Workbook

Variation on a Theme

 

 

Saying that presentation comes second, after flavor, of course, makes for great theory, but we really do put it into practice. Sometimes that process of arranging and rearranging is an important part of constructing a finished dish; I find I learn more about the components themselves and how we can further manipulate them. And by trying this and that, new ideas are improvised on the spot.

 

 

 

With the recent discovery of our caramel sheets, I began thinking of riffing on the idea of the familiar caramel-dipped apple. There’s a fascinating contrast at play, notably the soft, rich caramel against the crisp and juicy raw apple. In most plated dessert situations, apples are often cooked, transformed, and laden with spice; we rarely get a glimpse of their formerly snappy tendencies.

Part of the plan in preserving that freshness involved taking a page from the Sam Mason playbook, borrowing his idea of a stewed apple confit set with gellan gum. I’ve always loved how mixing low and high acyl gellan provides a toothsome, poached fruit quality. I simply switched out a slowly cooked apple purée with one of fresh green apple, heated just enough so not to prematurely set once incorporated into the hydrated gellan.

 

 

 

So, with a fresh tray of our caramel film and the green apple gelée- set into various shapes- I could then play around with plate presentations, and just how these two components worked in tandem. Interestingly, I kept finding myself increasing the proportion of caramel to apple for balance, or figuring out a way to wrap or layer the apple in such a way, that there was sufficient caramel in each bite. What follows are various exercises toward a pre-dessert or full plated dish. Some themes that inspired me include terrines, mille feuilles, maki rolls, and of course, the classic caramel-apple on a stick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was all just the result of just an hour of messing around, so we’re not quite there yet. The components themselves are in a state of flux as well, but I’ve included the latest versions of them here:

 

Download: Caramel Film- Workbook 25.10.2010

Download: Green Apple Gelee- Workbook 25.10.2010

 

 

 

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. 

 

 

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.

 
 

 

Conquered

Concord grapes always tend to sneak up on us. A first signal of autumn, it’s not uncommon to begin seeing them as early as late August. I love them, but for some reason I usually get stuck for ideas. Because of their seeds, they have to processed, and in the end, they just seem to lose a little something along the way. And simply turning them into coulis or sorbet seems boring.

 

Undeterred, we've set about blending and straining several cases since their arrival, incorporating them into a few different applications this season.

 

  

We're still exploring complimentary flavors via pate de fruit. Here, concord grape is teamed up with pear:

 

Though we haven't ever introduced gelatin clarification into a regular production or menu item, we play around with the method from time to time. It's a great way to transform a muddy-looking grape puree into a more refined end result. A dosage of 0.5% gelatin is dissolved into the puree, and then its frozen. The solid block is then allowed to slowly thaw through a chinois, producing a translucent to clear juice; the nasty bits get caught up in the protein network provided by the gelatin. Knowing that tannins can sometimes affect certain hydrocolloids, we haven't played around with this enough to notice.

   

Cheese has found its way back into some of our pre-dessert work; most recently, chevre has been given the spherification treatment. We using the 'reverse' method, of course, and a 0.8% alginate/water bath The natural calcium present in the goat cheese mixture is sufficient for the skin to form. Heavy production of this and a couple other spheres has taught us how a holding bath can help us control the end result. Storing the finished orbs in syrup make sense in a sweet application. A weak syrup actually helps to nicely 'tighten' their shape, though we learned the hard way that the syrup itself can suck away too much internal moisture, shrinking the spheres down to half their original size.

 

The grapes enter the dish in the form of cold oil/agar agar pearls, and the whole is finished with candied walnut and a half-grind of black pepper.

 

Concord season has also afforded us the perfect opportunity to work on a technique that's been on my to-do list for months. Borrowing a concept from the El Bulli camp, the goal is to create a stable liquid that can be baked into the center of a cake. I've seen a few minor variations, but the basic idea is to gel a fruit mixture with aglinate and calcium gluconate, followed by blending, molding, and freezing. The frozen center is then inserted into a batter. I've seen a similar effect achieved by Stupak, using gellan to  give his carameilzed brioche pudding a liquid caramel interior.

   

Here, the soft grape is baked into a standard financier piped into silicon molds. Perhaps I see a peanut butter and grape variation in our future.

Download: Concord Grape Pâte de Fruit- Workbook 01.11.09

Download: Concord Grape Pearls- Workbook 01.11.09

Download: Chèvre Spherification- Workbook 01.11.09

 

 

 
 
 

Just Yolks

 

In the process of taking a closer look at the composition and structure of our everyday ingredients, the hopeful goal is that we’ll arrive at a better understanding of their functionality, both on their own and in concert with others. A fringe benefit of this research is when such information aids the chef in thinking outside of the box, linking functionality with an actual application.

 

It was through my friend Cesar that I discovered a novel approach to pasta being explored by Carlo Cracco in Milan. In essence, Cracco’s innovation was to subtract from the already short list of pasta’s traditional ingredients; but what he decided to take away may come as a surprise. If we were to take away the flour (or rather, the proteins and starch it contains), what’s left? Eggs? Water? How can that alone give us a reasonable facsimile of a noodle?

