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Monthly Archives: November 2010

Following Ferran: Cooking From El Practico

30 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by jethro in recipes

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

El Practico, Ferran Adria, flank steak, pork fat, potato stew

El Practico

…I am grateful to him for having given me a big fat book five hundred pages long to read and learn.  A book of classic recipes, sixty-five hundred of them, a mix of traditional Spanish cooking and dishes heavily influenced by French cuisine…I still have the book.  It has a red hardback cover. It is called El Practico.  The pages are frayed.  The spine is cracked.  But I have it in a prominent place, always at hand, in my laboratory workshop in Barcelona.

–  Ferran Adria, The Big Red Book, or El Practico from How I Learned To Cook

Ferran Adria began his cooking career by landing a job in a hotel kitchen in order to save money to spend a summer partying in Ibiza.  Ibiza is a hedonist island wonderland just off the coast of Spain. It’s a wild, endless fiesta filled with bars, babes and beaches.

I know this.  I spent a weekend there about ten years ago.  My last night there I danced until dawn at Space, an indoor/outdoor club where airplanes from the nearby airport would launch overhead, sending the crowd into a frenzy.  I barely made it out alive.  Spainards are a different breed when it comes to being “a friend of the party”.  I can’t imagine an entire summer there.  Although I did try my best.

One can understand the motivation for a soccer obsessed high school dropout like Ferran. So he took the job as a dishwasher.  The cook, Miguel Moy, had a short temper and would explode at the slightest deviation from the expected way of doing things.  With his demand for excellence, he gave Ferran a copy of El Practico to memorize.

The first food Ferran ever cooked by himself for other people was a stew of flank steak and potatoes that he prepared one evening for the staff meal.

– Colman Andrews, Ferran

The first dish I learned to make was a potato stew. Miguel did not trust me at this stage to cook for the clientele. This was the food for the staff of the hotel…

–  Adria, The Big Red Book

When I read these passages, I thought I could gain an unique insight into the methods of the best chef in the world by creating his first dish. So I decided to hunt down El Practico, find the recipe for potato stew, and cook it up.  And, as always, things got more complicated than they seemed.

Hunting Down The Stew

The first step was finding the cookbook itself.  I had to hunt down the author’s names to make sure I was going to buy the right book.  I briefly lived in Madrid (around the same time as my trip to Ibiza),  so I used my connections there to find the book in a local shop.  Alas, no luck.  So I went online. It took a while but I finally found a copy, and after debating the price for a few days, finally let my culinary curiosity get the better of me and ordered it.

They had a difficult time fulfilling the order and it didn’t land on my doorstep for about six weeks.  I was very excited when it finally arrived in the mail.

One thing I noticed right away was at the beginning of the book.  A page full of symbols, representing what I gathered were elements of a professional kitchen.

Graphic Chart from El Practico

This page immediately reminded me of something I saw in A Day at elBulli: a set of symbols used to classify different product families of ingredients.

elBulli Graphic Chart

Could have this system received its original inspiration from the pages of El Practico?  I do not know, but the similarities are striking.

So there I was, holding Ferran Adria’s prized cookbook in my hands, the cookbook that inspired him to become a better cook, to become the best cook. I flipped through the pages.  A cornucopia of culinary knowledge.

If only I could read Spanish fluently.

I knew ‘potato’ was patatas in Spanish, so I looked it up in the book’s index, and flipped to page 449, where they had five and a half pages of short recipes for potato dishes.  117 dishes, to be exact.  Which was the stew?  I found that caldo means ‘broth’, so I read and re-read all 117 dishes looking for the word caldo.  I found three: Lard, Paysanne, and Savoyarde.  The only one that had meat in it was Lard, which had bacon.  OK, bacon – kind of like jamón serrano, I thought.  It’s not flank steak, but it’s close.  Perhaps this was his first dish.  But it seemed less like soup and more like a potato side dish.  Maybe I was looking in the wrong section.  So I turned to Sopas, or ‘Soups’.  Once again, as far as I could tell, no luck.

Next I turned to my Spanish speaking friends and asked what they would call Potato Stew with Flank Steak. Perhaps it was cocido, consome, or caldo. Maybe for meat they used churrasco, bistec, or filete.  Look for estofado or guiso. It could be in French: ragoût de pommes de terre or pot au feu.  And so I kept ‘reading’, searching for a recipe that would have all the elements I was looking for: potatoes, stew, and flank steak.

Ferran was right – a lot of the dishes in El Practico are French (and published in Buenos Aires by the way, so not really a Spanish cookbook at all).  I came up with an idea: I could use my copy of Larousse Gastronomique to read the French recipes to see if they were what I was looking for.  Finally, on page 323, I found a meat dish that could be served as a stew, which contained potatoes: Navarin.  Navarin is a French ragoût (or stew) of lamb or mutton.  I figured he could have substituted flank steak for lamb.  It didn’t have to perfect – it was for a staff meal after all, right?  It must be it.

From Spanish To English To Food

The Recipe

El Practico was first published in 1928, so the recipes reflect that: no measurements or steps, just short conversational sentences on how to put it all together.  A good set up for a dishwasher making his first stew, as it allows a lot of leeway. I translated the recipe with the help of Google and my meager Spanish cooking vocabulary.

Pedazos de pecho, paleta, etc. de cordero o carnero.  Sazonar con pimienta y sal. Saltear a la grasa de cerdo.  Escurrir.  Deglacer al vino blanco.

Brisket pieces, chuck, etc. lamb or mutton. Season with pepper and salt. Saute the pork fat. Drain. Deglaze with white wine.

