chadzilla

yet another rant on pseudo vegetarians

I am still being amazed constantly by people who want to be vegetarians, but still eat animals.  At first, it was a pet peeve for me.  Now, my deepest fears are recognized as this grave misinterpretation of dietary definition has reached epidemic proportions... this could far surpass diabetes and obesity as a serious national concern.  Victims of this confusion come in to eat everyday.  How do we recognize them?  Is there a red flag for this affliction?  Maybe we can train waitstaff to search deep into guests' eyes for a hint of deep soul-wrenching conflict... as someone who suffers from a bipolar disorder or lives under a veil of culinary ignorance.  This goes way beyond a person's knowledge of cuisines and foodstuffs.  We expect the general public to not be food experts.  This is different.  It is simply an issue of common sense.

A couple of nights ago, a couple came in and ordered two of our seabass entrees, which utilize a rich veal demi glace as a plate component (and this is also listed on the menu).  We have always loved to pair demi glace with lighter fish as the combination works extremely well... we have been doing this since the early to mid-nineties.  The couple was appalled to find that there was a 'meat' sauce on the plate, and returned them to the kitchen to be re-plated.  They were upset that no one told them that their dish had a 'meat product' on it.  Let me tell you, the word that these people were 'vegetarians' never made it to the kitchen.  In fact, it's a hard thing to assume when someone orders an item that consists of 7 ounces of a dead animal sitting center-plate.  Please, Mr. and Mrs. Ignoramus... can you forgive us for not being psychic and mentally challenged at the same time?

Now, I know that some true vegetarians out there think that many chefs have issues with you.  Absolutely not!  Although some rock-head chefs in the world may not appreciate your choice of diet, most of us do.  We respect all diets and allergies and will work with you.  Our real quarrel (or at least mine, lest many others take up arms and join me) is against the confused masses out there who are diluting your beliefs and giving you a bad name.  I have recently read a name for these people... they are called flexitarians.  This word basically means that they are flexible and will eat anything that they want at that moment.  This could possibly be like being raised Catholic but not practicing... or like being Jewish, but occasionally wandering into a Hindu monastery?  I don't know.  It exists for no other reason than to be a real (and already existing) label thrust onto a group which really has no definitional boundaries for itself.  Please people, listen carefully... you are not vegetarian.   Vegetarians eat only plant products and also animal products from which animals were not killed (i. e. dairy and eggs).  Some vegetarians do not eat these either, and they are called vegans (and they are much stricter, sometimes even abandoning honey as it is also an animal product).  There is already a word for people who eat plants and fish and sometimes chicken... you are called 'people who eat'... that's it... you are simply a person who puts food into his mouth to sustain your confused life.

This is my plea... Vegetarians, rise up and take issue with these people.  You are not gaining allies in these confused masses.  You are watering down your core principles.  You are being infiltrated by non-believers.  You are compomising everything you've worked for.  These people are your mortal enemies.  Vegans!   Take up arms with your vegetarian brothers and sisters!  You may be next!  Vegan may become the next 'cool' thing that people want to be called.

This is your fight.  These are the people that we can all bond against.  It is quite possible, if fact, that they are the growing mass that has made it possible for foie gras to be banned in some cities and states in the US.  They are the enemy of both extremes.  Turn an eye away from them if you believe that you are gaining numbers and strength from them.  Sure they have given you some success with such things, as in the foie gras ban, but listen up... that victory will come at a price... it shall not be long until these 'flexitarians' turn on you and you will truly be sorry.  At what cost will these mercenaries be satisfied?

mumbo gumbo

Since I am technically on vacation this week, I will post another segment on home cooking.  Actually my post is about gumbo, and I did in fact make it at work.  I can say, though, that I ate it at home.

