Dinner Theater

It started innocently enough – Madame’s good friend Cathy announced that she wanted to do a dinner event for a group of high powered women. Madame thought it might be fun to do it at our house – after all we could surely do something at least as good as most restaurants – and for a lot less in a much more intimate surrounding. She can be VERY persuasive. I immediately enlisted help from Dave and sought input from Cathy. Cathy was no help! She gave us completely free reign, “You guys are the experts in the kitchen, surprise and delight me.” We took the admonition to heart and concocted a menu based around a few key ingredients and effects. The key ingredients were those Asian staples, Coconut and Kaffir Lime. We don’t have a coconut tree, but we have an elegant and much loved Kaffir Lime tree in the garden. He gives up his leaves for good causes whenever called upon. He was going to be in great demand. As for the effects, we wanted to make sure that the guests would have full, rich mouth experiences by varying textures, tastes, and temperatures.

We started with a cocktail of Kaffir Lime infused vodka, coconut water, simple syrup and vodka – an intensely chilled concoction full of flavor to offset the first, appetizer, course – Chiang Mai sausage.

Chiang Mai sausages are small, potent, delicious pork sausages served all over Thailand. They make great appetizers because they are easy to eat while balancing a cocktail, have enough flavor to work with strong drinks and they set your palate up for delights to come. However, there are a few challenges. The first is the pork. For these to work there has to be a significant amount of fat. Most pork we buy is too lean, but I discovered a cut that works perfectly. It is a ham. Now don’t be thinking cured and smoked and all of that – think a raw piece of ham, complete with fat cap. If you choose well, you end up with just the right amount of fat. In this case the piece of meat weighed about 2 ½ lbs and the fat about ½ lb. Also the fat is nice and firm – it grinds well without going pasty and nasty.

Recipe for Chiang Mai Sausage:

2.5 lbs. Pork,½ lb. Pork Fat,8 Kaffir Lime Leaves, Chiffinade,16 White Pepper Corns (whole, ground in mortar and pestle),16 Whole Coriander Seeds (ground in mortar and pestle),1 yellow onion (small diced), 8 cloves garlic, minced, 1 oz. Fish Sauce

On to the flavoring.

Red curry paste was a must – we need some of that heat. But the canned versions are a bit one dimensional. So we added Kaffir Lime leaves, salt (not fish sauce, but salt!), garlic cloves, white pepper, ground coriander, and onion to the mix. That brought it nicely into balance.

I have the most wonderful neighbors – and we share equipment that isn’t used every day. They have a meat grinder, I don’t. The rule is simple – I borrow the grinder, they get some of the resultant product.  All’s fair in the kitchen.

After removing the fat from the pork, and removing any skin from the fat, I ground the pork (twice) on the coarsest grind setting. The first grind was just the pork meat. None of the fat cap. No spicing either at that stage. For the second grind I added the minced Kaffir Lime leaves, the white pepper, coriander and onion interspersed with the meat. Helping to blend the spices into the meat. Then the fat. Mix the ingredients together – with a small can of red curry paste. It looked fabulous. Break a small piece off and fry immediately to check the seasoning. A little added salt, a final mix and it is ready for shaping. I had done the easy stuff. Now it was Dave’s turn – actually forming the sausage.

Cling wrap and skill to the rescue. Dave formed these beauties by rolling the meat tightly in the cling wrap – making sausages about 10 inches long and an inch in diameter. 5 of them! One of course had to go to the neighbor along with the return of the grinder. The sausages are poached in plain water (still in their plastic wrap) so that they partially cook through. Then to the fridge to rest and let the flavors blend.

All that was left was to bring them out of the fridge an hour or so before they were wanted and sear then gently on the flat top until they had some color and were warmed all through. It’s nice that these are served, like much Thai food, at room temperature. It’s important, of course, that they be thoroughly cooked. But they don’t need to be piping hot.

Served on Chinese soup spoons with a garnish of Thai basil, galangal and lemon grass they looked and tasted wonderful. Such a great start to a wonderful meal. Especially good with the robust cocktail. The evening was off to a wonderful start.

SOUP COURSE:

The ladies didn’t require much encouragement to come to the table where we served the remaining courses. The soup was a simple roasted eggplant/garlic/onion soup thickened with milk & splash of cream, and enveloping a sous vide chicken egg. This course was about mouth feel and aroma. It was silky smooth and by serving it in a double bowl – the inner bowl having the soup, the outer bowl had boiling water and rosemary delivering a rosemary perfume without actually adding rosemary flavor. The lushness of the soup was accented through the wine pairing of a Gewurtztraminer from Trimbach in Alsace.

