Dinner 12-17-2011

I think this may be the last dinner before the new year.  We had another old friend visiting and the wife decided to invite some people over.  So I was cooking for 6 guests plus myself. One was the former head of her department at the college, now retired, and his wife.  The other is a current professor in the same department, and his wife.  Both couples are experienced travelers and eaters in Europe.  I know they've been to some fine restaurants there, and here in the U.S.  It would be fun to cook for them.

I decided to go with a little tour of French cookery.  Mostly to get their impressions given I have no reference point for what most things ought to be like.  (Impressions were favorable...whew!)

First  up was a little charcuterie plate with cornichons and dijon mustard.  I served fennel salami, smoked prosciutto, and rabbit pâté.  The only part of this I made was the pâté.   Lacking a meat grinder, I put the meat and fat through a food processor several times.   This was a fun one to make.  After cutting up the carcass of the rabbit, I deboned it and let it marinade with thyme, salt, bay leaf.  Then this is ground up with some pork fat back and pieces of bread soaked in milk.  The last touch before cooking is the addition of some mustard with cognac.   This is wrapped in bacon and then baked.  Once cooled, it is compressed with weights and left to chill, sliced, and served.

With the charcuterie I served two breads that I've made before: a sourdough baguette and brioche.  I need to work on my shaping skills....I'm masterful at making exploding baguette, which is caused by the loaf splitting at invisible seams in the dough rather than the scores I make.   The brioche was probably the best I've made so far.  This is Keller's recipe in Bouchon.

For a first course, I decided to do a "fruits de mer" platter.  I like this because the food is cooked simply, with finesse, and presented in a way that signals abundance and festiveness.

A few of the items are poached in court bouillon.  This poaching liquid consists of water, veggies (leeks, onions, carrots), herbs and spices (bouquet garni), dry white wine, lemon, and vinegar.  The lobster, crab, and shrimp are all poached for a few minutes in the liquid before being chilled.  The PEI mussels are cooked simply in a thin layer of boiling water before also being chilled.

I had fun with the oysters and clams, having never shucked either before.  It turns out to be pretty easy, and there's something gratifying when you feel the shell first pop loose.   These were served raw with three sauces.

 Starting at the top image, a cocktail sauce (easy: ketchup, worcestershire, mustard, horseradish), a mignonette (red wine vinegar, shallot, black pepper), and dijon mustard mayo (egg yolk, oil, salt, pepper, lemon juice, mustard)

The next course was a meat.  I love duck so much that I made it yet again.  I switched up the spicing and used finely ground coffee, salt, and pepper.  I made the port wine-sherry beurre monte again to sauce the meat.  This time served with sauteed spinach.    The other side with this was a red rice cooked in chicken stock with chestnuts and garnished with thinly sliced burgundy truffles.   This clearly isn't presentation for haute cuisine, but my oh my did the red rice-truffle-chestnut combo work, especially with the duck and the sauce.

Dessert came in two stages.  Again, not winning any awards for presentation, but still...so delicious.  First was a plate with baked balls of pate a choux, a pastry dough that we've seen before in the form of gougeres and eclairs.  This time is a form of 'profiterole' where vanilla ice cream is sandwiched between the two halves of the hollow ball of dough.  Topping this, admittedly somewhat haphazardly, was a simple chocolate sauce.  

On the side of the dish were poached prunes.  These were so so flavorful, and sweet, so meltingly tender, that I am sure to do this again with other fruits.  The prunes are left to marinate in red wine (cabernet sauvignon), with cinnamon sticks, star anise, and honey.  I added thai long peppercorns and some nutmeg, which I think are complementary flavors.  After sitting in this mixture overnight, the prunes and liquid are brought to a simmer only briefly to soften them, and  then left to sit and chill at least for a day. 

After dessert, we had some digestifs.  Available were cognac, scotch.  We also had some coffee.  Along with these, I made a strawberry-rhubarb tart and a cocoa flavored cookie topped with chopped walnuts.

Dinner 11-19-2011

When I received the French Laundry cookbook, I wasn't sure what to make of it.  The food was refined, but familiar.  It had Keller's spirit in it, which I experienced from trying things from his Bouchon cookbook.  But, TFL was a whole 'nother level.  It has a reputation for being quite challenging, so maybe I was a little intimidated.

So, when the opportunity to make dinner for some guests arose, I quickly turned to TFL to try my hand at some of these things.  This dinner was by far the most technically challenging I've done so far.  Many of the recipes have few ingredients, which really puts the emphasis on great execution.

I think I pulled it off.   I'm proud of myself that I executed each dish without any major fails.  Judging from what I've seen elsewhere on the web, when people attempt a single dish from TFL they find it very difficult.  I offered my guests a multicourse meal cooked and served alone.  I do mean to gloat.

As guests arrived, I offered champagne (well, sparkling white wine) from Napa Valley.  I tried some, and I think it went very nicely with the initial round of food.  First up were gougères, little balls of pâte à choux.  These were mixed with grated Gruyère.  The water in the batter causes the dough to hollow out.  This is the same stuff used to make the eclairs from a while back (minus the cheese).

Next up were white truffle custards with black truffle ragout and chive chip.  The tastes and textures are great in this one.  Crispy and silky at the same time, it also had a striking aroma.  At the same time pungent and sweet.  Intensely meaty with a delicate structure.  That aroma....oh truffle, you are awesome.  Nobody had tried truffles before, so it was new for everyone.  I think they liked it, judging from the happy sounds from the dining room.

For a small package, this was by far the most time consuming dish.  First, make stock, then make a remouillage from the bones and aromatics.  Combine the two batches and reduce, reduce, reduce.  Once I have a concentrated stock, which took on a rich brown color and amazing flavor, I make the ragout by finely dicing some black truffles and reducing to a thickened sauce.  The last step is to swirl in some butter and a few drops of vinegar.   

