random

Some random pictures from today



making 1200 portions of alphabet soup



a little dry ice




Onaga, agnolotti, root veg purees, shaved raw romano bean and baby fennel salad.

al plin....

The famous pinched pasta of Piedmont, made famous in America by TK with the release of TFL cookbook.



Our pasta dough is
28 egg yolks
3 whole eggs
1 kilo ap flour
1 tbsp whole milk
1 tbsp extra virgin
1 teas salt

This recipe yields a soft pasta dough that is easily manipulated after being rolled out as thin as possible. With agnolotti the key I learned from former bluezoo exec chef Ed Bilicki, is rolling out your dough twice on the last setting of the pasta machine. This will ensure that the dough doesn't puff up and seem thicker when cooked. Todd is all about thin luscious pasta. When Clay was the corporate chef for Todd I learned that "Pasta is like a woman, It can't be too thin or too rich". Somehow chefs always find a way to relate everything back to..., I won't finish this sentence but if you are a chef you should be able to figure it out.



Our filling was salt roasted celery root puree bound with potato, then a little butter and cream to smooth it out. It was a bout 3 to 1 celery root that we roasted in salt, push through a tamis along with the potatoes, added cream and butter and push through a chinois then cool. We served these tonight with braised baby fennel, tiger eye squash from Hammock Hollow Herb Company, and seared scallops.

Tomato Soup

We have the pleasure of making 1200 portions of alphabet soup and sandwich for a banquet event at the hotel. We start by blending and seasoning tomatoes with herbs and spices. The we load the puree into 5 gallon cambros and freeze. Then we take the giant tomato ice blocks out of the cambro and wrap in 4 layers of cheese cloth. The we let them defrost under refrigeration over a perf pan and wait to collect our clear soup base. Mix with alginate and either microwave in batches to remove the bubbles or if you have time let sit in the walk in overnight. Then we brunoise and blanch root vegetables. The we cook our mini alphabet noodles. Load the molds with the noodles and veg then top off with the alginate mix.


The only way to get them perfectly smooth is to freeze with liquid nitrogen then hold them until service. We submerge them into a hot calcium solution, then into hot water to defrost and heat through. They then get a nice coat of evoo and fleur de sel. Our tomato version pictured here.




The banquet version will be placed on a grilled cheese with Grafton Village white cheddar and brioche. Last night we did some plain tomato soup balls for amuse with waterkist tomato tartare, basil oil, toasted brioche, and micro parsley.



They are about 1.5oz each. Something to think about when making them this big is texture. You need to let the balls sit in the calcium bath a little bit longer so the encapsulation will hold and they won't collapse on themselves. Now that you have a thicker skin you need to have some crunch in there to mask the texture of the skin. They are liquid inside so you get the caviar pop just on a larger scale. We haven't been playing with this application for a while. Even though it seems new to people who aren't in the know about modern food, we've been making these for over 3 years now. I think alginate has jumped the shark a bit in the same way foams have but we still incorporate them here and there.

Bentons Hickory Smoked

Alan Benton makes some of the best ham on the planet. We have had the whole 18 month aged hams, the country bacon, and now we went with the straight up smoked boneless. I didn't even have to open the unmarked box it came in to know what it was. What's the expression, smells through the bag, yeah well it does. We will be slicing it super thin and serving as part of our chef's pasta.
House Tagliatelle...bentons country ham, 3 way english pea, bacon butter

More garbanzo

As we were painstakingly processing our fresh chickpeas I was thinking of more and more applications. What if you compress the chickpeas with the flavors of hummus. Maybe a little lemon, evo, sesame oil, salt, and a minute touch of roasted garlic.

So I compressed a few and ran the machine a couple more times over to infuse. It worked nicely, a whole fresh chickpea with a distinct hummus note.



Then as we were playing with it a bit we pounded out one of the bags. This went into the freezer so we had nice bright green bars of hummus.

Fresh Garbanzo

You cannot even begin to compare fresh and dried garbanzos. The sweetness of the fresh ones are incredible. I love snacking on them raw, but a quick saute or blanch is all that is needed for preparation, no soaking and boiling forever. We will be approaching this product from several different angles. In true Mexican style of fire roasted in the pod, wrapped in paper for a street food feel with a little lemon and dried chile to adaptations of hummus that I experienced in Israel. It's hard to make exceptional hummus here in the states mostly due to the bitter tahini and the quality of their fresh pressed olive oils are impossible to beat. The traditional hummus served there is made with dried chickpeas and is usually served as breakfast with the main consumption going to the Arab population. It is cheap and used as a source of energy to get them through a hard days work. One trick that was common place in all the hummus restaurants was that they add 1 teas baking powder to the pot during the cooking process to soften the skins and give their finished puree a silken texture. We will make our own tahini and frix air it to add another dimension and texture to the finished dish.

Can you say Kobe

the real deal



brought it in for a corporate dinner