Yet Another Tasting

As fall became official yesterday, we trotted out another really seasonal menu for our latest Chef's Table. We didn't put a lot of thought into this menu—in fact, we were barely functional and running solely on coffee at the time we scrawled this menu on the back of a used menu out on the deck yesterday morning. Thank the culinary gods for coffee!

Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

Jerusalem Artichoke Soup. The first of these sunflowers arrived this week and we have been talking about soup ever since. You see the soup realized as a take on sopa de ajo with bread, roasted garlic, and pimentón. The croustade is topped with a tangy salad of tomato, pickled and truffled green peaches, and crisp bacon, the tang coming from sherry vinegar.

Beet and Goat Cheese Empanada

Beet and Goat Cheese Empanada. We got to talking about beets and Tony said, "I wish we had some phyllo or puff pastry." I offered to make puff pastry, but I was never clear on what he wanted to do with it because it then clicked for me to make a batch of my awesome-if-I-do-say-so-thanks empanada dough. The beet garnish is dressed with a syrup of Tasmanian pepper; the frisée is dressed with a classic and highly tangy mustardy vinaigrette; the plate is dressed with both sauces.


"Bouillabaisse"

"Bouillabaisse." An overabundance of beautiful peppers was the spark for this deconstructed take on a classic. Saucing the plate are an addictively garlicky sauce rouille, extra virgin olive oil, and a reduced saffron-laden fish broth. The traditional croustades have been reformulated as crispy bits fried in olive oil with garlic and basil.


Prosciutto-Wrapped Loin of Rabbit

Rabbit Loin. There is nothing new in this dish really. We do it fairly often in the fall and winter. We pound rabbit loins and stuff them with greens (cavolo nero in this case) and local goat cheese, the whole being rolled in prosciutto. The sauce is a sweet potato cream.



Sweet Potato and Cranberry Risotto

Sweet Potato and Cranberry Risotto. We've been talking about this dish for months now and finally all the ingredients aligned with weather cool enough to serve this. The risotto base starts with onions and sweet potatoes and we add cranberry juice instead of stock. Dried cranberries get added along the way. The risotto is finished with maple syrup and brown sugar instead of butter and cheese. On top, you see a slab of house-cured pork belly that we candied in maple syrup, a fresh fig, a bit of blue cheese, and some candied walnuts. This dish was custom designed to pair with an awesome tawny Port.

Early Autumn Tasting

I know that it's not fall yet and won't be officially for another couple of weeks, but mentally, Tony and I are off creating fall menus already. As much as we love tomatoes, squash, squash blooms, and peppers, we are ready for the change to game, mushrooms, braised dishes, conserved pork products, and bacon, bacon, bacon.

Grilled Prosciutto-Wrapped Goat Cheese-Stuffed Figs

Grilled Prosciutto-Wrapped Goat Cheese-Stuffed Figs. This is not an earth shattering new dish, but it is wonderful nonetheless for having been made with local figs and local goat cheese. Next up, we're already scheming to make our own prosciutto when it gets cold enough. Served with a glass of prosecco, these are a great start to any meal.

Sausage and Eggs

Breakfast. Yet another in the long list of dishes that we have so titled, this one starts with a bed of chanterelle buttons cooked up with our bison and our venison sausages. On top is a spoonful of oeufs brouillés, duck eggs with chives and a splash of cream that have been whisked over a water bath until just set, more like a heavy sauce than traditional scrambled eggs and so, so much more sinful. Maple syrup around the edge adds a sweet note.

Truffled Steuben Yellow Eye Bean Soup; Potted Confit

Beans. Definitely my favorite dish of this whole tasting, and for being a soup, the most complex to make. My guests for this tasting are frequent diners and lovers of cassoulet, and so I worded the menu in such a way as to make them think that this course was going to be cassoulet. The beans are my favorites, Steuben Yellow Eyes, soaked overnight, drained, cooked to tender, and recooked with the juice that comes from roasting our pork belly (what we call "goodness"), mirepoix, smoked Surry sausage, garlic, thyme, bay, rosemary, and sage. It's all blitzed in the big Vita-Mix and passed through our finest chinois for an ultra-silky texture. Thinned, splashed with a touch of cream, seasoned, and lavished with a big spoonful of chopped black truffles, this is a soup for the culinary gods. Served with a croustade topped with potted confit. We finely chopped some of our duck confit and pork shoulder confit, then mixed it with softened butter, nutmeg, mace, and fresh thyme.