Then on to the scallop course. For this course we made a taro root puree. Using small while taro roots, peeled, boiled and then pureed with some cream and finished with a little butter. An interesting flavor reminiscent of potato, but a little more musky/funky. Also a tamarind sauce – made simply by heating a tamarind block with enough water to break it down and straining the result to give a thick, sour tasting, fruity sauce to offset the butteryness of the scallop. A little grape tomato/Thai basil salsa, a blanched, seared baby bok choy leaf and a beautiful dish. Secrets to cooking scallops are A) make sure they are completely dry, B) season with salt and a little pepper, C) cook on a hot flat bottomed surface – not non-stick. In this case a cast iron flat griddle with butter and grape seed oil. Finally of course, don’t overcook them. These were big, “dry” packed scallops from Rex’s in Dallas.

During the menu planning, we had decided to do BEEF COURSE, which was a flank roulade with a green curry paste filling and served with shaved frozen foie gras over parsnips. That’s about as far as the planning had gone. Of course the plate needed more than that. But I am getting ahead of myself. I had a whole (almost 2 lbs) of foie gras in my freezer. So obviously I needed to somehow turn it into a torchon. Now foie gras isn’t the easiest substance to work with. It has deep embedded veins that must be removed. It has occasional little blood pockets that need to be removed. It also gets soft and mushy – like working with thick hand cream very quickly. Anyhow, I prepared the foie with a sake/Kaffir lime marinade, wrapped it in cheesecloth as tightly as I could and set it in the fridge on an upside down egg carton so it would hold its shape. When the time came to cook it, we poached it in the immersion circulator at 44C for about 15 minutes, allowed it to cool, and froze it. A lot of work, but so worth it.

I had been given a copy of Chef McDang’s wonderful book on Thai cuisine and set about making a green curry paste. I am simply glad that I am not a Thai grandma. The work required pounding the ingredients in a pestle and mortar would drive me nuts if I had to do it often. Still, it was well worth it. Simple ingredients – toasted whole coriander and cumin, a couple of chili varieties (green of course), galangal, lemon grass, shrimp paste, salt, white pepper. It all came together nicely and was ready for the beef.

Getting flank steak tender enough to make a roulade is an exercise in meat beating. It is a pretty tough cut and required a lot of pounding. Finally we had it thin enough. Coat with the green curry (thinned with a little oil to make it spread evenly) and rolled up, tied with butchers twine and refrigerated until its time in the bath tub.

Meanwhile, the parsnips were bagged and cooked sous vide with a little butter and lemon grass. After an hour in the water bath at 85C they were almost cooked. Finished in the oven to drive off some of the water and concentrate the flavor and they were ready to go.

Red rice was cooked, cooled and then pan fried with a little onion, finished with cilantro completed the ingredients. The dish was served on a paan leaf – the leaf much beloved in the Indian subcontinent for wrapping a chewing mixture.  The final presentation has curls of grated, frozen foie gras all served on a white rectangular plate. This was a dish for the eyes as well as the palate.

And then the piece de resistance. The guests had been quite lively and animated all evening. We decided to build up the dessert with some theater. As we cleared the plates from the beef course, we placed small round plates next to each diner. The dessert itself was to be served inside halved coconuts.

It was a variant on chendol – that sweet coconut based dessert or drink known as Lorchong Singapore in Thai. Usually it is made with green bean paste noodles, soaked in a sweetened coconut cream – sometimes with some fruit added. We chose to use tapioca based ingredients, noodles, pearls and strips. The intent of this dish was to have a wide variety of different textures in the mouth and a stunning presentation. For fruit we used rambutans (“hairy” in Malay). Each coconut base is filled with a little crushed ice and a piece of rambutan. Some of the tapioca noodles, pearls and strips added, a teaspoon of a syrup made from palm sugar and pandanas leaves (screw-pine) poured over.

Meanwhile the alchemist – Chef David was foaming coconut cream into liquid nitrogen. This left a very cold, intensely flavored ice cream. The coconuts were served with their lids on, the guests invited to remove the lids and some frozen, vapor surrounded frozen cream placed into the lids. The room went completely quiet as the theater unfolded. Guests hurried for cameras to capture their own photographs of the high art. A spectacular end to the formal dining.

