chadzilla

the golden pig arrives with friends

Lately, we have been enjoying the products resulting from the incredible sourcing efforts of Chef K.  Aside from the great produce found locally in Homestead, FL, we have had the privilege to receive some products from the Four Story Hill Farm in Pennsylvania (sorry, no website to my knowledge).  Mrs. Sylvia Pryzant and Chef K had been in contact with each other, and a small order was placed.

We received the box within a couple of days followed by a phone call from Sylvia.  After confessing my ignorance about the products and detailing what my plans were for each, she offered me phone numbers to a couple of clients that also used the product... Daniel Boulud being one and Pierre Calnels (Chef de Cuisine of Le Bec Fin) being the other.  Sure, no big deal... I'll just call Daniel Boulud and ask his Executive Chef at Restaurant Daniel how I should treat Cote de Boeuf!  I have not called yet, but I'm tempted everyday.

This is lamb belly.  We have been trying to procure some for quite some time, and finally found it at Four Story Hill Farm.  We created a rub for it using a little of our Black Forest spice and some lamb-friendly herb and spice additions.  After slow-cooking it for about 30 hours, I pulled all of the meat off (which wasn't really that much) and folded it into a rosemary and mustard flavored BBQ sauce.  It made one hell of a unique sandwich when eaten on a toasted pumpernickel roll.

This is Squealer.  Squealer is a suckling Berkshire pig, one of the prized members of the Pryzant's farm.

This is Squealer dissassembled (good butchering practice for me since I don't get to break down pigs everyday.  We have plans for the baby Berkshire's various sections.  I used the belly on a Sunday special with some poussin (also from Four Story Hill below).  The head and shoulder may be used on head cheese or sausage.   The hind quarters, or hams, are pressing as of this moment.

Although we are not facilitated to produce dry-aged ham (and our hams are rather tiny), we are taking on this project purely for the experience and fun.  Far from Iberico ham, we just want to create our own style of dry-aged pork.  We are debating putting a cold smoke phase in between the pressing and the dry-hanging.  Since Chef K and I are from Kansas City and South Louisiana respectively, we each have a built desire to smoke all of the pork we get our hands on.  I plan to email Jorge Ruiz (babelfish translation from Spanish) in Spain for suggestions or comments here.  He is a food scientist and professor who has put many hours into the study of Iberico ham.

Here are 6 poussin coming out of an 8-hour brine to air dry for a day.  The Pryzants raise and feed their poussin with a milk-supplemented diet similar to the Bresse chicken diet in France (a practice she observed while living there).  The birds were shipped whole with only the feathers removed.  After eviscerating them, they were brined and roasted as you see here.  The roasting was done in one of my favorite ways... trussed with a pierced lemon in the cavity and rubbed with only sea salt and fresh black pepper.  This method in conjunction with the brining and the quality of the birds gave me the absolute best chicken eating experience of my entire life (but then, there is a lot more life to live).  One of the Haitian cooks in the kitchen fried the poussin livers which I also have to note was an incredible experience.

In addition to the lemon roasting, I basted it with lemon butter.  It was served with griddled potato rosti and wilted baby pea tendrils grown here in Homestead.  I wanted to present the chicken in a simple and glorious manner (and with the feet on after seeing the roasted chicken in Heston Blumental's book, 'Perfection'), and being a Sunday there seemed no better presentation than as a Farmhouse Sunday Dinner.  I offered it in conjunction with the suckling Berkshire belly.

Bacon & Eggs.   The belly was grilled and brushed with a light glaze of maple syrup and 8 Brix Verjus (liquid candy!!!) and served with a 2 hour egg.  Pass the toast, please.

more liver fun

There is a great recipe for foie gras with Sauternes in Joan Roca and Salvador Brugee's Sous-Vide Cuisine book.  However, they use a direct cooking method for a whole lobe which means that the food is cooked/heated in a water bath (65C/20 min reaching an internal temperature of 60C) then seared and served immediately.  I wanted to explore the same process but altered into indirect sous-vide cooking, meaning that the food is cooked to a safe internal temperature (65C), cooled rapidly in an ice bath, and later regenerated to serve.  Considering the extreme delicateness of foie gras, I did not know if this would work.  This is no recipe for indirect cooking of foie gras in the book, and maybe there is a reason for that.

