chadzilla

liver 'surf & turf'

ankimo, pickled ginger flower, blood orange, lime, maple == surf

chicken liver pâté, crispy smoked chicken skin, white pepper flake, beet licorice, basil == turf

Ankimo has to be one of the most amazingly flavored pure ingredients in the world.  We've utilized it periodically in the past, but the last package of monkfish liver that arrived was the freshest we've ever been privileged to work with... and probably nothing compared to some of the top rate sushi bars.

The process is very simple yet tedious.  The liver must be removed of all outer membrane and veins.  It is then brined in a mild salt solution for 30 minutes then manually dried.  Roll cylinders of it in plastic wrap, wrap in foil to secure, steam for 30 minutes, and allow to cool overnight.  Peel and slice and try not to eat too many of them.

sour cream 'fluff'

This was cool to make... basically a 'loofah.'

 

umami butter

After making tea butter and thinking about other butter infusions, I had thoughts about increasing the umami in butter by using traditional Japanese dashi elements.  If we sealed butter with kombu, katsuobushi, and dried mushroom, would we have dashi butter?

Using the tea butter recipe for reference, it steeped some Vermont butter and the dried ingredients in the C-Vap for 12 hours at 65º (which should be a good middle of the road temp for increasing the umami levels).  The next day, it was strained off and reserved.  Although I could not detect the dashi elements directly in the butter by taste (can't just stand there drinking too much clarified butter), is it possible that the umami level jumped significantly?  The butter was definitely rich and flavorful, but still tasted like butter... although it helped me to make one of the best tasting hollandaise sauces I have ever whisked together.  There was no distinctive difference in taste of color as with the tea butter.  Considering that the true beauty of well made dashi is it's subtlety, am I just missing it somehow?

I found a reference to seaweed butter on StudioKitchen and Daniel Patterson mentions David Kinch using katsuoboshi in a butter sauce.  

So if anyone out there has studied this subject... are umami enhancing amino acids and nucleotides soluble in fat as they are in water based solutions?

side note:  the Katsuobushi article on the Daniel Patterson link is a good read.  The process for making this is listed out.  Upon our last trip to Taiwan, Ming and I had visited a historic katsuobushi processing factory which was set up during the 50 year Japanese occupation.  The multi-story building near the sea had upon grate floors on each level and the aroma of deeply smoked fish was so thick it was embedded within every piece of wood in the architecture.  The texture of a true block of katsuobushi is so denatured from it's original state.  We had an opportunity to 'shave' some by using the small plane device described in the article.  Before this experience, I had always looked at bonito flake as simply dried fish... in reality it is so much more complex.

tea butter

There was a technique for infusing butter with tea on the website portion of Fabian's Dulcypas book.  Realizing all of the potential uses of such a base element led me to try it.

We vacuum sealed 2 each 1#/453g blocks of butter with 90g of black tea.  It was brewed at 56º for 12 hours, then strained.

An easy application was created by whisking the liquid butter into a cream reduction.  In retrospect, a bit of citrus added to the sauce would have cut the fattiness but the flavor was good (this dish was arguably too rich).

The onions were poached in garlic oil and aromatics at 65º for 4 hours.  They mellowed nicely while still retaining a pleasant 'crunch.'

fried softshell blue, tea butter scampi, pearl onion confit, carrot noodle, dried persimmon

It's kind of simultaneously sad and cute when softshell crabs try to pinch you to no effect.

tomato confit

The simple things are always worth looking at.

Tomato confit, or tomatoes poached in oil, is not a new concept by far... but preparing it with sous-vide gives control and the result is a very flavorful tomato element.  We've done these in the past, but with a slow oven and much much more olive oil.

These ripe tomatoes were bagged with extra virgin olive oil, fresh basil, and oregano.

 

They were cooked at 60.5ºC for about 2 hours (mainly because we only have 1 thermocirculator, and we were cooking duck at the same temp, but it worked).  The result was a tender tomato with a skin that was easy to remove.

 

Slicing can be a challenge, but the tomato punch is worth it.  The left-over oil picks up an incredible flavor as well.  Temperature and times may require adjustment depending on the variety and ripeness of the tomatoes.

black bean cake

This plate ended up with what seems like a mess of flavors, but they're all really complementary.  It actually all started with the cake, and the rest just sort of happened.  We were going for a Cuban or Latin flavor range possibly recreated in an alternate universe.  The highlight for me was still the cake.  I had searched for possible references online, and only pulled up variations of black bean pancakes or griddle cakes.  Afterwards, I just abandoned all of it and just had to roll with it from traditional cake formulas.  The amount of sugar was cut down, and sour cream was added.  The result was very nice.

black bean sour cream cake, tomato jam, ham hock chicken liver, goat cheese espuma, tomato crumbs, grilled corn purée, cilantro, cholula paper

 

Now I want to adjust the recipe for a Japanese-style red bean cake.