 

Cracco’s  egg pasta is the result of whole egg yolks that are individually packed into a ‘crust’ of salt, sugar, and a bulking agent, such as a bean purée. As the yolk ‘cures’, a good deal of the yolk’s water is extracted (remember, water makes up 50% of an egg yolk), passing through its permeable membrane. The liquid yolk has suddenly transformed into a workable dough-like consistency, behaving much like pasta- it can be rolled, shaped, dried further, if desired, and finally cooked. The method allows us to bypass the potential drawbacks a flour-based dough may present.

 

 

Such a realization affords us an opportunity to immediately make connections to similar techniques we’ve already seen, or to think outside the box altogether. That’s where constant reading and research pays off too; Cracco’s pasta instantly led me to take another look at Alinea’s butter-poached egg drops, dried egg sheets, and egg yolk truffles. And sometimes chance and luck have a way of bringing ideas together even if they experienced separately.

 

The technique employed by Cracco is time-intensive; the curing process can take several hours. But a different approach- a shortcut, if you will- can yield similar results in mere minutes. I first saw this variation while just hanging out in someone else’s kitchen; granted, it wasn’t an ordinary service, rather they happened to be testing possible techniques to employ in an upcoming episode of Iron Chef. Here, unadulterated egg yolks were spread into a thin film and gently steamed: instant egg noodles. What emerges has the look and feel of perfectly cooked pasta. And always wanting to track such an idea back to its original source, I’ve since learned the inspiration can be traced as far as Pedro Subijana of Akelarre in San Sebastien.

 

     
 

While I haven’t exactly come to any specific sweet application (though I instantly saw it as a possible wrapper for our recent corn ‘canneloni’ custard), there is certainly enough fertile ground for this component to grow upon. And there’s no real recipe to share, though I’d concede there is still room to explore and tweak in search of a pastry-relevant outcome.

 

That said, I couldn’t help myself- pictured below is an unabashedly savory interpretation: the inner line cook in me took one recent batch of fettucine-sized noodles, simply heated and dressed them with a touch of cream, butter, Parmigianino, smoke paprika, black pepper, and chive. In my own play, I’ve used both fresh yolks and a pasteurized liquid product. No doubt, this may be a great way to showcase the color and flavor some very special farm-raised eggs, but one early conclusion I came to was that I prefer the consistency of the pasteurized yolks.

 

 

I don’t have it in front of me, but also of interest is another technique (from Cracco as well, if I recall) detailed in a recent English issue of Apicius. Treating the egg yolk much like a ready-made spherification, he extracts a fair amount of its bulk, which is then replaced by another liquid, of course, with the aid of a syringe. All the while, the contents remain encased with the yolk’s own membrane. Definitely worth a look, and a moment to reconsider and redefine the role of our ingredients in low-tech ways...

 

 

 

Michigan Banana

 

That sounds like the punch line to a joke, but it’s just one colorful alias among many for a curious fruit. The paw paw also goes by Hoosier banana, poorman's banana, etc. I say curious, because it seems out place, as if it should come from the tropics. Yet this is truly an unique American specimen, its growing range covering the Great Lakes down to the Gulf, and from Texas east to the coast. It tends to thrive in the Midwest; the individual varieties themselves evoke visions of the heartland: Shenandoah, Allegheny, Taytwo, and Pa. Golden. 

 

     

 

Though I hail from Michigan myself, this year brought my first encounter with the paw paw. Visually, it could be mistaken for a small green mango, the size varying from three to six inches in length. On slicing it open, a soft white to yellow flesh is revealed, with a central grouping of hard, brown seeds. The fragrance hits you immediately- notes of banana, mango, and melon all combined. The appearance, texture, and flavor all call to mind the exotic cherimoya, or guanabana- indeed it is a distant relative, the only member of the Annonaceae family that thrives in a temperate climate.

 

     

 

Our first delivery of paw paws would be our only one. The season is ridiculously short, straddling the last weeks of September into the first of October. Due to its fragility and quick ripening, commercial viability is limited. They don’t ship well; each of our samples arrived carefully nestled in foam packaging and bubble-wrap. To preserve what we didn’t eat immediately, I figured the best test was to incorporate them into a sorbet. And without any other guideline to follow, we moved ahead by referencing its tropical cousins.

 

     
 

 

Download: Paw Paw Sorbet- Workbook 23.10.09

 

Keep these in mind when the season rolls in again next year; the best source for fresh paw paws (and more) is Earthy Delights.

 

 

 

Minor Revelations

 

It's true, we don't typically start out on something with expectations that it will fail. But nor do we assume we'll knock it out of the park on the first swing. This corn custard, however, began as a simple exercise yet yielded a beautiful, near-perfect result.

It’s just such a minor revelation that can turn a dull, normal day into a great one.

 

 

     
 

The original idea was actually a voluntary act of kindness, troubleshooting for someone else- a similar approach that lacked refinement. Now I hope I can find a place for it myself.

 

The goal was to create a heat-stable, yet soft, corn custard. Corn was briefly simmered in milk, then drained. Agar agar and locust bean gum were hydrated into the milk, while the corn was puréed and strained. Iliked the idea of adding some richness via a bit of egg yolk- its function was less about thickening and more about flavor. The two mixtures were put back together and seasoned before dispensing into cylinder molds.

 

 

To balance the salty/savory aspect, I sprinkled the custard with sugar and applied the torch. Pictured here is a plating scheme with some other components we normally within arm’s reach: hazelnut praline cream, popcorn, orange peel, and piment d’espelette.  

Download Corn Custard- Workbook 22.10.09