(more…)

Late Season Wisconsin Apples – When Malus Domestica Leads to Heartbreak

A quick trip to the Great White North (not Canada, but close enough) afforded me the opportunity to pick some outstanding apples. Late season Cortland, Macintosh, and Honey Crisp varieties were being picked on this windy and cold mid-October Saturday morning just outside of Merrill, WI at Helene’s Hilltop Orchard. Finding this outfit required navigating back roads and primitive “compass” work (i.e. “Where the hell are we?”) that in the end found is just downwind of a port-a-john and jauntily parked on a hillside overlooking acres of mixed hardwoods hastily dropping their leaves.

Wisconsin is home to a significant apple industry that is, by and large, overlooked on the national level. Home to some 300 commercial orchards and nearly 1 million trees, the state’s crop returns in the neighborhood of 60 million pounds of fruit annually. We were there to do our part in denuding some of the stout little trees of their pectin rich prizes. Believe it or not, they let just anybody wander in to the orchard and grab whatever you want—for a price, of course.
“Just what in the hell is a peck?” Care to venture a guess? Turns out it is 10.5 lbs. of apples, although it remains unclear to me if the term peck only applies to the weight of fruits and not other things such as “a peck of goldfish . . .” or “peck of.38 caliber ammunition.” Yes, I asked. Somehow my sense of humor was lost on the earnest looking attendant hunkered down in flannel and polar fleece behind a flapping plastic windbreak. This folksy weight of measure seems to be a quaint carry-over from our agrarian roots that are often forgotten in the world of pre-packaged products sold in amounts determined by market research nerds.

Like an anxious 19 year-old sailor from Indiana during Fleet Week, I plunged into the rows of trees searching for the most attractive things I could get my hands on. And I was amply rewarded. Peeking out seductively from under every leaf and branch was a tarted-up Jezebel feigning a lusty invitation to be picked first. Not easily lured in (and trying to mask my obvious enthusiasm), I engaged in some heavy petting of the various wares before choosing the right one. Weed-choked alley ways guided me between trees struggling to hold their bounty. The wind whipped their leaves like a bikini-model’s hair and at their bases were countless scattered castoffs, bruised but unbroken, who could not hold on long enough to make the final casting call. My first bite of a shy little Cortland who winked at me with a smirk of sunshine rolling over her curves did me in. The orgy was on.

One of the genetic flaws of human evolution is the fact that at times like this we are only endowed with two hands. For every apple I ate, I tried to pick two. Cortland turned to Honey Crisp and then Macintosh as I wandered in a daze passed mothers and children endeavoring to simply fill bushel baskets and get out of the wind. No doubt I looked the part of an outsider to this wholesome Midwestern fiesta of fruit strolling around without a bag, bucket or bushel basket in hand and clumsily chomping bites of one variety after another. After pausing for yet another smoke break, I realized that the rest of my party was probably beginning to wonder what had happened to me—and they were carrying the baskets, after all—so I reconnected with them and added a few choice Honey Crisps to the collection. My estimate was that several pecks (being a newly informed expert on this unit of measure) had been secured. I was a bit astonished when the rest of the group collectively insisted on cashing out our bounty and finding a warmer den.

The orchard offered a variety of apple focused edibles (what a shocker) in a countrified barn replete with older women in floral printed aprons making pies and pushing apple cider on families with frosty children. Warm, oven-heated air mixed with the appropriate scents of flour, apples and sugar meant that jackets could be unzipped and the final act could unfold. I was satiated from my back-alley orchard encounters, and was more than willing to indulge the rest of the group in sampling some warm baked bites. Would it be pie, turnovers, struedel, or apple butter that now lured us in? This was all good and fine, albeit a bit too much Dollar Store meets Martha Stewart for me, since some food and a warm-up were in order. That is until I happened to notice the apple turnovers being made in the open kitchen . . .

Maybe I was ruined by my whole-hearted digestion of American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen. Or maybe I just lost my way in the foodie fetish of “picking my own” farm-to-table fantasy. Regardless, my disappointment was profound. Right in front of my eyes—and the rest of the huddled masses—was a white pail of processed “Apple Turnover Filling” perched on the end of a prep table and being hastily slopped into pre-made turnover sheets by a pimply teenager with IPod headphones stuffed in her ears. Cue: sound of tires screeching to a halt. . . “What the fuck? An orchard that doesn’t use their own apples?”
Tragic. For all that was “right” with the world on this mid-October day, I realized then and there that there is a sound reason why some are inclined to keep the lights off and the blinds closed when engaging in certain delights. Some things are best left as mysteries. Some mysteries are better when they remain unsolved.

Follow Will Fleischman on Twitter @willfaoro

Maker of Pickles & Rib Jams- Teller of Tales, Bearded Culinary Agitator #Beard

Also see Hello-Hello by Will Fleischman on Beyond the Kitchen (China)

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