I'm sure there isn't a Katrina refugee or Louisiana transplant anywhere else in the country that hasn't felt deep satisfaction and comfort from cooking and eating a big bowl of gumbo in the almost 2 years since Katrina pushed us all over the place.  It started out as talk (as all things do) and about 4 or 5 trips to my favorite Chinese Market before I finally got the blue crabs I needed.  Chef K just happened to have some Patton's Hot Sausage and D&D sausage that Chef Mike brought back from his last New Orleans visit.  All of this is integral.  There are so many parts to a full-on New Orleans style gumbo and even more ways to make it.  Without bragging (well, just a little), I must say that my gumbo really kicks ass.  For the sake of documentation, I will list out the steps.

The stock evolved in stages.  First, I boiled 3 or 4 nice smoked ham hocks until they were tender.  Reserve the stock, and reserve the hocks (taking off all meat and cutting it into small bite-sized pieces).  We roasted some chicken backs and boiled them over the ham hock stock.  The last phase of the stock base is to strain it, heat it to a boil, and use it to blanch your live blue crabs for 2 minutes.  Pull out the crabs and reserve the stock on the stove.  Over a large bowl (to catch all juice and fat) peel of the top shell, the mouth area, and the gills of the crabs.  Dump these and any juice or fat that leaked out into the stock and boil for another hour.  Strain.

Cut the crab bodies in half (as above) and reserve for the final gumbo.  You will need to prepare a bit more mise en place before starting the gumbo.  Dice up some chicken meat.  Slice up your D&D sausage (or good andouille or other smoked sausage).  Take your Patton's Hot Sausage and roll it into little meatballs and roast them off to render out the excess fat.

Have about 2 or 3 pounds of peeled shrimp ready.  Dice up a nice amount of trinity (yellow onion, green bell pepper, and celery).  Mince some garlic.  Make a roux (not too dark but a little lighter than milk chocolate).  I use peanut oil and flour for my roux.  Avoid using butter or olive oil or other fats.

Now, if this is all done you can begin the process of putting it all together.  Render the fat out of the sliced sausage in a large pot.  Add the trinity and garlic to this fat.  Saute until translucency begins.  This is where I add in my cajun seasonings to brown them up a bit... paprika (or smoked paprika), granulated onion, granulated garlic, cayenne, cumin, salt, black pepper, oregano, parsley, sage (only small amounts of the herbs).  Let the seasonings blacken.  Add in the chicken meat to cook it.  Add in the stock.  Once it boils and begins to simmer, you can add in the other ingredients.  To mix in the roux, I like to ladle a bit of gumbo broth into a mixing bowl and whisk it completely before adding to the pot.  Do not thicken up your gumbo to a stew consistency like the tourist traps in New Orleans do.  Real gumbo is thin with a little more viscosity than water... like a minestrone.  Add in the shrimp and let it cook in the gumbo.  For the most part, it's soup now.

While you let the gumbo simmer on low heat (skimming the top to remove impurities and scum... and there will be quite a bit), mince up some Italian parsley and chop some green onion.  Remove some of the broth (like you did to mix the roux) and this time whisk in some gumbo file (ground sassafras).  This is an integral part of the flavor.  Once this is done, add in the parsley and green onion.

This is it!  Home in a bowl.  If you make this right, everyone will eat it.  Jamaicans will eat it.  Taiwanese will eat it.  Slovakians will eat it.  People from all 50 states will eat it.  South Americans will eat it.  Well... maybe kosher Jews won't eat it, but everyone else will love it.  If you made it without the pork or seafood, then everyone can eat it... you can make an incredible chicken gumbo with little more than chicken, trinity, and roux and that would be kosher.  It's all in the love of how you make it.

shrimp toast

I always thought that shrimp toast was one of those American Chinese inventions like chop suey or crab rangoon.  It just seems like an American thing to take Oriental flavored shrimp paste, stick it on bread, and deep fry it.  It turns out I am wrong.  This is in fact a popular family meal dish in China and definitely in Taiwan.  Ming made a rather large batch of it at home yesterday.

She made the paste with chopped shrimp and ground pork.  The mix was seasoned with chopped coriander, sesame oil, Xiao Xing wine, and salt.  She cut slices of bread into 3 rectangles each.  There is usually a trick of some sort to all of these simple dishes.  This one is the use of a cornstarch slurry.  It is brushed onto each slice of bread before applying the shrimp paste.

