The Carolina Food Experiment

Something new

2012-02-06T19:45:00.001-05:00

As my profession has changed so have my passions, a little. A new blog begins here. Hope you enjoy!

A new Home Cook

2010-09-26T16:18:00.002-04:00

For those still looking at this blog I have started a new one on wordpress. I haven"t posted in a very long time but I am going to start anew as I have started a new career. Check out the sight and see what's up. I will be posting soon.

New Blog Site

2010-03-23T00:10:00.002-04:00

So I have officially started the new blog. The first post is up and pending a battery with a charger I plan to post more soon. Here is the new address:

carolinafood.wordpress.com

You can click on this link to go directly to the site. I have renamed the blog to Carolina Cooking because the idea of experimentation implies science and that is exactly what I do not do. I am on a new look at food and I will express these thoughts through the new site. I hope you all follow.
Thanks
Colin
PS this will be the last post on this site.

New Start

2010-03-21T00:42:00.002-04:00

With the start of a new job and a new view and focus on food, I have started a new blog, or more or less a spin off of this blog. Kinda like the "Cleveland Show" to "Family Guy"... but better. I will post the new blog sight as soon as I have the intial details worked out, and a camera that has chared batteries. For those of you who may have followed the blog for a while and knew of my poor camera resulting in poor pictures I have also upgraded that as well. Thank you for reading andyour continued support.

Colin

Bacon roasted Quail

2009-10-31T13:52:00.004-04:00

Foie Gras, Pecan Hash, Date Butter, Pickled Apple

This is a bacon wrapped double quail breast, seared foie gras, dates cooked in madeira and buzzed with butter. The pecan hash has crispy potatoes, shallots, thyme, chives and lemon oil. We finish with bacon sherry jus, and pickled apples warmed in buerre monte.

My New Job

2009-08-10T14:24:00.005-04:00

I received permission several weeks ago to blog about my job as a line cook at Heron's. I have been putting it off though because I wasn't sure what to write about. The cuisine is intense and awesome, but it is not mine. I do not create the food at Heron's our chef, Scott Crawford, does. And he is extremely talented and driven. Which is why I went to work for him.

The first three months or so have been crazy. I have learned a lot including that as always, you never know enough. I spent my first couple of weeks not truly knowing how to brunoise correctly to get perfect little squares. It all makes sense now, but then it was a struggle. I have had to do my own cooking research in order to produce the food Chef Crawford wants and I have never had to work so hard in a kitchen. And I have worked at some places that really put you to test.

The big difference is that yearning for perfection. Some say there is no perfect dish, but it is the yearning for perfection that really drives us to make perfect knife cuts and to perfectly season. Most of what we do is beyond the guests we serve. They probably don't notice that the butternut squash was cut into perfect little 1/8 inch squares.

So for now I plan on writing about my station. It is what we call Hot Apps or hot appetizers. On the current menu I have four regular menu items and one item on tasting. On the menu I cook, Mushroom soup, butternut squash risotto, bacon wrapped quail, butter poached lobster. Chef Crawford has agreed to give me pictures of the food and as I get them I will write and describe.

On a side note I got to work with Dean McCord last night. I can't wait to see what he posts about his two nights at the restaurant. Check out his blog to see what he has to say.

Stepping Back

2009-07-23T00:03:00.003-04:00

The family and I went on a camping trip to the beach. We roughed it in tents (we even forgot the pillows), and we had a great time. Sometimes it is really refreshing to step back and look at things from a different angle. Going backwards often helps us to move forward. And that is what I am doing with my career.
Many of you may already know that I am leaving Azure Grille. I have two main reasons for stepping back. First and foremost is some family time. I have been working hard for a long time and I have a patient wife and two amazing little boys who I would like to spend more time with. Second is the opportunity to continue to learn and grow as a chef. I will be working for the leading chef in the area and I will post on my new job soon. I have had a great tenure at Azure Grille and Ed and Deborah Roach have been extremely nice and great to work for. I will definetly miss Azure but I will visit often.
My hope is that stepping back will help me see new things and lead me in a new direction. I am a little unsure of where I will go with this bog as I will not be creating the menus for my new job, but I do plan to continue to write.

