Half-Naked Fish and Chips - Level Up, Monday Morning Re-Cap

My dinner menu last Saturday started from one unlikely ingredient I found at a market. An oak-matured ‘old-fashioned’ Malt Vinegar from the UK. Everybody loves fish and chips, and I’m a big fan of the malt vinegar that accompanies it, but I’ve only ever had the cheaper brands, Sarson’s or Heinz. I saw an opportunity for an easy improvement on a classic, and sometimes you need a gentle nudge to dive into something as indulgent as ‘Fish and Chips’.

‘Fish and chips’ has some real pro’s and con’s.

Pro: moist flaky fish, crunchy, great vehicle for salt and malt vinegar, fried potatoes

Con: usually cheap fish, too much batter, oily, cheap vinegar, coma, death, dizziness, etc.

I want to accentuate the positives and minimize the negatives:

• Use Halibut instead of Cod or Haddock. Not that helpful in terms of taste and texture, but cleaner and a more refined taste.

• Decrease the oil intake by reducing the amount of batter by half by only battering half of the fish. Increase the crunchiness by substituting a Tempura batter.

• Boil the potatoes with their skin on, slice into wedges, gently paint with butter and salt, and roast. This will produce a rich, sweet potato flavor that will balance perfectly with the malt vinegar.

• Only dip one side of the fish into the batter.

• Be a little wild and and not so precious when putting the battered side into the oil. I’m using a sided pan with a 1/2 inch of oil and when I made the first pieces I was very careful to lay the pieces in gently. The end result was crunchy, uniform, and fine, but wasn’t what I love about Tempura. It was a rice cracker. Tempura is about crunchy jagged pieces that are light and airy. I little sloppier drop into the oil, and some early movement in the pan produced pieces with a little wilder Tempura “hat” with crunchy jagged pieces.

All-Star Weekend

This weekend everything worked. 3 meals with 3 different styles played off of each other. Interesting little tweaks to classic dishes. Classic frameworks that I adapted to the best ingredients I found while shopping, and that I knew my diners liked.

• French dip using a perfect filet mignon, hold the bread and cheese.

• Grilled Tuna with a yuzu sesame sauce, paired with avocado, tomato, and sourdough.

• Caesar Salad with endive, radicchio, and cabbage.

• Meatballs with charred “French onions” and mushrooms.

• Halibut with a tempura hat, half-naked ‘fish and chips’. Malt vinegar.

• Roasted Potatoes boiled whole with skin on, sliced carefully, dried, and roasted to unbelievable sweetness.

• Branzino “shingled” with Cremini mushroom slices and finished with a clean ginger and shallot broth.

Try thinking this way about your favorite classic dishes, even passed down family recipes. Substitute, tweak, and re-think them. Is there a part of that dish that you just tolerate, that maybe you wish weren’t there? Re-thinking dishes without disrespecting or disregarding the good parts about them can be an interesting exercise and a way to breathe fresh air into them. Maybe you have access to ingredients and techniques that the original recipe maker didn’t have. Maybe your grandmother wanted to use way less breadcrumbs in her meatballs, and if she had more meat would have preferred to cut the amount in half. A lot of early cooking was dictated by limitations that we don’t have as cooks now.

The best cooks I’ve ever met, from legendary French Chefs to my Seafood Gumbo perfecting grandmother, had a real quality of being curious, adventurous, and adaptive. Their fans obsessed over their recipe’s but they didn’t. They knew savory recipes are frameworks to guide the reader, not to be followed exactly. The recipes of the best cooks mostly have a secret hidden note at the end of them stating: use the best ingredients you can get and don’t let your dislike of one particular facet of the recipe keep you from the other ones. Use this as a guide to make something you like.

Read a recipe a few times, make a few notes and then close the damn book. Let your brain do the work, it’s really hard to write recipes and techniques that translate between cooks of differing experience levels, skills, and kitchens.

Delicate White Fishes

I’m not talking about lighter fillets that are easy enough to broil (like Flounder, Fluke, or even the Stripers we love here out east). Nor am I talking about the fish that classically call for a flour dusting before pan-roasting (Dover Sole, for instance). I mean delicate, white fish that are often referred to as flaky, which are sort of thick and take a few minutes to cook, and which you regularly see on fine dining menus: Atlantic Cod, Black Cod, Chilean Sea Bass, Halibut. These can be tricky in any milieu, especially in the home kitchen, so they’re often relegated to oven-baking. Which can get boring. So folks look for alternatives; Butter Poached Halibut, for instance, is delicious. But I’d like to go in a different direction.

