What the hell is a breast of veal? Breasts come from squab, ducks, chickens, and plastic surgeons, commonly. The average chap doesn’t often think of the breast of a baby cow, but Thomas Keller is no average person, I’m coming to find out. It turns out veal does have a breast, and it’s a pretty hefty thing indeed. I chose to make this recipe for my awesometastic toddler Bentley Danger’s 2^nd birthday, occurring on the intriguingly-auspicious 08.09.10. Why Linda, don’t you think he would have been happy with tater tots and easy cheese? Mayhaps, but I’m doing my best to cultivate a little urban gourmand, so I see no better occasion to make a multi-day feast than on the anniversary of Bentley’s birth. It is also a reminder of how far we’ve come in the last two years. Two years ago I was laid up in a hospital bed after 72 hours of 2-week overdue labor that included a crash cart scare and eventually being completely put to sleep for the birth of Bentley due to unforeseen complications. Everything is dandy now and I chalk it up to the little monster not being quite ready to enter the big, bright world, nevertheless it wasn’t the greatest few days. That is in stark contrast to our life now. Bentley is an aspiring sous chef, assisting me in the kitchen with all the dexterity he can muster. He has a surprising attention to detail (at least when it comes to licking the ice cream-churning beaters).

In lieu of a big party this year, we decided to keep his fete to family, since it was on a Monday. The reveler tally totaled 13 adults and four little ones, so I thumbed through The French Laundry looking for something that would feed a small crowd. It turns out the veal breast was what TK served the original crew of TFL a week before it opened, thus it’s a very meaningful recipe to him. I figured it would be an ideal dish to commemorate a momentous day, and so set out to gather my ingredients. TK suggests asking the butcher for a Bobby veal breast which is smaller than a regular breast, but I was unable to locate one. Just locating a veal breast itself proved challenging. Turns out we are not big veal eaters in this country, and least of all as strange a cut as a breast. No matter though, I planned to double his original recipe anyway since I had a larger crowd, so the butcher and I figured about half a regular-sized veal breast would do the trick. The whole breast weighed in at 20 lbs, of which I took 10.

The breast has ribs running up its length. The butcher compared it to pork spare ribs. I also came to find out it is full of cartilage and fat, which I suppose make it tender and delicious after a low and slow braise, but nothing turns you off of eating more than pulling a 10” long cord of cartilage out of a freshly-cooked piece of meat. The node-like tendrils looked like something out of a sci-fi film: half animate, half spare computer part. I wanted to share a picture but I couldn’t bring myself to ruin the magic of the final dish (it was definitely magical). About the time I was done braising and I was separating the rib rack from the meat, I started to seriously doubt this dish. There was a ton of fat, sinew, bone, cartilage, and all manner of odd thing interspersed between the flesh of the breast. How on earth would it ever taste good, and how could I serve my guests something so strange?

The next step calls for doubling the breast upon itself and weighting it so that it compresses together to form a solid, thin mass. I did this overnight, and the next day when I pulled the breast out to cut it into rounds for serving, the genius of the dish was apparent. The cutter wouldn’t cut through the fat, so it was easy to separate it at that time from the meat, and in the end I would up with perfect circles of meat the texture of tuna in a salad Nicoise with the flavor profile of well-braised veal. Every time I cook a TK recipe I go through a touch-and-go period where I firmly believe the dish won’t come together. Each instance so far, he’s proven me wrong. The steps are actually so clear and concise that any doubt and second-guessing is really a product of my own mind. I feel comfortable enough in the kitchen that I trust myself, but I guess I’m learning that I have to trust someone else too, if I respect them enough to cook from their book.

The grueling detail-focus in this recipe is maddening. For instance, he specifies shapes for the various vegetables that top the meat; the beets must be Parisienne balls, the carrots are 1” turned (whittled into miniature footballs), the celery are 1×1/4 batons, and the turnips are fluted ovals. If there is a soul among you who can scoop Parisienne balls from a raw beet, speak now! I wound up sous viding my beets, then perfectly cubing them- I think they were plenty beautiful. I spent roughly an hour chopping up a few vegetables for the dish. Had it been a creation from my own head, the same vegetables would have taken me 15 minutes and looked good enough to be served at a restaurant. Good enough is not TK’s style. They must be the best. My knife skills improved considerably in that hour.