The biggest advantage to this process ended up being the vacuum process of the sous-vide technique.  I poured a tablespoon or so of Riesling (Peller Ice Wine 2004) into each bag.  During vacuuming, the wine began to vaporize under the changed pressure and infuse with the proteins and the fat.

The variations from the original recipe are the internal temperature (an internal temp of 65C for hygienic reasons) and the time (the pieces are cut much smaller so the internal temp will be reached much quicker).  Without a way to check the internal temperature accurately (no high-density foam patches or needle probes), I just guessed and pulled the bags out after 12 to 14 minutes.  Because of the higher cooking temp, I had more loss of juices than with the original recipe.  I carefully placed the super delicate bags into an ice water bath and packed more crushed ice around.  Later, I removed one bag, let it sit out to warm to room temp, then seared it quickly.

So, what were the advantages to cooking it in this method?  As far as weight and mass loss during cooking, it may be equal to traditional methods in this case.  The real advantage here is with flavor.  Either through the vacuum process and the controlled cooking combined or just through the vacuum process alone, the Riesling flavor seemed to be infused throughout the whole mass of the foie gras... thus altering the experience.  Perhaps a further experiment of vacuum-infusing the wine into the foie gras combined with traditional cooking alone is necessary to complete the test.

ankimo again, and again...

We have lots of beautiful monkfish liver around now, but what to do with it?  Two busy nights in a row without selling any specials has left me frustrated.  I have been using it, however on little VIP dishes here and there.  I'm finding that the general western public is not very open to the idea of just eating monkfish liver, but if I pair it with something else (like the seabass above) they enjoy it.  I've also been having fun with it since I've discovered that the liver can be torched quickly to soften it up and further accent it's fatty creaminess as an accompaniment.  I still added citrus to it in the form of a light pomelo butter from some of Roger's fruits at Red Dragon Fruit Company.

I am going to experiment with freezing some of the ankimo.  It's probably not a suggested use of it, but it's better than throwing it away.  We'll find out how much texture change occurs later.

ankimo

After having developed a deep appreciation for monkfish liver pate in the recent part of my life, I finally had a chance to get hands on with it in the culinary sense.  We ordered (it took almost 2 weeks to arrive) some raw liver from one of our fish purveyors.  Having no references on how to prepare and use it, we referred to Nobu's first book which explains the process.  In its raw state, it is not a very attractive ingredient... at least not quite as beautiful as a fat lobe of foie gras.

Keeping the livers on ice throughout the process, begin by removing all visible tough veins on the liver lobe.  The outer surface is covered by a thin membrane which should also be removed.  Although somewhat tedious, it can be pulled off en masse by working the fingers delicately underneath the skin and separating it from the meat.  I was thrown back by the sight of a few parasites (namely worms) on some of the lobes.  I searched the internet a little for more information on this, and came to the conclusion that this is quite natural and not to be alarming.  Just pull them up a little with a knife, grab them, and gently pull them out... easy, right?  It reminded me of my culinary days in New England and the first site of the same little worms scattered through fresh codfish.

Once cleaned, the livers should be soaked in a 3% salt water solution for about 20 to 30 minutes.  Remove them afterwards and pat them dry.  Roll the livers in plastic wrap and roll tightly, piercing the wrap to allow tighter binding and prevent air gaps.  Next, roll the plastic wrap rolls in foil and tighten again to hold the shape.  Nobu recommends holding the shape by wrapping them in bamboo mats, but I skipped this step due to the fact that I only have one mat.

