Workbook

Sweetness, Developed

 

 

Among our recent menu changes is the welcome return of sweet potato, and our vanilla infused sorbet. I think I first became hip to the notion of refined sweet potato desserts from an early appearance by Joachim Splichal in Art Culinaire, almost twenty years ago now (yes, I'm getting old). The key to success is the slow roasting and development of the sweet potato's natural sugars, which need such coaxing; boiling doesn't even come close in ternms of flavor. We roast them whole, and when they've wrinkled and begun to ooze a caramel goodness onto the sheet pan, the sweet potatoes are ready. Peeled, and run through a tamis, the puree is then combined with the vanilla syrup and processed.

 

The new tasting menu dish finds the sweet potato simply paired with a dark chocolate cremeux (Cluizel's 'Los Ancones' estate, which I visited earlier in the year) and a bourbon caramel. I still find myself streamlining, slowly moving away from too many flourishes. I still have the urge to throw something else on this plate, but I think we've captured the essential.

 

Download: Sweet Potato Sorbet-Workbook 19.10.10

 

 

Smoke, Salt, and Sweet

 

 

It started a few weeks ago. The Chef had been wanting to play around with a dry chorizo component for a first course dish, and between the sous chefs and I, we figured the best place to begin would be a powder. The precious fat collected from very slowly rendered chorizo was simply blended with tapioca maltodextrin.

The flavor of spicy pimenton crept up on you, and lingered for some time. Once incorporated into the intended dish, however, its subtlety was lost. As my savory counterparts went back to the proverbial drawing board, I snatched what remained of the experiment and headed to the pastry kitchen.

 

 

 

Trends are funny. I barely take notice of them anymore. I do find that once something hits the mainstream, someone quickly steps out from the shadows to proclaim it 'over'. That seems to be the case with our beloved bacon; the ubiquitous pork belly has yet to completey disappear from menus far and wide, but we do seem to be moving on. Pastry chefs have yet to fully retreat from the pig- I think there are still a lot of ways we can harness its salty, smoky allure. 

So, I decided chorizo was next.

 

 

 

The brainstorm mentioned above just happened to go down the week of the recent International Chef's Congress, to which I'd been running back and forth before lunch service at the restaurant. All of those out-of-town chefs have to eat somewhere, and I found myself with three or four parties of pastry chef colleagues in our dining room, all in the same night. I was delighted to share my new obsession with them.

Loaded into a shell casted from dark chocolate, the powder was spooned over a drop of caramel, a touch of lemon confit, and an extra hit of smoked salt. With little else to get in the way, the chorizo flavor seemed more intense. Perhaps the fattiness of the melting cocoa butter even helped carry that smoky flavor longer. Presented as a transitional petit four after dessert proper, I realized it might also work as well, if not better, as a transition early on, between savory and sweet.

 

 

 

By coincidence (no, really!) this week's episode of Avec Eric finds me in the pastry kitchen with Eric Ripert, after his inspiring trip to Colonnata and a visit with its top producer of lardo. You know what we made. Check your local listings for air date and times. 

 

 

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.

 
 

 

Blocked

 

One of our recent favorites pairs fresh cherries with pistachio. Like so many summer fruits, I find the more minimal the treatment, the better the results will be. Here, the cherries are merely halved and kissed with a pinch of sugar and a pass with the blowtorch.

The pistachio enters as a block of an airy parfait into which we've inserted a cylinder of our old friend, caramelized white chocolate. Rounding out the composition are cubes of pistachio pain de genes, lemon cream and confit, and chopped caramelized pistachio nuts.

 

As with almost all of our mousse preparations, this parfait begins with our low-sugar pate a bombe. We initially had problems adding this directly to our pistachio paste (we use the Fabri product, sweet enough on its own to flavor the parfait without additional sugar). The mixture would inevitably sieze or contain innumerable un-incorporated lumps. The solution was to first produce a more stable emulsion with cream; this is great on its own as well, either as a plating component or even as a bonbon filling.

It also seemed logical to dissolve our gelatin in the warm pate a bombe mixture before whipping, but the final volume was reduced, and in the event it whipped too long and too cool, it would also sieze in the folding process. We simply try to keep all the components at or just above room temperature- the pate a bombe, pistachio base, and whipped cream- to avoid those little nuggets of gelatin from forming while mixing into the base.

Download: Pistachio Cream-Workbook 25.7.09

Download: Pistachio Parfait-Workbook 25.7.09

Effervescent

 

This bubbly bit came from a random sift of files that tend to pile up. I was delighted to find the notes from well over a year back, when I attended a demo by Ramon Morato, promoting Chocovic and his new (at the time) book, a mammoth tome I still haven't managed to get myself. Ramon embodies all the qualities of a great chef: he's a generous teacher, a skilled technician, a creative spirit, occasionally expressing himself with a sense of humor.

