A La Cuisine!

The Secrets of Incredible Food

For the past two years, I’ve been trying to figure out what makes food taste incredible as opposed to merely good or great.  And now, I think I’ve found the answer.

It’s often said that great cooking is a combination of great ingredients and technique.  Unquestionably, the quality of produce and skill of the cook* both have a tremendous influence on the final dish.  But incredible food often contains one additional element – nostalgia.  Like flipping through an old photo album, food has the power to arouse memories and bring us back to special moments in time.

Incredible food, in my opinion, has at least as much to do with nostalgia, as it does with ingredients and technique.  To anyone else, my mom’s meatballs are probably not the best in the world.  But they are the best to me, because of the memories I associate with them and because they’re the meatballs that I’m most familiar with.  So even if a dish doesn’t use great ingredients and technique, it’s possible for these limitations to be overcome by the nostalgia that a diner brings to the table.  Understanding and taking advantage of your guest's food-related memories is cooking’s secret ingredient.

Smoked Bacon and Egg Ice Cream, Pain Perdu, and Tea Jelly

I have long been an advocate of having dessert for breakfast, but at England’s The Fat Duck, breakfast is the new dessert.  Amidst the restaurant’s menu of Snail Porridge and Sardine on Toast Sorbet, a finale of Smoked Bacon and Egg Ice Cream seems to fit right in.  After reading rave reviews about this dish, I simply had to try it myself.  But since my chances of dining at The Fat Duck in the foreseeable future are next to zero, I spent last weekend trying to recreate it at home.

As you may have guessed, this dessert is Chef Heston Blumenthal’s whimsical take on a traditional English breakfast.  In addition to the Smoked Bacon and Egg Ice Cream, the dish also includes a sweet and slightly sour Tomato and Red Pepper Jam, caramelized French Toast (or Pain Perdu), a rich and creamy Salted Butter Caramel, and a refreshing glass of Tea Jelly.  The complete recipes for the dessert can be found here and here.

Dinner Series Wrap-up

While the Steelers and Seahawks spent the past couple weeks training for the Superbowl, I was in my kitchen preparing for two big events of my own.  My dinners last weekend may not have had a halftime show, and I didn’t get to douse my guests with Gatorade, but I accomplished what I set out to do, and thought the food was delicious.

Here's a summary of the dishes I served.  It may seem like a lot of work, but it's hardly fair for me to call it that when I had so much fun and learned so much along the way.

Butter-Poached Lobster Salad and Lobster Bisque (not shown)

Succulent lobster, bitter greens, and creamy and sweet lobster bisque.  The star of this dish is Thomas Keller’s famous butter-poached lobster.  After steeping each lobster in water and extracting its semi-raw meat, the meat is gently cooked in a butter emulsion, which loads the lobster with flavour and creates a melt in your mouth texture.

Crab and Avocado Ravioli

This is my attempt at L’Astrance’s signature dish.  Essentially, it’s a very simple preparation consisting of fresh dungeness crab meat sandwiched by two thin slices of organic Haas avocado.  The top slice of avocado is seasoned with lime and orange zest, Fleur de Sel, and almond oil (which helps lubricate the palate just as the avocado begins to melt).  Simple as it may be, this dish succeeds on a very fine balance of ingredients.

Dinner Ramblings

It took long time to persuade myself to charge my friends $50 for dinner next weekend.  After all, if someone invited me to their place but told me that I’d have to pay that much, I would really have to be convinced that it was going to be worth it.

Although the $50 is only to cover the cost of ingredients, it’s still a lot of money and my guests will undoubtedly have high expectations.  It’ll be different than all the other meals I’ve cooked (which I paid for) where good food was a bonus, but nothing was lost if things went awry.  Perhaps it’s the loss of this safety net that makes me a bit nervous.  Thankfully, I’ll still be cooking for friends who are much more understanding and appreciative than most restaurant customers.

On the bright side, this will be an opportunity to improve my standards.  There have been a few times in the past when I’ve served dishes that I knew weren’t quite up to par.  If this happens next week, I think I’ll dump it into a tupperware box.  Quality’s more important than quantity, especially when there are already eight other courses being served.

A la Cuisine

I've sharpened my knives and have amassed pages of plans.  And now I'm ready to begin.  For the next two weeks, I will be preparing and rehearsing for two dinners that I’ll be hosting on February 4th and 5th.  They will be the first two nights of what I hope will become a dinner series, where guests are asked to pay for the cost of ingredients in a multi-course tasting menu.  By charging $40 - $50 per person, I hope to be able to host fancy dinners more often (instead of only once a year), and to also cook and experiment with preparations I otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford.

On February 4th, my friend Renée will help with service and will contribute a couple of her own dishes, and on the following night I’ll be on my own.  We’ll be doing a plated service of small dishes, and tentatively, our menu will include canapés, three appetizers, two mains, three desserts, and mignardises to take home.