I steamed the wraps in our commercial steamer for 30 to 40 minutes.  They will still feel very soft at this point and must be chilled completely before unwrapping.  The next day, I opted to go for simple Japanese flavors and try an easy special... needless to say, we sold absolutely zero of them even though it was a busy night.  Anyway, more ankimono for me to eat!  Here is a picture of the dish with keta, thickened yuzu vinaigrette, micro cilantro salad, and fresh ginger flower.

boiled crabs & abita beer

That's what I did this evening.  At one moment, I was happy to notice that I was boiling crabs on my stove and drinking an Abita Amber.  Earlier, Ming and I stopped at an Oriental Market for a couple of things that weren't at the 'regular' store.  There they were, and I knew I couldn't leave without 10 or 12 of them...

I hooked them up Louisiana style with some of the add-ins below.  Some are for flavor.  Some are to eat.  Some are for both.  I even had some D&D sausage in the freezer that Chef Mike brought back from his last visit to New Orleans.  The bad thing about D&D sausage is that it makes everything in the pot taste just like it.  The best thing about D&D sausage is that it will make everything in the pot will taste just like it.  I can't explain why I held onto it in my freezer for so long, except that it was probably destined for this moment.

These crabs were all female, fat, and each one was packed full of orange eggs and yellow fat... that was perfect.  I should have taken a picture of the roe, but I was too busy eating it.  I felt like a wild savage coon-ass let loose... ah-yii!

This is the classic shot.  I have my cold Abita, and the crabs are fat!  That garlic was good, too.  I also made a really good dip for which there is no recipe.  The Saints lost, but I'm eating good.  Laissez les bon temps rouler!

out on the homestead

Chef K has been pushing us to utilize more unique and local products from local suppliers.  Horrible South Florida produce is a driving force for that cause.  It received a bit more attention a week ago when the Miami Herald printed an article in their Tropical Life weekly issue (Thursday, 18 Jan. 2007).  It focused on 3 well known chefs from New York and California that have recently moved into the Miami restaurant scene... Christian Delouvrier, David Bouley, and Govind Armstrong.

They all shared common observations of restaurant reality here.  Of these, lack of quality produce and other products struck a nerve because it was something that took me a moment for me to discover.  Seeking out local growers and farmers and fishermen and cheesemakers and building relations with them is important everywhere, obviously.  It is a necessity when faced with living in one of the most successful agricultural areas of the United States, and getting the crappiest produce on a daily basis.  True, much of the blame for that lies with the receiving department of an operation, but that is another story.  It should not be that difficult to obtain the best fruits and vegetables everyday.

This is the entrance to Roger Washington's Red Dragon Fruit Company.  Ming and I took a ride south of Miami to Homestead, which is one of the major agricultural areas of South Florida.  Roger specializes in growing exotic and lesser known native fruits and also grows plants to be used in landscaping.  He does this using modern methods and the results are fantastic.  Although I gave him very little notice of our visit, he took most of the afternoon to drive us around his farm as well as other places in his neighborhood.

These are dragon fruit plants, or more specifically, cacti.  There are between 10 and 12 different types here including several hybrids that Roger has had some success with.  Recently, he attended a dragon fruit conference in California where they measured one of his fruits at 90 brix with a refractometer.  His method is to keep the plants in pots (or actually a new type of bag which he is currently switching over to in order to promote better root development) and control the water through overhead sprinklers and irrigation through the small black hoses you see protruding from the pots.  Another reason for this method is the rocky layer of coral that lies only a few inches beneath the soil.  I'm sure they don't have this problem in the midwest.

A grove of longan trees stretches all the way to the end of the farm.  These are watered with a gas powered overhead irrigation system.  Unfortunately, there weren't many fruits in season at all during our visit, but we did manage to find a few longan.

One of the few fruits that made an appearance was the sugar apple or buddah head (as Ming called it).  I'm not sure of the texture or flavor of this thing, but I would assume that it was sweet.  Roger would point out and name what seemed like a hundred different plants and fruits during our visit.  Most of these, I had never heard of.  He also showed us his composting area made of cuttings and other discarded plant material.  There were 2 pits in his brother's yard that he planned to compost more in.  The pits were dug out to get coral rock for landscaping.  Once the pits are full of discarded plant matter, they can be compressed and eventually turned into fertile soil.  There was another area that looked like a dragon fruit cactus bush which consisted of discarded cuttings and failed hybrids.  The dragon fruit is a vining cactus so it will grow up trees or houses or anything next to it.