Braaied Skilpadjies

Skilpadjies. You South Africans might recognize the minature skilpadjies that we braaied on a skewer and served with geelrys. The rest of you see small tortoise-shaped patties of minced lamb and rabbit liver wrapped in caul fat, which have been grilled and served with a fragrant yellow rice and a green tomato ketchup. Somebody brought us a bunch of green cherry tomatoes from a field that needed to be tilled under for fall crops and so we made a big batch of spicy green tomato ketchup from them.

Corn Crème Caramel with Duck Breast

Duck. Here's another savory crème caramel. I just love the silky texture that it brings to a dish. This one is made from fresh corn flavored with thyme. You also see grilled Moulard duck breast, baby brussels sprouts, and a fresh fig. I made a jus (almost a consommé but I didn't technically clarify it) from more pork belly goodness, defatted Surry sausage jus, and star anise. This jus I spooned over so that its salty essence could marry with the caramel giving a delicious sweet-salty contrast with a haunting star anise note to bring out the spice in the accompanying Barossa Shiraz.

Pawpaw Panna Cotta

Pawpaw. We've been fortunate this year to have a local forager supply us wild pawpaws which have a banana-melon-mango flavor very similar to jackfruit. But pawpaws are a gigantic pain in the ass to prepare, unlike jackfruit. Here you see a plate with pawpaw purée, crème anglaise, and maple syrup on the plate, with miniature pawpaw panna cottas scattered about. Though it's hard tell, the large ball is a ball of coconut sorbet rolled in crushed black walnuts, with an oatmeal lace cookie sticking out of it.

Another Tasting

With a menu that changes every night and tastings happening all the time, the only way that we can remember what we cooked is to document it here. Sorry if we are boring you with all these pictures!

Tribute to Summer

Tribute to Summer. When squash blooms and tomatoes are in season, we just have to serve them. We have waited patiently all year for them and now is the time to celebrate them. On the left of the plate is a squash bloom stuffed with grated squash that we have cooked down for hours with heavy cream and seasoned with dill, feta, and basil. We beer batter the bloom and lightly fry it. Served with two goat cheese mousses: one with pesto, the other with sun-dried tomatoes.

On the right you see slices of fresh tomato, fried green tomato, and fresh mozzarella that we make in house each day. I still haven't figured out how to photograph these long plates so that they look good. Sorry, I'll stick to my night job.

Rockfish with Corn Chowder

Rockfish with Corn Chowder. Finally, big rock season opened on Long Island and we were able to get the first rock (striped bass) in months. Rockfish is the king of the American table for good reason and although I am very happy that the fishery is so tightly controlled, it means that we go long periods (spawning season in the summer especially) without being able to get any. We used this beautiful 15-pounder to showcase our crop of new fingering potatoes, white corn, and my new batch of house-cured pancetta. I was so disappointed with the commercial pancetta that we have been getting that I started curing my own from Berkshire pork bellies and the end result is so good that we are never going back to commercial pancetta.

Prosciutto-Wrapped Rabbit

Rabbit?!? That doesn't look like rabbit! We're guilty of a little food trompe l'oeil here in that we have taken rabbit and made it look like a steak. Our rabbit farmers are almost drowning us in rabbits this summer and we are constantly looking for ways to use them. In this case, we braise the rabbits in white wine and herbs, debone them, cook the braising liquid down with cream, sauté some mirepoix, and mix the rabbit, sauce, and veg and let it chill in the cooler. Then we form the chilled rabbit into little steak-like patties and wrap all sides with prosciutto. Served on a bed of carrots, leeks, the last of the early peas, and brussels sprouts petals finished with a splash of rabbit stock and cream. Off the hook good!

Scallop-Stuffed Morel, Corn Crème Caramel, Pork Belly Jus

Morel. We're having a weird year this year in that we're able to get beautiful morels all the way up into August when we should have switched over to chanterelles some weeks ago. Don't knock it. Morels have chanterelles beat hands down. This is admittedly a dish that is a little bit out there but I think all the flavors work well together. The morel is stuffed with a scallop and chive mousse, so you get a sweet oniony contrast to the crispy earthy morel, floured, egg washed, floured and lightly fried, then oven-finished. The morel is sitting on a classic crème caramel—that's right, a classic dessert—made from a white corn custard flavored with chives. The custard is totally savory, only the dark caramel on top adds a touch of sweetness, other than the natural sweetness of the corn. The chives echo the chives in the scallop mousse and the caramel contrasts with the naturally salty pork belly jus. The jus is the good stuff left over in the bottom of the roasting pan when we finish cooking the pork bellies for our regular menus. We have thinned it to reduce the salt level and fined it with egg whites to clarify it.

