A Razor, A Shiny Knife

When attempting to attack something of this nature, the best...

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:35:52 -0400

When attempting to attack something of this nature, the best thing to do, in my opinion, is just abandon all hope for being casual and relaxed about it. I say spend every waking moment obsessing about every detail and let yourself only be properly satisfied with an unusual amount of desired perfection in the outcome. Setting your goals ridiculously high will easily create a sense of unbridled drive and hopefully this passion will overcome you and push you to new heights, while inspiring others around you to throw in their lot and do the same.

That night in early November, a small group of us sat down to talk, plan, experiment and discover truly what we had signed up to in trying to recreate this meal.

First task was to turn the menu, with its simple and cryptic...

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:35:46 -0400

First task was to turn the menu, with its simple and cryptic description, ingredients and quotation marks, into recipes.

I can say now that the first night was one of the most memorable events in my entire life. To watch this assorted group of people fall together behind this quest and in 6 hours go from nothing to having some semblance of a plan. To see people, who had never met each other before bond with dedicated passion over this goal was so strong it fueled my own drive for the long months to come.

While pouring over the various cooks books we could get our hands on we searched and hunted for clues and tips that we could use. In a bit of good fortune some of the dishes were classics and were able to be gleaned directly from the amazing cookbooks these meals were celebrating. But a majority of the courses were new: progressions on thoughts that the chefs had been cultivating over many years, new flashes of inspiration that overtook them in the run up to these glorious events, reinterpretations on dishes and techniques that they had created or perfected and were now able to bend to their creative will.

This first night turned out a few great successes and some...

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:35:37 -0400

This first night turned out a few great successes and some amazing failures.
Our first success, were these little puffs of yuzu. Fluffed with Methocellulose F50 in a stand mixer and then piped on to a dry sheet of acetate. Like tiny meringues but instead of being baked with egg whites, these were dehydrated to a crisp. Containing only: yuzu, water, sugar and roughly 1.25% of the total weight of juice of Methocel F50.

This was a reinterpretation of a dish we found in the Alinea cookbook that was originally a spiced foie gras treat. Here it was served as a passed canapé with a smoked salmon pâté and with a caper buried deep in the light and crunchy yuzu puff.

One of the complete failures of the night, and what would become...

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:35:28 -0400

One of the complete failures of the night, and what would become one of the more difficult dishes to decipher, was Chef Achatz’s Lamb, Fennel, Pernod, Coffee-Scented Air. Not having any idea what this would be like we started making wild guesses and decided on trying to make spheres of Pernod sauce and braise lamb necks until they were tender. Turns out we got close with the lamb necks but in the end there were actually a total 3 different cuts of Lamb (loin, neck, sweat bread), three sauces (in varying consistencies: liquid, gel and leather) and the Pernod was actually an airy foam laid on top of the coffee braised lamb neck pudding.

After a long battle of wrestling with recipes we ended up...

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:35:06 -0400

After a long battle of wrestling with recipes we ended up breaking the menu into pieces for everyone to do some research and refinement over the weekend. And with a few more drinks we started stage two of our planning: how to recreate the Alinea display pieces.

The man behind the camera of these pictures W. Oberlin and Brian Sullivan, were captaining the construction and develop of the two critical devices we would need to serve this meal,
1. Parafin wax bowls
2. Squids

A handful of amazing drawings were scribbled out on paper, in blood red ink, crossed out and then redrawn. Little words were written next to big words on digital prints of the actual devices. After a bit of doing we settled on budgets and what we thought were good ideas and then remembered we had one last recipes setting in the fridge.

Even liquid nitrogen wouldn’t get the Pernod gel to set for us...

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:34:00 -0400

Even liquid nitrogen wouldn’t get the Pernod gel to set for us to try to encapsulate it with gellan. After about twenty minutes of fighting with this, everyone basically took to blowing into the bowl with the LN2 and making fun little clouds

It was decidedly the most triumphant success of the evening. It...

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:31:57 -0400

It was decidedly the most triumphant success of the evening. It was one of the most simple but thought provoking dishes in the whole menu. It was Chef Achatz Black Truffle Explosion, a riff on a Chinese soup dumpling but with a truffle stock and butter liquid center wrapped in a rich and dense Italian style fresh milk and egg pasta. Here the gelatinized center is poked before being wrapped in the silky pasta dough and gently cooked.