The waste present in most of TK’s recipes is a little staggering as well. In order to get perfect batons, balls and ovals, roughly 50% of the vegetable in question is peeled or pared away. In a commercial kitchen this would not be a problem, I wager, since stocks and sauces welcome the addition of wanton veggies. In my own kitchen I find myself scrambling to come up with clever ways to serve the unwanted bits, thus I make one recipe from TFL then eat remarkably unphotogenic (though usually delicious) meals for two days afterward. I have witnessed this phenomenon with vegetables, but also bones, duck breast, fish scraps, polenta remnants, et cetera. It’s something to be aware of, and I consider it a good and bad thing. It’s god in that it forces me to think outside the box to come up with alternative uses for the imperfect scraps. It’s bad because I imagine people across the country tackling the daunting recipes in TK’s books yet being busy enough in their lives that they simply boot the waste into the compost bin. I wish he would have addressed this issue by stating what he actually personally does with all the excess instead of the occasional “can be frozen for future use.” Future use in what? Let’s keep the food revolution going with inspired ideas for scrap foods. Maybe I’ll write that book. Hmmm, Goin’ Gourmet with TFL’s Tatters?

Last week I wrote about how TK inspired in me a love for strainers, chinois’, China caps, and the like. This week it’s got to be my round cutters of all sizes. He’s got me thinking I can make anything pretty by simply plopping it into a little round form. It really did the trick for this dish, however. Braised meat dishes tend to be among the most heart-warmingly delectable around, but they also tend toward unsightliness on the plate. A slop of stew, a smattering of spaetzle, and you are left with a full belly in front of a skid-marked plate. By packing the strands of meat into a round, pan-frying them, then serving them on equally circular cakes of polenta, the mess is virtually eliminated. It’s a fine thing indeed when the beauty of the plate matches the beauty in your belly, and this dish achieves that rare balance.

Bentley gave the dish the ultimate seal of approval when he unceremoniously (read: beseechingly, with sticky hands grabbing at the platter) requested a second veal breast round along with more polenta. He ate so much dinner he wasn’t overly obsessed with the chocolate/peanut/cajeta cups I made him for dessert, although they did end up all over his face during the manic unwrapping of gifts portion of the evening.

Best. Dinner. Ever.  When you challenge yourself to the limits of personal creativity, more often than not the result is an epic failure. I have had my fair share of those: popovers that didn’t “pop”, mousse that was more like sludge, pasta fit to line the rubbish bin, not the inside of a happy mouth.  That’s why I was so elated when I tasted the first bite of this bite-sized bliss.  Who knew Jerusalem artichokes would make such great gnocchi- certainly not me, though I thought I’d try because I had success with parsnip gnocchi recently, and what the hell, right?

Many of you may be asking yourself what in the god-damn is a Jerusalem artichoke aka sunchoke? It looks to me like a cross between ginger and galangal with a purplish skin if you are familiar with both of those roots, but it tastes like, well, an artichoke.  Sort of a really condensed artichoke with the minerally flavor many roots take on that is vaguely reminiscent of licking a D battery (in a good way!). 

I had a healthy handful so I baked them along with some purple potatoes and milled them into an even texture.  Then I added salt, a banty egg (but any egg would do) and enough flour to form a dough.  I rolled pieces of the dough into very thin tubes, maybe ½”.  Then I cut the tubes into ¾” lengths as you would gnocchi and placed them on a parchment-lined baking sheet.  I find that resting the gnocchetti (little gnocchi since they are so small) for up to an hour helps it to develop a nice solid exterior post-boil, but anything over an hour makes them too hard and dried out. 

This dinner in all actuality started three days before I served it, however, as I wanted medium-rare beef short ribs, and the only way to do that is in the sous vide machine.  It takes quite a bit of time for the collagen to break down and tenderize the meat at medium rare temperature (134°) so I planned ahead and gave myself 72 hours to tenderize the ribs.  I removed them at more like 60 hours and they were actually completely ideal, so in the future I’ll stick with that number.  Before I sealed them in the foodsafe bag I seasoned them with salt, pepper and smoked garlic powder (which you can learn to make here).  I tossed in a mango that I had sliced, since I wanted a sweet, tangy sauce made from mango and the sweetish effervescent Italian wine, Moscato.  Pan-global, I know, but it worked so well together I make no apologies. 

