a huge admirer of the Chef and his work. We were set to go to a wedding in Napa in March 2013 and I knew that I will try to snag a reservation at this restaurant. It took over a hundred calls back to back…until OpenTable.com came through for me (heh, who knew…) and I got a reservation for 4 on Sunday, March 16th. It was everything we expected to be. I had very high expectations and suffice it to say that I was not disappointed in the slightest. The service was impeccable. It was efficient, friendly and not at all stuffy. It was a lovely meal and a great time with Diana and two great friends of ours.

(Since I used no flash, as the natural light faded away the later pictures are a bit “hazy”. Sorry about that)

After being seated we chose our menu options and supplement courses. We also chose a bottle of an excellent Riesling to go with the meal. I love that the very courteous sommelier did not bat an eye when I requested a “white bottle under $100″. He simply picked two and explained in detail why one of them (the less expensive one) is the right choice. We were then served the Laundry’s classic canapes – Gougere and the Salmon Tartar Cornets. My wife and I opted for a couple of glasses of Champagne to start with as well. Then the meal started.

“Oysters and Pearls” – “Sabayon” of Pearl Tapioca with Island Creek Oysters and White Sturgeon Caviar

This is a French Laundry classic. It’s creamy, briny and delicious.

Royal Ossetra Caviar – Cauliflower “Panna Cotta”, Meyer Lemon, Black Pepper, Pine Nuts and Toasted Brioche

My friend ordered this as a supplement instead of the Oysters and Pearls. Beautiful and very tasty. (Yes, we passed the dishes around so we all can have a taste)

Salad of Heirloom Beets - Pickled Green Strawberries, Yogurt “au Poivre Vert”, Marcona Almonds and Wild Oxalis

Everyone, except me go this “salad”. Very good and fresh. Instead I got this beauty…

“Carnaroli Risotto Biologico” – Parmesan “Nuage” and Shaved Black Truffles

This was a supplement dish and worth every penny for the loads of truffles the server shaved on top of this creamy heavenly concoction. After showing us a box full of fist size fragrant truffles, she proceeded to cover the risotto with shavings. After eating half the dish, she actually came back and covered the dish again with more shavings of truffle. Her comment “Chef would like every guest who pays for truffles to REALLY taste the truffles”. Thanks!

Sautéed fillets of Mediterranean Lubina - “Picalilli”, Mustard Seeds and Thyme infused Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Tasty and perfectly cooked fish. I would’ve preferred if the skin was crisped though.

Sweet Butter-Poached Maine Lobster “Fricassee” – Kendall Farms Creme Fraiche “Pain Perdu”, Fava Beans, Green Garlic, Watercress and “Lobster Bearnaise”

Butter and lobster, rich sauce, fresh favas and crispy French toast. Perfect.

Four Story Hill Farm “Poularde” – Poached Field Rhubarb, Braised Spigarello, Sicilian Pistachios and Black Truffle Jus

It’s not a simple a chicken as it looks. The breast meat is perfectly cooked and juicy. It is also stuffed under the skin with a layer of chicken mousse and black truffles.

Marcho Farms Nature Fed Veal “Oscar” – Alaskan King Crab, David Little Potatoes, Sacramento Delta Green Asparagus, Garden Radishes and Shallot Sauce

This was a surprise of a sort. I was not sure what to expect, but it ended up being one of the highlights of the meal. Not pictured here is a small porcelain pot that was filled with very rich and airy potato puree. This was the ultimate meat and potato dish.

“Cantal” – “Thomas’s English Muffin”, Green Apple Relish, Petite Onions, Frisee and Black Walnut Puree

This was the composed cheese course. Lovely with a mix of textures and temperatures to go along with the Cantal cheese.

“Verjus Blanc” - Demi-Sec Grapes, Jasmine Tea Ice Cream and Marshall Farms Honey Crisp

A complex little palate cleanser before dessert

Passion Fruit “Swiss Roll” - Valrhona Chocolate Cremeux, Caramel Mousse and Banana Ice Cream

The ladies got this for dessert while , funny enough, the guys got the…

“Princess Cake” – Animal Farm Buttermilk, Navel Orange Marmalade, Toasted Marzipan and Cara Cara Orange Sorbet

I have to say that the desserts were the least impressive of the meal. Nothing bad or wrong, just not as “up there” as the savory courses that preceded them.