When I asked Roger how he had come to know so much information about exotic produce and modern agricultural techniques, he just replied, "It's what I do."  That's probably the only answer I would have understood since I have used it so many times myself in response to culinary questions.

I want to add a note about the recent massive loss of citrus and produce in California caused by the freeze.  It's an interesting reality of the corporate agricultural system that this country depends on.  At first thought, you would assume that prices would go up and other agricultural areas such as Florida would benefit.  The truth is, as Roger pointed out, that will now import more produce from places such as Mexico.  Once the market becomes flooded with inferior product, the local farmers will gain very little and it will be even more difficult for the American farming industry to regain its place in the market.  It's a sad reality.  It's not that one area should benefit from the misfortune of another, but the American industry needs to refocus.  We all depend on it to survive.

back house for front of house

Chef K and our banquet director are finishing up the salad course plate-up for a Front of House dinner that we recently did.  The function was on a different floor from our kitchen, and because of the delicateness of the dishes we had to assemble them in a nearby vacant function room.  This is always challenging for various reasons.  Needless to say, we run up and down a lot of stairs.

Front of House supplies many great dishes for a decent price.  Here is the origami dish again.  There is also a larger version of the same design.  This is a simple salad of marinated haricots verts, olives with Spanish Queen olive soil, artichokes, and slow-roasted (fast ripened) pear tomatoes.

twerkin' the plate

This is the conception of my Lenti Antipasti... or 'slow antipasti.'  I wanted to do a procession of power-umami flavors in Italian culinary language.  I used a Front of House Origami plate to break the whole into 4 small bites.  Each section focused on a classic Italian ingredient of flavor that featured long aged products or used glutamate intensifying cooking techniques.

The anitpasti is (from the rear clockwise around)... honeydew with prosciutto jus and balsamic must reduction, dried aged Coppa with espresso braised baby fennel, 8 hour slow roasted black heirloom tomato with parmesan and black pepper, 18 hour sous-vide toasted fennel and pesto duck breast.  It's a long explanation, but I didn't go off high winded to the guest.  I just explained the flavor intensification methods and told them which order to eat it.

Just look at the flesh of this tomato.  The flavor was uber-boosted.

The espresso and cream braised baby fennel left the tongue with the savory suggestion of tasting demi glace.  A very cool trick.  Oh, yeah... and the Coppa wasn't bad either.

the umami machine

Strange... just after my last posting about trying to push glutamate levels with new slow cooking methods, Ming happened across this new oven made by Hitachi.  Check out an English version right here.

The 3 ovens in the series are models MRO-BV100, MRO-BX10, and MRO-BS8 (priced around US$500, $750, and $915).  They claim to cook foods in such a way that glutamate levels are 300% more than they would be if cooked conventionally (and inosinic acid is 160% higher).  To do this, the machine employs 5 different cooking methods.  Slow cooking is a very important step in achieving this.  Hats off to the engineers and researchers at Hitachi for mapping these parameters out for us.  Apparently, glutamate increases when foods are cooking below 80C for continuous periods of time.  Inosinic and guanylic acids decrease tremendously when cooking below 50C.  To get foods from room temperature or refrigerator temperature to 50C as quickly as possibe, the MRO uses electromagnetic waves paralleled with conventional heat.  Once the 50C line is crossed, the oven uses infrared and conventional heat to maintain a steady slow temperature.  A steam heat feature is used to remove excess fat, but that is probably thrown in just to make the oven more marketable as producing healthier, tastier food.  A video (unfortunately all in Japanese) of a product demonstration showing a temperature graph can be seen here (look for the little orange play button underneath the macomedia flash window).

