Docsconz- The Blog

Taste of the Week - November 8th-14th

2009-11-15T09:19:00-05:00

Is it any wonder that Cafe Lazio has become my favorite restaurant in my adopted hometown? Chef Adriano DiMario made a dish specially for me the other night. I had told him that my favorite dish ever was the crab sauce and pasta that my mother would make for me when I was growing up. My mother's dish used fresh blue crabs stuffed with herbed bread crumbs simmered in a tomato sauce for hours. Served with perciatelli or buccatini pasta, it was heaven in a bowl for me.The real fun, though, was getting down and dirty and digging into the tomato sauce drowned crabs after the pasta. That was bib time and resulted in a napkin and crab shell graveyard.

My mother's crab sauce was (and still is) the best thing I have ever eaten. I have, on occasion, tried to make it myself when I have been able to come by fresh blue crabs and had the time to use them. My efforts have been good, but certainly not up to my mother's. Well, Chef DiMario's linguine with crabs and clams wasn't quite up to my mother's either, but it was pretty darn tasty, especially given the fact, that he used frozen blue crabs instead of fresh and they weren't stuffed like my mother's. Even so, his tomato sauce is so good and between the clams and the crabs, the sauce had a wonderful flavor, approaching my mother's. It was close enough that I scarfed down that meal with great pleasure. Between the wonderful flavor and the effort on Chef DiMario's part, this is clearly my Taste of the Week!

Starchefs 2009 Day One: Faces in the Crowd

2009-11-14T18:37:04-05:00

If you attended the Starchefs Congress this year there is a good chance that you will either see yourself or recognize friends in these photos. These are from the first day. I have purposely not identified people as I certainly don't know everyone in the photos. Enjoy!

Portraits from Starchefs 2009 - Paco Torreblanca and Asbel Reyes

2009-11-13T10:18:43-05:00

Paco Torreblanca from Alicante in Spain, one of the great pastry chefs of the world, arrived at Starchefs escorted by Asbel Reyes, the chef in charge of behind the scenes preparations for all the food presented at the Congress, the position previously held by George Mendes. Asbel, as did George, does a tremendous job, overseeing all the logistical details of the food prepped for presentations as well as foods presented for lunches and so on. This is a critical position, on which the success of the most important element of the Congress rests. As is evident in this photo, Asbel's responsibilities are not limited to the kitchen.

Starchefs Day One: David Bouley Fuses France & Japan

2009-11-12T09:21:00-05:00

Following the panel on American Cuisine, David Bouley came to the main stage to present his approach to cooking French style food with Japanese technique. Bouley who has had an illustrious career cooking as one of NYC's top chefs for at least the last 25 years, most of which has taken place at his eponymous restaurant, even as that restaurant has migrated through several locations, started with an essentially French repertoire. Over the years, the influence of Japanese cuisine has grown steadily on him to the point that his cooking is now largely a combination of the two cuisines. In this presentation he offered insights into his approach to cooking French with Japanese technique.

His initial preparation involved using black cod using Japanese ingredients and technique, but in a way he considers French. Below is a paraphrasing of some of his principle points.

Starting with black cod. As you know, miso is very tender and makes fish taste so moist (salmon with miso never seems to dry out)
Here we prepared a marinade with soy sauce and spanish pistachio paste – in Japan it would usually be sesame or miso paste. This paste has no sugar and it hasn’t been toasted – can be used in all kinds of cooking. Would be 2 pints of that marinade and put the black cod in the bath for about 20 minutes. Fattier fish would sit longer, leaner fish would bathe for less. Almond is also wonderful for cooking.
It’s now cooked to the point where the skin is very crunchy, and we’re going to put it on our buckwheat (very good for you, great grain), put some thickened dashi into the buckwheat. Dashi is now being used all over the globe, including at some 3-star restaurants in Paris. As you can see, Japanese cuisine is influencing food all over the globe. Now we’re putting it into the oven and are going to make a terrine.