It is hard to explain how incredibly flavorful this was, but easier to understand was the emotional response to closing your mouth around the little bit and having it explode filling your mouth with overwhelming deliciousness.

It was just the stock emulsified with butter and then set with about 1% gelatin into a sphere. Simple enough, and now a great way of making liquid filled ravioli of any flavor or design. Please try if you are so inclined as it is simple and amazing. The shape of the gel does not matter so you can just set a gelatin and then cut it up and wrap it tightly in fresh pasta dough. Have fun.

About one year ago we decided to embark on a series of...

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:05:00 -0400

About one year ago we decided to embark on a series of adventures. It was our hope to learn through emulation and execution of what would be some of the most exquisite food in the world, cooked by two of our generation’s greatest chefs.

It was last September 17th when Grant Achatz and Thomas Keller announced to the world that in celebration of their new cookbooks and their admiration toward each other they would host a meal at per se in NY, Alinea in Chicago and The French Laundry in Napa. They would serve a 25 course meal showing a career retrospective and some of the most current and advanced dishes their kitchens have developed, paired with the most amazing wines, at a price of $1500 a person. Three of the best restaurants in the world, hosting a meal that would come to define this generation of American cuisine.

It was at this point, while trapped in a crushing rain storm somewhere on interstate 84, driving to Boston for a series of events Daniel and I decided that best way to learn and advance with our own cooking was to try and recreate these meals. To elevate our own cooking by learning from the incredibly high bar these masters have set with this series of events. We decided the only way to do it properly was to recreate the meals to as exacting a measure as possible, following the chefs across the country, and preparing our interpretations of the meals in NYC, Chicago and San Francisco.

We gave ourselves roughly one month from the dates that they had set to host our first event in NYC. Without any knowledge of the actual events and not being able to sample and taste the food we embarked on the recreation from a purely educational point of view.

We were able to convince a friendly insider to sneak us a copy...

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:04:00 -0400

We were able to convince a friendly insider to sneak us a copy of the menu from per se a couple days before the event to see if it would be possible to execute such lofty food from our studio and serve it in home kitchens. With that one sheet of paper we dove into reverse engineering for twenty-five of the most technical dishes of haute cuisine in world, from simple menu description.

The above menu does not include the following passed canapés

Chef Keller
Salmon Cornet – Marinated Atlantic Salmon with Black Sesame Tuile and Red Onion Crème Fraîche
Lamb “BLT” – “Petit Salé”

Chef Achatz
Puffed Idiazábal – Yeast, Mustard Seed
Smoked Salmon – Yuzu, Caper

We had to rely on, photos and blog posts about similar dishes...

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:08:46 -0400

We had to rely on, photos and blog posts about similar dishes served and eaten in their restaurants and the few scraps and pieces that were scattered across their respective brilliant new cookbooks, and any hint or review that could be gleaned from small amount of press that attended the first dinner.

Not knowing how food was supposed to taste added one level of...

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:08:38 -0400

Not knowing how food was supposed to taste added one level of complexity but not knowing what it was too look like was another layer of impossibility that started to become overwhelming. How do you recreate a dish that in its description was beautiful to eat and delicious to see on the plate?

How could we know how they wanted it to be presented to the...

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:08:30 -0400

How could we know how they wanted it to be presented to the world? If we could get it to taste similar would we fail when the pieces didn’t come together correctly?

In addition to the plating and composition of the food we also...

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:08:22 -0400

In addition to the plating and composition of the food we also had been tasked with creating the custom service pieces that Chef Achatz uses to serve his dishes. Parafin wax bowls to suspend a pin a with a hot potato over a small cup of ice cold potato soup, steel squids for holding a singular bite. Here was the best example of how refined and perfected these men held their craft. Would we fail if we could not make sure to execute these details as well?

So with about 32 days to work out all of the details we set to work with nine chefs, two engineers, an industrial designer and a collection of amazing friends whose strength and support would prove to be the most deciding factor in being able to follow through with all of this.

A time lapse video of our 24 hours of cooking this past weekend....

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:38:00 -0400

A time lapse video of our 24 hours of cooking this past weekend. Thank you very much to Colin McCabe and Mike Lee / Studiofeast for putting this together.

