chadzilla

preppin' dog

I've been working on a special tasting menu for a local foodie (if he isn't offended by the word).  The term prep dog does not actually apply here, because it's been leisurely and... well, fun.  It's play time!  Each course on the menu will incorporate a unique technique or application or perspective.  We are doing things familiar, and also trying to work current techniques into practical applications... whatever the hell that means... really.

Here are some reformed shrimp...

These will be dipped into a batter and fried.  I used methocel to create a batter out of New Orleans BBQ shrimp sauce.  Working this into a practical dish was interesting.  We have written many many menus and gotten ourselves into trouble countless times by writing something down, then uttering the words, "it should work."  Those 3 little works can get you in the shits more than any other 3.  Although I had pulled off a couple of successful methocel batters recently, I had to tweak the crap out of this one.  The end result... I like it, and that's all that matters.

More reformation...

It's a simple idea, but I've been wanting to make petite filet mignon out of duck for quite some time.  These were hit with smoke from the smoking gun, will be grill-marked and roasted.

Handmade pasta dough... very meditative.  I spent almost an hour and a half mixing and kneading this egg dough.

I will post pics on the dinner later.  First we have to cook and plate the food.  Pictures are secondary, although permanent.  Food is a temporary art.

Meanwhile, back at the base... a little (well 50# is not so little) long-anticipated gift.  Well, not a gift since we paid for it.

This will have to wait a couple of weeks.  My wife and I are flying to New Orleans early in the week.  This is a project for when I return.

spring cleaning/eating

We've cleaned out the office.  5 chefs share this space... it's a freakin' closet.

Cleaning up the blog as well.  Seems I've been spending too much time in website BOH and not enough in the FOH.  Trying to make things a little more consistent now.  Just like the office, I'm getting rid of crap I don't need. 

One of my near future goals is to update the photo album section, and keep current on it afterwards.  I stopped trying to take quality food pix some time ago.  A cheap camera is the most practical thing for my day-to-day.  Lighting is out of the question.  I work in a real kitchen with 12 kinds of crap going on at any moment (well, 12 is a hypothetical number... any number of crap is highly possible whether it be slightly less or more than that).  Focusing on great photography is just not feasible under the circumstances.  That may change one day, but not now.  I do, however, realize that the candidness of random photos is interesting on its own.  Photo albums deserve more respect.  I vow to give it to them... sometime in the near future, but not right away.

On a lighter note, a blessing in the form of a 31 pound black fin tuna.

When I was a kid, I got used to random gifts from God like a unique catch, or whatever nature decided to roll in my favor for the time being.  This tuna was caught by one of our cooks.  His freezer was full, so he gave it up.  I was happy for the opportunity to work on it... only a few hours out of the water.  Black fin tuna is something I've never eaten.  It's one of the smallest tuna species.  The meat is unique because unlike most tuna, it feeds on larvae of shellfish like crab and shrimp instead of other fish... although this one was actually caught on a fish.  It is a big specimen of black fin (they max out at 40 lbs).

Like most of the Korean interns in the kitchen, I ate some raw.

That was some of the belly with a few passes of the blowtorch.

We don't do a family meal.  We're a hotel and we have a cafeteria that feeds all employees.  We have a full time cafeteria cook on schedule that takes care of this.  We do, however, occasionally indulge in the pleasure of sharing something special in the kitchen... something that someone threw together be it Columbian, Haitian, Italian, of something with fried hot dog weinies cut up in it.  The act of all sharing in the same food... especially in a kitchen... is important once in a while.

Remembering a recent article that mentioned Chris Cosentino cooking tuna ribs at a dinner, I couldn't resist.  Another cook took the ribs with the suggestion, created a marinade, and grilled that sucker... damn good.

... like good red meat.

Like some of the cooks and the Korean interns, I was excited to take some home.  Ming contributed to this manifestation that was a variation of chirashi sushi.  We flavored and seared the tuna, sliced it like tataki, and shingled it over warm vinegared sticky rice.

