Thyme for Beef

I didn't get a chance to post this last Wednesday because of travel and the chaos of pre-Christmas, so hopefully I've remembered most of the important parts.

We were in NYC last weekend to indulge in ultimate gluttony with our foodie friends, Sara and John. One night, we ate at One If By Land, Two If By Sea, the next at Jean George, and the last night at Brooklyn Fare Chef's Table. I feel that I have a new appreciation for these type of restaurants - how many different components there are to the smallest bites, and whether or not the flavors work well together. At Jean George, one of the items on the autumn tasting menu was similar to the Lobster with Fennel and Persimmons recipe that I made last week - they instead used saffron and passion fruit, which yielded a tantalizing combination. The tangy-ness of the passion fruit was rounded out by the saffron tapioca pearls, which melted smoothly on our tongues. I've decided that autumn is my favorite food season, with all the truffles and shellfish in season. Unfortunately, I may have to move on soon to the winter recipes because here in Chicago, the cold has finally settled in.

You may find the title of this post a bit cheesy, but I thought that perfectly encapsulates this recipe. After two seafood based dishes, Colin and I were ready for some red meat. The feature flavor was thyme in many forms, and we absolutely loved the richness and heaviness of this meal. It was actually easier to make than either the Tuna or the Lobster - I found all the ingredients between Whole Foods and our local Korean grocery store (for beef oxtail), and there weren't really any obscure cooking techniques (now that I've mastered the sous vide!) The portion sizes are perfect for an entrée for a dinner party.

Beef Roasted Tenderloin with Bone Marrow Crust, Swiss Chard, and Chanterelles
 

Braise oxtail in wine and veal reduction.

  

  

Shred meat from oxtails, and reduce liquid to a glaze. Return meat to glaze.

Bone marrow- use for bone marrow crust and rendered marrow fat. Add rendered fat to Veal Jus, shallots and thyme for Bordelaise sauce.

Mix bread crumbs, parsley, shallots, and thyme with butter and diced bone marrow. Spread between 2 sheets of parchment paper, and roll until thin. Once cooled, you can cut them to fit the tops of the tenderloins.

 Cook tenderloins with thyme and salt in immersion circulator at 145 degrees F for 25 minutes.(turned out perfectly medium-rare.....everywhere!)

 Infuse browned butter with thyme and garlic. **remove from heat**

 Crush boiled fingerling potatoes with olive oil and chives.

 Prepare chanterelle mushrooms by cleaning surface dirt and trimming until they are tiny and cute. They will be tinier and cuter after cooking, so the monster that you buy at the store will end up looking like the ones on the recipe picture.

 

Cook chanterelles in chicken stock, thyme, and garlic.

 Blanch swiss chard leaves. Place on plate, and spoon braised oxtail onto half of the leaf. Fold over the other half to make a meat pocket :).

 Place cut-outs of bone marrow crust on tenderloins, and broil for 1 minute.

Slice tenderloin in half lengthwise, and brush all over with garlic thyme butter. Place in between swiss chard meat pockets. Plate with potatoes, Bordelaise sauce, and garnish with chanterelles.

Tasting notes: this was our favorite recipe so far - maybe because it felt so substantial and we were famished. We loved the perfectly cooked tenderloin, and the meat filled swiss chard (what better way to have your veggies?). The mashed potatoes were amazing too - creamy and flavorful - I'm going to make that again for normal meals because it was so easy. One thing that I would be more careful of is not to cook the garlic too long in the thyme and garlic butter. I'm afraid I may have slightly burnt it with the residual heat from the pan, and I'm sure it would taste better if I had just poured the browned butter into another container before adding the garlic. Overall, this recipe is a keeper for a fancy dinner party.

Lobster Roe Nightmare

As pictured in EMP

Yesterday, I literally spent 6 whole hours on my feet, slaving in front of a hot stove (at times it was a cool sink....but that doesn't make it any better). This is the first full length recipe from Eleven Madison Park's cookbook, and I was really excited to see if I had the culinary endurance to complete it successfully.

Thanks to Colin, we have had most of the more obscure ingredients (i.e. piment d'espelette) since last week. In the morning, I went to Whole Foods to stock up on the rest of the fresh ingredients. They didn't have live lobsters, so I bought 4 spiny lobster tails that were previously frozen. Not ideal, but it should do the job.

At home, I began to cook even though we still were waiting for the raw lobster roe to arrive from Maine via overnight FedEx - this is after a week long search high and low for a vendor in the US. Once the lobster roe arrived, I opened the package and was instantly grossed out.....it looked like slimy black slugs swimming in slug juice. Irrationally, I expected the roe to look like mini iridescent red jewels, and after a mini panic attack, I realized that the roe only turned red after cooking. The two recipes involving the roe, Lobster Roe Oil and Lobster Roe Powder, both involved cooking the roe. For the powder, I first cooked it briefly in a saucepan, and then zapped it in the microwave to remove all of the moisture. The roe congealed into a sheet after heating, and the sheet ballooned into a monstrous blog that threatened to explode in the microwave. Thankfully, it didn't, and the roe blog settled nicely into a crisp cake that I later ground up with a mortar and pestle. The roe oil wasn't as easy - I had to simmer it gently for just long enough for the sacs to turn red, but not too long as to make the insides firm. I had to redo it 3 times (luckily we ordered a lot of roe) before I was able to prevent the inside from cooking too long. The entire time, I was on the verge of puking just from handling the slimy stuff.