In almost every restaurant I worked for in NYC we made a crust for such fish:

• Montrachet- Brioche, softened butter, and black truffles

• RM- Wondra flour and black steel pans transformed the skin into a crust

• Bouley- scallop mousse and tiny mango medallions

• Danube- scallop mousse and almonds or thinly sliced mushrooms

At Montrachet we used black truffle because we had black truffle scraps. At RM we were seafood purists so we had methods to transform the skins themselves into crusts. And at Bouley and Danube we used scallop mousse because we had scallop scraps and it set nicely when cooked.

In each case, by pan roasting the crust side on medium high heat, followed by a trip through the oven, we achieved a nicely browned, and deliciously crunchy crust—with flaky, tender flesh. No flipping. Maybe a quick finish with a herby butter baste.

I’ve used many other “crusts” in restaurants, but I’d suggest they’re not practical for home cooking.

Lately I’ve been turning to the world of vegetables to create interesting”crusts” for these sensitive and tasty fishes, experimenting with things like cabbages and bitter greens.

I saw a photo of some beautifully prepared stuffed cabbages, and my first thought was: I can’t get over the texture of those things; I love that slow cooked sweet cabbage flavor but the cabbage is a textural nightmare. How to solve this problem?

What I want is for the moisture from the fish protect to the greens from burning, while the hearty leaves from the greens shield the surface of the fish from cooking too quickly and becoming dry. I want a “crust” that cooks while our fish cooks, developing flavor and texture through a Maillard Reaction or Caramelization.

Here’s a picture of what I served this past Tuesday—Atlantic Cod, marinated in white miso and wrapped in Radicchio, grilled over Binchotan charcoal:

Pommes Puree, Ready for Top Billing

Mashed potatoes don’t get the credit they deserve. They’re usually thought of as a “side dish,” but I think of them as the perfect base substrate. Served skillfully, they can pair with, provoke, and highlight every other element of the plate.

When I worked at Danube and Bouley, nearly every entree came out with a tableside-plated quenelle of perfectly smooth and buttery potato puree. A perfect accent that paired with everything from Roasted Duck to Lobster. But what if mashed potatoes actually go top billing? Let’s flip things upside down. Let’s make the potato the star of the show.

Supporting Cast

• Roasted chicken ‘gravy’- Enrich a chicken stock with roast chicken pieces, reduce, thicken with charred onions using a hand blender and finish with black pepper and herbs

• Black trumpet and porcini mushrooms- Toast, roast, chop and bind with creme fraiche, black pepper, and parsley

• Sauteed Greens- Kale, spinach, or chard

• Grilled Shrimp- Spice and Lemon

• Charred lemons, olive oil, hot sauce, parmgianno, creme fraiche- Pass around

The above supporting cast can be served all together or alone. Depends on the crowd.

A few thoughts to guide the potato puree production:

• Use your favorite potatoes and simmer in lightly salted water with the skins on, peel after cooking, and use a ricer or food mill. Your potato flesh won’t be waterlogged and it will be thirsty for your butter and cream.

• Add a 70/30 ratio of butter to dairy (milk or cream). Season well with salt and pepper

• Pro tip: for extra silky push the puree through a Tamis, Chinois, or strainer.

• Be loose. It should be ‘on the wave’, and remember that it will set more on the plate than it is when warm in the pan. ‘On the Wave’ is expression used to describe the looseness of properly served risotto. Supple and fluid.

Final instruction: Tell yourself and others that its okay to make a gravy divot with the back of your spoon. Play around with this concept using different potatoes and accompaniments.

Monday Morning Re-cap. A Chance to Re-think, Re-group, and Level Up

Here’s an entry I hope will explain what I’m up to with this “Daily Cooking” blog.

Weekends. I do a big shopping trip on Friday morning, and kick off the weekend with a basic mental framework of the direction the weekend meals will take, leaving room for improvisation and innovation. And then I work hard, meal after meal, starting with Friday dinner straight through Sunday lunch.

One reason I love these weekends is that the longer days remind me of restaurant days: extremely busy and “in the flow.” In those days I worked, went home to sleep for five hours, and then went back to work. Nearly all my time was spent at work in the kitchen, and my brain operated in a strange mode, in which ideas and connections come quickly. My work as a private chef isn’t like that, but the weekends bear a slight similarity in that it’s a mix of ideas and heavy production.

