The Soviet Table

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Physical Food

While creating a menu for the restaurant and  for the pastry cooks, I have tried to be sensitive to the quality and varied preperations that goes on day to day. To clarify,  cooks usually do one or two different kinds of work; standing still and up and down movements. Sometimes there is nothing more gratifying then standing on your head after a day standing on your feet.  The first time I saw a chef use a spoon to put an ingredient on a plate with a swing on an arm, i noticed and took a note on the margin of my recipe book.  It really stuck with me not for the bravado but because i had never seen someone use that muscle while composing a dish.

At Meadowood, in  the dish ” to quicken the heart”, we do just that.  The chocolate decor is made by holding a paper cone filled with chocolate and squeezing it into an ice bath while moving the body in a circular pattern.

and for the assembly, we spoon umame powder ( aka mushroom flavored modified tapioca starch) on a brown butter bisquit

At the end of the day, what ever you put into the dish, and in this case the movement will translate to the guest. Even if its a fleeing thought, there are opportunities for many more gestures.

bread pudding for the people

nothing new just a step by step recipe that i’d like to share

Yield: 6 people

for lemon marmalade

Lemons                          4 each

Sugar                             1 cup

Water                             8 oz

Bay leaf                          1 fresh or 2 dry

for bread pudding

Brioche Bread                  half a loaf cut into 6 pieces

Half and half                    1 quart

Sugar                              1 cup

Eggs                                5 each

Directions:

For Lemon Marmalade

Put a pot of water to boil. Cut the lemons into quarter wedges and blanch the lemon wedges in boiling water for 5 minutes.  Drain and combine sugar, water, blanched lemons, and bay leaf in the same pot and cook it for about 10-15 minute on medium heat or until the lemon liquid is reduced by half, and the lemons look transparent.  Don’t worry if the liquid looks thin, it will thicked up as it cools.  Put into a jar or a container and let cool.

Cut the brioche into 6 pieces with the crust off, and arrange it into a deep baking dish so it fits snug.

Mix the eggs and sugar in a Kitchenaid mixer with a whisk attachment or in a bowl with a whisk until frothy.  Warm the half and half in a heavy bottom pot  to 120F/50C.  Add the frothy egg/sugar mixture to the warm half and half and stir with a whisk or a paddle to make sure that the bottom will not burn and stir until the mixture reaches  167F/75C, this is very important that the custard mixture does not go over the  167F/75C, or it will be too dense to soak the bread.  Pour the hot custard onto the bread and let soak for ten minutes.

take out the soaked brioche onto a baking sheet and let it drain the excess liquid.  Reserve the  extra liquid for the next batch. In a hot pan, cook the bread much like a French toast but just to get the color on all sides and then coat the tops of the bread with sugar and burn it like a cream brulee or use a hot spatula or an iron to burn the sugar.

Serve the Bread pudding warm with the lemon marmalade on the side.

Enjoy!

Moscow and a Stamp

Stamp is the ultimate approval instrument, it makes a sound and it legitemizes a piece of paper.  in moscow this is taken to an extreme, every menu is adorned with an official stamp.  on my recent trip in moscow, i was working at a restaurant behind the Bolshoi Theater, which looks like an occupied territory right now due to a renovation.  all i needed was a stamped blank piece of paper to walk thought the construction site to the back of the restaurants service entrance. In this spirit, working with my designer we came with a logo for the bagels project that will be opening in Moscow.

Rome Food Project

Rome is a place that in late 1980s experienced an influx of thousands Eastern European and Asian immigrants per year for about 5 years. But only a trace of this moment remained in the form of an indoor market 3 blocks away from the old outdoor market, where immigrants sell food in one part and clothes in the other. It looked defeated, though, not vibrant as I remember it 21 years before.  The current Rome seems to have erased this episode, and instead, weighed down by its architecture and history, can’t shake its inertia. I  guess I was hoping to find immigrants that used local resources (even if out of necessity) to create a diverse ecology or economy of their own in these spaces, but instead I found complacency, especially in the uniformity of the types of goods sold.  It is hard to identify the causes, but much like the garden at the Academy, Rome’s romanticized image (of the quality and diversity of its products) does not match the reality–related here are the homogenizing policies of the EU, in which many small farmers can’t even sell at most places anymore. Rome is the antithesis of Berlin, a city that has the difficult challenge of modernizing the eastern half of the city while maintaining the west, and throughout negotiating its complicated and contradictory history and architecture.

After checking out about 7-8 markets I settled at Campo di Fiori, mostly a produce market. I picked a place right in the center, with a safe distance from the legal stalls.  I was greeted with visits from wary vendors–who seemed undecided whether or not to flex their muscle and make me leave–and so made an effort to befriend them by giving them the fruit-flavored marshmallows I had made–both apricot and strawberries, chosen for being in season and cheap.

Later in the day the highly organized Southeast Asian and African immigrants arrived, selling fake watches, sunglasses, and  bags.  These people were not independent contractors, but part of a single fanny pack that collected all the proceeds and paid a salary to their salesmen. They also had to negotiate their place in the market, but they were ready to move at a moment’s notice when pushed to do so.  If the legal vendors were the insiders, and the fake goods’ vendors the outsiders, I belonged somewhere in the middle, a place that did not have a label anymore.