With the cod preparation cooking he proceeded to work on a dish of Malibu Sea Urchin Terrine with Creme Fraiche Sauce, Beluga Caviar and Fresh Kinome. For this dish he used a number of ingredients from the Japanese pantry including mirin, yuzu, dashi, sake, agar agar and kinome, a special Japanese herb not yet grown outside of Japan. To prepare the dish, he made chive oil , dashi and a creme fraiche sauce made by combining creme fraiche, yuzu, shallots, and chive oil. To make the terrine he combined and simmered the dashi, mirin and sake before blooming gelatin sheets and adding them to the dashi. He then mixed the agar agar with cold water before adding that also to the dash. He poured the liquid into a terrine mold at room temperature and just before setting, he added the uni to the terrine, allowing it to set. To plate the dish, he sliced the terrine and garnished it with additional uni on top, the creme fraiche sauce, caviar and kinome.

Bouley returned to the black cod in the oven. He had egg yolk, tomato water and a bit of dashi whipped on the stove, with mustard added along with a drop of yuzu and a drop of garlic oil for a sauce. He added some of the crispy, smoky cod skin to the buckwheat along with a few twigs of lemon thyme. The fish, removed from the oven, was easily flaked. He iplaced the buckwheat in a bowl, followed by the fish. Putting on a foam and grinding up black onion powder on top, he made it look a bit like a bowl of charcoal. Bouley finished the dish with a small dollop egg/mustard sauce right on top in the center, and then a few small mustard flowers. He said,

"This is a dish that I think demonstrates a very healthy ingredient in buckwheat and also a very different preparation of fish. It is itself a dish that would be with purity and integrity respecting Japanese ingredients and technique, but also having some fun, as we like to do in America to make it light and playful."

On the Farm: Consider Bardwell

2009-11-11T08:43:00-05:00

Consider Bardwell Farm located in West Pawlet, Vermont just over the border from Washington County, N.Y. has generated a reputation for making world class cheeses from both goat and cow milks. I recently had the chance to visit the farm and at the same time observe both the making of cheese and the making of a quality video as Michael Crupain of The Dairy Show was there to film the process.

The picturesque and bucolic farm is owned by Angela Miller, Russell Glover and Chris Gray. The engaging Peter Dixon, formerly cheese maker at The Vermont Butter and Cheese Company is the head cheese maker at Consider Bardwell.

The cheese are made from milk the farm's own Oberhasli goats and from the nearby Jersey Girls Farm. Dixon makes a a number of different cheeses, but his favorites are the firmer, aged cheeses, like the cow's milk Rupert he was making in the photos above. To make these harder cheeses, it is important to cut the curds into extremely small pieces to get out as much liquid whey as possible. Softer cheeses are made from larger curds. Dixon is fastidious in his cheese making, making sure that all the little details are right and that his cheeses are consistent from batch to batch, or at least as consistent as an essentially natural product can be. His attention to details like the pH of the whey/curd combination shows through in the fine quality of the finished product as does the quality of the base milks.

Stay tuned to The Dairy Show for more on the process and the farm including what is sure to be another outstanding video.

George Mendes Cooks Cuttlefish - A Docsconz Video

2009-11-10T08:55:00-05:00

After my most recent dinner at Aldea, described here, I asked Chef Mendes if he would cook a dish for me on camera. He kindly accepted and proceeded to cook one of my favorites from the night before, Baby Cuttlefish with Lychees, Mentaiko and Squid Ink. This was filmed early in the evening as service was getting under way.

TGRWT #20: Pumpkin and Cooked Chicken

2009-11-09T09:27:00-05:00

OK, I am more than a little embarrassed, but because I didn't fully understand how the Food Pairings Website worked, I initially chose a combination that I thought was within bounds - pumpkin and lemongrass. While I feel that the two ingredients really do go well together, they are not explicitly listed as such within the specific purposes of this database and therefore can not be the two principle ingredients for this exercise. Please feel free to use lemongrass in your dishes if you so desire, but please also use "cooked" chicken (as opposed to roasted - though roasted is also compatible according to the chart). This post has been edited to reflect the change.

I am excited to host the latest round (20) of “They Go Really Well Together” (TGRWT) and am honored to be following a tremendous group of food bloggers in this endeavor.

This food blogging event was initiated by Martin Lersch in April 2007 to explore flavor pairings suggested by the hypothesis that if two foods have one or more key odorants in common it might very well be that they go well together and perhaps even compliment each other. A list of all previous rounds with links to announcements and round-ups can be found at:http://blog.khymos.org/tgrwt/. I have personally participated in only one pairing so far, but have read through and enjoyed the others. They are great fun and a fine way get past more common ingredient pairings.