After calling Hitachi USA and emailing one of their representatives, I am told that the MRO models are available only in Japan.  I am still trying to find out about them over the internet, but information is limited at this point.  I always have the possibility of getting one through Taiwan if it is marketed there (and at least the voltage will match up with the USA).  The question then is how to produce these same cooking effects with available kitchen equipment?  Obviously the long slow cooking process can be achieved with slow cookers or thermocirculators.  How to jump start the food temperature in the beginning?  Is it worth it to attempt boosting the inosinic and guanylic acid levels?  What will be the difference in umami flavor at that point?  The Hitachi MRO in it's purpose-engineered near perfect conditions only boosts these acids by 160%.  Can we achieve better and more consistent results by just working to push glutamate levels to the extreme, or does the difference of the other 2 acids combined with it push the umami needle that much higher?  I guess we will have to wait until Hitachi decides to market the MRO here, but the western world palate will have to embrace umami much more before that.

Tongue Shui

Umami is the focus of the new year (the year of the pork animal).

There seems to be (on the surface) a lot of information about now concerning umami and the different perspectives on it as well as how different chefs (although not a huge amount) are utilizing it.  For the most part, the western culinary world has a misconception of what umami is.  Although the amino acid mostly responsible for umami flavor was discovered 100 years ago, umami's ad campaign to the west has been detrimental to its acceptance.  I remember always being told that umami translates to 'deliciousness.'  Well, that isn't very helpful or accurate.  Many things can taste delicious without having much umami.  The other element that has hurt umami's campaign is MSG (which whether you love it, hate it, or don't mind it has left most people thinking that MSG and umami are one in the same).

To steal a phrase from Chef Sarah Scott of Mondavi Vineyards, tongue shui is the way to understanding umami and using it to create a new dimensional balance in recipes.  Umami is not smoke and mirrors.  The glutamate amino acid in its free form is detected on the tongue by known receptors and can be accurately measured in all foods (usually in mg of glutamate per 100g of food substance).  What could be more useful than that?  In fact, I have been searching and logging glutamate levels in natural food ingredients for a few days.  My conclusion is that I don't believe anyone has approached the idea of creating a huge reference table listing all food substances and their natural free glutamate levels.  This reference would be as important to the chef as La Rousse.  It makes me wonder if Heston Blumenthal isn't already at work on this in his Fat Duck research kitchen... what kind of equipment is required for this anyway?

I have been (in my own amateurish novice way) exploring this idea with foods.  It is scientifically proven that glutamate levels increase naturally in foods during ripening, dry aging, curing, or fermenting.  So how can a chef use his magic chef abilities to push the glutamate levels up on the ingredients of his recipes.  I made potato salad at home and added the liquid from soaking dried shrimp to it.  I also finely chopped the shrimp and added them as well as a dash of Vietnamese 3 crab fish sauce.  This is a throwback to the flavors of a Louisiana shrimp boil, so I actually cooked the potatoes with Zatarains to complete the taste.  Sure, I added animal product to increase the glutamate level here, but what about other methods?  What about smoking foods... does that increase glutamate?  A wood grilled steak seems to have more umami than a pan seared one.  I have been thinking about cherry tomatoes after reading the pizza section of H. Blumenthal's book "Perfection."  They are so packed with flavor to begin with, but what about increasing that?  I drizzled olive oil on them and slow roasted them for about 4 hours.  Isn't this similar to ripening in tomatoes?  The flavor is definitely more intense, but did I actually raise the glutamate level?  Come on Heston, help us out here!  You have the money and the equipment.

If this is true, then what an epiphany for all chefs everywhere.  The new age of molecular gastronomy with all of it's accuracy and slow cooking and altering of foods may be the vehicle sent to us to take us through the next open door.  For me, everything is becoming more and more obvious.  I cannot ignore it because it goes back further than classical cuisine or any regional dish.  Even when man first began to preserve foods and didn't understand why cheese was more satisfying than milk... why did the ancient Romans add fermented stinking fish sauce to almost everything they cooked... why the mother's milk that a new-born human baby tastes has 12 times as much free glutamate than cow's milk?  We are all made from proteins which require free amino acids to form.  It evokes a craving much more ancient from within than say, the craving for a bar of chocolate or sugar cravings.