Presented by Morato and intended as a digestive mignardise, the memory of this little tablet came back to me at just the right time, while planning out a big presentation I'm working on later this month. It's simply white chocolate encapsulating sugar, powdered fruit, baking soda, and citric acid. The mixture is piped and pressed between acetate or stamped out, obviously remaining inert until the cocoa butter melts in the mouth, allowing the acid and base to react with each other in fizzy fun.

 

 

It's not something I ever see hitting the tables in our restaurant- it can be a bit jarring if the proportions are off- but it's a great, simple to tool to use in explaining how baking soda or other leaveners actually work in doughs. It can also push the idea of how we can explore other mixtures of acitve/inactive ingredients and reactions, how the forms and functions of components might become kinetic rather than just static food on the plate.

Download: Effervescent White Chocolate-Workbook 2.5.09

 

Separation Anxiety

 

It's safe to say my goals for this second blog were ambitious. A year's worth of daily posts- what would amount to a couple of books' worth of material- might require a discipline just outside my reach. I almost made it 100 days, but after a few bits of computer-less travel, the backlog began to mount, and keeping up seemed futile. Obviously the work and the documentation continue, I just don't want the focus to shift to the presentation of it, away from the 'doing' of it. It's important to remind myself that the blog is just the vehicle, not the primary catalyst nor a substitute for real work.

But, oh, have we been busy.

One of the many new developments and projects has been my ongoing collaboration and dialog with a noted food scientist. In addition to other discussions I'm engaged in and things I'm reading, this cook-scientist relationship has begun to affect my overall approach to cooking over the last few weeks, and not necessarily in the obvious way. It's a complex thing that I can't quite verbalize yet.

I feel a subtle shift not only in my perception- of looking at cooking methods and ingredients in a more holistic sense- but also of intention. So much of what we do represents a rote means designed to take us to a specific end. I'm now beginning to understand how to work from the other end: 'Here's something cool, what can I do with it?', rather than, 'This is what I want, how do I make it?' The former requires more time, thought, and attention. The latter simply relies on a solution that doesn't necessarily translate to knowledge; it's an intellectual band-aid of sorts. It's the difference between writing a recipe and following one. It's pushing yourself to answer every question with yet another question. I don't know, I'm still figuring it out. But it's a fun process.

Among the dozens of ideas (practical and theoretical) I've been discussing, one grabbed my attention not because it offered any solution, but rather it spawned question after question. Long story short, a discovery was struck by scientists researching ice cream: used in a very specific percentage, locust bean gum has a tendency to repel the casein in milk, resulting in phase separation. In simplistic terms, the milk will essentially split into a whey layer and a casein/fat layer (this is usually corrected with the use of carrageenan). Under 0.1% there isn't enough locust bean gum to create the separation, and over 0.15%, the mixture becomes too viscous for the split to occur. But intentionally hitting the middle was an experiment I just wanted to see for myself.

 

So the questions begin, by trying to exploit a problem that scientists have tried to fix. What, if anything, can we do with this? How do we better control the result? Can we speed up the process? What happens when we introduce other ingredients and which phase will that ingredient join? What happens with different forms of dairy? Even if it is a dead end, it's a process that taught me something new and spurred further thought. I could never have imagined this as an end result; it can only be a starting point for something else. In some small way, I think this little trick represents my own evolving thoughts about cooking, the fundamentals upon which everything rests.

So as I pick up after a month of cyber-inactivity, I'll leave you with a favorite milk related pre-dessert, a star anise-infused chocolate shot, and a few thoughts to ponder about cooking and life in general: How often do we ask ouselves questions? How do we go about finding the answers? And are we asking the right questions?

Download Milk Chocolate Shot-Workbook 1.5.09

 

 

Fade to Black

A visit down to our outpost in Washington DC had been long overdue, and one of the perceived holes that needed to filled on the menu was a chocolate cake. It didn't matter exactly what form it took, all I knew that chocolate cake would be at the top of my agenda.

 

In thinking of various options, from a simple layer cake (boring) to the old warm chocolate cake (kinda cool now in a retro way, but still tired) and beyond, I remembered always wanting to play around with black cocoa. And in the realm of cake bases, fewer are more simple, better tasting, or cocoa-centric than a flourless method. That was where I'd begin.

 

But the more I researched black cocoa, it became apparent that it wasn't this dark and secret special ingredient I had been missing all these years.  Rather, it's just treated with more alkaline to produce a darker color (think Oreo black), which doesn't ultimately add much in the flavor department, just a harsher bitterness.