... then ate it wrapped in seaweed snacks.

... and I smoked some small steaks marinated in Taiwanese barbeque sauce.

That was a lot of enjoyment from one fish.

All this and our apartment is being ripped apart tomorrow.  They're taking these jalousie windows out of the sun room, and putting in a more efficient sliding window system.  It would sound better if it weren't being done at 8am sharp.  It's not that early, but whatever... it's a disruption.

cracker batter

We've all messed with cracker dough, but I've come across a formula for making crackers with a batter... and cooking them in a microwave.

Here is the prototype... a tahini cracker.

This recipe utilizes the rice puree.  Other ingredients are tahini, egg white, and a little AP flour.  Salt the batter or add with the seeds for true cracker effect.  To get the proper consistency, I started with measured amounts judged by eye and tweaked as necessary (having an erasable marker board is quite handy).

Unfortunately, I don't have any flexi-molds... hopefully that will change soon.  Improvisation turned my eyes towards the little plastic 2oz souffle cups that we use to send BBQ sauce and honey mustard out to the pool and beach areas for orders.  Following the recipe above, pour 5 grams of batter into the cup, sprinkle the top with sesame seeds, and microwave on HI for 1:30.  Microwaves vary with wattage and models so you may have to tweak the recipe to fit your kitchen.

Before...

... and after.

Notice the slight shrinkage as the batter loses moisture.  This allows for the cracker to be easily popped out.  The texture is light and crisp.  Perfect timing for the cooking is necessary to achieve the right amount of browning.  Even without professional molds, the souffle cup can be used for several times... vert vraiment!

rice puree

Rice is my starch of choice.  Although I am American and grew up in a country founded on meat and potatoes (without alluding to our current status as corn people), I grew up on rice.  In south Louisiana we ate rice at every meal... rice with beans, rice with stews, rice with gumbo, rice with etoufee, dirty rice, jambalaya (the yaya suffix to the word actually means rice... it comes from a shortening of the term 'jambon a la yaya... or ham with rice which is a humble way of phrasing it).  We never put bread on the table (except for Sundays when Grandma broke out the 'brown n serve').  The smell of rice cooking is one of the most hunger-provoking aromas in my memory.  I stay away from 'brown' rice and I absolutely loathe the converted variety that dominated every New Orlean's kitchen I ever worked in... I call it perverted rice, because it seemed a sin to do that to perfectly innocent beautiful grains.  Rice is one of the many bonds that my Taiwanese wife and I have together.

This love of rice was fully driving my mind when exploring one of the El Bulli techniques that Ferran Adria demonstrated at the 2008 Madrid Fusion.  I started to delve into it (not being able to translate, I basically looked at the pictures and wrote down the recipes) because he was revealling their experimentation with microwave cooking.  (It's outrageous to me that the El Bulli R&D team has been trying this since 2004, and broke it out publicly in 2008, and it will be another 2 years or so until the rest of us begin to incorporate these techniques... they are literally 6 years ahead of us in innovation!)  One of the key ingredients in some of these preparations was rice puree.  I searched the web.  I referenced some of the El Bulli books and CD's, but to no avail.  I could not find a standard recipe for making a puree of rice for these applications.

I wanted the recipe to be executed in a rice cooker, so after a couple of trials with the water level, I reached the above recipe.  For those of you who have not used a decent rice cooker in the last few years, this means that you put 2 cups (not an actual cup, but the one that comes with the cooker) of rice in the cooking insert and fill the water level to the mark for 6 cups of rice.  I used basmati for it's aroma (jasmine would do just as well).  Also, only wash the rice once instead of multiple times as you would normally to leave some of the extra starch on.

The rice will have excess water remaining after cooking.  Allow it to cool and blend the rice with the water until very smooth.  Strain through a fine chinois.

My first recipe attempt with the puree was based on one of the Adria formulas.  I used Maytag blue where Adria used parmesan.  There is a good deal of probably variance due to the 'rice puree' not coming from a standard formula.  I mixed 125g rice puree with 50g Maytag and a pinch of salt.  Mix these until fairly smooth.