Nothing beats a chef camping trip. Coleman stove, hot dogs, and All-clad pan. Of course PBR. It is the blue ribbon.

Salt

2009-07-13T09:49:00.003-04:00

A lot of people wax poetic about salt. Every cook book will tell this salt or that salt is what you should use. Most of them are right. Don't cook with iodized (table) salt, it's terrible stuff. Ask you favorite restaurant what their chef uses. If they say iodized salt... Leave! Iodized salt does nothing but add sodium to your food. It has a harsh and bitter taste and does little for the fine ingredients you are buying.
We use Morton's kosher salt because that is what we know. We know the feel and are able to salt correctly and consistently with it. Kosher salt is a good standard, I've found, because it heightens the taste of food and brings out the flavors. It is really interesting to taste you food change as you adjust the seasoning with salt. We add it slowly and keep tasting until we think the flavors are heightened to the correct level.
I am not knocking other kosher salts. We just know the feel of Morton's. One of our purveyors sent us Diamond Crystal one time. Diamond Crystal is lighter in feel and worked just fine in all of our food. But we had to adjust our seasoning more because of the weight difference. It made us inconsistent. So we switched back.
There are lots of different types of salts on the market especially when you start looking at sea salts. I love sea salt but from a price standpoint it makes it hard to solely cook with sea salt. We finish with it just like you would expensive olive oil. You wouldn't want to take you $30 bottle of high end olive oil and saute onions in it.
But the main reason for this post on salt is not to tell you what you should use. But more over how. We all to often over look the real power of salt. Yes it makes our food taste good, but salt is also, an antibacterial agent. It is also good for seasoning saute pans so omelets won't stick. Well, we recently discovered a new use for our salt. Or I should say a modified use for our salt. It crosses the lines between curing and sanitizing.
One of our line cooks has a lot of experience in Japanese cuisine. A trick he said his old sushi chef would do was to salt his fish heavily for 20 min and then rinse it off. We also found a reference to this in Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. He would break down whole fish and rub salt over the flesh. this would do a couple of things. One it would leach a lot of liquid out of the fish. Dry fish is easier to brown and make crispy, especially the skin. Two it helps to kill surface bacteria on the fish extending the shelf life of your fish. Three the salt helps to remove parasites from within the flesh. Fourth it helps to season the fish just so lightly.
This is great for sashimi, sushi or any cooked fish. It's like a cross between curing and seasoning. It makes truly amazing fish. So to be a little more clear here is our method below. And we will keep looking for new uses for salt.

Break down your whole fish into sides. Clean the fillets and de-bone. Place the fish on a purforated rack skin side down and heavily salt the top and bottom. Place in the refrigerator and let rest for 20 minutes. Set a timer you don't want to forget. Rinse all he salt off the fish and pat dry. Now you are ready to cut steaks. Skin on or off is your choice.

From Scratch

2009-07-01T00:32:00.002-04:00

Working in a restaurant we often have to make choices as to what we make from scratch and what we buy. I go back and forth a lot on items and for many different reasons. Usually time and space hinder a lot for us. I am no bread baker but I can make bread. We do not have the space or equipment to make bread from scratch so we buy it. And we buy great quality bread. But do we make bacon?, depends on what we want to accomplish with a dish. Sometimes yes and sometimes now.

But we often over look from scratch items that are so simple and so effortless. They only require some time and a limited amount of space. After some recent reading online I found two things to start on. First on the Popular Science website the guys from Ideas in Food layout the specifics of making vinegar from just about anything. I decided to start with they're recipe for maple vinegar. Mainly because I love maple syrup.

The other is yogurt. Yes you can go buy high end yogurt or you can spend a lot of money on a yogurt making machine. But Harold McGee lays it out really simply.I have made creme fraiche before and what a treat. But to have a solid fresh yogurt on hand at any given time would be great. Should my experiments work, I might go for making it at home. What else am I overlooking? Sausage?