Pumpkins are plentiful and quite seasonal at this time of year in the northern hemisphere and useful in so many different types of preparations from soups to appetizers to main courses to desserts. In the U.S., they are probably most often used in the form of a dessert pie, though in recent years the pumpkin's popularity has expanded greatly. I have never really had chicken and pumpkin together before, so this should be interesting.

Participation is easy - just follow these steps:

 1. Prepare a dish that combines pumpkin and cooked chicken. You can either use an existing recipe (if there is any) or come up with your own

2. Take a picture of the dish and write an entry in your blog by December 8th, 2009 with TGRWT #20 in the title. Readers will be particularily interested in how the flavour pairing worked out, so make an attempt at describing the taste and aroma and whether you liked it or not.

3. A round-up will be posted here with pictures. Please send an email to john@docsconz.com with the following details: Your name, URL of blog, URL of the TGRWT #20 post and a picture for your entry in the round-up. If you don't have a blog, email me your name, location, recipe and a brief description of how it worked out and I'll be glad to include it in the final round-up.

So get those pumpkins and start carving out some new dishes!

Taste of the Week - November 1st - 7th

2009-11-08T09:18:00-05:00

Fresh peanuts from Mississippi, purchased in New Orleans at the Crescent City Farmers Market and brought home to New York, were fried in olive oil and salted per a recipe in The Fanny Farmer Cookbook. These wonderful peanuts, unlike anything in a can or a jar, were a revelation. They made an otherwise very good, home-cooked Pad Thai into an outstanding one and were quite delicious on their own.

Aldea Delights Again

2009-11-07T14:01:40-05:00

My first visit to Aldea was right around its opening this past May. The food was great then. When I returned to NYC this past September, I wanted to see how George Mendes and the restaurant have fared over the ensuing months. This time, though, I sat, with two friends, at the kitchen counter peering directly in to the hive of culinary activity. A hive it was, since in addition to the full downstairs dining room, the restaurant was hosting a party in their upstairs space for GQ Magazine including their star food and restaurant writer, Alan Richman.

For parties of three or fewer with an interest in food and cooking beyond the ordinary, sitting at the kitchen counter is a special treat, adding entertainment in the form of the kitchen ballet to go with outstanding food and wine. The night my friends and I were there, we had the benefit of sitting in front of Jade, a lovely, personable and talented young cook covering the cold apps station. Once our party collected the festivities began.

We started out with cocktails. Mine was a Shiprock with Plymouth Gin, sage, ginger, orange blossom water and lemon. It was refreshing, savory and delicious. My companions appeared satisfied with their cocktails as well.

One member of our party had a distinct leaning towards seafood, so when we asked the kitchen to put together a meal for us, we asked them to feature seafood dishes, with the one exception being the arroz de pato, Chef Mendes' rice and duck dish that has become one of his most popular dishes and one I didn't get to try on my initial visit.

Our first course, quite refreshing for a late summer-early fall NYC evening, was the tomato-cucumber gazpacho with heirloom tomatoes, mozzarella "ravioli" and mussels. This dish is a wonderful example of Mendes' approach to cooking at Aldea. It is a modern take on a classic dish. While maintaining an absolute respect for what makes a gazpacho what it is, Mendes has taken a small liberty by including the mozzarella, not a classic component of gazpacho at all. Not only did he include mozzarella, but he took that a step further by using it as an Adria-esque encapsulation. This was the most obvious use of a contemporary vanguardist technique in our dinner. The good news is that it worked. The even better news is that there wasn't any bad news. Chef Mendes is quite familiar with the gamut of contemporary cooking techniques, having spent time working in Spain under the basque master Martin Berasetagui, but at Aldea he doesn't flaunt it. When used, these techniques are firmly in the service of the food rather than the reverse.

The soup was followed by baby Cuttlefish with caramelized lychee, mentaiko and squid ink. If this were just the grilled cuttlefish, this would have been delicious, but the caramelized lychee provided a balancing note, familiar but still surprising, that put the dish over the top and making it a revelation. The lychee and mentaiko are clearly neither traditional Portuguese nor Spanish ingredients. They come from Asia and their use here reflects both Chef Mendes' creativity as well as the continuing fascination of Iberian and other western chefs with Asian ingredients. Certainly, ingredients like these have been popular throughout Europe and the Americas for some time. It is therefore, no small feat to discover a preparation that uses them and still achieves a revelatory result like this preparation did.