Spoon drop a little of the mix onto a plate as though you were making cookies.  I ended up settling on a time of 1:30 in our microwave at normal high power.  This was enough time to melt the dough into a disk and cook the starches enough to hold.  The result was a soft Maytag 'skin' that could be removed with the assistance of a knife after it cooled.  This outcome was very different from the parmesan 'bricks' that Adria had shown... but like I mentioned, there are variances in the ingredients.  I do like the results.

I cannot wait to see what other applications the puree will benefit.  My love of rice has me excited over the possibilities.  Without the use of wheat, many of these can also benefit those with gluten allergies.

ancient grain-ola

I wanted to do something with granola just to riff on Sousa's use of the breakfast grain mix.  There was another experimental purpose in mind involving over-cooking and dehydrating grains.  Indian Harvest always has decent samples of blends.  We always receive tons of samples of all sorts from purveyors everywhere, and for a change I decided to actually utilize some of them... instead of shoving them in a pile in the chef's office to sit there for a year until we throw them all out in a gross display of wastefulness.

The ancient grains (bulghur, buckwheat groats, red rice, whole grain quinoa, brown flax) were steamed then dehydrated overnight.

Crunchy, but nice.  I did an old world/new world composition in the breakfast fashion.  Poached honey vanilla yoghurt, verjus macerated blackberries, and ancient grain-ola.  The yoghurt was set in an egg poacher with 1% SGA 16 for about 8 minutes.  I like the soft warm texture.  Perhaps the 'egg' similation would be nicer without the vanilla powder, but I like the flavor.

jaded by green

We recently came across an interesting term born out of the current eco-craze... greenwashing.

I think it is very important to keep ourselves in check during this world period.  We are increasingly being bombarded with green claims by everything from cars to restaurants to pet food to anything that utilizes marketing to sell.  Unlike other 'trends,' we cannot afford to allow ourselves to become jaded by green.  The underlying necessity to fix our ill planet (or more directly... to stop inflicting illness upon our planet) cannot become a mere marketing ploy, attacking consumers from every direction and making them oblivious to the truth.  Dishonesty in claims through greenwashing may cause consumers to associate anything labelled eco-, all natural-, green-, etc. with falsehoods or uncertainty.

There is a great downloadable article by TerraChoice Environmental Marketing titled "The Six Sins of Greenwashing."  It only takes a minute to read the shortened version, and 5 minutes to read the full article.  Before marketing your restaurant or hotel or resort, determine what shade of green you are, how green you are, and be honest.  There should be no shame in whatever shade you are.  Honesty before green!

83C

This was a test run at the magic cooking number of 83C.  The controlled cooking yields incredible textures with vegetables (especially potatoes) because it breaks down the starch while leaving vital structure-maintaining pectin intact.  I tried a variety of starches that we normally utilize... the most exciting part of the results was that even after a long 7 hours of cooking, the potato texture was never compromised.  Overcooking was virtually impossible... perfect potatoes in 2 hours or 20 hours.

These are bars of sweet potato cooked with orange juice (a typical Peruvian application).

Some boniato with roasted garlic oil and salt.

Yuca cooked with mojo... this was unfortunately the big dissappointment of the trials.  I really wanted to achieve a firm texture of yuca with all of the starch broken down into creaminess... didn't happen.  After 7 hours of cooking, the yuca was still too hard and had a raw bite to it.  I fried a piece for a short time afterwards out of curiosity.  The result was so/so, but not 'get all your hopes up' promising.  The idea was to achieve a great texture through sous-vide (with mojo flavor infused) and keep the pieces in mis en place to fry a la minute.

This next photo was an attempt to create a solid Peruvian causa, which is a cold potato dough.  I bagged the Yukon gold cubes with aji amarillo, lime juice, olive oil, and salt.  This method would allow 'causa' to be made out of whatever shape we decided to cut the potato and use it in ways that typical causa could not be used.  Just chill after cooking.  The result... very good.