After all that food and almost four hours we got some warm donuts and coffee.. .

This extra course is the same one I posted about recently, Coffee and Donuts. It’s cool to taste it there and, except for the much better foam on the semifreddo, my dish was pretty damn close to the real thing. This was also delivered to the table with a bunch of Mignardises – a selection of chocolate truffles and chocolate covered macadamia nuts.

We left with a small box each of buttery shortbread cookies and the memory of a lovely evening of good food and excellent company at a unique and beautiful place.

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French Laundry: ‘Coffee and Donuts’

Posted in Book Recipes, Bread, Food, Ice Cream and Frozen Treats, Pastry, tagged Coffee Desserts, French Laundry Desserts, Fried Dough, Frozen Desserts, Thomas Keller on April 1, 2013 | 2 Comments »

Yeah, foam is a crazy new fad. Afterall, no chef was making any food with “foam” ten or 50 years ago. Right? Well, no. Wrong. Foam in cooking, baking and beverages is everywhere. Sometimes it is obvious like a nice froth on a cappuccino. Other times, like in this dessert, it’s a bit less recognizable. This dessert (part 2 of my French Laundry meal) is composed of several foams. Five types to be precise. As the name suggest and the picture shows this is a sort of coffee with a nice froth on it served alongside some perfect donuts. This is a classic French Laundry dessert that is much more than it seems.

The coffee part is actually a coffee semifreddo topped with steamed frothy milk to give it a traditional cappuccino look. Semifreddo literally means semi-frozen or half frozen and it is a very traditional Italian dessert made by mixing three foams. A custard foam made from egg yolks, sugar and flavored with instant espresso powder is mixed with stiff-whipped sweetened cream and a simple meringue (whipped egg whites and sugar). The three are gently folded together and portioned out into small coffee cups and then frozen. The frozen product has a wonderful smooth rich texture similar to frozen mousse. It is allowed to warm up for a few minutes and then it is topped with hot frothy milk. The effect is both lovely to look at and just delicious with the fantastic juxtaposition of hot and cold.

Bread and cakes are filled with air bubbles. They are also a type of foam that we bake, steam or fry to trap those air bubbles. As the air in those bubbles heats up it expands producing airy products that are at the same time light and sturdy. These donuts belong to the category of yeast-risen doughs as opposed to cake donuts which are a quick bread leavened chemically with baking soda and baking powder. Chef Keller’s donuts are rich and almost like a brioche dough. they are made with flour, sugar, eggs and butter. After I made the dough I put it in the fridge to allow it to rise slowly and develop flavor. A couple of hours before frying, I rolled the dough and cut it into 2-inch rounds and then used a much smaller round cutter and punched holes in those rounds to get both donuts and donut holes.

When ready to serve, I fried the donuts and holes. It’s really neat seeing them go in the oil then bob up when they puff with the heat. While they are still hot, I rolled them in a mixture of cinnamon and sugar and plated a donut and a donut hole alongside the “coffee”. The combination, just like the braised pork cheek dish that preceded it, is comforting, familiar and refined. The semifreddo gets soft enough to even dunk the donuts in it. I highly recommend you do that if you decide to try making this. The recipe makes a good bit of donuts and that’s a good thing because one is not enough.

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French Laundry: Braised Pork Cheek with Yellow Corn Polenta Cakes, Glazed Vegetables and Sweet Garlic

Posted in Book Recipes, Food, Grains, Pork, Root Vegetables, Sous Vide, tagged French Laundry, Haute Cuisine, Sous Vide, Thomas Keller, Turned Vegetables on March 26, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

A week before our much awaited dinner at The French Laundry (I’ll post something about that at some point…hopefully soon) I wanted to make the family a meal from one of my favorite cookbooks. I thought of it as an appetizer of sorts. Of course my meal was not a 10 course 4-hour extravaganza but only a couple of courses, a main dish and a dessert. When both come out so perfectly delicious though, it really is a treat. In the book there are several recipes for “cheap” cuts of meat, not just pricey and exotic cuts. Chef Keller uses cuts like beef cheeks, tripe, pig head and transforms them into refined three-star plates of beautiful food. This is such a recipe. I’ll post about the dessert in a subsequent post.