When I pulled the ribs from the sous vide bath (pictured above, before deep-frying), I added the juices from the bag to a shallot I had lightly sautéed in a saucepan.  I let the juices reduce a little, then added another chopped mango.  Finally I added a cup of Moscato and let the sauce reduce until slightly thickened and all the flavors came together.  I gave it a few whirrs with the immersion blender et voila.  I didn’t even add additional salt and pepper as the bag juices were already seasoned to the perfect level.  The smoked garlic powder came out stunningly in the sauce, and lent a subtle savory hint to the sweetness of the mango and Moscato. 

The final step in putting together this plate of scintillating savory seduction is to throw the sous vide short ribs in the deep fryer at 375° for 60 seconds.  This all came about because a few days ago I was excitedly tweeting (on twitter, for those of you wondering whether I regularly walk around the house acting like a bird-follow me @saltyseattle) about my new deep fryer.  One of my wonderful twitter follows/followers who is also sous vide-obsessed (@bamiyahara) suggested I deep fry sous vide short ribs a la Chang of Momofuku fame. 

still rare but so soft after three days

I couldn’t track down a recipe, but it’s not exactly rocket science, so I worked my own magic, and after one minute in the fryer I was very pleased with the nice caramelized crust that had developed on my short ribs.  Much more than a minute and I’d have worried too much about undoing all the great pains I took to keep the ribs at medium rare, but any less than a minute and not enough caramelization occurs.  I am very thrilled that this was the inaugural use for my deep fryer. It has convinced me unequivocally that there will be many more to come.

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.

As many of you know, I’m participating in the United Way Hunger Action challenge this week.  What does this mean? Well, since I have a family of three, in Washington State we would qualify for $18 per day in food stamps.  The goal of the challenge is to try and live on that amount for five full days, so my weekly budget is $90.  Throw in the fact that Wednesday is my husband’s birthday and I’m trying to make it special for him, which usually equates to an off-the-hook feast, and I’ve got quite the challenge.  I also plan to stick to my usual habit of buying mostly organic ingredients if at all possible; let’s see if it can be done.  You may think I’m lucky in that I can count three people yet Bentley is merely a toddler.  Not so, because he knocks back three gallons of milk a week, and at $5.00 a gallon (for organic) that drops my budget down to $75 right off the bat, not to mention the fact that he eats bananas like a monkey on crack- thank god they’re cheap! 

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This is another one of those culture combining posts.  Be warned if you don’t think a Seattle sparrow should fly to Greece by way of Thailand in order to rassle up dinner for the evening.  You know it, I know it, I’m going sous vide crazy right now. It’s a culinary trend that’s sweeping the nation and I’ve tethered onto the broomstick nice and tight.  I can’t help it though, it’s just so fun to throw something into the steamy water bath and forget about it for several hours, only to find that you’ve cooked it to perfection because of, not in spite of your absentmindedness.  I’ve been playing with all manner of meats and vegetables, but not yet a whole fish. Until now. 

Branzino is a sexy, spectacular fish; bass of the Mediterranean, it’s sometimes called.  The first time I had it in Oporto, Portugal at Don Tonho restaurant, it was cooked fully immersed in rock salt in order to lock in the moisture and sweetness of the delicate flesh.  It came out on a glamorous silver platter buried in a deep salt grave that the waiter excavated in order to extricate my dinner.  He filleted it perfectly, leaving nary a bone, and ceremoniously removed the head with a felling flourish as a finale to his dramatic work.  I always thought he was uber-talented in his tableside displays, but after last night I realize it’s actually quite easy to debone a branzino tableside.  The bones slide away from the flesh as effortlessly as the last grain of sand that passes through an hourglass, it’s such a fluid gesture. 

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I was pretty nervous to serve my guests garlic chocolate gelato last night.  That’s why I made three flavors, so that if they didn’t like the garlic chocolate they could delight in the obvious goodness of gianduja chocolate chip, for example.  Or take global comfort in the spicy delicacy of cardamom pistachio, from India and Italy with love.  The good news is that I had plied all 5 of them with enough wine throughout dinner to loosen their lips, so I’m pretty sure I got candid comments between creamy bites.  Curious what they thought?  Well first let’s talk about the “safe” flavors. 

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