Dinner Party Feb 2016

 I like to cook, and I also quite enjoy eating, but eating a 12 course meal by myself if beyond even my abilities.  So what to do? Invite over 5 friends!

Appetizers

  

Charcuterie course; Mostarda, chicken liver mousse, olives, sage cheese, cheese with mustard seeds and a honey goat cheese. Also had some cured meats, green apple and bread.

 

 Chorizo empanada with chipotle crema. Dough is simple puff pastry

Orange and Beet. Heston Blumenthal runs the Fat Duck restaurant in the UK, he is famous for his excellent inventive food.  This course was straight out of his book. 

You tell the diner that the course is Orange and Beet jellies, they assume the red are the beet and the yellow-orange are the jellies made of orange juice. However once they take a bite they are surprised to find out it is the other way around.

Raw golden beets were juiced and then the juice Agar filtered.  Blood oranges get the same treatment. The juices are then set with 1.7% gelatin by weight.

Agar filtration is a technique that allows nearly any juice/stock/extract to be made incredibly clear without any special equipment. Agar is a gelling agent similar to gelatin, but the gel is much less elastic (more brittle) than gelatin. So if the gel matrix is disturbed the liquid can quite readily weep out (Syneresis).  The juice you wish to clarify is set with 0.7% agar, then froze. The ice crystals punch holes in the gel matrix. The frozen juice is set in a strainer over a bowl in the fridge and left to thaw.  Any solids (particulate, starches, proteins, etc) remain trapped in the agar matrix and crystal clear juice drips into the waiting bowl. 

 Asparagus and greyer tart.  Puff pastry crust, shredded cheese, raw asparagus, hot oven for 15 mins.

My new toy is a vacuum siphon. The bottom chamber is filled with water.  The upper chamber holds what you wish to infuse, in this case Kaffir Lime leaves and lime zest. (Apparently you could make coffee with this device as well....)   A fabric filter holds the solids in the top chamber while a burner heats the water below. As the water boils, the steam pressure forces the water up a dip tube into the top chamber where it steeps with the kaffir.  Once the heat is removed below, the steam will condense and suck the water back through the filter into the lower chamber.

This broth was then poured over frozen blueberries. The broth picks up a mild but very aromatic Kaffir lime scent. Delicious with blueberries.

Main's

 Tacos.

Ground pork was seasoned with lemon grass, fish sauce, salt and pepper.  0.1% sodium phosphate is added, this phosphate salt allows the meat proteins to better bind to their moisture, keeping the meat noticeably juicier as it is cooked. The ground meat was torchon-ed, and sous vide at 145F for about 4 hours. At service the torchon is dried off, and seared in a very hot pan.

To make the food pyramid fans happy we have various veggies to go with the meat. Kimchi, pickled carrots and cucumbers, various Vietnamese mints, scallion and lime.

Pumpernickel gnocchi with braised pork shanks and roasted Brussels sprouts. 

There are two styles of gnocci. The Italian is made with mashed potatoes, held together with the barest amount of wheat flour possible.  These gnocci are incredibly tender as they are mostly gluten free potato startch.

The French also have gnocchi, Parisian style. These are little dumplings of pate a choux piped into boiling water.  Pate a choux ( translates  to shoe paste, thing sound sexier in French huh?) is a dough made by adding wheat flour to boiling water, this paste is then beaten with raw eggs.

 With all the beating one might expect a leaden dumpling to result. However since the flour is added the boiling water, the high heat prevents much of the gliadin and glutenin from forming gluten.

I made these Parisian gnocchi with Rye flour, a touch of cocoa powder for color and caraway seeds for flavor.

A bowl is inverted over the finished dish and a Smoking Gun is used to pipe in a small amount of apple wood smoke. When the bowl is lifted the smoke wafts out to the diner.

Desserts

Yogurt ravioli.  How does one fill a blackberry shell with liquid yogurt? Very Carefully.

The yogurt is froze in small hemisphere molds. Meanwhile blackberries are juiced and 2% gelatin dissolved. A thin layer of gelatin is set on a silpat, and the frozen yogurt placed on top.  The gelatin can then be poured over the top, setting in a shell around the frozen yogurt.  These are allowed to thaw in the refrigerator before service resulting in a liquid inside the gelatin shell.

Creme Brulee.  My preferred method for cooking custards is sous vide. Here is used Douglas Baldwin's recipe. The custard is cooked in a ziplock back at 185F for about 45 mins, then poured into the service vessels. Refrigerate overnight and you have a perfectly cooked, never curdled, custard without all the Bain Marie hassle. 