Experiences in Catering

Until last weekend I had never cooked for strangers.  The prospect of actually charging money for food was something I hadn’t thought much of.  The possibility of preparing food for dozens of people and inadvertently poisoning them all was a dream I had had more than once.

Fortunately only the former came true last Saturday when I catered a charity concert organized by my friend.  In total, my friends and I made about 600 hors d'oeuvres for 120 guests at an after-recital reception.  In my brief history of kitchen adventures thus far, this was certainly one of the most exciting.

About a month ago, my friend, Grace asked if I would be interested in catering her concert.  I suppose she asked based on her previous experiences eating my food, but also because I offered to cater at a fairly reasonable price of $5 per person.  In other words, my competition may have been the frozen hors d'oeuvres aisle at the supermarket.  But nevertheless, I was ecstatic to get the job, since I rarely cook for more than four or five people at a time, and had only once cooked for 20.

Chocolate Sous Vide Soufflé (IMBB 20)

By Boyle's Law: Pressure ∝ 1/Volume at constant temperature.  So by placing the soufflé under vacuum, we decrease pressure and increase volume!  In the fridge, the chocolate solidifies and stabilizes the soufflé, so that it doesn't collapse when the vacuum is removed. 

Before:

After:

Tagged with: IMBB # 20 + Souffle

Utensibility: FoodSaver Professional II Vacuum Sealer

While my friends dream about buying the latest Bimmer or Porsche, I spend my time fantasizing about kitchen appliances.  A Pacojet tops my list, followed by a Thermomix, and a Musso 4080 Dessert Maker.  Space and money are my only limitations.  Ideally I’d like a kitchen that’s as well equipped as Iron Chef’s kitchen stadium, but realistically it looks like I’ll be hanging out in my 8 by 8 foot kitchen for the foreseeable future.

I’m always on the lookout for unique and useful kitchen appliances, but I don’t have much interest in gimmicky gadgets that I’ll rarely use, or cheap knock-offs that look like they’re about to fall apart.  Fuelling my addiction for kitchen utensils, Sam, the eminent author of Becks and Posh, recently asked food bloggers to write about a favourite kitchen utensil. Although Sam’s Utensibility event was on June 27th, I’d still like to write about my Tilia FoodSaver Professional II vacuum sealer.

As its name implies, this appliance saves food by vacuuming out the air from a bag of food before sealing it.  With no air around the food, the food deteriorates at a slower rate and stays fresh longer.  According to the packaging, the FoodSaver "keeps food fresh 3-5 times longer, prevents freezer burn and saves time and money."  The FoodSaver also comes with special wine corks that lets you vacuum the air out of wine bottles, a jar sealing device, and a large storage canister that lets you remove the air around delicate foods like lettuce without crushing it.

Anyway, this is all fine and good.  It works great, and I’m pretty sure it does what it claims.  But the real reason I bought a vacuum sealer was for sous vide.

Miss Gla'Gla, you’re so fine and delicious (IMBB 16)

It was love at first sight.  Her slim, gorgeous figure set against her flowing raspberry highlights.  And everyone simply knew her as “Miss Gla'Gla.”   

Okay, so I haven't fallen for a girl with a funny name, but I am smitten with Pierre Hermé's macaron ice cream sandwich that’s called Miss Gla’Gla.   The first time I saw it on Pim's blog, I just knew I had to make it.  I love macarons and I love ice cream sandwiches.  So Pierre Hermé, if you’re reading this, I think you’re a genius for combining the two.  (And seriously M. Hermé, if you actually do read my blog, I would be more than happy to share my thoughts on your other creations, if you would kindly send me some samples.)

Today marks the 16th edition of Is My Blog Burning? hosted by the ever stylish Viv of Seattle Bon Vivant.  The theme is eggs, which is perfect, because yolks are essential for making rich and smooth ice cream, and whites are responsible for the volume and shape of macarons.  Seeing that I didn’t have an actual recipe for the Miss Gla’Gla, I decided to use three flavours that I’ve come to love.

SHF 9: A Pair of Pears and a Chocolate Disaster

Whether I fail or succeed, I've come to think of food blogging events as opportunities to experiment.  Besides forcing me to try preparations and ingredients that I otherwise wouldn’t use, events like Sugar High Fridays and Is My Blog Burning? also give me an excuse to attempt recipes that are too complex and time-consuming for everyday cooking.  Unlike dinner parties, the time constraints for blogging events are more flexible, and the pressure to present something that’s both perfect and impressive just isn’t there.  That's not to say that I won't 'try' to make something that’s impressive and perfect, but I’d much rather fail at making something ambitious, than succeed at something that’s easy and uninspiring.

One of the things I like most about food blogs is that they’re driven more by process and content, than results and audience.  If you want to read about someone’s triumphs and failures in hosting an elaborate dinner party, food blogs are the place to go.  But if you want to read an article about throwing the 'Perfect Christmas Dinner Party' that’s aimed at middle-income North American households with standard kitchen equipment, who are most comfortable with ‘safe’ recipes that use easy-to-find ingredients, then food magazines would probably be a better fit.