7 course dinner

2009-06-16T01:00:00.004-04:00

We did a seven course tasting menu last week for some friends of the owner. I wanted to show some of the highlights from the dinner. We had a lot of fun with this. These first 3 pictures are of the beet root carpaccio with aged balsamic, Greek extra virgin olive oil, mint and radish.
We did a pasta course of Carbonara. Housemade spaghetti, roasted tomato, Meadow Creek Dairy mountaineer, applewood smoked bacon and quail egg.

I got a chance here to work with 2 cool new items to me. Yellow Tail hamachi and Grains of paradise. We seared the hamachi for sashimi and served it with julienne salsify root and orange butter emulsion.

Here we have Cavendish Farms quail stuffed with housemade port, current sausage; black current jus and puffed quinoa.

Like an idiot I forgot to get a picture of our dessert. It was more or less fair food or everything you want from the South in a desert. We made graham cracker grit cakes with sugar and honey and battered and deep fried. We topped the hot grit cake with banana ice cream and sweet tea caramel. Can't beleive I forgot the picture.

A lot to catch up on

2009-06-09T00:02:00.008-04:00

It's been too long so I thought I'd just roll a bunch of blogs into one. It's hard to think of where to start as we have been up to a lot in these past few weeks. Spring time has come as well as local produce. It almost makes your head spin. So much produce rolling in and what to do with it all. It's a good problem to have.

Why by a thermal circulator when you can have a Johnski!!!

So many chefs today focus on sous vide cooking and cooking at the right tempurature in order to yield a steak that is 99% med rare and 1% well done. This was a steak on a party of 60 we had one saturday night. John, my sous chef, grilled probably about 35 filets to medium. This was one extra one and had sat for a good 20 minutes after the party before we cut into it. It is pictures like this that makes me up in the air about how so many chefs are begining to use so much equipment to get results like we have above. Proper cooking, using methods proven to give standardized desired results, is almost always as good as any machine. So get yourself a Johnski. He also slices, dices, chops, and gets mad a staff meal!

Of course John always does a great job but we can't let his head get too big. So the front of house sent back a joke ticket. I had no idea and as I called the ticket John looked at me and said "I think I quit."

New Dishes

We have come up with a lot of new menu items. Here they are and we should have these on the menu for a little while longer.

Here we are looking at our new pheasant. It is a provencal style sauce with tomatoes, fennel, olives, roasted peppers, and fresh herbs de provence(we use thyme, parsley, majoram, and lavender). We serve the pheasent with artichoke hearts and grilled polenta.

Here we have a boneless lamb loin. Grilled and served with a lavender-port jus, arugala, asaragus, fava beans, red peppers and roasted tomatoes. This is like lamb over a warm salad.

These are the soft shell crabs we got in for one weekend. The season is so short and we had so few. Here is what we came up with. We battered the crabs in kadafi dough (shredded phyllo) and deep fried them. We served the crabs with arugula, and pommery mustard vinagrette. The brioche and quail egg we made like a tiger's eye, aka toad in a whole. The quail egg tiger's eye is a small tribute to my late grandma who used to make me tiger's eyes in tomato soup.

We finally changed our scallop dish. We pan sear the scallops and serve them over a puree of cauliflower and sauteed spinach. We made a gremolata and used brown butter solids to reinforce the brown butter in the plate. A tarragon-basil emulsion, more brown butter and candied lemon finish off what I think is a great dish.

Some random pics

Exactly as the title says.
This is John making roasted garlic and mushroom butter. It looks really cool on the plate having 2 different colored butters.

Suck it Sergio!!! Winslow is funny!
Jeff stealing the Tryon truck.
Nicely seared salmon. Courtesy of cisco.

Purple Off

2009-05-13T01:20:00.003-04:00

Another competition has arisen between myself and my sous John and we have gone to the polls to settle this. Above we have two very different methods of making braised red cabbage. This competition is very specific. Please vote by comments and If you want to be anonymous that's ok. If you know us please tell us your name. It's nice for bragging rights more than anything else.

Here is the question:
WHICH BRAISED RED CABBAGE IS MORE PURPLE, A OR B?

Please let us know. John lost last time and wants some redemption. To make this a little more formal we will close the polls one week from today.

