2012: The Alien Ingredient Series

Each week of 2012 here at One Block West Restaurant, we are aiming to find, use, and document two new-to-us (aka "alien") ingredients for a total of 100 during the year. I have worked with hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of ingredients from all over the world in the past 30 years of cooking. But a quick trip through our new international food market here in lovely Winchester, VA reminded me that there are hundreds more ingredients out there that I have never worked with.

So the crew and I are on this mission to document what we find and are using, to not only broaden our own knowledge, but truth be told, to have some fun too. We love surfing through markets for cool stuff. We're just like kids in candy stores!

The 2012 Alien Ingredient Series

1. Dwarf Truffle Peaches
2. St. Germain
3. Culantro
4. Epazote
5. Banana Flower
6. Dragon Fruit
7. Pickled Eggplant
8. Coquitos
9. Buddha's Hand
10. Nilgai Antelope

Alien Ingredient #10: Nilgai Antelope

The only antelope I have cooked before is our native Pronghorn which was objectionably gamy, so hoping for a tasty antelope, I was happy to get my hands on some Nilgai, a large—huge in comparison to Prongers—wary, and speedy antelope which is native to northern India and Pakistan, but which is now escaped in great numbers and thriving in south Texas, where it is considered a nuisance.

You see here a big hunk of leg that I have started breaking down into 5-ounce steaks. We grilled the meat straight away to medium rare just to check the flavor profile. The flavor is beefy (grass-fed beef) with a venison overtone, nothing objectionable at all. You can see in the photo that there is almost no intramuscular fat, similar to venison or ostrich. The texture of this leg meat, while not at all tough, has a decided chew to it. I actually like the texture which is more like New York strip than tenderloin.

Customers were not at all happy with having antelope as a choice on the menu. I just barely covered the cost of the antelope before having to pitch it. Nobody, but nobody was willing to try it, no matter how hard the servers sold it.

Vote: While not objectionable in any way, the flavor just isn't there to support the monstrous price tag. We'd eat it again, but for slightly less money, we'd rather have an awesome elk steak.

Alien Ingredient #9: Buddha's Hand

Call it Buddha's Hand all you want, but doesn't it look like a lemon and a squid got together in the walk-in and produced this alien-looking offspring? I've seen these crazy citruses (Citrus medica var. sarcodactylis) also known as fingered citrons on and off over the years in chef magazines and on the web, but just never had the money or motivation to try them. (Did you catch that Greek above? Sarco "fleshy" and dactyl "finger." Pretty appropriate, huh?)

Cutting open the Buddha's hand, the center is all pith, but the pith is more sweet than bitter, and perfectly edible raw or cooked—the cooked pieces that we infused in cream and strained out are delicious lemon candies. The rind has a bitter aftertaste to it that a standard lemon does not. The fragrance is more at Meyer lemon than standard lemon and the flavor is lemony with a haunting note of lemongrass.

With the rind and the pith being edible, I can imagine all kinds of wonderful uses for Buddha's hand citrons, from savory (sliced and sautéed to go with fish) to sweet. For my first foray, I infused half of this one into two quarts of heavy cream and made that into crème brûlée. The staff's verdict on the result? Awesome!

Vote: Price be damned, this is the best tasting source of lemon flavor ever!

Vegetarian Chef's Tasting

This is a tale about letting go.

Last evening, we cooked a 5-course vegetarian tasting on a relatively slow Friday night, slow enough to let me take photos, something that I was unable to do all during the fall when we were so busy.

I was really happy to have this opportunity to do a vegetarian menu. Getting away from the meat-centric menu really frees my mind, removes constraints about how dishes are usually prepared, and gives me freedom to just do what I am feeling.

I loved each and every dish on this menu and I think we did a great job of putting the ingredients that we have now in dead winter on a plate in a creative and inviting and (most importantly) delicious manner.