Fry the toast meat side down.  The cornstarch makes the meat mixture grab onto the bread instead of floating away.  Fry them for about 5 minutes at 350F.

A couple of changes on paper towels and even a short time in the oven will help to eliminate some of the grease.  The worst thing is to eat something that tastes like a little sponge filled with fryer oil.  We were able to get rid of most of it.  One recipe I looked at recommended drying the bread out in the oven before hand to stop a lot of the grease from going into the bread.  This can possibly work, I think.  Maybe next time.  Also, I am wondering if there is one type of bread that would be most ideal for this?

the rusted food chain pt. 2

Well, it seems that I will be on vacation for this week... actually 6 days returning to the kitchen on Saturday when we have another VIP wine dinner scheduled.  I'm not totally decided on what to do yet except to do nothing.  If you are looking for some Memorial Day reading, check out the link below... and as with every holiday, please keep in mind the true reason for the season.

If it seems that we are experiencing an increase in food scares over the last few years, it is definitely not a matter of coincidence or chance.  After reading a recent article in Business Week ('How Safe is the Food Supply?" by John Carey), it is obvious that something needs to be done immediately to fix our sick system.  Aside from the recent pet food contamination by tainted grain from China, there are also cited (and even more recent) recalls... one being a tainted supply of vitamin A that nearly made it's way into infant formula.

What can be done right now?  After reading about efforts by large companies such as Kraft and even the monster Con Agra machine, the first answer is sourcing.  As chefs and food service managers, we need to immediately start asking questions and knowing the direct source and supply chain of all of our products.  This goes hand in hand with current food trends.  It is not by mistake that we must not be separated from the origins of our food.  It is no longer for philosophical reasons, but for more urgent life-threatening reasons as well that we do this and eliminate the weak links in our food chain.  Know your food.

quack heads

Yes.  I cooked and ate duck tongues last night.

We received 12 Rouen ducks from Sylvia Pryzant at 4 Story Hill Farm on Thursday.  She ships them right after slaughter, uneviscerated with the head and feet intact.  The birds are only defeathered.  The Rouen duck is related to the mallard with a few differences (brighter plumage, maturity size and weight, egg laying cycle).  The ducks are killed by ringing the neck to keep all of the blood within.  This keeps the original flavor much more intense, although much messier to butcher.  It's great to get product in while it's in this state.  It's a great reminder that meat does not come in nice little plastic bags counted out in cardboard boxes.  I had also recently watched the conversation on offal on the Star Chef's Conference DVD set so I was amped to try something unusual... like the tongues.

After internet browsing for a recipe or method of preparation for duck tongue, I only came up with 2 Chinese recipes.  I created my own method afterwards... remove and wash the tongues, steam them for about 15 minutes in an commercial steamer, cut out the hard inner cartilage, then simmer the soft flesh in a broth I made with the roasted necks and feet along with added ginger root and onion.  I finished it by pouring it over rice noodles, mung bean sprout, enoki mushroom, and scallion.  Slices of Rouen duck breast were shingled over the noodles to give it a little more substance.

So how was it?  I really did not care for it.  The tongue flesh is very soft and slightly chewy like firm gristle.  The flavor and aroma is very nice.  Although the slices of breast were a flavor between domestic duck and something shot in a lake, the overall dish did not sit well with me.  The restaurant manager loved it and ate pretty much all of it.  That was an assurance, because it meant that my personal taste wasn't an accurate gage to the success of the dish.  Anyway, it was fun and I loved cooking something different. I should also note that this was experimentation and we did not actually serve any duck tongue in the restaurant, although it was tempting.

Sorry, no pictures of any part of the process here.  I do have one picture of the newly arrived duck sitting on my cutting board, but it doesn't seem completely appropriate to post it.  It was quite bloody, and although I enjoyed the process I realize that most people are turned off by such reminders.  It's good to know that I am not a hyprocritical meat eater.  I enjoy being educated on where my food comes from.

barramundi & balsamico

These are the last of the wine dinner dishes from the Cellar Masters dinner that I want to share.  In keeping with the poussin's slight light autumn theme, this barramundi plate is another refreshing course based on fall flavors.