Eggplant Purée, Pork Belly, Quail Egg

Pork Belly. Almost no menu here is complete without pork belly. This dish is a blatant rip-off of the Turkish classic Hünkar Beğendi, eggplant purée topped with lamb. The eggplants were grilled, puréed, and mixed with a classic Mornay sauce made with hard sheep's milk cheese. Topped with crispy pork belly and a poached quail egg. Just sinful!

Lamb Loin, Tomato Salad

Lamb Saddle. While we were over in the Mediterranean, we also took a stop in North Africa. We had just got a lamb in, so I boned out the saddle and marinated the whole loins in ras el hanout, sumac, and touch of smoked paprika. The loins were simply grilled to rare, sliced, and fanned over a salad of fresh cherry tomatoes, house-cured preserved lemons, Niçoise olives, fresh chickpeas, mint, tomato vinaigrette, and a touch of hummus to bind the salad.

Panna Cotta with Blackberries and Anise Hyssop

Panna Cotta. Down on the plate you see a ribbon of three flavors of panna cotta: blackberry, apricot, and blueberry, three of the most abundant fruits right now. The plate is garnished with a little quick blueberry jam, apricot coulis, oat and sunflower seed granola, crème anglaise, honey-lime blackberries, and anise hyssop.

Chef's Tasting

Here are photos from last night's Chef's Tasting. Appearing for the first time this year are cherries, summer squash, sockeye salmon, new potatoes, and red raspberries. This is likely the very last tasting of the year to feature strawberries and asparagus: only the weather knows for sure.

Deviled Egg

This dish is the happy coincidence of foie gras and duck eggs. You know, the late afternoon, between shifts conversation on the deck that goes like, "What happens if we mix foie gras into a deviled egg?" The result is so rich that it can only be eaten in tiny quantities. Notice the relative size of the cornichon fan to the egg-foie mousse. We kept adding more and more pickle brine to the mousse to balance the fat and the acid. The olive-looking critter in the center is a truffled pickled immature peach.

Sockeye Salmon

Over the years, I have done many takes on a dish of salmon and Thai curry and this is another. The sauce is a green Thai curry and the green dots are a curried avocado mousse. In the center of the plate are cubes of deep-fried salmon and avocado, topped with some tobiko for crunch and a little Thai basil.

Soft Shell Crab

Not much to say here except the salad is awesome. It's a mix of Beth's mesclun, bean sprouts, carrots, Thai basil, cilantro, and green onions tossed in a dressing of vinegar, sugar, lime juice, fish sauce, chile paste, and garlic. Very Vietnamese and very cooling and refreshing.

June Salad

Gorgeous! The first new potatoes of the year down in a ring with grilled asparagus over and then topped with a sauté of peas, asparagus, and morels in a white wine and shallot butter sauce. A quail egg gilds the lily. These peas are so amazingly sweet that we probably ate more than half of what we shelled. They are addictive!

Squash and Goat Cheese

This is a quick taste of summer in an otherwise late spring menu. Because of our crazy spring, everything is running 2-3 weeks early, including these awesome pattypan squash that we sliced, grilled, and stacked with rounds of fried goat cheese. The goat cheese is an amazingly creamy product that was made locally on Wednesday (and served on Friday). We mixed it with roasted red pepper before forming it into rounds and breading it. A drizzle of pesto and some borage blossoms complete the garnishes.

Pork and Cherries

We love cherry season! Sorry this photo is so dark. All hell was breaking loose in the kitchen at the time: the dining room was full and our ticket rail was overflowing onto the counter. We were in hyperdrive, which lends itself not at all to decent photography. On the left there is a pork cheek, braised, chilled, sliced, and crisped in a steel pan, topped with a cherry-celery salsa. Cherries and celery, sweet and bitter, yin and yang, awesome! In the center on top of the grits is a piece of our pork belly topped with the remains of our dried cherry olivada, a tapenade-like relish. On the right is a salad of microgreens and pork confit threads. We cure the pork confit and age it under duck fat. For this dish, we shredded it and deep fried it, then mixed it with greens and tossed it in a cherry vinaigrette. All our pork is certified Berkshire.

Berries

This is a fun and light way to celebrate the end of strawberries and the beginning of raspberries. Their seasons only ever overlap for a week or two. I baked some oatmeal tuiles and layered them with a lemon meringue and fresh berries. Simple, light, and a fitting ending to a late spring menu.

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.