There are a few small preparations in the Eleven Madison Park cookbook that use a microwave to desiccate ingredients. The simplest of these is the “Olive Powder” in the Couscous Salad.
In a nutshell: line a microwave-safe plate with plastic wrap, finely chop some pitted black olives, spread them over the plastic and microwave until dry and crispy. The recipe in the book says two minutes is enough. Even for the small amount I did it took closer to four. Maybe mine weren’t chopped as fine as theirs.
The result is an attractive, jet-black olive crumble that tastes like, well… olives.
While this olive powder is okay, it’s interesting to think of this as a generalized technique for desiccating. Caper … Continue reading.
I’m on the fence about this one. The Eleven Madison Park cookbook contains a few vegetable preparations variously called “caviar” and “couscous”. They are uniformly tiny pieces of vegetable that are seasoned and dressed. The consistency is achieved either by meticulous knifework, or in the case of veggies like broccoli, by paring off the very tips of the florets.
On the one hand, I appreciate the beauty, the display of fine knifework, and the using up of trim. Especially for broccoli, the “couscous technique” is an example of parsing or deconstruction that lets you appreciate a specific part of a specific vegetable.
On the other hand, it’s minced raw vegetables, and to employ the terms “caviar” and “couscous”, even with … Continue reading.
This is a dish of ancho-braised lamb shank with panisse, squash, yogurt, and a warm salad of tomato, charred green pepper, cilantro, and pumpkinseeds.
While the components are compatible and well-integrated, there were many disparate inspirations.
Core Elements and Inspirations
I like to have one braised item on every menu. It is an essential technique for my students to learn, it’s a good balance to the many lean pan-roasted or grilled proteins on our menu, and it helps simplify service as it can be hot-held. I decided lamb shank would be this season’s braise.
Baby’s first fluid gel! Fluid gels are an entire category of sauces that are ubiquitous in contemporary cuisine. I avoided them for years, another example of my old disdain for things I considered “modernist”.
Flipping through the Eleven Madison Park cookbook I saw several dishes in which yogurt was drawn across the plate in perfectly smooth lines. I had recently used yogurt on a lamb dish, and not only did it not look smooth, it also tended to weep a bit of moisture when put on a warm plate. I finally discovered that the yogurt component in these EMP dishes were actually dairy fluid gels made with agar agar. While the yogurt has to be somewhat diluted with milk or … Continue reading.
My first class in culinary school was “Soup and Vegetable Cookery”, and one of the many many techniques taught was “tomato concassé”. While this literally translates to “chopped tomato”, it is a rather more involved preparation in which the tomatoes are scored, briefly boiled, chilled in ice water, skinned, seeded, and then chopped. At the time I thought the only way I would ever peel tomatoes would be in canning whole tomatoes. The thought that I would actually do this in a restaurant was laughable.
Flash forward a few years and I am reading the Momofuku Cookbook. Lo and behold there are peeled cherry tomatoes in an interesting variation of a Calabrese salad. And darned if they aren’t just the … Continue reading.
While not a full-fledged fad, I’ve seen plenty of chickpea flour fritters on restaurant menus the last few years. From the panelle di ceci at Uccellino, to the chickpea fries at Canteen, to the panissa at Teatro, chickpea flour fritters are a gluten-free and vegan-friendly starch with great textures. My own introduction to this kind of preparation was the Provencal version called panisse.
At its simplest panisse is water, chickpea flour, and a bit of olive oil, cooked in a pot into a thick porridge that is then spread into a pan, chilled, sliced, and fried. It is very much like polenta fritta, only made with chickpea flour instead of cornmeal. One interesting difference is that most … Continue reading.
This dish featuring salmon wontons checked a lot of boxes for me. We have a salmon entrée on our menu and we accumulate a lot of trim from cleaning and portioning the fillets. I challenged myself to make a dish that could use up this trim so it doesn’t go to waste. I also wanted to make a dish that used a mousseline, partly because it’s a fantastic classic technique, but also because it is a required element in the CCC practical exam.
Most importantly I wanted to make a dish that would be an example of how to adapt a simple traditional preparation for service as a composed dish in a fine-dining setting. To give a specific example, this … Continue reading.
No matter the type of liver – pork, veal, chicken, duck – I generally use this recipe, which combines liver with equal parts pork shoulder by weight.
Because I am typically working with the giblets from only one bird, I’ve never had enough turkey liver on hand to do anything more than sauté it with onions and mushrooms and eat it on toast. This past week at work we were running a holiday menu and ended up with the giblets from several birds, so I set aside a pound of turkey livers to make a terrine.
Here’s another dish that ties together multiple ideas and techniques gleaned from the Eleven Madison Park cookbook. Actually this one is just an adaptation and simplification of an EMP dish.
The feature ingredient is scallops, and they get a treatment I haven’t seen before. U10 scallops are very briefly steamed (2 minutes at 185°F) then chilled. This slightly cooks the outermost part of the scallops while the inside remains completely raw. I’m not totally sure what the point of this is, but I think it makes the scallops easier to handle during the intricate knife-work they are about to undergo.
These par-cooked scallops are then scalped so that their tops and bottoms are perfectly flat. The trim is reserved. … Continue reading.
I set myself a challenge. Every season there would be a salad on the menu, but it needed to be a composed salad, not a tossed green salad. I was really keen to make a beet salad with goat cheese this fall. It’s a fine line between classic and clichéd, so I wanted to make it in a way that I hadn’t done before.
I was really struck by the Beet Salad with Chèvre Frais in the Eleven Madison Park cookbook. Most of all I liked the presentation, with perfect rounds of sliced roasted beets arranged on the plate, and pops of colour and texture placed artfully around and among them. I played with this a lot over the … Continue reading.
The personal website of Edmonton chef Allan Suddaby
