New salad, but my plating is too playful for APBC.
Beets cut into demispheres, and cooked sous vide at 85C for varying times depending on the thickness, Pickled Candystripe beets, dressed with white balsamic vin., pumpernickel crumbs, and goat cheese. Garnished with micro arugula, opal basil, and celery.
New dish: Olive Oil poached Salmon at 52C for 15 minutes with 1in. thickness, below is a roasted veg. medley of Fennel, Corn, Leek and Garlic. Once reheated I toss it in a Mushroom “Pesto”, tarragon, and chives. The sauce is a parsnip, vanilla puree.
Progress on the Husk inspired fried chicken:
So, after soaking the legs, thighs and wings in seasoned buttermilk for 24 hours, I vacuumed sealed them with some rendered pork belly fat and duck fat, then cooked them sous vide at 82.2C for 6 hours until very tender.
I immediately put them in ice, and reserved for the next phase of the fried chicken inspiration, which will happen tomorrow!
Using this as inspiration I will be recipe testing some fried chicken to be used in APBC for a fall dish, hopefully.
I’ll be posting more info tomorrow on the steps we are taking to make this amazing Husk dish our own at APBC.
Chef playing around with plating for a new dish. We decided not to go with this style, but it’s still an awesome concept none the less. The components will stay, but the plating will change for a faster pickup during busy service.
What we have is Compressed Watermelon, Watermelon Radish, Goat Cheese and Marscarpone, Roasted Red and Purple Baby Beets, Reduced Balsamic, Breakfast Radishes, Candy Stripe Beets, Roasted Eggplant, and Tomato.
Hottest chili in known to man! Scoville scale rates it at 1,067,286. I’m making wings tomorrow…
So, today was the big unpacking of every single piece of equipment in Apple Pie. We packed up before the summer break, and when I returned to unpack our normal plates there was a palate of boxes with all these great plates:
This is my favorite new plate.
My second favorite, but from here it’s out of order…
Recipe testing tomorrow, and most likely Friday. A lot of testing next week though, so stay posted!
So tonight I made two lobster tails cooked en sous vide with this amazing vanilla beurre montè I made. I blanched the tails for 3 minutes in simmering water (1gal H2O + 50g W.Vinegar), then took it out and immediately peeled the tail off, ripped out the vein with tweezers, and cut the shell of, while carefully preserving the membrane holding the flesh together. Here is what we did:
Vanilla Beurre Montè:
4 fl.oz. Water, from lobster blanching
12 oz. Unsalted Butter, room temp, cubed
1 tea. Madagascar Vanilla Bean Paste
10g FMC Biopolymer Gum Acacia
(The Gum Acacia has emulsifing properties, but actually is not an emulsifier, it’s actually a hydrocolloid from a tree known as the Acacia Senegal. They are most plentiful in Africa. Extraction comes from knocking the bark off the tree, and the sap the drips collects on parts of broken bark and hardens into a white glob. It is then harvested and processed for commercial use.)
Lobster:
Salt
Pinch White Pepper
Season lobster, place in vac bag with 3 oz. Buerre Montè and vac/seal.
Cook en sous vide at 59.5C/139.1 for 17 Min. Exactly.
It’s awesome…try it.
Here is something I was working on a couple of weeks ago. Tasted amazing!
Raw Beef Tongue
Scrub the beef tongue very well!You really need to spend a good 5-10 minutes scrubbing this tongue. There are pieces that will scrub off, and you do not want them in your pot.
Bring beef stock to a simmer.Once the stock is at a simmer add the beef tongue with fresh garlic and onion. Also, add aromatics about 45 minutes from completion. Thyme, Rosemary. Simmer the beef tongue for about 2 hours, until fork tender. Reserve the cooking liquid, strain it, and use for the sweetbread blanching.
Sweetbreads and milk.Put the sweetbreads in milk and soak them for 24 hours.
Remove sweetbreads from the milk.
Reserved stock from the tongue. Use this for the blanching! It is full of flavor, and will build the flavors with sweetbreads.
Once the sweetbreads have been blanched for 6 minutes, rapidly chill them in an ice bath.
Pick apart the membranes, and peel away the slime. Lightly sear each piece in a saute pan with butter, garlic, thyme.
Use this mold from The Chicago Mold School.
Use a small ring cutter to cut 1cm high rounds that will fit snug in the mold.
Packed in 3 layers. Sweetbread-Tongue-Sweetbread. Glue them together using Activa RM, and let it set in the refrigerator for a minimum of 4 hours.
No matter what I do facebook keeps uploading this file upside down!
The final product!
I then use crispcoat uc-egg wash-crisp coat uc-egg wash-refined panko. In that order, then deep fry till golden brown at 325˚.
I was doing a Pacojet demonstration at a club forum at The CIA, and my ice cream base was not cold enough to run through the Pacojet successfully, so I put a small amount of Liquid Nitrogen in the Pacojet beaker and then I ran it through. Well, my machine shut off mid-way through the cycle. So I reset the machine, and take out the beaker and the ice cream was a powder! It was as light as cake flour, and when you tasted it the ice cream would first make its way around your mouth as small granules, then would melt into the creamy texture we all love.
So, I wanted to recreate this without breaking my Pacojet, so I thought, how could I create as fine of a powder without the Pacojet? After about ten minutes of brainstorming I thought of this:
.
A misting spray bottle. NOT one that will shoot in a stream.
If I could spray the base into Liquid Nitrogen, it just might work. My initial concern was that ice cream base is thick, so it would not work being misted. Then I thought, why don’t I create an ice cream base that still contains egg yolks, but do not allow them to fully thicken the base! So that was the key, an ice cream base almost as thick as whole milk, but has all the flavor of a traditional base.
So, here is the final product after misting the base into Liquid Nitrogen:
Blueberry & Port Wine Ice Cream Powder
So here is a recipe that was adapted from Ideasinfood.com, which was modified from Ferran Adrias Olive Oil Coil Recipe. I adapted it to my needs, so the recipe is slightly different, but I have seen consistent results every time I made it.
200g Isomalt,
50g Glucose Syrup
4g Sucrose Ester
1g Salt
60g Any Fat (Bacon, Foie, Nut Oils, Olive Oil etc.)
4g Glycerin Flakes
Yield=1 Gal.+ Cotton Candy
Combine Isomalt, Glucose Syrup, Sucrose Ester and Salt in a small pot. Cook to 160˚/320˚ C/F.
Grab another small pot. Add the Glycerin Flakes and the fat of choice, and warm only until the Gylcerin flakes have melted (about 120˚F).
When both pots are at their temperatures, using a Small, Handheld Immersion Blender drizzle the fat slowly into the hot sugar in 3 additions.
Continue to blend until the emulsion is stable, and pour the mixture onto a Silpat until the mixture sets.
Once cold, break the mass into pieces, and put them into a Food Processor and process until most of the pieces are powdered.
Sift the powder, and reserve.
Place the powder in a Cotton Candy Machine, and spin.
I am going to be transferring all my old notes I made on FB to this blog. As you’ll see they’re all from when I was doing a club at school, and they were my projects I was working on at that time.
Custom business cards for A.P.B.C! So awesome! They’re mini cards too. Things seem to be cooler when they are scaled down.
So with this equipment I shall begin my CIA journey of documenting awesome cooking debauchery…whoa! Did I just?! I did…