While we were very pleased with the end result, the journey in getting there wasn't all that simple. Some menus just write themselves; this one did not. Over the past few years of designing menus, we have come to understand that simplicity is better than complexity, flavor trumps presentation, and if it doesn't feel right, it isn't. In short, we've learned to let go of pet ideas if they don't fit. There's always another day, another menu, another opportunity to try out that new idea.

A potato cake. This menu almost got derailed by a simple potato cake. For some reason, the Ecuadoran potato cake called the llapingacho insinuated itself into my conscious brain and wouldn't let go. From there, it was an easy enough leap to a full Ecuadoran menu. Over five or six days of brainstorming, we found ourselves putting dishes on the menu simply because they were Ecuadoran, not because they highlighted our local ingredients and not because we had a flavor profile that we were trying to express in a finished dish. This is not the way to design a successful menu. If a dish doesn't speak to you as a chef, discard it and move on.

I finally heeded the warning bells that were gently dinging in the back of my brain and punted the whole Ecuadoran menu save for the llapingachos that sent us off seeking the elusive red herring. At this point, we freed ourselves to get back to highlighting our local ingredients such as Jerusalem artichokes, rapini, and Fairy Tale squash.

As the menu started forming, all of us collectively said about the same time, "I'm not feeling the peanut sauce on the potato cakes." So we struck the traditional peanut sauce and that freed us to strike the rest of the Ecuadoran seasoning (achiote and cilantro) and just to retain that singular characteristic of the llapingacho that makes it stand out in the world's pantheon of potato cakes: the grated cheese in the cake itself.

And that is the lesson to take from this menu: learning to let go is hard but necessary. Don't force it. Keep it simple and distill it to its essence. Feel it and do it.

And now on to the photos.

Jerusalem Artichoke Soup. We have a super abundance of Jerusalem artichokes in our cooler just now and they are a natural for soup. They bring an almost inimitable silky appealing texture to soup. The downside is that they can bring a dull and listless grey color to the party as well. To mask this, we added a tiny bit of roasted red pepper for an orange hue, but not enough to flavor the soup. Too much of a silky soup can really bore your tastebuds, so we had to bring some acid to the party, which we did in the form of a roasted red pepper and goat cheese mousse. The acidic goat cheese is just the thing to keep your palate refreshed. Paired with a lemony Spanish Albariño.

Yukon Gold and Two Onion Potato Cakes. Here are the llapingachos that started this whole menu, made from local Yukon golds with a grated three-milk (goat, sheep, and cow) cheese, green onions, and caramelized onions. To reiterate the cheese, we have sauced these cakes with a warm cheese and beer sauce, using the same cheese as in the potato cakes and a very hoppy amber ale to give the cheese sauce a touch of hoppy bitterness to keep it from being cloying. The green sauce is a green onion cream that brings a cool acid bite to counterpose the rich cheese sauce. Paired with Chilean Pinot Noir. This could have easily paired with a white wine, but the customer's preference is red wine.

French Onion Soup Bruschetta. Not really sure where this dish came from except that we were probably cold on the day that we brainstormed this and wanted soup to warm us up. This is an exercise in reimagining a classic soup. We took the soup and puréed it to become the sauce for the plate and put the onions on top of the croustade rather than under it. High cuisine? Not. Delicious? You bet. Paired with a medium-bodied, lower acidity Willamette Pinot from Yamhill-Carlton.

Rapini "Wellington." Again, I don't remember the genesis of this dish. With three of us throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks, creating dishes is a very crazy process. In any case, we decided to showcase our beautiful local rapini as a quasi-Wellington. I learned long ago that wrapping wet ingredients in puff pastry is a big fail, so we baked the puff separately and then topped it with the lightly bitter rapini, a duxelles of black trumpet mushrooms, and then a bit of herbed soft cheese to help marry the spicy earthiness of the mushrooms with the vegetal bitterness of the rapini. In the South, we always serve vinegar with our braised greens. The plate sauce of porcini stock and balsamic vinegar finished with a hint of cream (to round out the vinegar's tang) is a nod to that. Paired with a very high end Argentine Malbec.