In the book, the recipe is made with veal breast. That’s, more or less, the equivalent of a pork belly on a calf. It’s tough, sinewy and flavorful. It’s also very tough to find at almost any store. I was not about to mail order it so I decided to improvise and see what I have in my deep freezer. I had two excellent pork cheeks in there and I figured these would make a very nice substitute for the veal breast. The recipe, from Keller’s pre sous vide days, braises the meat traditionally (sear, cook in stock with aromatics gently). I opted to first sear the meat really well and then bagged it with carrots, celery, leeks, herbs, stock and white wine and cooked it sous vide at 82.2 C for about 8 hours. When the meat is cooked I removed it from the bag, discarded all the herbs and vegetables and strained the liquid to make a sauce from it later on. The meat went in the fridge to rest and set.

To complete the meat portion, I cut the cheeks into 2 inch rounds using a biscuit/cookie cutter. The cheeks are not as nice and even as a veal breast would be. See this post for an idea how the cooked cheeks look in one of the pictures. So some pieces were more even than others. Right before serving, I rubbed the meat with Dijon mustard and then rolled the flat sides in panko bread crumbs. Then I pan fried them well in grape seed oil and got them ready for plating. The meat from pork cheeks is really something special. It has a very deep almost slightly gamy flavor and unique texture. Braising the meat then pan frying it till crispy and luscious on the inside. Cutting the meat into rounds creates a good bit of extra chunks and uneven pieces that I used for the next few days in fried rice and tacos for the best ever crispy carnitas.

The rounds of pork sit on crispy corn cakes, aka polenta cakes. These are fairly classic made with polenta cooked in water and enriched with mascarpone cheese and butter. I then mixed in some chopped chives and poured the porridge in a silicone square cake pan to set. The cakes are finished similarly to these hominy cakes by rolling in flour and pan frying in some butter until browned and crisped.

The vegetables in the book (carrots, turnips, celery root, beets) according to the recipe are supposed to be cut into different shapes. The beets into tiny pea-size marbles (parisienne), the carrots into small ovals (turned), the trunips into small fluted shapes and the celery root into small batons. So, I have no parisienne cutter and no vegetable fluter. I also opted not to use the the celery root since I did not have a kitchen brigade doing my bidding. Instead I cut the beets into small coin shapes and the turnips into small cubes. Then I turned the carrots. It really takes some time and skill to turn hard vegetables into acceptable small football shapes. It really makes one appreciate all the work that goes into creating and executing one of those dishes at a place like the French Laundry. It took me about an hour to make maybe 20 carrot ovals and they were by no means perfect.

Chef Keller in the recipe blanches the vegetables separately to cook them. Instead I bagged the carrots and turnips together and separate from the beets (to avoid discoloration since beets really stain) and then cooked the two packages sous vide at 85C until perfectly tender. To finish the vegetables and plate them they get sauteed in some butter and sugar to glaze them (again the beets are glazed separately) and then they are warmed in a small pot of beurre monte, Keller’s ubiquitous butter-water emulsion. The last vegetable in the mix is the sweet garlic. These are garlic cloves blanched in several changes of boiling water and then slowly poached until very soft and then sauteed in butter to brown them and further flavor them. The garlic and the rest of the vegetables get tossed together at the last minute, right before serving. If I could change one thing about this recipe, it would be that last step of tossing in the beets. Even with all the care and even though the beet coins were mixed in at the last second, they still managed to slightly stain the turnips and garlic a shade of pink. Really I should’ve plated the beets without tossing with everything else.