When it’s all over, Monday morning typically finds me at home in Brooklyn with a surplus of these fresh, high-quality ingredients I didn’t use over the weekend. And I have an extremely well-appointed test kitchen in my home. Without the pressure of time or the distraction of other dishes, I use this time to take a favorite idea that didn’t get fully fleshed out and work on it in a vacuum. Sometimes I record this work on video. You can expect to see examples of these videos here on my site in the not-too-distant future, but my real motive is to finish and codify my ideas. I want the chance to tap back into my ideas and innovate and/or perfect the dishes a little more as time goes on.

Butter Poached Halibut

Cooking things in oil has a terrible reputation for good reason. Modern deep fat cooking usually features breading and/or batter that serves to protect the flesh, and create a delicious crunchy crust. But the crust acts as a sponge, and in the end the diner ingests a lot of low-quality oil that’s been held for hours at a high temperature. It’s not the oil itself that’s the problem; it’s the breading. In fact, done skillfully, oil might just be the greatest cooking medium of all. It retards dehydration; it’s fast, and uniform. It also delivers and extracts flavors.

I use high quality oil, slow cooking, and NO crust to cook fish, and I cook it GENTLY. Halibut is a beautiful firm-fleshed white fish that dries out and toughens quickly when in direct heat. Over-saucing is a common fix, but let’s avoid that.

Beurre Monte’ is a magical solution that is too little-known to home cooks It’s a versatile workhorse in restaurant kitchens, and it’s simple: it’s melted, emulsified butter. It’s used to slow cook lobsters, rest roasted meats, and poach fish. Restaurants use it the same way they use sous vide machines: for slow, even, controlled cooking. Beurre Monte replaces the plastic bag of sous vide with a warm, sometimes seasoned butter bath.

Start with a tiny amount of water over medium high heat, and start melting and moving large pieces of butter. The cold butter regulates the temperature to prevent breaking. It’s an emulsion of water and butter that is 99 percent butter—the water just gets it started melting properly. Depending on the size of the restaurant, it might consist of 5-10 pounds of butter, kept on-hand in a warm area of the stovetop at about 120 degrees.

Let’s translate all of these ideas to home cooking using less butter but getting the benefits of all of the above.

• Marinate the fish however you like.

• In a medium sized heavy sauce pan boil 1/4 cup water and then put in a pound of butter and start pushing them around over medium heat until melted. Infuse with salt, herbs and seasonings. It should be about an inch deep.

• Pat the marinade off the fish and season lightly with salt and pepper. Drop it in the pan on low heat, move it around enough to coat it in butter and, cook on one side for 3 minutes. Flip and cover lightly with parchment paper Cartouche. (A tighter seal of a lid or foil would cause a temperature spike and unwanted condensation.)

• Continue to cook over a low flame or throw pan into a low oven for 4-5 minutes, or until it’s done.

• Off of the heat, baste the fish with the surrounding Buerre Monte until it starts to adhere and glaze.

• Transfer to a paper towel or rack before plating. Strain a little of your butter mixture and add a fresh squeeze of lemon and fresh herbs to make a sauce.

Simulated Hamburger Lettuce

A busy weekend had passed and I found myself back home in the test kitchen with an odd assortment of unused ingredients. I took a “mystery box” approach and gave myself a challenge. I had:

• Aged Sirloin steak

• Smoked Chicken Demi-glace

• Enoki Mushrooms

• Frisee' lettuce and cherry tomatoes

With a mind to slice the steak thinly later on, I pan roasted it and removed it to a cutting board to rest.

In the same pan I sautéed the mushrooms in the smoky chicken sauce. The flavor was great, but the consistency was off; it was oily, soft, and a little loose. It needed a unifier.

I dropped in two lightly beaten eggs and made a quick soft omelet.

I sliced the steak and plated it with the omelet and the Frisee & tomatoes (lightly dressed).

The steak and omelet disappeared first—they were delicious. As I began to eat the salad I detected a flavor that was at once deeply familiar and elusive. It took me a minute. Smoky, beefy, crunchy, tomato, mushroomy…

It was HAMBURGER LETTUCE. The lettuce that picks up the juicy taste from grilled beef. The residual liquid from the beef and smoky chicken Demi that were now dressing my frisee brought the exact taste experience of that first perfect bite of a hamburger with crunchy lettuce and tomato.

