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?