To make the sauce for the dish, the braising liquid is reduced and flavored with chopped shallots and fresh parsley. At the last minute is is enriched with more of the beurre monte. For plating I put a spoonful of the sauce on the plate first and topped it with a corn cake. On top goes a round piece of crispy pork cheek and that gets topped with the glazed vegetables and the sweet garlic cloves. Is it good? Damn right it is. It is a delicious dish that combines comfort with Michelin – star cuisine. The flavors are deep and rich and the textures are amazing. Everyone loved it including the kiddos. It was a bit funny when my 9 year old asked for seconds and requested that the meat be cut into a circle again for plating and my 6 year old now routinely asks if we are cooking more food from “French Laundry”! That’s a lot of pressure. Next is dessert, another French Laundry classic…

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Pear, Caramelized Genoa Bread, Chocolate Veil

Posted in Baking, Book Recipes, Chocolate, Dairy, Food, Fruits, Ice Cream and Frozen Treats, Sous Vide, tagged Almond Paste, Francisco Migoya, Gellan, Homemade Ice Cream, Modern Pastry, Poached Fruit on March 10, 2013 | 5 Comments »

Francisco Migoya from the CIA (the Culinary Institute of America, not the other CIA) is a superb pastry chef and judging from his books, an excellent teacher. He has 3 books and I got a hold of two of them so far, Elements of Desserts and Frozen Desserts. While I have many high end, modern and professional cookbooks, until I got Migoya’s books, I really did not have any pastry and dessert books that target the professional cook. If you want to go beyond desserts tailored for the home cook and learn the way modern pastry chefs compose and create desserts, these are the books for you. They are geared towards the professional chefs and deal with everything from the basics of desserts, the professional tools of the trades, running a pastry kitchen and of course many beautiful modern desserts. I love reading through those books, looking at all the gorgeous pictures and learn a few things about the creative process, especially for plated desserts like this one here.

The flavors are not strange or foreign , just a few primary flavors that work very well together and a modern unique plating. Migoya instructs that no more than three primary flavors should be included in a dessert or else the palate would be overwhelmed. This plate combined pear in the form of ice cream and poached fruit, almond Genoa bread accented with caramel and chocolate in the form of a cool “veil”.

This was my first time trying Genoa bread (aka Pain de Genes) even though I’ve read about it from many sources. It is a cake of sorts made with a lot of almond paste that gives it a wonderful flavor and a dense almost fudgy texture. This makes it ideal as a refined “cake” or building block for plated desserts. It can be flavored with anything from pistachio to black sesame or chocolate. This particular one is flavored with almond praline. I made the praline by cooking almonds with caramelized sugar and pulverizing the mixture. After baking the cake in a sheet pan I cut it into rectangles. Right before serving the bread gets a nice layer of caramel. The process sounds easy but is a bit tricky. It involves melting sugar till it is a dark amber caramel and then rolling the bread rectangles in it to get a thin coating of caramel on all sides. Well, rolling pieces of cake in a liquid lava is no easy feat. I managed to do it but the caramel was a bit thicker than it should be. Still it was a delicious crunchy counterpoint to the sweet soft cake it enveloped.

The recipe also includes a pear ice cream (in my book almost any dessert recipe should include a frozen concoction of some sort!). It’s a straightforward ice cream made using pear puree, cream, yolks,…I had no pear puree and decided to make my own. I just cooked some peeled Bosc pears sous vide with about 10% of their weight sugar until fully tender. Then I pureed them, weighed what I needed and froze the rest for another batch later on. The other pear element is caramel-poached Seckel pears. These are those cute small pears about the size of a large chicken egg. To caramel-poach them I made a caramel using sugar and pear cider. I peeled and cored the small pears then cooked them in the caramel until soft and took on a lovely deep color. These were cut into quarters and reserved until serving time.

It’s really fascinating to me how a final small touch could elevate a dessert of poached fruit, cake and ice cream. I’m referring to what Migoya calls a “veil” here made of chocolate. He uses this techniques in a few recipes in the book incorporating a variety of flavors. It’s basically a solid sauce that covers the dessert components and adds it’s own texture and taste. To make the veil a cocoa nib stock (cocoa nibs steeped in hot water) is mixed with cocoa powder, sugar and low-acyl gellan gum (a gelling agent). This is then poured in a sheet pan until set and then cut into large squares that get draped over the plated components. I was really worried about this step and figured it might get to be very tricky but overall it was pretty straightforward and worked well. The cut chocolate veil squares keep very well for a few days between squares of acetate in a tightly closed container in the fridge.