Ups and Downs

2009-05-12T23:53:00.006-04:00

It's been a long couple of long weeks and I have personally had some rough times. But things are looking up again. We had a great Graduation and Mothers' day at the restaurant and now we are looking at some great local produce as well as some fantastic fish.

Today I rolled out our new tuna and I am really happy about it. It's a play on salad nicoise. You can find it in just about any Paris bistro and is great this time of year. We lightly poached the tuna in Zoe extra virgin olive oil, local radishes and mizuna, tomato confit, piquillo peppers, our house tapenade and hard boiled egg with a broken mustard vinaigrette. I look forward to serving this for a while.

Here we paired miso with salmon, nothing out of the ordinary. It's simple and great. We dust the salmon witha spice mixture or coriander, black pepper and cardomom. Daikon, edamame, carrot, cucumber, Spain farm shitakes and sugar snap peas finish this dish. A while back we were trying to re-work a vegetarian option on our menu. I am not sure exactly how we got to this but we can't stop selling it. I am really happy with this dish and the flavor and colors really pop. We roast white and green asparagus and set it atop an essence of red pepper. A black beluga lentil cake and butter braised shitakes and oytser mushrooms top it all off.

Below we have some shots from Mother's Day weekend. Below Ricardo is shaving manchego for our arugala salad.

Kyle came in to help us for the weekend. He never looks as tough as he does in this picture. We never could have gotten ready without his help. Thanks again kyle. This picture really makes his nose look small.
P.S. That's what you get for taking pictures with my camera.

Francisco is reading up on the special menu for the weekend. All great line cooks prepare mentally as well as physically.

Things to work on/ New Ideas

We need to get morels that look good
I need a new knife
Our plating can get better
Our speed is really quite amazing
Guilford County Grits are good and we need to utilize more
Look at what we do with our crab cake
Scallops need a facelift
Post pictures of our Panna Cotta!!!

Posting Soon

2009-05-06T21:36:00.002-04:00

We have been really busy getting ready for Mother's Day/ Graduation weekend here. I have a lot of pics but haven't had time to post. After this weekend I will post more.

Busy Bee Cafe

2009-04-08T16:48:00.003-04:00

Three friends of mine have just reopened The Busy Bee in downtown Raleigh. They have put a ton of work into a place that will be amazing. I have not had the chance to visit yet but my trip is planned. Their menus look fantastic, with the chef they have it makes sense, and the decor from the pictures looks great. Go check them out. These are the kinds of local businesses that will make Downtown Raleigh a vibrant and exciting place. Congratulations, Woody, Chris, and Jeremy.

Keep Moving Forward

2009-03-29T21:38:00.006-04:00

"Keep Moving Forward" is a quote from one of my sons favorite movies "Meet The Robinsons." It really is a great movie and one I don't mind watching 10 times in a row. But the line keep moving forward relates to an inventor who get excited every time he has a failed invention. So often we come up with dishes and I look at it and think somethings not right. More often than not it has to do with plating. Do we keep it high and tight, spread through out the plate etc. And often I get frustrated with myself for not being able to get the plate the way I want it to look. I was so frustrated the other night I hucked a spoon across the kitchen because I couldn't get my chicken to stay on top of the vegetables. I was also in the weeds and I didn't through the spoon at anyone just a wall. At the end of the shift I thought about keep moving forward. If you don't get the desired result keep moving forward. So I did and completly revamped our pan roasted chicken. I am much happier the dish. We are always refining, improving and revamping in the kitchen to make sure we are putting out our best.

Here is our new pan roasted chicken breast. We use Tanglewood Farms free range chicken from Winston-Salem. Leek and gruyere bread pudding, sugar snap beans, roasted garlic veloute and tomato fondue. It was a big hit this weekend.