The very last trial was not based on potato, but on corn.  After seeing Bruno Bertin make polenta with sous-vide cooking (of course, he used a CVap), I could not get the idea of cooking grits out of my head... for professional and personal reasons.  After gaining the benefit of waking up to perfectly cooked eggs, I felt that waking up to perfectly cooked grits would be like the gap-toothed dixie fairy paid us a visit overnight.

The results of the grits were simultaneously promising and dissapointing.  If you want the most creamy melted down grit feel, then it's a dissappointment.  The promise was an entirely new texture.  I modified Bertin's recipe a bit to be more compatible with the American southern palate.  The texture was soft, but pliable.  These were grits that you could scoop up with your hands and shape like clay.  Chef K mentioned that it was reminiscent of cornbread to an extent... perhaps with some ingredient changes this direction could be interesting.  He is right that the texture is of a batch of cornbread that did not fully cook in the center.  I did learn that (as much as I want to thrown it into the mix) butter doesn't fair well in the bag at 83C... it broke down, and had to be re-kneaded in afterwards by massaging the bag.

We'll see where we go with this in the future.  At 7 hours of cooking time, these definitely are not the instant grits that no self-respecting southerner would ever admit to eating.

vegetable sous-vide

We constantly focus on temperatures for the breakdown of proteins and collagen when we utilize the sous-vide method for cooking meats.  Some of these temps have become chiselled into our brains after so many trials that an educated guess has become an experienced guess...  Still, there is no substitute for cold scientific knowledge.  This bit of information came along with an epiphanal mental 'hallelujah' chorus singing in the background.  The information was delivered in the broken English of Bruno Goussault with Bruno Bertin in the DVD series of workshops from the 2007 Star Chefs Congress.  (This disc set is an incredible investment... even if you were in attendance and you are the king of note-taking, there is always missed information that comes to you later.)

The epiphany was Goussault's recitation of the cooking temperatures associated with vegetable matter, not animal matter.  True, I have cooked vegetables in the bag before but it was like shooting mice in the dark without having a knowledge of breakdown temperatures.

Chef Bertin was cooking polenta in a vacuum sealed bag in a CVap.  Goussault explained that all vegetable and fruit product should be cooked at a temperature of 83C.  Why this temperature?  Let's look at the components of plant matter.  There is obviously sugar present depending on the ripeness and the plant itself and there is also cellulose matter which does not breakdown at normal cooking temperatures.  The other 2 components that must be respected in relation to texture are starch and natural pectin.  Starch will begin to breakdown at temperatures of 78C or 80C and above.  Natural pectins, which are the molecular glue holding all plant cells together, do not begin to break down until 85C.  This knowledge along with a controlled method of cooking allows some great new textures to be achieved.

The polenta recipe used was interesting, but I wanted to give it a run on a smoked potato component in a dinner we had scheduled last night.  I tossed the potato in olive oil, salt, and pepper and let them smoke for awhile.  Once the smoke flavor was fixed on the surface of the cubes (along with the oil which will act as a vehicle to bring the smoke flavor through and through), the potato was bagged up and thrown into an 83C water bath for 2 hours (the top most picture is of the potatoes out of the bag after cooking).

The result was a potato texture I have never experienced before.  The completely broken down starches yielded a creamy texture while the potato still had a slightly crisp bite from the intact pectins.  Obviously, the texture was uniform throughout the cubes.

The next question (and one that I will discover today) is... will this texture remain if cooking is prolonged another couple of hours or indefinitely.  I plan to play around with soft grits cooked in the bag, and I'm going to drop some more potatoes in the water bath as well... they both cook at 83C.  Chef K suggested that this could be a great cooking method for yucca as well (the extremely high starchiness of yucca has always turned me off to it, so it will be exciting to examine it's controlled cooked texture).

raw food

We handle quite a variation of groups and events throughout the various outlets in our resort.  Food allergies are one and special diets are another, and it's beneficial when someone contacts us ahead of their arrival allowing us time to communicate the situation to our staff.  I was put on the spot last night by a different sort of dietary request.