To plate, I put a pile of crumbled caramelized genoa bread and almonds next to a piece of the cake and used that as an anchor for the ice cream. The whole thing gets covered in a chocolate veil and topped with a piece of the fruit. A small cut with a paring knife on the veil reveals the ice cream underneath it. The finished plate is as delicious as it is beautiful. It has a perfect combination of textures and flavors from the bitter to the nutty and sweet.

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Wild Duck, Cabbage, Fried Hominy and Red Wine Beet Sauce

Posted in Duck, Food, Game, Grains, Green Vegetables, Root Vegetables, Sous Vide, tagged Grits Cakes, Red Wine Sauce, Wild Duck, Wild Game on February 10, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

I’m still working on my wild duck cooking skill and the best result I’ve gotten so far is through removing the breasts and legs and cooking them separately. I’ve made a “quick salad” for my kids and I recently and I basically sautéed everything for different times and then sliced and served on top of a tart green salad. That was very nice and I achieved the well cooked crispy legs I complained about missing in this post. I also managed to get the breasts to be medium with a crispy skin, but some parts were over-cooked a bit and overcooked wild duck is not a very good thing.

For this dish I took it to the next logical level and did what experienced cooks and chefs always instruct us to do: cook the breasts and legs separately each to their optimum doneness. It’s that “optimum doneness” part that can be a bit tricky while shooting for a crisp skin on such lean small birds. The way I tackled it is to cook the breasts sous vide and the legs baked in a very hot oven. The legs were well-done and crisp and the breasts were a lovely medium rare and a nice rosy color, even after a quick sear in a hot pan to crisp the skin. Before cooking the meat I simply salted it and rubbed it with a bit of thyme the night before and the breasts were packaged in FoodSaver bags with a bit of butter in there before going in the water at 55C for about an hour.

To go with the duck I made red braised cabbage and fried hominy cakes. The cabbage is from Gordon Ramsey’s “*** Chef” that I posted about a while back. It’s a very simple recipe of cabbage, butter and vinegar. The end result is delicious and very flavorful, much more than the sum of its parts. The hominy cakes are another direct rip off from Hank Shaw where he also pairs it with duck, canvasback to be exact. I followed Hank’s recipe verbatim and it worked perfectly. The grits cakes held together and had a great crispy exterior and a lovely soft interior. The flavor was mild and it really offset all the other robust flavors in the dish from the duck, cabbage and sauce. The dish needed the texture and the cakes delivered it in strides. The bread crumbs I used were made from a loaf of bread I baked with poppy seeds and that’s why the cakes’ crust has all these little black specs in it. That looked pretty neat and worked well with the sort of Germanic theme of dish.

The sauce here is based on the duck carcasses. After removing the breasts and legs, I cut up the remaining bones and trimmings and made a stock with them. I wanted the stock to be robust and full of flavor, so I first roasted the cut up oil-rubbed carcasses and sautéed a bunch of aromatics in the drippings in the pan. Then I deglazed the pan with Madeira and sherry vinegar. Everything went in the pressure cooker and cooked at 15 psi for about an hour and half. I ended up with a good 1.5 quarts of amazing duck stock. I used about a cup for the sauce and the rest is now frozen for other applications (possibly an oyster and duck gumbo to use up the last three birds I have in the near future). The sauce is prepared like a traditional red wine sauce made by simmering red wine and aromatics with the addition of chopped fresh beets. I added the beets for color and flavor, another item that to me sounds Germanic as well. After the wine is reduced I added in the duck stock and allowed that to reduce a bit as well before enriching with a bit of butter. The sauce had everything I was looking for a rich color and deep flavor.

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Striped Bass and Oyster on an Edible Beach

Posted in Fish, Food, Root Vegetables, Sous Vide, tagged Edible Landscape, Edible Soil, Filleting Fish, Heston Blumenthal, Modernist Techniques on January 24, 2013 | 2 Comments »

This dish came about because of the edible stones from Mugaritz that I posted about recently. I did not want to spend a good bit of time making the potatoes to look like stones just to serve them as is, a bite or two of food. So, why not spend much more time and incorporate them into an actual dish? the potatoes reminded me most of beach or river stones so fish was the first to come to mind. Then of course I remembered Heston Blumenthal’s very famous “Sound of the Sea” dish at the Fat Duck. that dish has a variety of seafood, served on a “beach” complete with sand, sea foam, weeds, shells and to gild the lily an iPod! The iPod plays gentle beach and wave sounds as the diner enjoys the dish. The idea is that all of our senses are related and that we are much likely to enjoy the dish if every sense was immersed in the experience. Another of Blumenthal’s findings regarding sound and food: potato chips seem much crunchier and fresher if you eat them while listening to crunchy sounds? Anyways, back to the dish.

