Workbook

Downsized

 

 

The true joy of cooking, for me anyway, is recognizing the amazing results of simple transformation, the inherent nature hidden within a product. In that sense, cooking is often less about manipulation, and more an act of enabling something to be what it ‘wants’ to be, fostering the right conditions for a few basic ingredients to create something way, way more than just the sum of its parts.  Bread certainly teaches us that, and cheese, too. And recently, the cacao bean taught me that when we approach our ingredients with respect, of their properties and potential, we appreciate what they express a lot more.

 

Enter my love of praline. Simple. Hazelnuts and sugar. Roasted, caramelized, and ground. Two ingredients- or three, if you count heat- and enough force to render them into a paste. One of my favorite flavors, it’s a smooth and rich complexity a hazelnut on its own just faintly suggests. Yeah, I could just eat the stuff with a spoon. It never ceases to inspire me.

 

A few months back I had been playing around with some classic bistro desserts for a consulting project. One of my favorites of the group was a simple mille feuille, an attempt to in some way channel the ethereal lightness of the one I’d had at Arpege several years ago. The filling in my version was a simple praline mousseline- just a matter of loosening up the praline paste just enough to take on the addition of gelatin and whipped cream. I can’t say it flew off the menu, but I sure loved it.

 

 

 

Working on a different project just a couple weeks ago, it hit me that the real inspiration was the classic Paris-Brest- a large choux ring topped with smaller puffs, all filled with a praline cream- strike that- the choux merely becomes a delivery system for it. Done well, it deserves its classic status. I nicked the all-important recipe for the cream from Gilles Renusson, one of those great pastry masters we probably don’t talk enough about. We shrunk it down into an individual quasi-plated dessert…

 

 

Download: Praline Choux- Workbook 21.6.2010

 

 

But I couldn’t leave it alone. Next we downsized it even further, to petit four scale. We pride ourselves, in a way, in how small we miniaturize these items, but even I was surprised when I realized they make a dime look big in comparison…

 

 

 

 

Spaghetti Day

 

I recently dusted off the 'spaghetti kit' I got from Koerner way back. Basically, the kit consists of coiled surgical tubing, a squeeze bottle, and an attachment for the iSi canister allowing removal of the noodle with a blast of gas.

Of course, I'm rarely, if ever a first-adopter: it's been a solid decade since El Bulli shocked the world with its consomme noodles, rendered heat stable with the use of agar agar. My pal Johnny Iuzzini even went light years further with the idea, running carrageenan-gelled mixtures through a peristalic pump to ramp-up production. And one of my favorite pastry chefs, Patrice Demers of Montreal's Newtown, featured a composed dish incorporating a clementine noodle in his last book. I'd been thinking about it a long time, too, but despite others being able to pull it off well, I never quite settled on how best to employ the technique to fit what we do, rather than just riff off of someone else.

 

 

A noodle- conventional or otherwise- is a challenging texture in a dessert context, something I realized many years ago while attempting several variations on sweet ravioli. It's tough, in that you either have to go all the way, or not at all, and I don't see us doing bowlfuls of faux pasta at LB anytime soon. But shrinking it down to a pre-dessert bite seemed to preserve the novelty without beating anyone over the head.

Here we extracted strawberry water, clarified it, and set it with agar and locust bean gum (I think to create a longer, chewier texture, I'll substitute the LBG for gelatin next time or try Johnny's carrageenan blend; it also threw off a lot of water through syneresis after the fact). I coiled one long single noodle onto a demitasse spoon and imbedded tiny,tiny cubes of strawberry pate de fruit, a thin slice of semi-candied celery and leaf, fresh strawberry, and orange zest.

 

 Download Strawberry Noodle- Workbook 14.6.09

As a base for the noodle, I used this strawberry consomme (further clarified with 0.5% gelatin) that I wrote about a couple years ago in this Notes From the Kitchen post. A puree would work just fine, but wouldn't offer the same translucence.

Download Strawberry Consomme

 

 

 

Snapshots

Of course, so many moments speed by without proper documentation. For instance, this year's New Zealand greengage crop came and went without me going on about it like I do every year. At least here anyway. We did end up discussing its merits, clafoutis-style, on Martha Stewart Radio back in late March. And then Chef and I shot a greengage-yogurt-rhubarb dish for photographer Mary-Laetitia Gerval's next book project. But I digress. A few more snapshots from our kitchen and beyond... 

