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....

Pizza

There are only two types of Pizza, thin and deep dish. Anything else claiming to be pizza is poor imitation.

Deep dish pizza must be properly deep, 3/4 inch minimum. If your deep dish pizza is cooked through in less than half an hour you are being lied to about it's deepness.  

Geno's East of Chicago are proper preparers of this type of pizza perfection. And I suggest all who wish to reach enlightenment study here. Come hungry and patient. Long hair and Bourbon Sour are optional.


I do not pretend to  compete with Chicago's pizza in my home kitchen. I practice the art of thin crust at home.  And as there are rules for deep dish, so must you follow the One Commandment of thin crust pizza; No Bending.

Thin crust pizza must have a crisp crust, if it is flexible enough to bend, then you have a soggy crust. No doubt those who are members to the cult of New York style pizza will disagree with me here.

  

I ate at John's Pizzeria in New York. and it was quite good, other than the soggy, flimsy crust.  No that I have offend millions of people; on to the discussion of pizza cooking hardware.

While I would love to have a wood fired, brick oven to cook my pizza,  my bank account and local zoning laws do not support that. 

So the a ceramic Pizza Stone is the nearest many will come to that goal. I have owned two such devices, and as shown above, they both cracked. They are also impossible to scrub the little bits of burnt cheese off.  The self clean function of a modern over is very effective at carbonizing all mozzarella remains off of a pizza stone. That same function also works well to turn one pizza stone into multiple small stones, as I found out with my first model.

Given the severe limitations of a ceramic pizza stone, I purchased a Baking Steel from Stoughton Steel. Basically a laser cut plate of 1/2 inch thick mild steel. No doubt Stoughton has a great margin on these things, but fools like I buy them, so more power too them.

This  30 lbs hunk of steel lives in the bottom of my oven. I did try to place it on a rack, but the bow the rack took was concerning.  Preheat oven for half an hour at 550*f, then switch the broiler on and you are ready to enter Crispy Crust Nirvana.