Chef at Home

Archive for April, 2010

We infused strips of cucumber shaped like noodles with a smoked shrimp consomme. The translucent noodles add a chilled crunch to the preparation of shrimp tasso. A puree of smoked coconut and diced and sliced lovage complete the dish. It is bright, clean, decadent and whimsical a combination we are thrilled with.

Go to Source

Go to Source

It turns out Aki ordered two trees with aromatic leaves: the finger lime and the yuzu. That is great since we both have black thumbs and we need to get something out of this home grown thing we are trying. In actuality we are both thrilled by the bounty bestowed upon us. We have always wanted to integrate unique citrus leaves into our cooking and have been stonewalled by a lack of aroma. Thankfully we now have a wide open path. Of course now the question arises about how many leaves may we pilfer before we weaken the trees whose fruit we are trying to grow?

In any case, the addition of the finger lime leaf and the yuzu leaf to our repertoire has added a broad spectrum not just to our cooking but also our cocktails. The yuzu leaf has the aroma of fresh yuzu juice married with the pine attributes we associate with its rind and natural oils. In chewing it we get a clean bite of yuzu meets pine meets green. An amazing taste with no real bitter notes and a world of aromatic potential.

Go to Source

In lieu of my recent restaurant departure I've come to have a few thoughts about how there are a lot of different kinds of pastry chefs, and how "comparing one's inside's to another's outsides," can lead to dangerous territory.

By this I mean– competition and self doubt and keeping up with the Joneses and all those icky feelings that crop up when we're worried about who we are and what we do, and instead of just being who we are and doing what we do, we stop, and peer around the edge nervously, spying on our counterparts, and reading each others press, and worrying.

We worry that we have the wrong desserts and we employ the wrong methods.

We worry about how we might be too boring, or not boring enough.

We worry we're too old fashioned or not sticking to the Classics.

We worry about how closely we're sticking to the seasons and if any Eat Localvores are going to arrest us for putting strawberries on our menu one day too soon.

We worry our menu is not approachable enough for the clientele we are serving. We worry our chef will keep making her/his portions bigger and bigger and keep complaining that dessert sales are too low to keep us on. We worry our desserts are better than our chef's savoury food & one day he'll notice and fire us for some bogus reason.

We worry.

We worry even when we're drunk or asleep or lounging easily on the bar or flirting with waiters or yelling at our cooks or trying to fix our Kitchen-Aid with masking tape or hiding our chinois in our lockers or doing our endless laundry or on a date or walking around nonchalantly as if we've not got a care in the world, on our one day off.

Sometimes the worry takes a vacation and ends up in a place it gets stuck because a volcano has decided to erupt or an earthquake has taken over the newsreels or someone in our family has died and

for a minute

we can breathe, worry-free.

But then it starts again.

We pick up a food magazine and see yet another recipe for a stupid dessert or a cliched pairing or the name of a pastry chef who's been getting press since dinosaurs opened ice cream parlours

and then the worry begins again.

Of course I'm being a little silly.

Not all pastry chefs worry around the clock. There are a few cool, calm & collected ones. A few Clark Kents who are just as wonderful even before they do a quick-change in a diminutive telephone booth. A few who know exactly who they are, where they came from and make desserts from their heart, their heartland.

But I do think a little worry is alright.

Because a lot of complacency is what I see on most dessert menus, wherever I eat, wherever I work, whenever I travel.

It's all too easy to make dessert cliches. It's all too easy to easy to conform. It's all too easy to become the undead pastry chef. It's all too easy to do only what you were taught in school. It's all too easy to perpetrate crimes against plated desserts, pastries, sweet thangs.

Because the masses want same. Sameness sells. Lowest common denominator flies off the shelf. Boring rules. The bottom line is infatuated with mass production.

Sugar is a siren.
The population is its ship.
Sugar spins web of deception.
The blind lead the stupid lead the lemmings.
All to their creative death.
And so it goes, round and round.

Because sugar, or the taste of sweetness, harkens back to our childhoods so strongly, and nostalgia is at the root of most classical dessert creations, it's difficult for people to allow pastry chefs to take chances with flavours/ingredients/pairings they love and hold close dearly.

Perhaps so close they suffocate pastry chefs!

So I beg of you this:

stop worrying and—–>

start thinking outside the pink box.
start coming up with some slightly new flavor pairings.
stop only ordering from your purveyors and begin going to health food stores and online sources for some of your ingredients.
start reading of-the-moment chef blogs and start looking more closely at food photos and buy some food magazines & cookbooks not written in your native tongue and get your mind out there– even if you can't afford to travel your body on that culinary airplane.
delve deeper into the ingredients you think you know– try different animal eggs, animal fats, animal & grain & nut milks, various flours with and without gluten contents. toast your flours, taste new salts, experiment with as many kinds of sugars as you can find– jaggeries, muscovados, raw/turbinado/demerarra, coconut sugar. taste honeys from all over the world. taste all strengths of Manuka honey. attempt using miso in replacement of salt, or even sugar.
substitute labne or Greek yogurt or sheep's milk yogurt for creme fraiche. substitute fromage frais for ricotta. or better yet– make your own ricotta!
if you always use mascarpone, look into Crescenza or other triple cream wonders. try goat butter for your next batch of shortbread.
challenge yourself to a week of vegan baking. gluten-free baking. nut-free baking.
if you've never used fresh herbs in your muffins, cakes, cookies, buttercream, try it today. buy small batches of Organic non-irradiated ground spices and see what a difference they make compared to what your dry goods supplier is sending you. think they're too expensive? you only need 1/4 of the ginger root powder if it actually tastes like itself.
go to restaurants just for dessert.
get yourself out of your personal cave of dessert making and try someone else's creations. for all you know they're on twitter or facebook too and if you have questions imagine how happy they'll be to learn that you, another fellow pastry chef, came to eat their food & now has questions about some of their plates!
do something besides sleep on your next day off.
try getting inspiration from not just other food related sources. go to a gallery, a museum, get on a rollercoaster, take someone's kid to the zoo, or lay in the moss under some redwood trees and look high up into their canopy for perspective.