The chive chips worked on the first try, which surprised me.  I'm so glad I bought a benriner mandoline. This allowed me to make paper thin slices of russet potato, which were used to create a little chive sandwich, brushed with clarified butter and baked between two silpats.  

The eggs to hold the custard.  We have a standard custard flavored with white truffle oil, salt, and white pepper.  The egg shells were fun to make, but difficult to do without the right equipment.  After some trial and error, I came upon a good technique to make them.  I used a serrated knife and carefully cut perforations around the shell before slicing through.  This method helped to prevent the egg shell from shattering as I cut into it.

After the custards, I gave people yet another dish they hadn't had before: bone marrow.  Served with parsley, garlic, caper, with olive oil and lemon juice vinaigrette, homemade baguette slices brushed with garlic infused oil and seasoned with green salt, and a line of yellow and brown mustard powder. This of course is a great tasting dish.  I totally get why Anthony Bourdain loves it.

Rather than roasting the marrow this time I soaked it and pulled (really, pushed) the marrow from the bone.  They'are then diced and seasoned with salt and covered in flour before being fried in oil.  The marrow is mostly fat, so if the oil is too hot you can burn the flour.  If it is not hot enough, you can cook away the marrow before it has a chance to crisp. While the presentation isn't great, this is a difficult dish to execute.   I nailed it.

Now we start on the "mains."  First was a dish you won't find in TFL, Bouchon, or Alinea, but it has elements from all three.

The pasta is a chestnut-white truffle agnolotti.    Served with nutmeg creme fraiche, fried sage leaf, and thin celery strips.

This was a lot of fun to make.  The pasta was a standard ratio of flour to eggs (3:2).  The chestnuts are from a local farm. They're roasted, then simmered in vegetable stock and pureed.  The filling is finished by mixing in some mascarpone cheese (which was easy for me to make), and white truffle oil.

The creme fraiche I've made before, documented on this blog.  It was simply whipped with freshly grated nutmeg and a little salt.  

The celery strips, pretty cool thing from an Alinea dish.  Showing that you can get great texture, color, and flavor without anything fancy.  The celery is peeled to get the stringy bits out.  Then with a vegetable peeler, I cut thin strips.  Soaking them in ice water causes them to crisp and curl.

 It is a soup course too.   I thought the flavors would pair well here, so I combined the TFL/Alinea-inspired dish with the butternut squash soup recipe from Bouchon.  I think this knocked people's socks off.  It got great feedback.  

Next was the "fish" course.  This is pretty much straight from TFL.  Butter-poached lobster tail atop red beet juice reduced and enriched with butter.  The lobster is resting on a thinly sliced round of leek which was blanched for a minute and chilled.  Topping off this tower of deliciousness was a piece of "pommes maxim."  As TFL notes, this potato crisp was created in France first.  It is made by taking paper thin slices of yukon gold potatoes and tossing them in clarified butter, then layering and baking until crisp.

This dish is what I had in mind when I said execution is so important.  So few ingredients to produce an amazing combination.  This is definitely a great dish that Keller has developed over years and years of serving it.

Next up was duck breast spiced with fennel, coriander, and cumin.  Served with a port-wine and sherry vinegar reduction.   None of my photos turned out, so I'm reusing this from when I served this for dinner a little while back.  I wanted to get feedback from folks, so I put it on the menu.  Best I got was that it was done perfectly.  People compared it to the duck they had in some truly great restaurants.  The sauce they said paired well with the duck, and it was a hit.  I think I served too much meat though, as some mentioned it felt like a lot on the plate.  I have some ideas to improve this dish in the future.

For a palate cleanser, I went with a dish from Alinea.  This is my rendition of "Cranberry Frozen and Chewy".  It is tart and sweet, and melts in your mouth as you chew it.  It has a creamy texture without any fat added.  This is achieved through the use of two cool techniques.  First, the cranberry stock is mixed with Ultratex-3, a modified starch that helps thicken and prevent large ice crystals from forming.  Second, the mixture is flash frozen in a balloon with liquid nitrogen.  Lacking liquid nitrogen, I had to figure out a way to make a super cold liquid that won't freeze at the temperatures I needed.  I decided to use isopropyl alcohol and dry ice.  The dry ice drives the temperature of the alcohol down to the point where the alcohol turns to slush (close to -173.2 degree Fahrenheit).

Dessert, finally!  This is also straight from TFL.  They call it "Coffee and Doughnuts".  The doughnuts were fun to make, basically a simple sweet dough fried and covered in cinnamon sugar.  These are light and airy, and just wonderful fresh from the fat, still warm.

The coffee is a frozen coffee flavored mousse.  Topped with a hot milk foam.  I'm proud of my solution for the milk foam.   I don't have a frother or steam thingy you see in coffee shops.  I do have an iSi Siphon, however.  Charged with nitrous oxide, I could get the microfoam, but they would disappear almost immediately.  So, I tried adding xanthan gum to stabilize the foam.  That worked, but the foam disintegrated when I heated it (I couldn't start with hot milk because the siphon isn't designed for use with hot things).   So, I knew I needed something that would be stable at high temperatures...I happen to have gellan on hand, so I used that.  Success!   Thanks to khymos.org, I was able to zero in on a good concentration of these hydrocolloids to produce a good produce that was heat stable.

So, that was dinner.  I was exhausted by the end, and quite happy with the result.  I think 6 people, 8/9 courses is about my limit right now.  Still, I executed well, but felt like I was falling behind, and I did.  I thought the dinner would clock in at 2.5 hours and it turned out to be closer to 3.5 (yikes!).  I need to work on speed and efficiency, but not at the expense of good execution.  I think I did something I can build on and learn from.