Thank you to everyone who made this possible, especially those at 90 N 5th for the space! www.aptsandlofts.com

More to follow.

At the end of October we sat down with our good friends Alex and...

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:32:00 -0400

At the end of October we sat down with our good friends Alex and Aki from Ideas in Food and wrote up a menu for a seven course meal that we had been kicking around for a little while. It was a difficult balancing act getting four such divergently creative minds to come together to create seven dishes that would then form together a cohesive meal.

It was also difficult preventing Alex from adding courses when we weren’t looking as he was full of ideas that just weren’t able to be realized in this meal.

This meal was the first of a style of event and also marked the first instance where we felt that we were able to really balance the theatre of the event with the open and warm social atmosphere as well as food that was executed the way we had imagined it.

Menu:
1. Cervidae Tartar with Smoked Onion Rings and Cranberry
2. Chioggia Beets with a Roasted Red and Yellow Beets Pasta Salad, Beet Curd, Aji Amarillo and Passion Fruit
3. Pumpkin Seed Risotto with Coffee and Ham Hock Lardons
4. Olive Oil Poached Halibut over Celery Leaf Gnocchi in a Lobster Mushroom Ragu
5. Skirt steak with Brussels Sprout Kimchee, Apple and Chicharrones
6. Pierre Robert with Walnut Ribbons and Pear Mostarda
7. Lime panna cotta and banana rocks with a banana sponge cake and key lime

Menu Written with Daniel Castaño, Aki Kamozawa & H. Alexander Talbot

Executed with H. Alexander Talbot, Daniel Castaño, Thomas Helmick, Cathy Erway and Kathryn Mahoney

There are 17 Images associated with this meal I look forward to hearing what you think about them.

Photo:
Cassidy DuHon
www.duhonphotography.com

Cervidae Tartar with Smoked Onion Rings and Cranberry The...

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:31:54 -0400

Cervidae Tartar with Smoked Onion Rings and Cranberry The tartar was made from the leg of a deer. We did a coarse chop with a set of knifes and got it into a proper 1980’s tartar texture, and tossed with some olive oil, mustard, salt, pepper and herbs. The onion rings were compressed in smoke brine instead of hot smoking them to give them a nice smoky flavor but to also get them to be nice a crisp. The smoke brine was then carbonated and used to make a tempura batter which also helped carry the smoky flavor as well. A sweet and tart cranberry sauce was put on the plate to help soften the flavors and bring a smooth richness in texture. Photo: Cassidy DuHon www.duhonphotography.com

Chioggia Beets with a Roasted Red and Yellow Beets Pasta Salad,...

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:31:48 -0400

Chioggia Beets with a Roasted Red and Yellow Beets Pasta Salad, Beet Curd, Aji Amarillo and Passion Fruit

The Chioggia beets were glued into a sheet and the red and yellow beets were unpeeled using a planner and compressed with a spicy passion fruit dressing under vacuum. They were then cut into cut into linguine shaped strips and dressed on either side of a firm Yellow beet vegan curd.

Photo:
Cassidy DuHon
www.duhonphotography.com

Sheet of beetsAlex and Aki pioneered this process of using...

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:31:43 -0400

Sheet of beets
Alex and Aki pioneered this process of using pectin or sodium alginate and calcium to create a fruit and vegetable glue that can impart flavor while holding things together. Here we created a dressed beet sheet that was sliceable.

Photo:
Cassidy DuHon
www.duhonphotography.com

Alex explaining the whole process of gluing fruits and vegetable...

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:31:38 -0400

Alex explaining the whole process of gluing fruits and vegetable together with a sheet of beets in his hands.

Photo:
Cassidy DuHon
www.duhonphotography.com

Pumpkin Seed Risotto with Coffee and Ham Hock Lardons The...

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:31:32 -0400

Pumpkin Seed Risotto with Coffee and Ham Hock Lardons The process of pressure cooking pumpkin seeds to give them a risotto like consistence was another invention by Alex and Aki, while on vacation somewhere silly. In this iteration they were cooked with coffee and pumpkin stock. After cooking they were cooled and mounted to order with butter and the cooking liquid, dressed with ham hock lardons which gave the dish a nice smoky flavor. Sous Vide pumpkin balls where topped with a little pumpkin powder and parmesan cheese. Photo: Cassidy DuHon www.duhonphotography.com