The Challenge

The challenge has been thrown down. Rob, the exec chef of the hotel is a well traveled culinarian with places like The French Laundry, El Bulli, and The Ritz Carlton dining room chef for several of their properties on his resume. He is a great cook, no doubt, product knowledge is amazing, but can he smoke? We joke around here a lot when a certain process or classic dish comes into question and there are differences in thought on how they should be executed. The conversation usually ends like this "I forgot more about smoking than you'll ever know, what, you want to take the challenge?" and from that conversation to now, 4:00am, here I am sitting next to my smoker getting it lit for the pork loin challenge.
We got these monster pork loins from Four Story Hills Farm, it wouldn't even fit on a sheet pan. We each had one loin to do with as we see fit, the finally product has to be cooked completely in a smoker, rubs are allowed but no sauce, meat only.




We recieved the loins on Monday, I brined mine on Tuesday morning, removed them from the brine Wednesday night and were allowed to air dry until Thursday afternoon.



Thursday I applied the rub, I have my own spice mix then I toasted out all of it in bacon fat and let the rub cool to a paste. Applied the paste and allowed to air dry for another 8 hours before packing everything up to bring home and smoke.




So now here I am, early as hell, getting the smoker up to temp. I live 45 minutes from work, have to drop my son off at the babysitter on the way to work and have the pork sliced and ready for judging by noon. It will be close. I'm going to have to be on top of my temperature, 180f, and adjusting as needed.
Its good fun, healthy competition, and could earn some bragging rights. The judges range from fellow chefs, FOH managers, catering executive, and hotel GM who was once the corporate F&B director for starwood hotels so he know his stuff. They will be rating from 1-5 in categories like texture, flavor, and originality. I haven't seen the whole scoring card but this is what I have heard. I hope for chef's sake he wins or I will ride him forever on this and I'm sure he will do the same for me. I'll keep you posted on the days proceedings.

Jowl

One our cooks here, Brian Baxter, has been pushing the majority of our charcuterie projects. With the recent 12 heads of suckling pig in house due to the chef gala event we had some leftover parts and pieces for the taking. Brian used a guanciale cure then slow cooked them. They are fatty and salty little pieces of delicouisness.



A nice brunoise might make an appearence in a pasta with some scallops.

You asked for it

Davidssun of the Metropolitan Club wants to know what we are doing with the Nemox Frix Air that we have acquired. It spent the first couple of weeks in the exec chef of the hotel's office but I convinced him to turn it over. We have put it to use on our raw bar and it works great for "frix-ing" small portions of bloody mary cocktail sauce. The bloody mary "sorbet" keeps the oyster nice and chilled as well as adding a smooth sauce component to compliment the oysters silky texture. You really have to play around with this thing. I thought it was going to be fairly simple but somethings definitely work better than others. Here is the bloody sorbet.


Some melon and tomato "frix-ing" salads in the future.

BellyLT

For some reason I forgot to post the amuse form the dinner on Wednesday with Todd so here it is.
BellyLT
we sous vide the belly at 82C for 12hours, then pressed them, cut and seared at low temp rendering out the skin. The L is arugula puree, the T is waterkist tomato heart, and the bread component was a brown butter powder we made with maltodextrin and the we ground brioche crouton and sifted the two together.

Todd is in Town

With 21 restaurants to run chef doesn't get to spend a whole lot of time in one place. He was here last night and we did a tasting menu for a media dinner.

The menu

BellyLT...suckling pig belly, waterkist heirloom tomato, arugula

Trifecta...ahi tartare, blood orange hamachi, peruvian ceviche

Corn Ravioli...sweet corn, summer squash, king crab tail

Mero Seabass...Hawaiian seabass, organic vegetables

Wagyu tenderloin...farm potato, porcini, agro dolce

Chocolate tasting...coriander, hazelnut, absinthe, malt, sorbet

Here are a few shots from last night's dinner. Chef isn't camera shy by any means but even after working with him for six years I find it odd to stick a camera in his face, especially while we're working. Pictures of food ok though, don't know how that works but whatever.