We have been getting some fantastic NC coastal shrimp for about 3 weeks. They are super sweet. I have always been a fan of paella since I traveled to Spain when I was younger. We took the paella idea and revamped it slightly. We cook the shrimp sous vide in lemon, thyme and butter. The shells, and heads when we can get them, go to stock for the risotto. We serve the shrimp over a saffron,shitake, and chorizo risotto and top it with basil oil. I can't by enough shrimp to keep up with the demand.
Here are some shots of the guys and the pass this weekend.
Things to work on/new ideas

Update dessert menu
Floating Islands- on a caramleized white chocolate anglaise
Death by chocolate- chocolate marquis, white chocolate and raspberry jelly, mexican chocolate pot de creme
Cane Creek Braised pork shoulder- deconstructed NC barbecue, spaetzle au gratin and braised red cabbage
Salmon, orzo salad, farmers market sorrel.
Foam amuse bouches
Hot Foie Torchon.
Get to the Farmers Market- produce is starting to hit
We need to get ECOS on Board

New Menu Layout

2009-03-22T21:44:00.004-04:00

We have been making some changes in our menu style and layout and we have been really happy. Less is more is the theory. We have been running a two page menu with one side highlighting specials. We now only have one menu which we are printing on a regular basis, and changing pretty often so try and keep up. This allows us more flexability with what's in season. We can change on a dime if need be and we are having a blast with it. This week we are looking at 2 new items going on.

First is a wild stripped bass bouillabaisse broken down. We are going to grill the bass and serve it with a slightly spicy bouillabaisse sauce, rouille croquette, and french bean salad. I
ll try and get picture up soon.

The other is Braised Cane Creek Farms pork butt with spaetzle au gratin, braised red cabbage, and spiced cider gastrique A big twist on Alsatian food and NC barbecue.

We have also been getting amazing NC coastal shrimp fresh!!!. It's been a long time since I have worked with shrimp this good. We are cooking the shrimp sous vide with butter, lemon and thyme and putting it over a spin off of paella. A saffron-chorizo risotto with shitakes, and topping it with basil oil.

Truffle Fest Pictures

2009-03-15T21:24:00.007-04:00

PREPARE TO BE OVERWHELMED. My wife took a lot of pictures. As I said before we had a blast as some of the pictures will show.

An obscene amount of truffles from day 1. This was the story for the entire weekend

More of the Same. People were using truffles like they were button mushrooms. Awesome

This is an up close picture of our Tea smoked duck from the first night. We served it on wontons with homemade black mustard. We cured it for three days and slow smoked it with Lapsang Souchong.

Chef instructor Jules Pernell from USC.

A large bowl of truffled ranch courtesy of Sam Poley of Durham Catering. Delicious!

My sous chef John Mersinger cutting up a lot of tea smoked duck.

The beautiful house were we served our smoked duck, foie gras, and truffled brie.

Cane Creek Farms Pork belly made by Amy Lynn Lafreniere of the Umstead Hotel and Spa.

A picture of two of our three passed hors d'oeuvres. The top one is foie gras tourchon, black currant jam and shaved truffle. The bottom is our tea smoked duck with housemade black mustard.

My ugly mug working in the kitchen at the Double Tree hotel in Asheville pre party.

John getting ready the first night.

Sam Poley's roasted salmon.

Bill Harrison from The Umstead.

Me again cutting crostini

A celebratory drink at 11am on saturday. John, Bill from the Umstead, and I after finishing the risotto competition.

Two pictures of the plate John and I put out for the competition. We tried to think of ways to use risotto that didn't involve a traditional bowl of risotto. So we used the risotto rice like sushi rice and served it with seared scallop in the center, Mache tossed with verjus and pickled truffle.

A picture of the photogragher, my beautiful wife, and Amy Lynn from the Umstead.

More Champagne after the competition.

This is John first thing on saturday morning stirring our risotto with a lot of love. He looks so happy to be stirring while I kept asking what was taking him so long.
(It didn't really take that long)

This is a quick shot of the crew from the Umsteads' plate going out to the judges. It looked amazing.

John and I with the man Franklin Garland. Franklin and his wife Betty, provided all the Truffles, and Accomodations for the chefs. We were really pampered.

The large bottle of Chimay going on Ice on saturday morning. If you look closely you can see this is a 22qt cambro. That's a lot of beer.

