Chef's Tasting

Here are the photos from last night's Chef's Table. We used our customers as guinea pigs in a sense: we were auditioning new dishes for the main dinner menu. In most cases, this is the first time we've tried these dishes. Some may go on to feature on the main menu, some may get tweaked and tried again, and at least one will be relegated to the bit-bin here on the blog.

Dueling Pork Belly. You may have noticed a theme to recent Chef's Tasting menus: pork belly. In our quest to convert people to the Pork Belly Legion™, we seem to be serving it everywhere. Here, we have two quick one-biters for our amuse course.

The first (closest) is the way we have been featuring pork belly on the main dinner menu since we first started experimenting with this combination back in November for another tasting. Sitting on a mound of grits is the pork belly, which is drizzled with local hickory bark syrup, and topped with what we are calling a red grape "olivada" after the Italian condiment of the same name. It consists of red grapes, olives, capers, anchovies, lemon juice, oregano, and olive oil.

The second presentation (the farthest away) is a classic Vietnamese treatment of pork belly, but one we've never featured here at the restaurant. I braised the pork belly in a sauce that I made from caramel, fish sauce, black pepper, and shallots. You see the pork belly sitting on a mound of grits, topped with more of the braising caramel sauce, and topped with a cilantro leaf.

Seared Sea Scallop. This dish is the result of us having baby Shanghai bok choy, lop cheung (Chinese sausage), and pickled mustard greens in the cooler and trying to find a way to use them. Coupled with this, Matt just delivered us a huge bunch of chicken feet when he last brought us rabbits, so we had a big batch of super good chicken stock in the cooler as well. Soup was a natural thought given this bunch of ingredients, but we decided to change the form and do the old soup in the wonton trick. In the photo, you see a soup-filled wonton down and a quarter of a baby bok choy, cilantro leaves, pickled mustard greens, green onions, and lop cheung coins over, with a scallop topping the feast.

What you don't see is a tiny bit of the fish sauce caramel from the pork belly underneath the wonton. When the guest cuts into the wonton, the ginger-flavored chicken stock spews forth, mixes with the caramel, and fills the bowl with a delicious soup broth. It worked as intended, but the guests seemed non-plussed by the dish: they didn't seem to know how to eat it. Not knowing how I should eat something has never stopped me from trying, but then I am not most people, and that is why we test some of these dishes at the Chef's Table before launching them in the main dining room. This dish, as good as it looked and smelled and as fun as it appeared to us to be, will probably never make it to the dining room.

Wild Mushrooms on Celery Root Latke. There is nothing earth shattering here, just plain old-fashioned deliciousness. In recent weeks, we have really taken a liking to celery root paired with wild mushrooms and this is that pairing's latest incarnation. The chanterelle mushrooms (the last of the season before we switch to hedgehogs for the winter) are finished old-school, with veal demiglace and heavy cream. Classic French habits die hard in old chefs!

Roasted Red Drum. This is a test use of Tony's puttanesca-style lentils. I am a big fan of lentils with fish; the pairing just works for me. And pasta puttanesca, with it's bold seasonings, just may be my all-time favorite pasta dish. Here you see the lentils flavored with olives, capers, anchovies, garlic, basil, and crushed red pepper flakes under a piece of drum that has been rubbed with olive oil, salt, pepper, crushed red pepper flakes, and garlic, and then roasted. This is headed for the dinner menu this weekend. It will probably perplex customers, but I love the pairing and the plate presentation is clean and inviting.

Jerked Veal with Sweet Potato Spätzle. And now for something completely different and a dish that will never go any further than this. We've been serving a classic schnitzel with spätzle on the dinner menu this week. Tony had the idea of taking that dish and doing a Caribbean riff on it. The veal cutlets were rubbed and marinated with our house-made jerk paste then grilled, sliced, and stacked Lincoln Log-style. On top of this stack you see a cranberry salsa made from cranberries, lime, jerk paste, allspice, and cilantro. The salsa was pretty good and may be something we would try again. Next to this you see the sweet potato spätzle, browned with brunoise of sweet potato, and finished with a touch of grated ginger, lime zest, and allspice. I was unhappy with the presentation and the Caribbean flavors just didn't add anything to the dish; they weren't bad, but if they don't add anything, why are they there?

Caramel Apple Butterscotch Bread Pudding. What? This doesn't look like a bread pudding? Well, it is. These small local Blushing Golden apples are hollowed out and then baked with the bread pudding inside. Sauced with house-made dulce de leche, crème anglaise, and a touch of maple syrup, this dish was a fun way to finish dinner.