what are some other things you do to clear your head when your chef or the owner or your customers want you to make the same boring desserts they

remember from their childhood
had their last pastry chef make
know how to pronounce/eat/serve
think they know how to make themselves
eat year round whether those ingredients are in season or not
are oppressing you with only boring dusty 1980's (or earlier!) ideas

?

Enquiring pastry Chefs want to know.

Remember this:

the first chef who made something which strayed from his tradition/culture/local ingredient list/ etc. had to work hard to convince others of his and its merit.

the comfortable spot you've cornered yourself into keeps you and me and other chefs and future diners dumb.

guerilla acts of change are necessary to facilitate education, growth, change and to open one's mind one might sometimes need a crowbar as well as a spatula.

Go to Source

The result of marinating tomatoes with feta and its brine was a wonderful elixir of their combined flavors. We first worked on using the liquid as a dressing for vegetables. Then the heat wave arrived and we were looking for cool dishes. The idea of granita popped to mind and we ran with it. The dressing was originally thickened with 0.15% xanthan gum and easily transitioned to a frozen preparation. To compliment the granita we added some of our dissolving basil and a stalk of romaine lettuce. A few drops of reduced minus 8 vinegar completed this refreshing dish.

Go to Source

When the dumpling arrives in front of you, you ask the same question “how is the filling going to be?” There is an emotional time gap, between the moment you see it and when you finally eat it. How is it going to be? Fabulous, disappointing or just ok. From the outside dumplings all look the same, but the filling is the key. Balance of flavors, fat and moisture make the filling the winner or the loser. Shanghai-style dumpling are my favorite. They are just extremely hot inside and you have to wait a little bit for them to cool down. The pork bouillon and the rendered fat in the filling fully satisfy your mouth with the density of the mix. 

We made the dumpling dough with rendered wagyu fat mixed with green onions to flavor and color it. We used a taco press to make the dough very thin, then a combi oven on full steam to cook them. As we are experimenting with the product we started the dumplings for amuses with very various filling. 

Here in the picture it is a pork filling flavored with ginger and served into a bouillon infused with katsuobuchi. We now use it as a component of an halibut dish. It is a flat dumpling that covers the fish and is filled with arugula, baked tomato and green onions. It does not have the pork fat, but it is very tasty.

Go to Source

A first run at pairing the shrimp tasso with meat. Here we drape it over braised short ribs and compliment it with cucumber batons infused with smoked shrimp consomme. The short ribs are glazed in a sauce of braising liquid enriched with some of the smoked shrimp consomme. Anise and seafood are often happy partners and we looked to chervil to pique the shrimp flavors in the cucumber and the dish as a whole.

Go to Source

We started with a blend of basil, ricotta and a 3 percent low acyl gellan milk block to make an intense basil puree. The gellan is cooked in whole milk and then set into a rubber ball like texture. Another look at the approach is here. Its viscosity allows us to thicken other products like the basil we were working with. The puree is wonderful: as is, as the filling for a ravioli, dried slowly and flaked as crisps. We made a batch of dried basil crisps and were planning on using it as a crispy element for a fish dish. Our daughter had other plans. She decided to spread the crisps across the floor and then pick up every third one and put it back in the zip top bag she somehow acquired without either one of us spotting her. Since the crisps were now just a clean up project we did just that. Except somehow we put most of the flakes in the garbage and a handful made it into the sink. The flakes in the sink were quickly soaked with water and that was the inspiration. The crisps hydrated quickly and dissolved in the water. The basil was now back in puree form. It started the waterfall of ideas in adding an herb, a compilation of herbs or even another flavor to a dish and then at a point and time adding moisture to dissolve and dissipate the flavors and colors. It also allows us to serve a bowl of assorted crisps–bacon, shrimp stock, pea– which may then be eaten or partially eaten and then the addition of a soup, sauce, scrambled eggs, a ragout or even a puree may be added to which the dried elements dissolve and contribute flavors. The opportunities are endless and that is good. Better go and thank Amaya for playing with our food.

Go to Source

Our first experience with finger limes was years ago when we were in Colorado. Now we are trying to grow this elusive and elegant citrus. Time will tell whether we will have some which are home grown.

Go to Source

We took the idea of our pressed shrimp terrine and seasoned the shrimp in the style of tasso ham. The shrimp are molded into a block with the help of transglutaminase. Once the block of shrimp is formed we poach it in a vacuum bag in a 55°C water bath for an hour and a half. That may seem like a long time for shrimp, but in order to cook the shrimp through it was necessary and there were no negative effects from the process. After the shrimp was cooked we chilled it down and then loaded it up in the car. A quick drive to elements restaurant and with the help of their slicer we were indulging in sheets of thinly sliced shrimp salumi. The sheets have a beautiful marbled look and a delicate texture: smooth and snappy. We are looking forward to working with this evolved shrimp preparation in our kitchen. Shrimp toast anyone?

Go to Source