Hamachi (Yellowtail). Taking it All the Way

• Roast the Collar

• Char the Belly

• Slice the Loin

Too often “Japanese” cuisine just means sushi with some cooked appetizers. Its deeper, richer slow cooked dishes are overlooked and underserved. A side of Hamachi (Japanese Yellowtail) from your fish butcher will allow you to explore this type of cooking at home. Its 3 parts, the collar, top loin, and belly serve to make 3 of my favorite Japanese fish dishes.

• Break the two muscle pieces down into boneless and skinless (or have the butcher do it), and leave the collar as it is. The bloodline is bright red and somewhat acceptable in raw preparations, but turns dark and unappealing when cooked. Trim and discard it wherever you see it. Marinate the collar and belly in Miso paste, Mirin, White Soy, Ponzu, lemon zest, and oil. Season it lightly with a spice rub if you like.

• Put the loin in the fridge, the belly in the freezer, and the collar on a parchment paper lined and wire-racked tray.

• Place the collar skin side up under a broiler on the lowest rack. This will effectively create a hot oven with a direct heat source. The collar should cook all the way through in 8-10 minutes. It has bones running through it all angles that you will slide out and pick out later.

• Flip the collar and place the now much colder belly on the tray and under the broiler on the highest rack. 45-60 seconds should yield crackling, sizzling sounds and great color.

• Take out and rest. Dash with ponzu to season and stop residual cooking.

• Slice the loin sashimi-style and season with whatever sashimi seasonings you like,

• Slice the belly an inch thick and sauce it however you like,

• Discard the skin and bones of the collar and serve in a bowl with herbs, ponzu, lemon, oil, and charred tomatoes (optional).

Marinated and Broiled belly, being dressed with Ginger infused Ponzu

A New Old Cheese Sauce: Lighter and Stronger

Dinner Menu

• Roasted Tomato Soup/ Rosemary Ciabatta

• Beef/ Veal Meatballs /Porcini/ “French Onion” Broth

• Broiled Miso Salmon

• Cavatelli

• Roasted Broccolini and Cauliflorini

• Romaine/Endive/Radiccio Salad

It’s freezing cold outside and this menu needs a unifying element. I want this meal to feel more like Swiss Alps than Italian night. The beef-shiitake broth I made with short ribs in my pressure cooker is really good and I want to use it for more than just the ‘French Onion’ broth. I also need a sauce for the pasta that will play along with the broccoli and meatballs. I’m thinking about a slightly funky cheese sauce using a gruyere-like cheese that isn’t heavy and creamy. I want to marry the broth and the cheese. The answer is old school Fondue.

A union of wine and cheese. Cornstarch usually does the thickening and smoothing in classic Fondue preparations, but I’m going to use melted leeks and garlic.

• Melt Leeks and Garlic and season with salt and pepper, a sprinkle of flour or cornstarch

• Add equal parts White Wine and Stock, simmer for 2 minutes

• Puree until smooth with a hand blender

• Add Gruyere-like cheese, anything you would find in a Fondue recipe

• Adjust your consistency with White Wine and Stock, Adjust seasoning

• Black Pepper and thyme are nice late additions to this sauce and the usually the more acidic the wine, the better. You can use any white wine, but the citric and tartaric acid in tarter wines are what facilitate smooth melting.

Broiled Greens and a Name I Can't Figure Out

I have 2 small gardens in Southampton and Old Westbury. They’re more experimental than productive. I’ll pick part of a section early, right on time, and leave the other to be harvested late, noting the difference. I like things to sprout and go wild. One of the most interesting examples of this was with some late-harvested arugula. The biggest difference was in the hardening of the stalks, and the extremely bitter flavor. The texture was closer to a young kale than an arugula, and the taste had an incredibly bitter finish. It was nicely chewy, but the bitterness was too much. It needed taming.

I knew I was going to have to cook it, but it is technically a lettuce so I had to be fast, in and out. I toasted some at high heat with light oil and salt. The stalks were great, but I lost the leaves. I was going for kale chips, but the leaves didn’t hold up. So I seasoned them the same way and ran them under the broiler using my OVERLAP technique you can read about in Big Ideas. But the leaves burned before the stalks got tender.

I decided to stack them about 4 high on a small tray, and put them under the broiler.

The top part started to color, so I turned the charred ones into the pile exposing a new layer to the broiler. After about 4 turns most of the arugula had color, the stalks were tender, and the bitterness was diminished. The water inside of the arugula pile had protected the leaves from getting scorched and shriveled.