 

   

The LB team also busted out a new cookbook over a mere few weeks in April. My contribution to the project- a companion book to ER's PBS series- included about twenty dessert recipes. Above, a few of my reference images for the recipe tester- Roasted White Chocolate Panna Cotta, Blueberry-Almond Budino, and a classic Chocolate Mousse. And below, evidence discovered along the way that not all vessels are in fact oven-proof.

 

 

As usual, Spring was event season here in NYC, and I must have averaged one such out-of-house gig a week. Above, for the Tap-n-Tapas event, we riffed on our pistachio-cherry-white chocolate dessert. A few weeks later we twisted it further: black sesame, soy, mandarin, yuzu, and cherry, for the inaugural Lucky Rice festival. Below, going back further, our prototype for the SoBe dinner honoring Daniel Boulud. Our plate-up for 600 was a mashed-up vacherin of sorts: lemon, praline, coconut, cocoa pain de genes, and meringue.

 

 

When you get the call to make a special surprise birthday 'cake' for Dave Arnold and Nils Noren, you accept the challenge without question. Above, my test semla- a favorite dessert from Nils' homeland- essentially a sweet bread flavored with cardamom, hollowed out, it's interior shredded and soaked in milk, blended with almond paste, and stuffed back in, before being finished with clouds of whipped cream. Pretty good, I thought. But not as cool as Brooks Headley's commisioned Fudgie-the-Whale, complete with decor of fried pasta. This will give you a good sense of how the evening progressed.

 

 

Above, a loose strawberry-rhubarb tart designed for our project in DC. Below, changes made there earlier in the year, rocking out the classics, if you will: Profiteroles, Praline Mille Feuille, Apple Tatin, and a coupe- Pistachio, Vanilla, Rasberry, and Caramel. Heading back this coming week to do more; I will also be paying a visit to the White House.

 

I haven't yet really followed through on the 'Covers' idea, but not for lack of inspiration. Pulled this book off the shelf a while back. As you can see, it saw quite a bit of use when it appeared in the mid-90s. I must have lifted every single component in that book at one point. Classic indeed.

 

Breakfast functions at LB aren't all that common, but rather than out-source pastry when they do pop up, I recently decided to upgrade and produce everything in-house because, well, we can. It's been fun re-learning this facet of the profession after fifteen years of restaurant work. Simon took the lead in fine-tuning the doughs and lamination. In addition to bagels (of course), we're now at the ready to pump out croissant, pain au chocolat, several danish, muffins, etc. Good stuff.

   

 

 
   
 
 
  

On the plated front, a sketch: Black Sesame, Mandarin, Cherry, Shiso

 

 

Another rough draft. Almost too similar to the Black Sesame dish in terms of techniques and components, this is a play on the idea of Tres Leches. It all began with Jesus, and after much back and forth, he put together a traditional version, which led to this interpretation, blown out to include a condensed milk ice cream, brown butter micro-sponge, banana, coconut, and caramelized white chocolate. Needs more work.

 

 

I traveled quite a bit in the interim- quick trips to Miami, LA, Seattle- but the highlight was a chance to tour cacao plantations in the Dominican Republic. Hosted by Michel Cluizel, a small group of us pastry chef types were offered access to the Rizek family's Los Ancones and La Esmeralda plantations outside San Francisco de Macoris. To say that it was inspiring would be an understatement. No matter how much of you read about it from a book, there's just no substitute for seeing, feeling, and tasting the process from tree to bar up close and on location. It will change your view of chocolate, for sure. We were suprised with a last-minute challenge to prepare a dessert on the plantation for local chefs and media. The group I led produced a conceptual dish inspired by the surroundings, composed of hand-ground cocoa paste, young coconut, green mango, cashews, lime, ripe mango pearls, goat's milk caramel, freshly-roasted nibs, beans/pulp taken straight from fresh pods, flower buds, and garnish made from chocolate produced in the next room.

   

 

 

I've been digging these little matcha truffles. We've messed around with them off and on, first for the Lucky Rice event, and most recently, for the lunch attended by the Dalai Lama, where they found a place in boxes of take-away chocolates.

 

Lots of other fun stuff happened, but the question will always remain, 'What's next?'

As always, it's a pleasure to be here.