I made my beach scene based on the recipe from the Fat Duck but simplified it a good bit and went with what I had. The “sand” mixture from the Fat Duck includes powdered kelp, blue shimmer powder (no idea what that is), carbonized vegetable powder (I’m pretty sure this is burned vegetables), dried baby eels, fried Panko bread crumbs, tapioca maltodextrin, spices, salt,….I stuck with the bread crumbs, the powdered kelp, ground up hazelnuts, black pepper and the maltodextrin. Really the maltodextrin is the one that gives it a perfect sandy texture and make it just melt in the mouth when eaten. So, it is essential here.

For the seafood, I wanted at least one fish and a shellfish or two. I intended to use clams and mussels for the shellfish but the couple of stores I went to did not have any decent ones. So, I settled on good quality shelled packaged oysters from Louisiana. For the fish I stopped by a favorite of mine, a large Asian grocery store that always has excellent whole fresh fish in addition to a few live ones. The striped bass looked the best so I picked one and asked the guy behind the counter to gut and scale it but leave it whole. When I got home I rinsed the fish well and filleted it. This gave me 4 nice bass portions. It also gave me some bones and the head to make stock that I need for the sea foam sauce. I made the fish stock sous vide for the first time per the instructions in the Modernist Cuisine at Home book. I packaged the bones and head with a lot of aromatics and some white wine and vermouth and cooked it at 80 C degrees for 1.5 hours. It made for a marvelous stock with clear color and a perfect flavor. Fish stock should not simmer much or boil at all so cooking sous vide makes perfect sense. It also eliminates evaporation which concentrates the flavor by not allowing any aroma to dissipate into the air with the steam. Another stock by the way that is amazing prepared sous vide is vegetable stock.

I cooked the fish sous vide and crisped the skin right before serving. For the oysters I also cooked them sous vide but included a good dose of garlic and parsley butter in the bag. With the seafood cooked, the “stones” and alioli good to go, the “sand” is ready and my fish stock is prepped, I focused on finishing the sauce which forms the beach foam as well as preparing some “shells”. The shells are shallots that I separated out and poached till tender. Then I tossed them in some Ponzu sauce right before serving. For the sauce, I warmed the fish stock and mixed in the juice from the oysters then seasoned it with soy sauce, salt and pepper. To finish it and foam it a bit I added soy lecithin and blitzed it with the hand blender.

To plate the dishes, we (since I was preparing several plates Diana helped a lot with plating) put the “sand” down on one side of the plate and then added a few dollops of the alioli on top for the “stones” to sit on. Then on the side of the sand went the fish and oyster followed by the foamy sauce on the edges of the sand. Then the garnishes went on including the ”shell” shallots and a few green leaves as a stand in for sea weed that I had not time to shop for. It all worked great and my in-laws who stopped by for dinner that evening enjoyed their whimsical meal very much. It’s always a relief when experimental dishes like this one work out when guests drop by and we don’t have to order pizza or something. The plate had a lot of flavors that worked perfectly and of course a lot of textures ranging from crunchy to soft to somewhere in between.

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Mugaritz: Edible Stones

Posted in Book Recipes, Food, Root Vegetables, tagged Edible Stones, Fun Food, Kaolin, Mugaritz on January 7, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

There are so many intriguing dishes with familiar and odd flavor combinations in Mugaritz, the book about the cuisine of Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz. There are interesting techniques and very cool and whimsical dishes. The ideas are bold and they focus on mostly minimalist presentation and straightforward flavors. I knew from the second I started flipping through the book months ago and reading the text and philosophy (there’s a lot of that and it feels a bit heavy-handed at times honestly) that the first recipe I would like to try is Aduriz’s famous “Edible Stones”.