The raw food diet has been around for a few years now.  Despite it's fair existence, I have never personally had to deal with it.  I guess that by keeping myself ignorant (even with great books such as the Charlie Trotter Raw book which has been our for a few years... and which I have never purchased or read), I left myself open for a spontaneous challenge.  That challenge came in as part of a party of 20.  Two women in the group claimed to be on the raw food diet, and I found out with less than 30 minutes to their reservation time.  Even worse, they were owners of a condo next door... who are famously high-maintenance and we can never seem to please for some reason... despite our best efforts.

So with a quick and fruitless internet search, I cursed our slow network and found a morsel of information.  People choose the raw food diet because they believe that vital enzymes and other nutritional goodies are lost when food is taken above 116F... that's just a little over room temperature in south Florida!  Also, 75% of their diet must consist of raw foods... that makes sense considering that certain flavorings and oils must undergo a good deal of processing (usually involving heat).  Dairy (considering the pasteurization process) I was not sure of, so I avoided it.  Raw meats... well, they fit the bill, but I wasn't sure on their acceptance.

Here was my submission to "Battle Raw Food."  The tuna component on the right is there only because I found out (again, only 10 minutes before dishing) that although the girls were on the diet, they absolutely allowed themselves the vice of seared raw tuna and soy sauce... whatever.  So the tuna went on, cold smoked with the new smoking gun, and topped with soy-infused shaved red onion.

The rest of the plate was my spontaneous creation... compression-braised watercress (smoked with peach wood, then compressed with grilled peanut oil), vacuum-infused eggplant with white anchovy oil, garlic, and preserved meyer lemon dust (compression technique again), slow-warmed teardrop tomatoes, and shaved pecans.

The watercress was interesting... allowing smoke and wilting without heat.  Strong meaty flavors there.  The eggplant was also interesting.  My train of thought was that although the dieter could not enjoy anchovies themselves, I could use the oil with compression to offer a similar flavor to the diner... this falls in accordance with the 75% rule in my book.

Next components.  To add more umami, I threw some tomatoes in the Alto Shaam for a short time on low temp.  This slow-ripening or pulling of flavor reminded me of MFK Fisher's story of placing orange wedges over her radiator in her French Apartment.  It's a slow dehydration and glutamate builder.  Taking something naturally good, and making it incredible with very little effort... only patience.  The shavings of pecan are just for extra flavor dimension and texture.  I wanted to incorporate some sort of nut shaved on the microplane, but which one could I use without toasting?  Maybe it was conceived years ago by growing up with a pecan tree, but the flavor of raw pecans are much better than toasted pecans.  I'm not sure if I'm the only one out there who feels this way, but it makes the pecan an anomoly among nuts.

So what's the conclusion here... when I offered to answer any questions about what they were eating, both ladies declined.  They also both ate the tuna from the plate and did not even touch the rest of it... insult to the chef!  I try not to let such things get to me, but I did run around hyped up for a good 40 minutes on this dish while organizing the rest of the parties food.  It wasn't a masterpiece, but I was momentarily proud of it (at least in technique and flavor... not in presentation).  Miami is full of trendy wannabe nobodies without a freakin' clue.  Rise above, Zilla!  The bright side is that it allowed me to educate myself on yet another ridiculous food diet and its unnecessary rules.

upgrade

Had to finally do it.

It took some time to arrive from Polyscience, but here it is.  This means I'm retiring the DIY model for use at home.  Although I haven't really ran it through a test yet, I did fire up one bowl of persimmon wood splinters.

Thumbs up for ease of use.  Thumbs up/down for smoke effect... I expected more smoke than from the DIY model, but the volume is about the same.  The thumbs up here is for not having to repack the bowl as often.  Hopefully it will receive more thumbs up in the future for durability.