Download Black bean sour cream cake

tomato olive oil flan

Here is an application of the gelled emulsion. 

 

The tomato base is left fairly basic in the recipe, but enhance the flavors as much as you like.  We called this application a flan because of the super soft texture.  It is, however, surprisingly easy to work with.  The olive oil is between 15 to 20% of the gel mass, so the flavor and mouthfeel comes through.  It may be served at room temp or slightly above.

Download Tomato Olive Oil Flan

corn 'cobb' salad

Got a few fun dishes from tonight.  Here's the corn egg used with cobb salad elements.  It's the blue plate special.  Funny to see everyone look at it as a sliced boiled egg.

yellow corn & popcorn milk egg, avocado buttermilk ranch, bacon & blue cheese

 

Download Corn Egg

Download Avocado Buttermilk Ranch

an egg

Eggs remain one of the quintessential symbols of Spring since ancient times.  Eggs became one of the benchmarks of a chef's skills as observed in Escoffier's day.  Eggs have been the sole subject of cookbooks.  The egg was re-created by Wylie Dufresne and Marcel sparked controversy in the modern genre by incorporating the same ideas in a magazine article.  What about this guy?  Alex and Aki demonstrated a false egg based on the various gelling temps of methylcellulose in a rare video post.  Is it all just slightly acidulated water under the bridge?  The egg is a single cell, the basis of life, and life-sustaining.  What would Easter be without them?  What would breakfast be?  What would a cobb salad be?

 

I had a weird idea to make a boiled egg completely out of corn (that's the only claim to originality I'm making here).  That in itself can by symbolic, as corn is already used to make up pretty much everything available that we eat in the USA.  Maybe corn supercedes the egg as the modern symbol of life.  Maybe not.  Aside from getting the obvious yellow and white parts down, I wanted to get similar textures as well.  I did this by considering the mouthfeel of the base elements and by varying the percentages of agar agar.  The end result looks like a sliced boiled egg.

The yolk:  Yellow corn juice gelled with 0.45% agar and a little added saffron for color reinforcement.

The white:  Popcorn-infused milk gelled with 1.2% agar and 0.25% xanthan.

 

Wilton egg molds available at your local Wal-Mart!!!

still smokin'

It's not Cheech & Chong, but it's destiny to come around to circles again... and this is my 500th blog post or some ridiculous number, so 'Cheers!' everybody!

When we did our first Paradigm dinner the very first course was titled 'smoke & mirrors' (raw oysters with mignonette gelée smoked under glass on a mirror garde manger platter) and it was our way or poking fun of the gimmickery of the modern food movement... the type of gimmickery that allures many guests and media into one night stances and would later torment chefs like Achatz who seek constant new validity to the craft and make us question the raison d'être of modern food.  Well, the process and freedom afforded by the new movement has broken down many doors of perception and birthed thousands of new techniques and ideas that will fill many cookbook pages in years to come once the dust settles.  We want respect, but still desire to entertain... "like picturing Jesus in one of those tuxedo T-shirts that says, I want to be formal but I'm here to party."  In the end, we will all be the better for it, simply because we stretched our brains and decided not to be content with the status quo.

Sure, we have been known for quite some time (even before modern water-bending trickery and Willy Wonka-vision) to be overly corny or cheesey with menu descriptions.  We tend to entertain through whimsy as much as feed you something tasty.  It's hard sometimes not to fall into the 'smoke & mirrors' trap of modern cuisine, but if Richard Blais can still present 'smoke under glass' like it's the next new thing and maintain a lucrative respected career on it, then we are allowed some leeway.  Share the wealth.

 

I know it has been done in some form or another, but I've always wanted to put smoke bubbles on a dish.  A sweet base of 100g water, 50g honey, 1.5g sucro provides a base with which to trap it... sweet sweet smoke.  The only real catch here is using the Polyscience Smoking Gun of which I love and hate.  I love what it can do, but hate that it's a gamble on whether it will work or not under crunch time.  I still have my home-made model which I use at home to smoke meats before cooking.

So what gimmicky cheesey cool thing can be done with smoke bubbles... we'll find out on Friday night.