At the restaurant, that is the first thing the diners get, a plate of apparently perfectly nice stones. The diners are not told anything at first and, unless they know, are left to wonder what the hell is going on. Then they are instructed to eat one plain. A nice soft small potato covered with a coating that make sit resemble uncannily a river rock! For the next bite, they are encouraged to dip it in a rich garlic alioli and enjoy the very familiar flavor of a boiled potato dipped in garlic mayonnaise. In a matter of moments the restaurant guests went from a “what the…?!” moment with river rocks to enjoying a perfectly classical and familiar bite of food. Now, that is very cool indeed.

I made the garlic alioli first a couple of days before I cooked the potatoes and kept it in the fridge. I prepared the garlic confit by gently cooking whole garlic cloves in olive oil until very very soft. These then get pureed with an egg yolk using an immersion blender and olive oil is drizzled in while the blender is running. The sauce has a lot of garlic in it, but since it’s cooked gently it has no harsh edge or pungent flavor, just a sweet garlic flavor. The potatoes as first boiled in heavily salted water and then dipped in a mixture of Lactose, kaolin, water and black food dye. Kaolin is a type of clay used in a variety of applications including face cream, pill casings, upset stomach remedy… Allen Hemberger on his -awesome looking with pictures a 150 times better than mine- blog made these a while back and discusses in a bit more detail the many uses of kaolin, check it out here . As far as I can tell the Lactose is there to add a hint of sweetness to the casing of the stones and to help it harden in the oven. The potatoes, after receiving a nice coating of stone-colored kaolin mixture, go in a very low oven to dry up and for the coating to harden. Then they are ready to serve while still warm.

I served these as part of a larger dish (I will post about it soon), but we tasted a few as is, just like they serve them at Mugaritz to get an idea how they taste on their own. As expected the flavor is nothing weird. Potatoes, seasoned nicely and served with a garlicky mayonnaise. The coating has virtually no taste really and very little texture. It’s sole purpose is to create the “stone” illusion and it works perfectly for that. Everyone, from my kids to my in-laws, got a kick out of these cute stones. Next time I’m having a few guests over for dinner I’m going to make sure they start their evening with a bowl of rocks and a side of alioli.

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Roasted Teal with Delicata Squash, Farro and Spiced Red Wine Sauce

Posted in Duck, Food, Game, Grains, Green Vegetables, tagged Duck, Red Wine Sauce, Waterfowl, Wild Game on December 18, 2012 | 1 Comment »

About a month or so ago I finally got all my plans in order and booked a hunting trip with a local guide to see if I can get myself some wild ducks. It’s been many years since I’ve been hunting but finally I get myself a gun, license and practiced some clay shooting at local range to get the rust out of my shooting. In no small way I have Hank Shaw to thank for the motivation. To say his hunting, fishing and cooking articles at his blog and in his book, “Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast” were inspiring is an understatement. All in all, I ended up with several mallards that day and a couple of nice teal. Teal are small, about the size of a pigeon and are supposed to be delicious so I wanted to show them off by cooking them whole.

I roasted them simply by following Hank’s instruction. I first seasoned them with salt and a mixture of orange zest, allspice and thyme. I then baked the birds in a very hot oven to a medium rare. That worked well for the breasts, but honestly I was not crazy about the texture of the legs. They remained a bit tough for my liking and the skin did not crisp as well as I would’ve liked either. The flavor of the teal though was very good. They tasted rich and robust but not too gamy. I’m glad I made a full-flavored sauce to go with them. The sauce is from a Mario Batali recipe in the Babbo Cookbook and it’s not much more than a reduced red wine sauce flavored with allspice and cloves. Batali serves it with venison and a pumpkin caponata.

I took another page from that recipe and made a much simplified version of that caponata using Delicata squash which is amazingly sweet. I roasted it and then tossed it with sauteed onions, raisins and red wine. To make this more substantial I tossed the squash with cooked farro. The combination was very tasty, like a rustic and comforting risotto. The flavor of the birds was wonderful with the spiced wine sauce and the earthy squash farro.

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Oven-Dried Tomatoes

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Roasted Teal with Delicata Squash, Farro and Spiced Red Wine Sauce

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