We seared small fillets of Australian barramundi and served it over a warm corn puree, and finished it with squash powdered popcorn (by using dehydrated squash powder as a popcorn dust) and a drizzle of homemade peppadew sauce (made by pureeing some peppadew with a little added vinegar and thickening slightly with xanthan gum).  The wheat grass is there for garnish, although I think it would be cool to try dehydrating small cuts of wheat grass on the root... like hay... then we could really play around with menu wording.

The dish below was a balsamico granita that Fabian made.  The flavor of the syrup he created for it was like candy... you would literally just want to drink it, or use it in a cocktail.  For extra texture, Chef K decided to add toasted pine nuts at the last minute... the result, a perfect flavor pairing.  If you have never tried pine nuts with balsamic syrup, then you must taste how naturally they go together.

The granita texture was perfect.  It was made the traditional way by freezing a pan of the liquid, and scraping it up with a fork every 5 minutes as it continues to freeze.

egg yolk sheets

Here is another example of a dish from the Cellar Masters wine dinner.  One of our first courses was to be a small strip of grilled maple-brushed pork belly served with an egg yolk sheet (bacon and eggs, get it?!?).  For the egg yolk sheet, we used a technique from ideas in food.  Naturally, to give full credit observe Alex and Aki's recipe for their egg yolk ribbons right here.  It's not an easy recipe to find because it is hidden in one of their comments.  Anyway, the process begins with eggs being cooked fully through at 63.8C.  After the eggs are cooled, crack them open and clean off the white and the yolk skin.  What you are left with will look like the yolks below.  The temperature coagulates the yolk into an interesting pliable ball.  You can actually mold it with your fingers and shape it, yet it retains the flavor of only very slightly cooked egg yolk... creamy, fatty, intense.

The next step is to lay the egg yolks down on a sheet of acetate.  You can see by the photo how well the yolks can be squeezed together into one mass.

Lay another sheet of acetate over the yolks and begin to spread it and smooth it out with a dowel or rolling pin.  I had quite a bit of yolk so I found it difficult to retain a perfect thickness level.  I am also wondering about purposefully rolling the yolks a bit thicker to give it more body for certain dishes... more of a flattened cube shape.

The compressed yolk sheet is then frozen.  Once it is completely frozen, remove it and cut it into whatever shape you desire.  Without an exacto knife, I opted for simple squares.  Also, this is much easier to achieve when the yolks are frozen.  They will thaw and become pliable fairly quickly so work fast.  Also, if they begin to thaw, freeze them again.  This can easily be done a day or two ahead and wrapped in the freezer.

This was the dish up for the pork belly.  Here I am applying just a drizzle of basil and chive oil to complete the presentation.  We added some fried potato nests for extra texture.  The yolk sheets were set on the plates ahead of time and allowed to thaw on the plate.

Here is a close-up of the finished dish.  Of course our minds are always moving in (sometimes goofy) different directions, so we could not help but notice how much the yolk resembles a slice of American cheese when cut into a small square.  This has us already itching to do an 'open-faced cheeseburger tartar' which would consist of a small round patty of steak tartar topped with a square of egg yolk sheet with the corners draping slightly over like melted American cheese.  We could then top it with complementary flavored micro greens to resemble lettuce and thinly sliced teardrop or cherry tomatoes.  We could even sit the tartar patty on a slightly toasted slice of brioche. 

You want fries with that?

galantine of poussin

Maybe it's the heat (...not the Miami Heat, but the heat in Miami).  This is the entre from the recent Cellar Masters wine dinner we did.  It's a galantine of poussin (flavored with fresh herbs, olive oil, and citrus zest then poached in a thermocirculator).  It sits atop a griddled cake of hominy grits cooked with tres leches, and is accompanied by a tempura-fried squash blossom stuffed with southwest flavored goat's cheese.  The sauce is simply a butter-mounted glace de volaille reduction.

