Disclaimer: this post will mention sous vide cooking, I know, I know, again.  It will have value for anyone, though, since good garlic powder is something all of us should have in our kitchen arsenal.

The lovely pulverized goodness that inspired this post came to be as a result of mucking and fuddling about with my newish favorite kitchen gadget- the Sous Vide Supreme.  Now that it’s been out for a few months there are plenty of converts and just as many naysayers on their respective bandwagons. All I can say is that it has revolutionized the way I cook, but no more than, say, my food processor or stand mixer. Funny how you don’t hear a bunch of divisive derision on either of those culinary staples. It’s not like by adding in the sous vide machine someone’s taking away your frying pan, blow torch, or dutch oven, it’s just another notch on the belt, people.  Ok, enough of my rant.  On to the garlic powder.

One thing I’ve learned from sous vide that I am now considering with various other cooking methods as well is that different foods are ideally cooked at different temperatures.  You would certainly cook a steak in the sous vide bath at 134°, though if you throw in some onions or garlic to give it extra flavor they won’t cook properly at such a low temperature.  In order to work around this quandary, you have to come up with a way to get the flavor you want without expecting the sous vide bath to do the cooking.  Same goes for lots of other flavor-enhancing ingredients in the sous vide such as wines, vinegars, ginger, some herbs, et cetera.  Often a chef will pre-cook an ingredient, or merely add it via sauce after the meat is done cooking on its own in the sous vide bath.  I really wanted to experiment with post and pre flavor additions in sous vide, however, to see if the slow and low approach lent any depth or detracted in some way.  This is how I came up with the idea of making garlic powder (aka pre-cooked garlic) to add at will to my sous vide concoctions.  I found a great post on the matter on Pablo Escolar’s blog and I decided to shake things up a bit by adding smoke. 

I was smoking some bacon and artichokes that day anyway, (bacon, always a success, artichokes, not so much) so I figured no harm done by throwing the garlic in the smoker and cooking it that way.  After two hours at 200° in the Weber Smoky Mountain, my garlic had taken on a burnt sienna hue and smelled like savory ambrosia.  I also really liked how I could truthfully state I was smoking cloves, but without the nasty smell and lung-hacking most clove-smoking high-schoolers experience.  Talk about umami- the fifth taste was all up in this piece that day.  That’s when the waiting game started.  Regardless whether you decide to make garlic powder by smoking or roasting the garlic first, unless you own a dehydrator you then need to air dry your garlic to the point that you can successfully pulverize it and it turns to powder, not paste.  I air dried my garlic for three weeks before I ground it in the mortar and pestle followed by the blender for good measure.  I didn’t mind much, though, because whenever I wanted to use some I just spirited away a clove or two from amongst the drying bulbs. 

I’ve been experimenting with the finished product for a week now and I couldn’t be happier with the result. The only thing I wish I had done differently is make more of it.  You might heed that if you try it.  For the trouble you go to, you may as well yield a greater quantity than half a cup, which is what I got from five heads of garlic.  In retrospect I probably would do twenty at a time- that way you would only need to repeat the process maybe twice a year.  It is absolutely perfect sealed into the sous vide bag with a grass-fed filet, a touch of fine salt and nothing more.  I considered pre-mixing some salt with the powder, but I kind of like to individually administer both because different foods require different amounts of both garlic and salt.  The smoke really lends a kick to the flavor, by the way.  Any notions I had of it softening the taste of the garlic are gone.  Instead, it intensifies it, much like smoke intensifies pork belly when making bacon whereas pancetta (which is the same thing sans smoke) has a more subtle flavor.

The title is erroneous right off the bat, but Clippertrip just doesn’t have the same ring to it as roadtrip.  The Clipper is the nautical vessel one takes from Seattle to Victoria. It is essentially a high-speed shrunken version of a ferry, though it feels eerily like an airplane inside.  In any case, the whole fam hopped the Clipper for the two hour jaunt up to Victoria for the weekend as I had a half marathon to run on Sunday.  We spent Saturday tooling around Victoria- this is a city I could really get into.  I pictured it as a quaint little burg lost in time. It actually was very cosmopolitan and wore the inevitable rustic charm that comes with being a seaside tourist town known for High Tea with understated cool.  Off the main drag, the shops were edgy and on-trend and the locals could not have been nicer. 

There were no dearth of dining options; however it being marathon weekend I knew I wanted to steer clear of the herds clamoring for plates of linguine in all the Italian joints, so I chose French.  This may not have been the wisest meal to consume the night before running 13.1 miles, but I was very happy with my time so I’ll leave carbo-loading to those who wish to indulge in bland potatoes and limp noodles.  We selected Matisse based on its reputation as one of the finer French restaurants in town, and we came away quite pleased. 

The first thing you need to know about Matisse is that John Phillips is the heart and soul of the place.  From the moment you walk in the door and he personally removes your jacket, it is obvious he is not a lackluster waiter whittling down the hours until his shift ends.  Despite the fact that he owns the place and has plenty of laurels to rest on (Exxon Mobil 4 star rating, et cetera), he works the room like a new president on his first day in office.  No detail is too small, and his perfectionist tendencies translate to an unbeatable meal you’re not likely to come by easily elsewhere.  He started us off unprompted with an aperitif called Pineau; if you have not had this amazing drink, go out and find it!!! Pineau accidentally originated in the sixteenth century when some daft servant wrongfully put grape juice in some old Cognac barrels.  The grape juice fermented, became naturally fortified from the cognac, and ultimately went on to be one of the most popular aperitifs from the Charentes region in Southwest France.  It comes in both a white and a red version, and oddly enough I preferred the white, which NEVER happens.  I should clarify that the “white” is actually a lovely caramel color, and the taste is like a perfect blend of passito, vin santo and amontillado thrown in for good measure.  What a scrummy way to start a meal!

Next off was a delectable amuse bouche of smoked albacore tuna with tobiko roe and crème fraiche- Damn the size of these amuse bouches, give me a tray of these babies to nosh on, already.  Because John had proven to “get” us wine-wise when he brought out the Pineau, we let him pair wines for the rest of the meal.  I rarely if ever relinquish my wine-rights, especially after having known someone for five minutes, but the man is solid.  He kept the white stuff away (I hate it when you say you don’t like white wine and someone spends the rest of the night trying to prove that there is a decent white out there!) and the red flowing freely, nailing nearly every course.  At this point my tasting notes falter in terms of wine- everything was just so good I had to stop madly pecking into my iPhone and sit back and enjoy what was in front of me.

Next up, elegant escargots presented beautifully in a small Le Creuset Cocotte.  They were divine, in a shallot-y, herbed buttery smooth sauce that I plan to recreate at home. 

The only course that was just so/so was the lobster bisque I had next.  I was oscillating between that and some greens, so perhaps I was latently craving roughage, but the soup did not blow me away.  The filet mignon erased any hint of a misstep, however; one bite and I was back in Matisse bliss.  Jonas had venison and he could not stop talking about how melt-in-your-mouth tasty it was.  He offered me a nibble toward the beginning and I’m glad I got in while I did because his plate disappeared in a few short and satisfied moments. 

At that point no dessert was really necessary and I was starting to think about all those kilometers I’d be running the next day- 21, whew.  John would not have any of our hemming and hawing, however, and he brought us out the two specialties of the house, mousse au chocolat and crème brulee. 

 Classic, yes, but presentation and execution are what matters and Matisse certainly did not disappoint.  Fresh, amusing, lovely on the plate and palate, both takes on French tradition soared.  I do hate to cut a good evening short, but alas, dear readers, 5 am comes rather too early for me, so we rolled out of Matisse fat, happy and ready for bed.