A final squeeze of lemon juice, drizzle of olive oil, and a slice in half.

I’m still searching for a name to call this dish. What do you call something picked too late? Elderly? Mature? Forgotten harvest? I think the technique should be called Composting, but how appetizing is that? I’m taking suggestions if you have any.

One last thing, balance the bitterness of this dish with the lemon juice I mentioned. Most recipes and cooks balance bitterness with sweetness, but I feel like it mutes the flavors. Balancing bitterness with acidity acts as an amplifier, and works great for bitter greens.

Spaetzle. The Pasta Dumplings that aren't as Tricky as they Look

Properly sautéed, browned, and puffed spaetzle are really special. Spaetzle are little egg noodles made from a wet egg pasta dough. But what’s different about them is their malleability and versatility. You can really finish them. Most people treat them like pasta, but their magic lies in directly sautéing them. Their drop dumpling shape allows them to brown evenly, stay separate, and soufflé' before going into a sauce or soup. Making them has the potential to be a little crazy and messy, but they are well worth it.

There are a million basic spaetzle recipes on the internet that will get you most of the way there, but I’ll share the little tricks that elevate them. As I have mentioned before, I was the chef of a great Austrian restaurant, but I started as the low man on the totem pole. I was taught this basic framework of a recipe, and I made it dozens of times. Here are some tips..

• Use slightly more egg yolks than whole eggs (i.e for a 10 egg batch- 6 yolks, 4 whole eggs)

• Add 1/2 c of creme fraiche or quark cheese for acidity and smoothness

• Basic neutral seasoning of salt, pepper, and optional nutmeg (for old schoolers)

• Use a sturdy whisk and work like crazy. It should be tiring to do

• Whisk in Wondra flour until its really difficult to move and little bubbles appear

• Using a simple spaetzle maker drop into salted simmering water, and don’t crowd your pot. Make multiple batches

• After 30-45 seconds and a float to the top, scoop out spaetzle and give a quick rinse under cool water, lightly coat with oil and lay out on a tray

The really strong whisking at the end of the flour addition is important to develop the gluten that will keep them together as they drop into the boiling water. If the batter is easy to move around, then you should add more flour.

My favorite way to finish Spaetzle is with a quick sauté in oil and butter and finished with herbs and cheese, but they are infinitely versatile. The quick sauté not only gives color and flavor, but the soufflé effect really lightens them up as they puff. This is versatile dish that just screams handmade and special.

Eat these Beets

This beet recipe works anytime of year. When beets are in season they are easy to cook so I peel and simply roast them. When they aren’t in season they can get woody, dehydrated, and hard so I prefer to use some liquid. I’m always striving to preserve and intensify the naturally occurring flavors in an ingredient, so I’m not a big fan of boiling beets. Boiling any vegetable for a long time extracts flavors into the water, and out of your final dish.

A quick roast, and then a braise is the best way to cook beets. High heat roasting concentrates and caramelizes flavors, and a slow braise cooks them through and infuses them with whatever flavors you choose. A dutch oven or any covered braising dish should do the trick. A Pro Tip is to use beet juice as part of the braising liquid. Some neutral stock and something salty and acidic in combination will help to balance the sweetness from the reducing beet juice. Herbs, spices, cured meats, and aromatics also lend flavor but use them sparingly, so the beet flavor can stand out.

Beets with oil, salt, aromatics and herbs. Pre roast

Use a Cartouch to facilitate slower evaporation

Finished cooking (short rib added for flavor)

Salmon. All the Ways

Smoked. Grilled. Poached. Cured. Broiled. All great ways to cook and prepare the popular and versatile Salmon. Let’s look at a way to combine some aspects of these preparations that will elevate a simple Salmon fillet to new heights. Sadly, Salmon is usually boring and overcooked at most restaurants, or chewy and not fresh from your local sushi joint.

Let’s start with a simple marinade for a fillet that is my absolute Go To for almost any fish. It’s a mixture of:

• Mirin

• White Soy (optional, highly recommended)

• Ponzu

• White Miso Paste

• Neutral cooking oil (Grapeseed preferably, but olive works too)

  Optional additions: Herbs, citrus zest, spice rub

Whisk ingredients, liberally coat, and let set for 15 minutes to an hour.