Chef Mendes gave us another homage to Asian cuisine with his magnificent Sea urchin toast with cauliflower cream, sea lettuce and lime. This dish harmonized a variety of textures and flavors in a way that could keep me eating it all day long, if there weren't so many other delights s till to come.

Aldea has already developed a few signature dishes but perhaps the most highly lauded and deservedly so, is the Shrimp Alinha, this time with garlic, coriander, pimentón and pressed jus. The first time I had this dish at Aldea, it was presented more simply and with the head still attached to the body. While I missed being able to suck the juices from the shrimp heads this go round, the overall presentation and dish was somehow even better than the original composition, with additional complexity provided by a few subtle plating elements. Whether this dish continues to evolve, some form of it must always remain on the menu here, as it is truly a timeless classic.

It is truly a pity that cod fisheries are not in better shape than they are. The Iberian peninsula has justly received a reputation for doing wonderful things with this fish. It is no surprise that Mendes does as well. His own sea-salted Chatham cod with market cranberry and fava beans and lemon-basil mussel broth is a tour de force of cod cookery. The fish is flaky, moist and not in the least bit fishy. The flavors are subtle, but superbly accented by the beans and the broth.

The monkfish that came with roasted baby eggplant and tomato-saffron yogurt was also perfectly cooked, flaky, tender, moist and delicious, but the eggplant elements of this dish were the one part of my meal that I was less than thrilled with. I will admit that eggplant is one food that I have had issues with for basically my entire life. While I have actually come to enjoy certain preparations of this vegetable very much, it is still not something that I can grasp without reservation. The textures and flavors of the eggplant in this dish were just such preparations that leave me short. For someone who is an unabashed eggplant aficionado, they were likely heaven. Alas, for me, a small bit of purgatory in this otherwise paradise of a meal.

Arroz de Pato with duck confit, chorizo, olive and duck cracklings is a dish that one would not typically expect to find in a fine dining restaurant, but this one absolutely belongs. It is comforting and intriguing at the same time. This dish is the essence of what makes Aldea a great restaurant. Portuguese cuisine is not really known as a fine dining cuisine. That is not to say that it isn't a delicious cuisine. It most certainly is, but it is a strongly traditional cuisine, perhaps more than any other in western Europe, and tends to lean towards comfort and informality. Aldea, while certainly comfortable and not particularly formal. is, make no mistake, a fine-dining restaurant. Mendes has taken dishes based on tradition, kept them delicious and comforting, but through the use of technique, special ingredients and plating, elevated them into something unique, personal and special. The arroz is a prime example.

While dessert is not the greatest strength of the restaurant, they are still quite good. The strawberry tasting, though nothing extraordinary or revelatory, was refreshing and pleasing. The chevre cheese parfait with poached plums, nectarines and honey ice cream was outstanding though, providing just enough sweetness with cloying and balanced perfectly by the wonderful chevre parfait. This dessert could grace the table of any restaurant in the city. A cheese course with quince paste satisfied as well.

In an age where value counts, Aldea, to my mind, represents one of the very best values in fine dining in the city. It eschews the trappings of luxury dining, but remains comfortable and accessible. It doesn't eliminate the necessities of fine dining, though. The service is attentive and efficient, friendly but not intrusive. The wine list is interesting, representative of its focus region and more than fairly priced. Most of all, though, the food has a tendency to hit the right chords. While the emphasis is not on ultra-luxe ingredients, it does squarely focus on high quality ingredients that may be beyond the reach of all but the most ambitious home cooks. While the cooking is based on tradition, it is also highly personal, refelctive of the chef, George Mendes and not really like that of any other place in NYC or even the US that I am aware of. This is a restaurant, whose continued evolution I am keen to follow.

Portraits from Starchefs 2009 - Pierre Gagnaire

2009-11-06T16:06:26-05:00

While this is not the sharpest image of Chef Gagnaire, I believe that it captures his intensity and concentration as he prepared for his demonstration at the Starchefs ICC.