I ended up making a couple recipes from restaurant-chef-penned cookbooks this past weekend. One was an example of why Thomas Keller is my culinary hero and the other was an example of why it's hard to recommend many chef cookbooks... Let's start with the bad.
Due to a hard-to-pass-up sale ($5.49/lb.), I ended up with a two pet lobsters on Saturday. Their names were Bob and Mr. Pinchy. I wanted them to look good for their photo op, so I ran them a nice hot bath... but, as you can see from the picture above (that's Bob on the right), I apparently had the temperature too high. I think Bob and Mr. Pinchy would have wanted me to make the most of this tragic situation, so I decided to make a recipe from Alfred Portales' "12 Seasons Cookbook" that I'd been wanting to make for years but had never gotten around to (and had never had 2 lobsters at my disposal to make). The lovely picture in the book looks like this:
(We'll come back to that in a minute...) After dismantling Bob and Mr. Pinchy, I had a good-sized bowl of lobster meat:
I made a quick batch of mayonnaise to use in the dressing
then chopped the lobster meat and set it aside along with some diced steamed beets, celery, and fingerling potatoes, a chiffonade of romaine, and a bit of the mayo. (Look at all that lobster!):
This is where I start to have some issues with Mr. Portales. Let me begin by saying that I understand food photography and I know that pictures in cookbooks tend to be an idealized, arranged-with-tweezers version of what the dish could look like at it's finest. (One of the nice things about books photographed by Petrina Tinslay, who does all of Donna Hay's books among others, is that the food looks absolutely gorgeous but in a natural, un-fussed-with way...) Alfred Portales apparently sort of made a name for himself by plating tall stacks of carefully arranged food in his restaurant back in the day - a style which has since gone out of fashion (along with serving food in martini glasses... ahem) - so I was prepared for fussy presentations in his pictures. What I wasn't prepared for was reading a recipe's instructions and seeing that they could not possibly result in anything even remotely resembling the pictured dish, as was the case with this lobster salad. I had never cooked with beets before, but even I knew that if I were to toss everything on the above plate together (as the recipe instructs), I would end up with a hot pink mess. (You will note the absence of said hot pink hue in the book's photo.) I actually did this to one serving just to confirm my suspicion (yep... hot pink...), then opted to just sprinkle the beets over the plated lobster salad for a less fluorescent version (served with thinly sliced avocado):
You can still see a few hot pink spots from where a beet barely touched the salad as it tumbled past... This is the type of chef recipe that can seriously irritate a (high-strung) person, and I'll probably hesitate to open that book to find a good recipe in the future... It also wasn't substantially better than just dipping the damn lobster in some melted butter, which isn't really acceptable given the amount of tedious prep involved in making this dish. (Especially relative to the alternative recipe, which is: Cook lobster. Melt butter. Combine in desired proportions as you eat.) Anyway... On to the good...
Above is the cookbook photo of the Citrus-Marinated Salmon with a Confit of Navel Oranges and Pea Shoot Coulis (the coulis is in the gravy boat in the picture) from Thomas Keller's French Laundry Cookbook. I'll save you the suspense and let you know right now that mine will not look like the dish in the picture (if only because mine is not topped with $100 of caviar), but it could. What I love about Keller's cookbooks is that he'll tell you exactly what you need to do to make your own version of the amazing food that comes out of the French Laundry kitchen. Whether you can find the quality of meat and produce that his purveyors bring him (you can't) or have the technical skills and patience of the team of chefs involved in the preparation of each dish (your probably don't) is another story... I tend to opt out of following his fussier instructions when cooking for myself, but I appreciate that they're there in case I have a few extra hours on my hands and want to try to blow a dinner guest's mind...
This is actually a pretty easy recipe, as far as this book is concerned. A side of salmon is covered in a marinade of sugar, salt, white pepper, and zest of limes, lemons, oranges, and grapefruit, then lightly weighted and left to cure for ~3 hours in the refrigerator. Meanwhile, you supreme the oranges and confit the segments in simple syrup with a splash of vinegar. The pea shoots (uncooked in the picture on the right above) are blanched, puréed, and strained, then loosened with a little butter just before serving. When the time comes to cook the salmon, you rinse off the marinade, pat the salmon dry, then allow it to come to room temperature for ~45 minutes.
The recipe calls for poaching the fish in olive oil 110°F at this point, and this is one place where I chose to go astray (largely because I didn't want to be left with a gallon of salmon-infused olive oil that I would end up having to throw away). I decided, instead, to get all trendy and make my first-ever attempt at using the much-touted sous-vide method. For this, I rubbed the salmon portions with olive oil (to get a little of the flavor that the poaching would have provided) then vacuum-sealed them in a pouch. I heated a water bath to 110°F using my free (family-discount at a yard sale) electric wok rather than the $900 thermal immersion circulators that masters of the technique use. I cooked the salmon for 10 minutes (the wooden skewers are in there just to make sure the packet doesn't touch the bottom of the wok, which may be warmer than the desired 110°F).
The wok held the temperature perfectly (which was a pleasant surprise since I had been pondering more expensive alternatives). I plated a small pool of the pea shoot coulis, topped it with navel orange segments, then laid the salmon across the top and garnished with chives:
(Next time I'll make the citrus powder to sprinkle around, which I totally forgot this time.) No points for French-Laundry-like presentation but, like I said, this is largely due to my refusal to properly follow directions... This was a really interesting dish. The salmon looks raw but is completely cooked, and is somewhat reminiscent of the best gravlox you've ever had in your life. The bright fruitiness of the orange segments and the fresh vegginess (?) of the pea shoot coulis were a great compliment to the salmon... If only I'd had an extra $100 burning a hole in my pocket with which to buy some caviar, this may have approached genius... I guess my point here is that, among other things, I appreciate that Thomas Keller never tries to make me turn a lovely plate of ingredients into a hot pink mess.