Pat dry. Drizzle with a little more oil, and place on a parchment lined sheet tray. Place under a high broiler on the second rack. Depending on the thickness of your fillet or steak your time will vary. For an average sized piece I’d recommend about 3-4 minutes. You should be looking for color on top and the flesh should be turning opaque. The sweetness in the Mirin and the Miso paste should aid in the browning on top while the flesh has a chance to gently cook, a result of the gentle heat throughout the oven everywhere but the surface exposed to the broiler. Cook the salmon to the temperature of your liking, and you can even play around with other cooking techniques like grilling and pan roasting. The 2 keys to this approach to Salmon are the marinade and the unidirectional heat source. No flipping so you get the best of both worlds. The concentrated great charred Salmon flavor from the top surface, and the slow cooked tender texture throughout the rest of the flesh.

A useful way to portion for uniform cooking

Marinade with herbs

Black Trumpets. The Mushroom Infusion you Need

Black trumpet mushrooms look like a mess. Sticks, spiders, and strangely shaped. DANK is a good word to describe them. They have to be cooked, and I wouldn’t ever just serve them as a major component of a dish the way one would a Chanterelle or Maitake. Their best substitute would probably be a Shiitake, but at least a Shiitake has a traditional size and shape. When black trumpets are cooked properly, they have a depth of mushroom flavor that is unrivaled. They taste and smell like the good part of a forest, it’s hard to describe. Torn into strips, roasted, and toasted they can elevate so many flavors. A good cheese comparison would be Parmesan. Rarely eaten alone, but elevating and tying together so many elements of a dish. They even get briny and taste like seaweed when deeply roasted and dehydrated.

Because of their long cylindrical shape, more trombone than trumpet, they have to be cleaned. Black trumpets can contain sticks, grass, and if you’re lucky…. spiders! My sous chef always laughs when we find living things on our produce, and calls it “Pro-ta-een”. You know you have fresh stuff if caterpillars are on your lettuce, and spiders are in your Trumpets. Tear them lengthwise to expose the center, and give them a rough wash in cold water. Rinse, repeat. Discard any really soggy or mildewy smelling ones, they can ruin the whole bunch and will never cook properly. Lay them out on towels and really dry them. An effective way is to lay them out is on a bunch of paper towels, and then roll the whole thing up.

Now to cook. Wipe a non stick pan with oil, and throw on high heat for 1 minute. Do not crowd the pan because trumpets have a ton of water and if we don’t get color on them they won’t develop their flavor. They will stay wet and dank. Strangely, the color we want is a brown one. When you sauté these on high heat the black turns brown. After about a minute, start to move a little and add some more oil, black pepper, and thyme if you like. When it looks like most of the water is gone, add salt and some more oil. 20 more seconds and you’re done. Transfer to a sheet tray or plate. Adjust the seasoning, add some finishing oil and you can still go in a few directions. Roast more for a crunchy seaweed flavor, or splash with vinegar for a funky mushroom vinaigrette flavor. You can serve them as they are mixed in with pasta or rice, chop them and sprinkle them on a steak or fish, or even puree them and make a great sauce out of them. When I worked at RM we pureed them with vinegar and oil to make an amazing thick vinaigrette we served with lobster.

These are rare mushrooms that can really elevate a dish. They require a little bit of work but they are worth it.

Cabbage Time!!!

All of the cabbages are sweet now. I found the biggest one I have ever seen at Young’s Farm in Glen Head, NY. It wasn’t overgrown and old. Just big and healthy. I wanted to preserve its natural form and serve it as is. I cut the 2-inch wide EQUATOR section out of it, keeping the heart intact so it would stay together for a roasting.

On this cross section I want to caramelize the sugars on the surface and get a lot of color and flavor while leaving the inside gently cooked through. This cabbage has a great raw flavor that I want to preserve too. I want to try to combine two great cooking methods in one dish. To do this I use a simple marinade of softened butter, olive oil, white soy, Mirin, and a mild spice rub of your choosing. (Fat, Salt, Sweet, Spice). Massage this in so that it penetrates into the slice. To cook it, put it on parchment paper on a sheet tray. 15-20 minutes under a high broiler with 3 flips. Because of the Mirin, a sweet rice wine, the natural sugar in seasonal cabbages, and the butter rub, you will get a lot of color and even some burning on the outer edges. This is ok because the flips submerge the burnt sides into the liquid on the tray. It’s a great effect that lets you get a lot of color without burning.

Slice and serve like a tart.

Perfect cross section. Caramelized surface and gently warmed interior.