 Pears poached in red wine with toasted walnuts.

Chocolate Pot de Creme with Baileys 'Cappuccino' foam. The pot de creme was cooked sous vide as the creme brulee was.
Bailey's is thickened with 0.7% xanthan gum and foamed with a nitrous charger.  This is added to the top of the pot de creme at service.


Twelve Courses in all, 5 friends and a few bottles of wine.  A great way to spend an evening. Lets just not talk about the dirty dishes the next morning....

Ossabaw Island Pork

What is the best way to preserve a extremely rare heritage breed of animal, eat it!

Ossabaw Island is a small Island off the coast of Georgia. When the Spanish were exploring the Americas in the 16th century, they brought livestock with them as a mobile food source. The Ossabaw Island pig is a feral breed of the pigs the Spaniards left behind hundreds of years ago on the island. They are also thought to be the only U.S. breed which is descended from the Iberian-type pigs in Spain.

Both the island and mainland populations continue to be considered vulnerable by the ALBC, Slow Food, and others.The breed is listed as "critical" on the priority list of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy,and is also included in Slow Food USA's Ark of Taste, a catalog of heritage foods in danger of extinction

The meat of Ossabaws is dark, with a unique texture, and is prized for resembling the jamón ibérico of the Black Iberian pig. It is considered to be artisanal, heritage product especially well-suited to use in pork, cured meats, and whole pig roasts.   Source

As a man with a love of all things Porcine, I jumped at the chance to get some of this rare pork from my local butcher, Cleaver and Co.

The first cut I got from the butcher was a chunk of back fat, about 3 lbs in size. This block of pork love was destined to become God's gift to man, Lardo.

Lardo is a Tuscan cured pork product. Where slabs of back fat are cured in marble tubs with salt, pepper, rosemary and garlic. They age for as long as 6 months before being sliced thin and served as charcuterie.

I used a recipe from Ruhlman and Polcyn's book Charcuterie. Salt, sugar, pink salt (sodium nitrite) pepper and bay.

 

This mixture was vacuum packed around the pork and left to cure in the refrigerator for two weeks.

The salt pulls out moisture, resulting in a very firm texture in the pork.

The curing mixture is washed from the surface of the pork and then left in the fridge to dry for a few days.  Shaved thin, it is best served with air, it also makes an excellent lip balm. Its sweet, salty, porky flavor is impossible to describe, it must be tasted.


Oh, but I couldn't stop at Lardo, Bacon must be had as well.

I also purchased a belly of this same wonderful pig. As you can see, the meat is very red compared to domesticated pork. Signs that this is again a special animal

 Rulhman's bacon recipe was used, with the sugar being brown instead of white.

The meat is covered in cure.

Vacuum packed tight and aged in the refrigerator for a week.

After curing, the belly is rinsed and returned to the fridge to dry for a couple days.

At this point we have a well cured pork belly, but it is not bacon without smoke. The above is a Smoking Gun, it has a little chamber in which wood chips smolder,  the smoke from this is then blown down a hose into whatever vessel contains your food. Allowing one to cold smoke anything from cheese, to meat, to chocolate. All in a very quick and controlled manner.

 The smoked meat is then vacuum packed again for its date with the water bath.

 A dip in the sous vide for 24 hrs at 155 degrees F cooks the meat and begins to render the fat, allowing the meat to crispy wonderfully when pan fried.

The bacon is chilled in the bag, then sliced nice and thick. Ready to be fried up.

Fried to crispy goodness, this pig shows us what pork once was, and hopefully what it can be again.

Singapore, The Food.

 This spring I was lucky enough to be able to spend two weeks in SE Asia, 5 days of that being in Singapore.

I thought it a good destination for a Culinary Vacation being a small, well connected country with a diverse population. And I was right, I found food from India, China, Korea as well as dishes that are distinctly Singaporean. 

The Hawker Centers are an amazing concept, all the deliciousness normally found at street food stalls are brought inside to a building with proper electrics, running water and plenty of seating.  Just be sure to bring your own napkins, they won't be provided to you.

Singapore has many of these Hawker Centers and I found many of their best dishes in them.

Many of Singaporeans are ethnic Chinese and the cuisine reflects this. There is no way I could pass up a stall selling Shark Fin Soup, this dish had noodles in a cornstarch thickened brown broth, with little nubbins of deep fried Fin-y goodness.  The texture of the fin was like a cross between the cartilage of a pigs ear and soft tendon. 