A bunch of picture of most of the chefs at the competition with Franklin and Betty Garland front and center.

Bill working hard to make sure the chimay gets cold!

Some of us awaiting the results of the competition. Yes that is Iron Chef Walter Royal all the way to the left. He was a judge and is a super nice guy.

Saturday night I am describing our scallop dish to 120 people.

Yes look at the date on that Medoc. I went out into the dining room to brag to my wife that I was drinking a 1996 Medoc in the kitchen. She in turn shows me this bottle of 1988. Both were amazing. This is a little nod to lavash lifestyle we were living for 3 days in Asheville.

John and I trying to look pretty at the last event on Friday. These great outfits were courtesy of our restaurant Owners Ed and Deborah Roach who were so kind to let us both attend the event.

A Big Thanks

2009-03-09T00:15:00.003-04:00

I wanted to get this up as soon as I got back from Asheville where I had one of the best times cooking with some of the most amazing people. I want to thank Franklin and Betty Garland who made this weekend happen and they also provided all the truffles!!!!! I have to thank my sous John Mersinger who helped bail me out of hangover cooking. My wife Sarah who has taken an insane amount of pictures, and eaten a lot of truffles, which I will be posting soon. And to all the other chefs we worked with it was a great time and a great weekend. Look forward to more from the fest.

Trefethen Wine Dinner

2009-02-26T17:47:00.004-05:00

We are offering a wine dinner featuring Trefethen Wines on Wednesday March 18. The menu i posted below and should be a blast. We have pulled a few items from the Truffle Fest menu so those of you who can't make it to Asheville the weekend before won't feel left out.

AZURE GRILLE

Trefethen Wine Dinner

March 18, 2009

Reception, 6 – 7 pm, First Course, 7 pm

All wines from the Trefethen family vineyards

in the Oak Knoll District of Napa Valley

Trefethen’s Southeast Regional Manager, John Harrington,

will be here to present the wines

Reception

Gougeres with chived goat cheese

2007 Dry Riesling

First course

Smoked Salmon with sherry dressed shaved asparagus

2006 Chardonnay

Second Course

Merlot risotto with pancetta, grana padano and micro basil

2005 Merlot

Entrée

Pheasant en Crépinette, Pheasant Sausage, Chestnut Jus

2005 Cabernet Sauvignon

Dessert

Ile Flottante

Floating Island, Raspberry Mousse,

Caramelized White Chocolate Custard and Almond Tuile

2007 Late Harvest Riesling

National Truffle Fest Part 2

2009-02-22T20:49:00.003-05:00

The First Annual North American Truffle Festival is coming up in a few short weeks. Tickets are still available. I wanted to post the menu for our wine dinner we will be cooking the first Thursday of the event. Each chef is cooking 4-5 course to be paired with wine and each meal is for roughly 12 people, so tickets for this event are going fast. Here is what we have decided to cook. Remember this is a truffle driven event so get ready to eat some truffle.

Amuse Bouche

Tuna Crudo, Litchi-Green Tea Gelee, Telicherry Pepper

First Course

Chicken and Foraged Mushroom Consommé Royal, and Shaved Truffle

Second Course

Diver Scallops, Risotto, Shaved Truffle, Sorrel and Verjus

Third Course

Pheasant en Crépinette, Pheasant Sausage, and Chestnut Jus

Fourth Course

Ile Flottante

Floating Island, Raspberry Mousse, Caramelized White Chocolate Custard and Almond Tuile

Eating Local and The Economy

2009-02-18T00:27:00.003-05:00

Today President Obama signed into law a bill to help save the American economy. An insanely large some of money that I can barely fathom. This combined with my sous chef's ranting phone call about local economy and restaurants spurned me to post this particular blog. Well, right now we here a lot of gloom and doom coming from the restaurant gossip circles. And not just around here in NC but all over the country. Friends in NY and New Orleans talk about it being particularly bleak.

2 poor semesters of college economics does little for my validity,and I am hardly political, but here are my thoughts. EAT AT YOUR LOCAL RESTAURANTS! At our restaurant we purchase roughly 80% of our food locally. Our owners actually live 3 blocks away from our front doors. All of our employees live and feed the economy in our area. But it goes so much further than that. When a guest enters our restaurant you help us as well as our waitstaff to make a living. In turn we purchase food from local purveyors which helps their employees and so on.