Not surprisingly, most of the cooking time went to the garnishes, and I realized that most of the steps for this recipe can be done days beforehand. The finishing touches - reheating the lobster in the Beurre Blanc sauce, glazing the fennel, plating - took at most 30 minutes, so if you wanted to make this recipe for a fancy dinner party, it would be easy to plan ahead.


Lobster Poached with Fennel, Orange, and Persimmons

 Poach lobster at 150 degrees F. Since these were fat tails, 

I cooked them for 20 minutes. 

 

Ingredients for Braised Fennel

Slice fennel, add braising fluid, and vacuum.
Cook in immersion circulator for about 1 hour.

 

Slice fennel "wings". Combine with olive oil, salt, and vacuum.

 Ingredients for Beurre Blanc

 12 sticks of butter for the sauce!!

Reduce wine. Combine with cream, OJ, and lots of butter for Beurre Blanc.
Keep at 155 degrees F. Add 'piment d'espelette (French chili pepper).

 Pickle persimmon slices in white balsamic vinegar.

 

 Sweat fennel and potato, puree and add fennel fronds.

 Raw lobster roe

 Cook roe until orange

Microwave roe in 30 second blasts.

 Lobster Roe Powder

 Simmer roe sacs, then remove roe and press out oil through a strainer.

Combine roe oil with canola oil.

 Finished!

Tasting notes: this turned out to be a delicious combination of flavors, but a little heavy on salt. I could have shaken off more Beurre Blanc off of the lobsters, and not added the extra salt when glazing the Braised Fennel. The sweet and tart flavors of the persimmons were wonderful with the orange tones of the Beurre Blanc, and they both brought out the sweetness of the fennel and lobster. Success!

Tuna and Fennel for Thanksgiving!

As pictured in EMP

Colin and I spent Thanksgiving in Michigan with his family, and we lugged all of our equipment with us to make the Tuna and Fennel hor d'oeurve for Thanksgiving. We packed our sous vide immersion circulator, vacuum, and 10 giant bulbs of fennel, and we planned to get fresh sashimi in Michigan after our Amazon.com sources told us that they couldn't ship until after the holiday weekend.

We ended up waiting until Black Friday to start our inaugural recipe, since the place where we wanted to get our tuna from, Nobel Fish Market, wasn't open on Thanksgiving. I started making the Lemon Oil while Colin called Nobel to make sure that they had received their 12pm fish shipment from their suppliers. We ended up with the freshest sashimi, and Colin decided to get some hamachi (yellowtail) as well to spice up the recipe. Overall, this took us about 4 hours of active cooking from start to finish.


Tuna and Fennel

Zest lemons.

   Heat canola oil with lemon zest

 Simmer lemon oil for a few hours, then chill and strain.

 Meanwhile, prepare fennel bulbs.

 I found that halving the bulbs made it easier to remove the petals while keeping them intact.

 Using a biscuit cutter, Colin cut over a hundred fennel "coins", hoping that we would be able to to find 64 good ones in the end.

 Pernod and white wine reduction for fennel.

 Preparing fennel and reduction for sous vide machine.

 Voila the immersion circulator!

 Fresh sashimi....yummm :)

 Tuna and yellowtail coins

 Assembling fennel, fish, and garnishes.

Tasting notes: this recipe turned out beautifully, even though we couldn't find the fennel pollen for garnish. We thought that the fennel coins varied a little too much in terms of thickness, which may have resulted in unevenly cooked fennel coins. Some of the thicker, crunchier fennel coins overwhelmed the delicate sashimi, and we think that using the thinnest fennel coins, or cooking them for a little bit longer in the immersion circulator, would have resulted in more consistent and delicious sandwiches. Overall, we're very happy at our first attempt at this cookbook!

To new beginnings

Colin and I were inspired by Julia & Julia's story, where the girl cooked through Julia Child's cookbook at the pace of one recipe a day. We wanted to do something similar, but not at such a hectic pace, with Eleven Madison Park's cookbook. Today, Colin and I are getting serious about our culinary undertaking by tracking down all the esoteric ingredients and equipment, and studying the cookbook for the upcoming batch of recipes.

The book is organized by seasons, and as it is now November, we flipped to the Autumn section and chose to focus on 4 seafood dishes (see Recipes on Deck for the items we are planning to attack). Our plan is to aim for one new recipe every week, assuming that Colin, hunter extraordinaire, can procure all the items needed in each recipe.

We expected that some things needed in the menus would be a little hard to find, a little expensive, and that we'll eventually end up with a lot of random kitchen equipment. Boy, did we get a reality check when Colin pointed out that we need to buy a "sous vide" immersion circular cooker - cheapest one on Amazon.com topped out at a mere $300! It looks like we can't escape it - many of the recipes in this book require its use, so hopefully we will fall in love with this cooking technique and use it even after we finish cooking with this book.

I can't wait to channel my inner artiste and start painting with sauces!