The Schnitzel

For a long while the word Schnitzel appeared all over when you Google searched my name. My last job before the one I currently have was as the chef of the Danube. A 2 Michelin starred Austrian restaurant in downtown Manhattan. It was beautiful, expensive, and we always had a schnitzel on the menu. I’m not Austrian and never made one before I started working there as a line cook. People are very opinionated about Schnitzel. Including the German and Austrians I worked with. This recipe is not your grandmother’s schnitzel. It’s better and lighter and the greatest thing ever. It’s not fair, it is a cheat code into your guest’s brains pleasure centers.

• Veal cutlet pounded thin. Have a butcher do this.

• Wondra flour, beaten eggs with a splash of seltzer, slightly blended or crushed panko bread crumbs. Be meticulous and clean during this breading process.

• An inch of oil medium/high heat. Don’t crowd the pan and swirl the pan around dangerously so that the oil bastes over the top of the schnitzel. If you have carefully breaded your cutlets it should start to soufflé.

• Sprinkle of salt and squeeze of lemon. Serve with Lingonberry sauce, cucumber and potato salad.

I promise I’ll add a video soon. Here’s a photo of a perfect one.

Veal Schnitzel. The GOAT

Pommes Anna. Simple and Tricky

This is my favorite potato dish. It’s so versatile and embodies all of the things I like about potatoes. The soft, the crispy, the dark brown, and the fluffy. Pommes Anna has symmetry and natural beauty. I’d like to write about it because 99 percent of the recipes for this are lies. Lies like the ones that tell you its possible to caramelize onions in 10 minutes. Rude attempts to make the simple and sublime seem simple to make. Pommes Anna is not easy to make, and takes a lot of practice to get just right. My contribution is going to be a few points that are absolutely helpful and not in a lot of the recipes out there.

After the flip

Slice peeled Yukon Golds on a mandolin. Not paper, but cardboard thick. Dip them in CLARIFIED butter. Lay slices on a tray and season lightly with salt and pepper. Have a nonstick or seasoned pan with sloping sides on medium heat. The above photo shows the order of how the slices lay. Place one in the center, and then make slightly overlapping rings, IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS, until you reach the edge. Then make one more and gently nudge from the outside to tighten the whole shape. Raise the heat to medium/high and press on the top with a cake pan or slightly smaller saute pan to flatten and ensure maximum contact with the non stick surface. 2-3 minutes on the stove and then throw the whole thing in a 400 degree oven. 4 minutes and take off the weighting pan. 5 more minutes and take out of the oven. Give the pan a wiggle to make sure its not stuck, and then flip it out onto the back of a sheet tray. Like a magician slide it back into the pan and cook on medium heat for 3 more minutes.

That is the basic framework for this dish. Pay attention and like the Tart Tatin, the edges are going to brown more quickly and are not the signifier that the potatoes closer to the center are browned. If your edges look perfect, your center is under cooked. Be brave and let it go a little more than you are comfortable with. And CLARIFY your butter. The potatoes should be browning, not the butter. All BROWNS aren’t the same.

3 Broths and a Dangerous Tart

It was cold, rainy, and a Friday. I’m only making dinner on most Fridays, I’ve done a lot of shopping for the weekend, and I’m ready to go. I definitely wanted to make some kind of soup or broth, but wanted it to be the centerpiece of the meal. When I’m doing this for a group of people I like to give options. So I decided on 3 Broths, to which could be added any number of proteins, vegetables, or starches. I’ll draw a map.

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Everybody gets a warmed bowl with these barely cooked vegetables pictured below. I have extra bowls ready for mid-meal changes and inspirations from the diners. Roasting chicken pieces first gives the broth a real depth and character that boiled chicken stock lacks. I barely skim the stock, and just use a hand blender at the end to emulsify it. Its cloudy, rich, and really satisfying. The beef broth is clean and light with some earthiness from shiitake mushrooms. The curry is spicy, sweet, and slightly funky. All of these broth recipes are detailed in the Big Ideas section. The combinations that these ingredients yield are endless and mostly all work. I personally like to mix everything except the pasta.

Zucchini, Celery root, Daikon, Carrot, Kohlrabi

Now for the dangerous tart. I love Tart Tatin for many reasons. It’s a simple and fast prep, and needs a lot of attention and expertise to get right. And some bravery. When I’m sure that is deeply colored and caramelized, its about 80 percent of the way there. Every time I make this I inevitably put it back in a hot oven or on a stove top for a final darkening while shaking my head muttering “well this is too much, it’s going to burn”.