Let's take for instance dining at your neighborhood chain restaurant, i.e. Applebees, Chili's, TGIF, Macarooni grill, Outback, Carrabas, Bonefish etc. When your enter these Establishments yes you help the economy of the employees who work at each individual unit. That is more or less $.30 of every dollar you spend staying local. Next, the food purchased by these chains comes from varying sources such as California, China, Mexico, Peru. That is another $.30 on the dollar not going to local economy. Then the profits from these chain restaurants is shipped to Wallstreet where CEOs get it.

Money Spent in our restaurant stays local. If you have a problem with a meal you can call/ email the owner. They live right here. They are your neighbors. Also, if you don't find favor with the food that I create you can come knock on my door. So eat at your local restaurants.

I was in a restuarant profitablity workshop and talking with the restaurant expert I came to find out that most chain restaurants are actually more expensive than the local eateries. Yes they advertise meals for $5.99 (to start). But the majority actually charge more and usually offer far inferior products. Support your local dining scene and I bet the economy will benifit greatly.

My wife and I this past Sunday went to celebrate the final days of the restaurant where we met. Shucker's Oyster bar had been in business for 24 years and has finally closed it's doors at the original location. It was a happy sad time. Good friends and drinks. It is also the kitchen where I got my start. Here is what that kitchen looked like after a beating and 24 years of service.

Truffles

2009-02-15T22:55:00.003-05:00

I got an education in truffles. It was like a back alley drug deal. 10:30 at night our local truffle farmer and the USA truffle man, who also started this years first annual truffle fest, came by with an obscene amount of truffles picked that very same day out in Yadkin Valley near my home town of Winston-Salem. Franklin Garland was super kind to come by so late with his truffles and actually let me pick the best of the bunch. I got to sniff and touch and hold more truffles than most chefs will ever get a chance to handle. We had to scrub the dirt off to get an accurate weight measurement. You don't want to pay for the dirt when truffles run $800 a pound. I was completely awe struck. Of course Franklin is telling me about roasted a whole truffle with a little cognac and eating it like a baked potato! Seriously, that is sick. I picked two truffles which came out to exactly a 1/2 pound. But Franklin gave me a lot of information about truffles and the different less expensive varieties. It was a good time.

Valentines Day Shots

2009-02-15T21:47:00.006-05:00

Here we have the start of our chocolate dipped hazelnuts with fleur de sel. This was our amuse bouche for valentines day. On this tray alone there were roughly 400 hazelnuts. We poured hard ganache over the four different times and then topped them with fleur de sel.

This is our almond brittle thuile being molded on our back line. We used it for the Banana Split for Two shown below. My sous John and I write a lot menus over many beers and we play the what if. Example, what if we did a banana split for valentines day. Yeah, maybe we could make a huge sweeping thuile to come off the plate. Sounds great. Well the next part is actually making the thuile. I am no pastry chef, but with a little trial and error and one quick run to Ace hardware we actually pulled this one off. These are the types of experiments for me that really get me excited. Especially when they work. It is actally pretty scary how many of our ideas come through versus how many fail.

Thanks to all who came for Valntines day. I am pretty sure the banana split is going on to our regular menu.

Separation

2009-01-25T22:41:00.005-05:00

Some vinaigrette's are easy and some are not. A lot of of our recipes use very few emulsifiers to bind our dressings together with the idea of keeping our flavors as pure as possible. But this often results in line cooks (and myself) breaking the vinaigrette. So we used to start over and try and re-emulsify. Thanks to cooking for engineers we saw a better way to start over. Of course using a basis from chemistry we force the separation to speed up using a zip lock bag. Hanging the bag allows for a complete separation and when the mixture is finished we cut a small whole in the bottom of the bag and allow the mixtures to drain into separate containers and then we can start anew. It is a great method for separating any liquid.This is our pomegranate vinaigrette. A constant source of frustration.