Mystery Basket Dinner

This past Sunday we held a Mystery Basket dinner at our house for some of our customers as a way of thanking them for their business. We drew names from all those who had entered at the restaurant and each winner brought three ingredients that were unknown to me. When everyone arrived and had a glass of wine, we unveiled all the ingredients. And here is the sum of what everyone brought; I contributed the hickory bark syrup just for grins.

beets
pom pom mushrooms
bison sausage
Walla Walla onions
haloumi cheese
sweetbreads
garlic
tomatoes
red peppers
barilotti pasta
baby bok choy
pink lady apples
rhubarb
hickory bark syrup
bulgur
puff pastry
pomegranates
Dubliner cheese
Italian sausage

As you can see from this list of ingredients, we had quite a crazy melange of foodstuffs from which to concoct a menu. As we were unveiling the ingredients, I was already triaging the foods in my mind, trying to figure out what went where. The quantities of some foods dictated how we would have to use them. The little block of haloumi wasn't going to go too far.

The bulgur suggested a tabouleh, the puff pastry a pizza, and the barilotti a pasta, naturally. That left the sweetbreads and the haloumi for appetizers. The menu we ended up with was:

Saganaki: Pan-Seared Haloumi with Sautéed Garlic and Lemon Juice. This is a simple dish to make. Slice the haloumi and place in a hot frying pan with a touch of olive oil. Brown on both sides and remove to a plate. Add chopped garlic to the pan and brown slightly. Deglaze with the juice of a lemon and pour over the cheese.

Sweetbreads with Pom Pom Mushrooms and Baby Bok Choy. Sweetbreads are delicious and pretty easy to prepare. I showed everyone how to poach them, then how to remove the membranes and veins. Once they were cooled, we tossed them in seasoned Wondra and seared them well in a skillet. Then we slabbed the pom pom mushrooms and seared them and after that, we wilted the baby bok choy in a good quantity of olive oil and garlic. We arranged all these goodies on a platter and dug in. I had never worked with farmed pom pom mushrooms before, only the wild form that I have known as lion's mane. The mushrooms had a slight crab-like flavor, very mild and subtle. Image courtesy of Mike Hoffmaster.

Tabouleh with Pomegranates, Pink Lady Apples, Beets, and Rhubarb. This was the sleeper dish of the evening and my catch-all for all the red-colored ingredients for which we had no other use and it was the one dish that I cooked myself. I don't think anybody didn't have seconds of this tabouleh: it was that good. I started by cooking the bulgur, some fancy organic long-cooking kind that took a lot of persuasion in the microwave to get cooked, and by roasting the beets in foil in the oven, the single best way to handle beets that I know.

Everyone got a kick out of my beating the hell out of the pomegranate with a wooden spoon to get the seeds out; the whole thing was seeded and ready to eat in 30 seconds. I marinated raw rhubarb in a lot of hickory bark syrup to tame its rampant acidity, then threw it in with the pomegranate seeds, diced apples, and diced beets, to which I added a lot of lemon juice, chopped Italian parsley from my garden, minced garlic, and extra virgin olive oil. I mixed it all and the whole thing turned scarlet and after correcting the seasoning, it was truly delicious.

Do note that rhubarb contains oxalic acid, which in large quantities can be toxic. Most of the oxalic acid is confined to the leaves, which is why they are not eaten. Cooking neutralizes the oxalic acid and many texts suggest to always cook rhubarb, but it can be quite delicious when eaten raw.

Puff Pastry Pizza with Buffalo Sausage, Caramelized Onions, Cherry Tomatoes, and Dubliner Cheese. Everybody was in a pizza kind of mood, so I rolled out the puff pastry on a sheet tray, built a rim around it with a second layer of puff, docked the bottom, and pre-baked it to about half done. Next it got a good layer of caramelized onions, buffalo sausage, halved tiny tomatoes, and a topping of Dubliner cheese for good measure. What's not to like?

Barilotti with Spicy Italian Sausage, Onions, Tomatoes, Red Peppers, and Basil. I'd never seen this cut before, barilotti, little barrels, but I like it. I'm a big fan of short pasta cuts and this reminds me of cavatelli, also a very favorite cut. These little barrels are the perfect shape for a sausage pasta because they have the perfect nooks in which sausage bits can hide. All the ingredients were sautéed in turn with copious amounts of garlic and fresh basil, then tossed with the hot pasta, some pasta cooking water, and a big handful of grated pecorino romano. Awesome!

Candids

Cleaning sweetbreads.*

Chef Mike tackles a mound of onions.*

Jimmy, zesting lemons.*

Was it my imagination or were the women outside kibbitzing while the guys did all the work?*

To be fair, Julie helped EJ a lot and Jen had a broken wrist. What about Ann? She was social directing!*

Grayce, the canine vacuum cleaner.*

And Dewi, the human vacuum cleaner.

The crew.

*Image courtesy of Mike Hoffmaster/Dennis Trimarchi.