 

After trying a couple of different proportions, I quickly realized that, in the end, the cake was just fine, if not better, with our conventional cocoa. I'm sure there are, however, appropriate applications for black. And the cake that eventually emerged happily exceeded expectation; it was refined enough to put our name on it, while not being too fussy for a casual bistro menu.

 

Download: Flourless Chocolate Cake- Workbook 26.3.09

Back in Black

 

I feel like I've been ignoring our old friend black sesame.

   

 

The last macaron we did contained a center of ground caramelized sugar and black sesame seeds, further mellowed out by a hit gianduja. We could never get it super-fine; I liked the texture, but I always thought it needed improvement. Then we decided to give macarons a rest, and our sesame efforts drifted elsewhere.

This is the result of trying a typical soft rocher approach: the black sesame paste with added cocoa butter and dark chocolate. It's a delicate mixture to handle, either liquid or solid, but that magic melting point makes it nice to eat. It might need a touch more sugar for some; I purposely chose a low percentage chocolate to help that balance.

Download: Black Sesame Rocher-Workbook 23.3.09

   

Roots

 

There were various odds-and-ends on my to-do list over the Winter, many of which will now have to wait until the season returns. The kitchen had been using parsnips the last few months, and every time I spied them in the walk-in my mind would start to wander.

Switching them out for the usual in a conventional carrot cake is an obvious first move, one that Sam Mason made years ago. For a more straight-forward approach, I took inspiration from Ken Oringer, and a dish I once had at Clio, which combined parsnip, cocoa, and black truffle.

     

     

As I set out to fashion a parsnip custard or panna cotta, I began to consider what form or shape it might take, and in turn, how I might pair a chocolate component. I kept coming back to the simplest yet most effective presentation. I first dropped a mound of dark chocolate ganache in to a bowl, letting it set before pouring in the parsnip cream. Here we maintain a playful element of surprise, and the guest will invariably experience both flavors and textures at once, even if in ever-shifting proportion. Most of all, there's nothing superfluous to distract from the dessert's intended purpose.

   

I did two versions: one in a small bowl, above, and the other in a glass. I definitely prefer the former. And though I may file it away for later in the year, I'll likely be thinking of similar variations, perhaps cauliflower or celery root...

Download: Parsnip Panna Cotta-Workbook 22.3.09

The Best Thing Since

 

Although we've pretty much been a Valrhona house for years, I'm always tasting other chocolates, often bringing them in for very specific uses. We've done this with Amedei, Weiss, and most recently Michel Cluizel. I'm actually beginning to lean heavier on the Cluizel line; my favorite at the moment is their Maralumi Lait. As more and more consumers have become aware of cocoa percentages, I think milk chocolate has gotten a bad rap over the years, scoffed at for being 'pedestrian'. It definitely has its place, and sometimes offers certain subtleties that darker chocolates can't. In addition to the warm caramel and malt flavors, the Maralumi in particular (a whopping 47% cocoa content) has notes of licorice, spice, wood, and toasted bread. A perfect compliment for bread ice cream, of course.

   

I've seen a dozen or so variations on this idea over the years. Perhaps my first encounter was a pain d'epice ice cream by Bernard Loiseau, from the amazing, but short-lived publication Opt Art (if you ever stumble upon one of the six issues they published, buy it). There have been countless other variations bouncing around for sure, even one where milk is inoculated with yeast to provide fermentation and that 'bread' flavor- I never got around to trying that method, but it has always intrigued me.

I like to start with a whole wheat bread, and to provide optimum flavor, I toast the slices until the color has developed and the bread is completely dry. Then it's an overnight soak in whole milk. The resulting milk is a beautiful tan color; we press as much moisture from the bread as possible, but there's still a significant loss- more on that later. The milk also takes on a slight saltiness, which makes sense, as salt would be one of the primary soluble materials left in the bread.

   

The base is made in the normal manner with one exception. If I'm going to go through the process of making a bread, or better put, toast ice cream, why not a cinnamon toast ice cream? Using a trick that I picked up from Bajard, I fold a cinnamon-sugar mixture into the finished ice cream after it comes out of the machine. The result is a brighter and more intense flavor than infusion can ever offer. And as a bonus, the sugar gives it a texture that is not unlike a slice of actual cinnamon toast. We simply reserve half the sugar from the otherwise conventional base for this purpose.

Download: Cinnamon Toast Ice Cream-Workbook 13.03.09

     

To capitalize on the affinity I assumed the Maralumi Lait might have for the ice cream, we fashioned a simple cremeux. We had saved the spent bread, which would have made a nice puffed garnish (using the tapioca starch method mentioned here), but opted to go with super-thin slices of bread brushed with olive oil and toasted. A small amount of the soaked bread did get incorporated into an anglaise, which was then further lightened with whipped cream.

Download: Maralumi Cream-Workbook 13.03.09