 I believe this to be one of the Singaporean dishes.  Noodles in a slightly sweet (tamarind?) broth with hard cooked egg and chunks of bread.

This particular bowl was a delightfully delicious welcome to Singapore in the airport. Research has shown that the best way to recover for 36 hrs of travel is noodles in flavorful broth. This also happens to be an excellent hangover cure... not that I would know anything about that.

I believe this to be a similar dish to the above, this time with some crispy shallot on top and some sweet spice in the broth.  The fried pie on the bottom right was filled with a savory vegetable mix.

This dish was ordered via the "point and what ever that is method" at a little cafe outside Little India.

These strange little things are pancakes filled with cheese, red beans and peanut butter. I swear the cheese was the exact same recipe as the  Kraft Singles of my youth.

 It is physically impossible for me to walk past a Bubble Tea shop without ordering some. This particular cup was a Almond Soy Milk.  It was quite vile. 

 

My first hotel in Singapore, Wanderlust, was in Little India. This dish was from a shop not too far from there, a spicy vegetable dish with cheese Naan.  Cheese and bread are a combination that is universally delectable.

America has pretty much the most disappointing airport food possible. This is not the case elsewhere, as this flavorful chicken curry with prata shows.  Prata is another iconic dish of Singapore, it is a layered, flaky flat bread, crisped up on a flattop right before service. Great for dunking in curry sauce.

Taro bubble tea is simple pleasure I can never get enough of. This cup was from Gong Cha, a chain famous for serving the fat-straw-slurpable beverage.

Many countries in SE Asia do variations of  crushed ice desserts.  Far removed and far more delicious than the artificially flavored, colors that do no occur in nature, American Snow Cones.

The example on the left was mango and coconut. On the right, red beans, grass jelly and taro. Both were a great way to cool off from the Singaporean humidity and  heat and humidity.

These examples were soursop (left) and creamed corn (right). If you ever thought that creamed corn over crushed ice would taste good, you would be just as horribly wrong and this shop that has this funky and failed dish on the menu.

Soursop is however quite delicious, what ever the hell a soursop is...

American breakfast also pales in comparison to the rest of the world. Why would anyone want a bowl of soggy corn flakes when you could have a hot bowl congee (rice porridge)  with nubbins of pork offal swimming through it?

Silkie black chicken are a breed just not seen in the US. This was a bowl of soup made with the bird. Many shops sell this as a Medicinal soup, and it tasted about as good a medicinal grape Nyquil....

 Soup Dumplings, why can't I find these little pouches of liquid love in the States?  Served at a temperature slightly higher than napalm, they are a lesson in patience delivered in a steamer.

Of all the famous Singaporean dishes, chicken rice is the most famous. By cooking the rice in the chicken broth, the rice is really the star of the plate with the chicken just along for decoration. A dish I don't know if I could ever get enough of.

And as perhaps my favorite food moment of the entire trip, Mangalitsa pork belly, griddled with kimchi and other Korean side dishes. 

But once I got to Mangolitsa I know you stopped reading and started drooling on your keyboard.

Thirteen Desserts

 The thirteen desserts are the traditional dessert foods used in celebrating Christmas in the French region of Provence. The "big supper") ends with a ritual 13 desserts, representing Jesus Christ and the 12 apostles. The first four of these are known as the "four beggars" (les quatre mendiants), representing the four mendicant monastic orders: Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinian and Carmelites. [Wikipedia]

    Raisins (Dominicans)
    Walnuts or hazelnuts[4] (Augustines)
    Dried figs (Franciscans)
    Almonds (Carmelites)

 I am heading to a Christmas party, and it would be rude to show up empty handed, so I made.

1.        Raisin filled sugar cookies
2.        Candied Hazelnuts
3.        Fig Pinwheels
4.        Almond Cookies
5.        Dark Chocolate Tart
6.        Coffee and White Chocolate Tart
7.        Crème Brulee
8.        Apple Tart
9.        Cherry Clafouti
10.      Lemon Bars
11.      Cinnamon twists
12.      Pears poached in Mulled Red Wine
13.      Bacon Jigglers.

Fig Pinwheel cookies, Almond cookies, Raisin filled cookies and Hazelnut brittle.

Half dark chocolate, half coffee and White Chocolate tart.

Creme Brulee.

Apple Tart

Cherry Clafouti

Lemon Bars

Cinnamon Twists.

Pears poached in red wine

 Bacon Jigglers. These were less than the crowd pleaser that I had hoped for...