Fairy Tale Squash Flan. Eat your vegetables! There's probably no more sinful way to eat your squash than as a silky flan flavored with cinnamon and maple syrup, and garnished with gianduia, crème anglaise, maple syrup, gianduia powder, a chocolate cigarette, crispy salted phyllo, and a pumpkinseed brittle flavored with pimentón and sea salt. Paired with a 10-year old tawny Port.

Alien Ingredient #8: Coquitos

These tiny nuts come from a palm tree native to Chile called the Chilean Wine Palm (Jubaea chilensis). I first saw them on an episode of Iron Chef, the Battle Coconut where Morimoto had that crazy looking Coconut Crab. They look like fun, so I ordered some from the produce company.

Even though these little guys (see the nickel in the photo for reference) come from a different palm from the coconut, they look and taste just like miniature coconuts. What you see here is already husked and cracked out of its outer shell and is completely edible. I snacked on a couple for giggles, er, research, and they are just what you'd expect.

When the coquitos arrived, I happened to be making some chocolate truffles and walked by the pan of ganache on my way to fetching the mandoline to see if I could slice these guys into rings for garnish—sure can—when I decided that the accidental dipping of a coquito speared on a skewer into the warm chocolate ganache might not be a bad thing. Mounds on a stick, anyone?

Vote: Fun but not again—their cuteness cannot overcome their exorbitant price, given that they are pretty much limited to garnish.

Alien Ingredient #7: Pickled Eggplant

Yeah, OK, I am a sucker for Asian condiments. I've tried gazillions and yet there are gazillions more to try. So when I saw these eggplants in the refrigerator case at the market, they just had to come back to the restaurant with me. I guess I chose them because of all the pickles I have eaten, none have ever been eggplant. It just never occurred to me that eggplants were pickled. And now I wonder why not, given that I pickle all manner of things including peppers, onions, green tomatoes, green beans, and okra.

But looking further into it, I see that pickled eggplants are common all over Asia. So now I feel kind of stupid, but then that was the point of this whole "alien ingredient" series: to learn, to play, to have fun. And these pickles are fun, too!

The eggplants are of a cultivar that I do not recognize, looking like tiny pickled green tomatoes. I am used to the Thai zebra-striped green eggplants, but these appear to have no stripes. In any case, the smallest are pickled whole while the largest appear to be quartered, with many simpled halved. They are very crunchy, perhaps just a tad too crunchy (quoth Alex, "I wish these were a little softer") and the brine is very aggressive in a salty industrial vinegar kind of way. I wish they had used a higher quality vinegar and less salt. The red chile is fairly mild as red chile goes. Of course, I am a chile head of the first order, so don't trust my judgement!


I think Alex summed it up fairly well: "Sort of like eggplant kimchee."

I am going to try these in two cooked applications. I think that they would be pretty damned tasty in a curry and tossed into Thai fried rice.

Vote: these are fun and addictive to munch on. We'd like to try putting up our own this summer because we know we can do a better job.

Paean to a Pen

This week I was going through some of the thousands of photos that I've taken over the years and suddenly it struck me that there was a Sharpie in many of the photos. That got me to thinking about how this unsung and unglamorous pen is a staple of every restaurant kitchen and that Sharpies rank right up there with knives in terms of importance to chefs. In fact, I've never seen a chef's knife kit that didn't contain a couple of Sharpies. And we have them all over the kitchen.

I use them to label anything and everything. They write prep lists and cross items off prep lists. I use them to manage my ticket rail, crossing off the courses as they are fired and as they go out. I kind of freak out if I get into dinner service and there's not one in my jacket pocket. They are hanging by string in convenient locations in the kitchen—so they don't grow legs—especially near the freezer.

In case you think I'm alone, check this out.

We use them to label all kinds of stuff from our pantry staples

to the sauces and garnishes we use on the line.

They hang around all over.

And my jacket never wants for one or three.

They even go where I go (and claim what I own).

David Lebovitz, eat your heart out!