We had a couple of plates on this menu that reflect on autumn flavors and ingredients.  At the same time, these dishes have been created to be fairly light as opposed to heavy autumn dishes.  This was completely unintentional.  It's sort of like walking around in the spring, and just thinking of fall.  The dried squash blossom garnish adds to the autumn look of the plate here, and it's a simple element to create.

Here is Chef K in the early stages of the galantine prep.  The deboned poussin were pounded and then rolled.  We used the Michel Richard method of floating the galantines in an ice water bath after they were cooked to keep the round shape, as opposed to letting them sit on a flat surface to chill.  (I again cannot stress how important the Michel Richard book is to any cook's library.  It reveals so many obvious and well-thought techniques and ideas.  It should have won every James Beard award in every category.)  We warmed them slowly in an alto-shaam after slicing so they could be served warm without destroying the nice sous-vide texture in the meat.  That's respect.

beets, duck, & eggs

Here are a few passed hors d'ouevres that we came up with for another Cellar Masters wine dinner.  The evening started with a casual reception on our outside terrace.

Beet Tartar.  These are spoons of small diced roasted beet tossed with olive oil, tarragon, and chive.  They were topped with a touch of lemon creme fraiche and some micro bull's blood beet sprouts.

Duck Char Sui with Smoked Onion.  This is a simple and obvious idea... cooking duck breast with Chinese char sui flavors.  We used sous-vide cooking for the duck (25 minutes at 65C) with the marinade enclosed.  I love the bacon-like appearance of the sliced duck.  The onions were smoked by Chef K at home on a small Weber BBQ... intensity.

Quail Eggs rolled in Tomato Powder.  Basically that's it.  These are hard boiled quail eggs peeled and coated with tomato powder.  The rosemary is simply a skewer.  We served these in inverted egg cups.

107 from 4 story hill

It was a red meat Sunday.  We had gotten around to doing a taste comparison on prime cuts of strip steak, delmonico, and filet mignon from 2 different suppliers earlier in the day, and later on I finally found the time to process this huge 107 cote de boeuf from 4 Story Hill Farms that Sylvia Pryzant had sent to us.

Taking care of a piece of meat like this wasn't made any easier due to my lack of good large-sized butchering knives.  I took on the entire mass with a santoku and a small utility knife.  The cote de boeuf was dry-aged for over 3 weeks... a process which leaves it lighter (from slight dehydration) and also allows for mold to set in much more quickly than the now common wet-aging that we see in most grocery stores.  The rib arrived on Wednesday and by Sunday had a thin layer of mold covering most of the surface.  I trimmed it up and broke it down into a few smaller-sized rib roasts.

For science and knowledge (of course) I decided to sample one of the roasts.  I took the smallest end piece and cooked it sous-vide at 70C for almost 2 hours.  The roast weighed between 2 and 3 pounds.  It was flavored with only sea salt, telicherry peppercorn, and a little organic olive oil.

Here's the mammoth steak on a plate after the sous-vide cooking process and a quick sear on the stove to give us that familiar texture and flavor that we have become accustomed to.  The smell of the dry-aging process (although slightly surpressed by the searing) was still evident.  It isn't hard to imagine the majority of the general public being turned off by the aroma and flavor.  It tastes like a nicely cooked piece of red meat with overtones of dry-aging such as prosciutto or speck.  Although not a smell of rancidity, the presence of mold does give the meat a unique flavor that some people would interpret as an 'off' smell.

Here is a shot of the perfectly medium rare grain.  The meat's texture is that of rare beef from the sous-vide process.  We ate a couple of bites that suggested a hint of blue cheese... just a great excuse to pour a nice glass of aged Bordeaux as an accompaniment.  Hey, in the name of knowlegde you've got to do what you've got to do.

The cote de boeuf is not an easy piece of meat to find information on.  Obviously it's from French and even more specifically from the cote (meaning rib cut) which is adjacent to the entrecote (or sirloin cut).  The exact specs were not so easily found.  4 Story Hill sells it as a 107 which is the most specific label given to it, and although Sylvia dry-ages it, I'm not sure that dry-aging is a requisite for cote de boeuf.