It has never burnt but one pictured below came the closest. I’d say 10 percent of it was over-cooked, but the other 90 percent was perfect. It’s the trade-off for this dessert. To get the inside part where I want it, a little of the outer rim gets too dark. (This one has a chocolate puff pastry base, that is why it is so brown).

Order and Mushrooms

Mushrooms are my thing. My favorite thing to cook. In my Big Ideas section there is a more comprehensive Mushroom essay. The following is a quick and specific case. Tuesday night I made some Trumpet Royale mushrooms, and last night I made Oyster mushrooms in a similar way for a similar purpose.

I wanted the mushrooms to be a stand alone perfectly cooked ingredient. Just oil, salt and pepper. I wanted them to be balanced, medium cooked, and versatile to be eaten with meat, fish, or a pasta. A big condiment-like component. When I’m cooking family style at work I have a framework in my head of the dishes and how they should be arranged on a plate, but I leave it open for interpretation by the diner. I leave the door open for combining the dishes I make into one big thing, or eaten as all separate courses.

Oyster Mushrooms, in formation

Oyster mushrooms are water filled sponges. You have to cook them in a specific way to unlock their flavor and nutrition. High heat toasting, then season and roast. If you add salt too early, the water starts to escape and you never develop the bready, nutty toasted flavor they contain. And you have to give them space to get rid of their water without steaming and ruining their neighbors. There are a few ways to approach this, but this is what I did last night.

Wipe a heavy pan with oil. Arrange mushrooms like so. Quick trip under the broiler to start the drying and toasting and then a spraying with oil of your choice. More broiler until color. Salt, pepper, (optional thyme) and another spray of oil. MORE color! Onto the stove top for 30 seconds on high heat. Drizzle with oil, and a little more salt. REST. (When I say “spray” with oil, I mean put a good oil into a kitchen pump spray bottle)

Perfectly cooked mushrooms that you can do anything with. I put them on top of a buckwheat pasta that needed an umami and textural lift. It worked.

Leveling Up!! A Monday morning recap

This weekend I kept things very simple. I had access to some great vegetables from Young’s Farm on Long Island and I wanted to showcase them in this current form. As I mentioned in a previous post, vegetables this time of year are fully hydrated and contain a lot of natural sugar. I don’t need to add any liquid to my cooking process. Cooking simply is not easy, its just not complicated. It is paring down your technique and process to a minimum number of steps and ingredients. For example, if i’m just going to simply grill Broccoli and serve it basically as is, it better be great. I need to think about utilizing all of the facets of a small piece of broccoli. What I mean is that there are several flavors, textures, and experiences you can get. There is raw texture and flavor, a steamed one, a roasted one, a burned one, etc. There is something nice about all of those,but I want them all, at the same time. That is how you make “simple” cooking, exciting.

Years ago I read about a Carrot “Stew” that Daniel Boulud was serving at Daniel. He said he wanted to combine all of the different carrot flavors and textures. Slow roasted, raw, sweet, vegetal, juiced, pickled, etc. So he used 3 different techniques, several seasonings, carrot juice, lime and it was a full spectrum, great chef way of approaching an ingredient. Trying to be the alchemist. Take a simple ingredient like a carrot and transform and elevate to an exciting experience for a diner.

Well I want to make the complexity in Carrot stew without a ton of prep work, an army of cooks, and more efficient thinking. In a previous post I wrote about roasting vegetables that are in season around November. An example I used was a Kohlrabi. One of the attributes of this vegetable is that it is great raw, slightly cooked, and slow cooked. Crudite' to soup, depending on how you cut them. I want the carrot stew effect in the same bite, not just the same dish. The way to achieve this is through your knife work and cooking placement and technique.

Cut the Kohlrabi into a 1.5inch shape. Irregular is great. Toss with oil, salt and pepper. Heat a pan to Medium heat and place Kohlrabi as flat as you can in the pan. Don’t crowd them. Let them develop some color on your stove for 2 or 3 minutes and then throw in the oven at 400 for 2 or 3 minutes. Take out and let rest for a minute. The part that was touching the pan should be nicely browned and sweet, the “middle” should be cooked through and have less sweetness, and the part farthest from the pan should be just warmed through and still be a little crunchy. Finish with extra virgin olive oil, lemon, and a sprinkle of salt. This is an amplification of all the facets of a Kohlrabi within one bite.

Anyone who has ever seared a piece of protein to get a crust and kept the center medium rare has done a version of this. The vegetable world needs this treatment too.