Due to a hard-to-pass-up sale ($5.49/lb.), I ended up with a two pet lobsters on Saturday. Their names were Bob and Mr. Pinchy. I wanted them to look good for their photo op, so I ran them a nice hot bath... but, as you can see from the picture above (that's Bob on the right), I apparently had the temperature too high. I think Bob and Mr. Pinchy would have wanted me to make the most of this tragic situation, so I decided to make a recipe from Alfred Portales' "12 Seasons Cookbook" that I'd been wanting to make for years but had never gotten around to (and had never had 2 lobsters at my disposal to make). The lovely picture in the book looks like this:
(We'll come back to that in a minute...) After dismantling Bob and Mr. Pinchy, I had a good-sized bowl of lobster meat:
I made a quick batch of mayonnaise to use in the dressing
then chopped the lobster meat and set it aside along with some diced steamed beets, celery, and fingerling potatoes, a chiffonade of romaine, and a bit of the mayo. (Look at all that lobster!):
This is where I start to have some issues with Mr. Portales. Let me begin by saying that I understand food photography and I know that pictures in cookbooks tend to be an idealized, arranged-with-tweezers version of what the dish could look like at it's finest. (One of the nice things about books photographed by Petrina Tinslay, who does all of Donna Hay's books among others, is that the food looks absolutely gorgeous but in a natural, un-fussed-with way...) Alfred Portales apparently sort of made a name for himself by plating tall stacks of carefully arranged food in his restaurant back in the day - a style which has since gone out of fashion (along with serving food in martini glasses... ahem) - so I was prepared for fussy presentations in his pictures. What I wasn't prepared for was reading a recipe's instructions and seeing that they could not possibly result in anything even remotely resembling the pictured dish, as was the case with this lobster salad. I had never cooked with beets before, but even I knew that if I were to toss everything on the above plate together (as the recipe instructs), I would end up with a hot pink mess. (You will note the absence of said hot pink hue in the book's photo.) I actually did this to one serving just to confirm my suspicion (yep... hot pink...), then opted to just sprinkle the beets over the plated lobster salad for a less fluorescent version (served with thinly sliced avocado):
You can still see a few hot pink spots from where a beet barely touched the salad as it tumbled past... This is the type of chef recipe that can seriously irritate a (high-strung) person, and I'll probably hesitate to open that book to find a good recipe in the future... It also wasn't substantially better than just dipping the damn lobster in some melted butter, which isn't really acceptable given the amount of tedious prep involved in making this dish. (Especially relative to the alternative recipe, which is: Cook lobster. Melt butter. Combine in desired proportions as you eat.) Anyway... On to the good...
Above is the cookbook photo of the Citrus-Marinated Salmon with a Confit of Navel Oranges and Pea Shoot Coulis (the coulis is in the gravy boat in the picture) from Thomas Keller's French Laundry Cookbook. I'll save you the suspense and let you know right now that mine will not look like the dish in the picture (if only because mine is not topped with $100 of caviar), but it could. What I love about Keller's cookbooks is that he'll tell you exactly what you need to do to make your own version of the amazing food that comes out of the French Laundry kitchen. Whether you can find the quality of meat and produce that his purveyors bring him (you can't) or have the technical skills and patience of the team of chefs involved in the preparation of each dish (your probably don't) is another story... I tend to opt out of following his fussier instructions when cooking for myself, but I appreciate that they're there in case I have a few extra hours on my hands and want to try to blow a dinner guest's mind...
This is actually a pretty easy recipe, as far as this book is concerned. A side of salmon is covered in a marinade of sugar, salt, white pepper, and zest of limes, lemons, oranges, and grapefruit, then lightly weighted and left to cure for ~3 hours in the refrigerator. Meanwhile, you supreme the oranges and confit the segments in simple syrup with a splash of vinegar. The pea shoots (uncooked in the picture on the right above) are blanched, puréed, and strained, then loosened with a little butter just before serving. When the time comes to cook the salmon, you rinse off the marinade, pat the salmon dry, then allow it to come to room temperature for ~45 minutes.
The recipe calls for poaching the fish in olive oil 110°F at this point, and this is one place where I chose to go astray (largely because I didn't want to be left with a gallon of salmon-infused olive oil that I would end up having to throw away). I decided, instead, to get all trendy and make my first-ever attempt at using the much-touted sous-vide method. For this, I rubbed the salmon portions with olive oil (to get a little of the flavor that the poaching would have provided) then vacuum-sealed them in a pouch. I heated a water bath to 110°F using my free (family-discount at a yard sale) electric wok rather than the $900 thermal immersion circulators that masters of the technique use. I cooked the salmon for 10 minutes (the wooden skewers are in there just to make sure the packet doesn't touch the bottom of the wok, which may be warmer than the desired 110°F).
The wok held the temperature perfectly (which was a pleasant surprise since I had been pondering more expensive alternatives). I plated a small pool of the pea shoot coulis, topped it with navel orange segments, then laid the salmon across the top and garnished with chives:
(Next time I'll make the citrus powder to sprinkle around, which I totally forgot this time.) No points for French-Laundry-like presentation but, like I said, this is largely due to my refusal to properly follow directions... This was a really interesting dish. The salmon looks raw but is completely cooked, and is somewhat reminiscent of the best gravlox you've ever had in your life. The bright fruitiness of the orange segments and the fresh vegginess (?) of the pea shoot coulis were a great compliment to the salmon... If only I'd had an extra $100 burning a hole in my pocket with which to buy some caviar, this may have approached genius... I guess my point here is that, among other things, I appreciate that Thomas Keller never tries to make me turn a lovely plate of ingredients into a hot pink mess.