Here is the Mero bass from hawaii, clean flavor and one of few fish that have been recognized as sustainable from the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, apparently these guys are the authority on fish and wheather or not they are sustainable. The mero is on sunchoke puree, surrounded by fiddleheads, baby purple artichokes that had been olive oil poached, ramps, morels, braised baby fennel, and baby golden beets. I love this plate, you can enjoy the fish with a little bit of everything.



The hamachi was flown in fresh from Japan. We have used the fillets that have been super chilled on the boat before processing and shipping but they aren't even close to this. I cryovac'd the fillets with blood orange juice and meyer lemon olive oil. Fleur de sel and a little fresh kumquat juice finished the vinaigrette once the fish was removed from the bag. Insane flavor and the blood oranges were sweet, not bitter. The fish was perfumed all the way throughout.



Corn Ravs, we agar'd some corn silk then built our ravs around the gel, let the cook and delicious liquid corn cream inside. These were by far the best ravioli I have ever had or made. It was just the right time for the corn, perfect sweetness.



Here is the completed dish, grilled corn, favas, spinach, tiger eye summer squash, ravs, butter poached crab tails, mache. We also spiked the corn succotash with some chile flake, it balanced everything out nicely.

Fia Perera

Fia Perera, comedian, writer, and spokesperson for the Humane Society of the United States contacted me today. She is one of the leaders in bringing chefs together to sign pledges to rid restaurants of Canadian seafood until their government does something about their annual spring seal hunt. There is a very small percentage of Canadian fishing boats from seal hunting provinces such as New Foundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and Quebec that take advantage of this practice to turn a profit. The HSUS is NOT targeting Inuit people that have seal hunting privileges and end up actually using the meat and fur for survival.
I am not a peta person by any stretch, I believe that people who raise animals humanely, have respect for the land and what it gives us are artisans. They care about the process, the stress that is put on the animal, and their diet but in the end they are doing it for a reason.
This is senseless killing but I do have issues with ridding the restaurant of all Canadian seafood. I understand that their government won't do anything about it, but guess what, welcome to the world. As much as I would like to believe that all canadians have bad jokes and talk funny(actually I really want to go to Canada and check out a couple places likethis one The Black Hoof), I don't want to hurt the guy who's out their getting my rod and reel ivory king salmon or beautiful oysters because some fishing boats take advantage of helpless animals. Why do the guys that make a well deserved living off the land and water and do it with respect have to suffer? I definitely don't agree with banning all Canadian seafood, but I'm on board with eliminating product that comes from companies that participate in the seal hunt.
Fia seemed well versed in all the purveyors and says she has knowledge of there actions and can let us know who to stay away from. Their is a lot of information out there on the subject but here are a couple things I was sent that are pretty convincing in themselves.

video

others who have joined the cause

We will be signing the petition to oppose all seafood coming from seal hunting provinces but not banning all Canadian seafood. Hopefully their government gets this under control but as long as there is a market in Europe it seems like this will be an issue. I'll bet if they ban it they would probably make similar revenue from seized boats and fines for poaching.

Chef Gala

Chef gala was last night. We've never tried to mass produce anything with the antigriddles so we did a few practice runs once we got everything set up.




It actually worked out pretty well, if we only had one antigriddle it would have been a little tight but I could load one and Diana could continue when I would run out and have to start building again.



Here is the bz team.



Michael Gleason came out of retirement to help plate the pig for the event. HCD!!



The suckling pig with Louisiana hot sauce fluid gel, coleslaw. We brined then braised our pigs in the smoked pork stock, picked, reduced the braising liquid and buttered it out. Then we added our house bbq rub, chives, and juice from our pickled okra. It came out nice and smelled awesome when we were searing.



Didn't hurt to have a nice frosty keg of abita turbodog 5 feet away.



We threw in the Wild Turkey American Honey just as an extra but we had people coming up and asking for 6 at a time.



A good event and raised a lot of money for a good charity, only part that suck was that I didn't see one second of the magic\cavs game. I had my head down pretty much the whole time just cranking it out.