I have found one place in Rome that is trying to capitalize on the trend of sustainable economy that I wanted to see and talk to its organizers, but its closed in the summer, and only a small organic market that was mostly empty at 5pm was operating in vast space of a former animal processing plant.  They have a website, but just in the same vain of my Roman experience its site looks better then its actual offerings.  http://www.cittadellaltraeconomia.org/

Muse in the Kitchen

this was posted on Starchefs website, but i’m publishing the unabridged version of the project here

The first time I saw Richard Serra large scale sculptures was at the  Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain.  The first emotion I had to the piece was its scale and how that scale transformed me in the space I was in. While walking through the serpentine, the scale of myself in relations to the room and space had been  transformed.

When I was asked to do a demonstration for Starchefs ICC, and what stood out in my mind were the new challenges of my role as a tastemaker / consultant.  Chefs don’t often talk about is how we appropriate and reference others chefs, this practice is a taboo subject in our industry, unlike in fine art where there is a really important dialog that is happening on appropriation to a point where this becomes a tool to make statements about us humans and reflections on and reactions to our nature and culture.

For me, choosing Richard Serra was to choose a focus on study of form of material and the balance it shows.  As a pastry chef, manipulation of form happens with your hands, and the only way to get better ant it is to work with the material.   Chocolate seemed the natural medium,  much like steel it is cured by cold ( wind , water) and borrowing  the method of curing steel, I used iced water to sculpt my chocolate.  While this method is not revolutionary, I thought that it was a good example of reaching a result not from copying a technique from a book, but instead reaching outside of our perimiter of  cooking discipline,  and create a dialog with another person (culture) and the relationship of material(nature).  And the best part by far is the motor skill experience, your hands doing a dance in the water, the way you make them go limp and turn the wrist to make the chocolate sculpture look unbalanced.   This is the sensitivity that sets the stage for a great meal and experience of eating.

these are photos of the the making of the piece….

photos by noele lusano

Making Flødebolle with Tcho 68% chocolate 2.0

…..testing testing testing Flodebolle, as an homage to Denmarks own Noma restaurant receiving its #1 spot in the worlds restaurant ranking. here is more info on these treats…..

yesterday was a good day. my roomates were very happy that i was testing Tcho’s Pro 68%.  Unlike last time when i just winged the curve ( it was 52, 28, 32)  i had gotten the TCHOPro_Tempering_Instructions from the Tcho team .

first off, i would say that the conditions in the Treatlab was optimal, around 71.6F/22C

also unlike instuctions i try to avoid water at all costs. I used my dehydrator to decrystalized the chocolate to the TMP 1 temperature

Secondly , again I table tempered the chocolate to TMP2 and TMP3

I had made marshmellows with strawberry puree and some violet liqueur

and its erobing time. the best thing i can say is have a hair dryer handy. Because  hand dipping is significantly more time consuming its nice to have an instument to keep the chocolate temperature at a constant TMP3 31.7ish

so for the results

the chocolate was nice flavor and  crunch, and the marshmellow contrastingly smooth and silky in texture. But again the chocolate crystalized too fast, leaving it more matte then a professional chocolatier would expect from the chocolate.  I did make some solids with the extra chocolate that i did not use, and that came out a little bit better. More testing soon with milk ganache

first tempering trials with TchoPro blend

melted the chocolate in the dehydrator for 2 hours at 58C/ 140F , my new favorite method to make sure that the chocolate completely  de-crystalized
i table temped the chocolate with a curve of  28C/82F   and the brought up to working temperature of 32C/89F
this is the curve I usually use, I was not sure of the manufacturers recommendation, but this usually work on any couverture I tried. The fluidity of the couverture is good, i was able to coat the caramels with a pretty thin shell

the caramel chocolates once enrobed, crystalized pretty quickly. My kitchen  was at 65F 68F, and comparison with Valhrona, Tcho crystalized a bit faster.   For the chocolates to be glossy, longer crystallization is more beneficial.

i hope this helps, I would like to try and make molded bonbons and see how glossy they come out.   I was pretty impressed that this quality of chocolate is coming out of San Francisco and not Europe.   I would love to find out the cocoa solids info and experiment with dairy/chocolate recipes.

i hope that helps

i interrupt this….hold your thought

“how do you stay faithfull in a room full of hoes”

do the new wave of chefs need a new manifesto?

Yes, no, maybe… but please lets not reject all the work and knowledge we had accumulated over the past decade. im seeing this trend to reject the creative process in favor of pretentious simplicity , aka elitism.

i came across this article, where the chef is boasting on how he took pictures and then threw away culinary “chemicals”, thus rejecting culinary heritage, thus these same perceived values he deeds to uphold when he said that there was  “…no mortar and pestle”.  So sad to blame the technology that propelled humans from sickness and poverty into wealthy nations.

so i raise the chalice to  you ” farm to table” and “bean to bar” people, but i don’t think that you’re “keeping it real” at all . there i said it…