Pork fat.  For most people, that would entail some research to find and purchase.  I, however, live right next to an Asian grocery store.  I knew, having never bought it before, that they would have it.  Sure enough, they did.  So I began cooking it up.

Pork Fat

Next came sauteed onions, the flank steak, potatoes and a bouquet garni (what else could give it away as a French dish?).  I also added pearl onions, turnips and carrots.  No need to follow it to the letter.  I mean, I’m just cooking a staff meal.

After it cooked for a while, I removed all the meat and vegetables to another dish, reduced the stock, and added it back to let it simmer a while longer.  And soon I had a potato stew with flank steak.  Ferran Adria’s first dish.

What I learned was his cooking, like most all Western chefs, is informed by French techniques. Having spherified coffee, root beer and melon juice earlier this year, it was enlightening to return to Ferran Adria’s roots, and see, like all artists, that he began with the basics, and it is from that foundation that he has launched his culinary innovations.

And that foundation, I might add, is pretty tasty.

Jethro

Cranberry Glass with Pure Cote B-790

29 Monday Nov 2010

Posted by ericriveracooks in starches

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Cranberry, Pure Cote B790

A friend of mine told me about Pure Cote B-790 and the work that Alinea was doing with it.  I looked at this link (click) and my mind started racing with ideas of the things I could do with this.

I was cooking Thanksgiving dinner and I made a cranberry puree and had the skins and the other spice residues (tonka bean, black pepper, other things) left-over from the puree that I decided to dehydrate in order to work it into the pure cote b-790.

After I dehydrated it completely then I turned the cranberry into a powder then mixed. I weighed everything then tried an 11% use per weight ratio of pure cote.  I heated the isomalt, glucose, cranberry, and pure cote to 160F then poured it over the silpat, let it dry overnight and then checked it out the next morning.

Success!  There are a couple things I want to do to clean it up a little bit (strain mixture before pouring, use acetate to make thinner sheets, etc…) and maybe increase the rigidity of the final product but that can be addressed with the Ultra-Tex as recommended in the link or maybe I’ll shoot for something else when I get some time.

The goal is to create very thin sheets of this so I can make something that resembles stained glass.  I also have an idea for a sheet of ice and see through ravioli (as seen in the link but with a different filling).

We’ll see what happens!

Eric

Savory Chorizo Meringue Tapas

21 Sunday Nov 2010

Posted by sheimend in recipes

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

appetizer, Chorizo, meringue, savory, tapas

chorizo meringues
Thank you, Spain, for one of the best flavor combinations on earth: chorizo, Manchego cheese, and olives.  Any combination of the three yields an irresistible tapa (Spanish snack), and this recipe is no exception.  Turing the chorizo into a savory meringue is a nod to the textural transformations that Spanish chef Ferran Adrià pioneered, and which are now a hallmark of modernist cooking.  Plus, it’s crunchy!

Makes: about 50 pieces
Total kitchen time: 2 hours (20 minutes working time)

Shopping list:

  • 1 dry-cured chorizo (available in the deli sections of finer grocery stores)
  • 6 egg whites
  • 1/4 tsp. Cream of Tartar
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 2 tsp. cornstarch
  • 2 tsp. salt
  • 1/4 lb Manchego cheese
  • 50 Spanish olives
  1. Preheat your oven to 300°F and set the top rack in the middle position.  Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, and dust with flour (adding a little cooking spray to the parchment helps the flour stick).
  2. Cut off about 4” of the chorizo and slice thinly.  Use the remaining chorizo for a snack while you’re cooking – you deserve it.  Blend the sliced chorizo in a small food processor until it is broken apart.  This should yield about 1/2 cup.
  3. Add the egg whites and cream of tartar to the bowl of your stand mixer, with the whisk attachment installed (you can use a hand mixer, but mixing times may vary).  Beat the egg whites on medium-high for about 2 minutes, or until they hold soft peaks.
  4. Whisk together the sugar, cornstarch and salt in a small bowl.  With the mixer running on medium-high speed, slowly drizzle in the sugar, cornstarch and salt.  Continue mixing until the egg whites are glossy and hold stiff peaks.  Finally, mix on high speed for 45 seconds until the egg whites are stiff.
  5. Carefully fold the ground chorizo into the egg white mixture.  Spread the mixture in an even layer on the prepared baking sheet until it is about 1/2” thick (this will occupy nearly the whole baking sheet).
  6. Bake at 300°F for 90 minutes, or until the top is light brown and firmly spongy to the touch.  Remove the meringue and transfer to a cooling rack.  Let cool 10 minutes.
  7. Slice the meringue into 1 1/2” squares and top with a thin slice of Manchego and an olive.

I was hoping to find a way to make the meringue using my whip cream charger instead of the stand mixer.  I did come close by rendering the oil from the chorizo and adding it to egg whites and cream of tartar.  It foamed on its way through the charger, but without the sugar, the foam just wasn’t strong enough to hold up in the oven.  Oh well, that’s the fun of experimenting!

Scott

Modernist Cuisine vs. Burger King

20 Saturday Nov 2010

Posted by jethro in uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Burger King, burgers, Modernist Cuisine

Is Burger King going to market Modernist Cuisine’s ultimate cheeseburger, or is Modernist Cuisine going to reveal the secret recipe for the Whopper?  Mm.

Modernist Cuisine At Home: Smooth Purees, Part I

12 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by jethro in MC at home, recipes, sous vide, vacuum sealing

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

apples, artichokes, beets, Modernist Cuisine, puree

Apple and Beet Purees

Last month I began to cook my way through the upcoming Modernist Cuisine cookbook by using their PDF excerpt they made available for download.  Out of the three recipe examples given, only two have enough information to make them in their entirety.  First I created their recipe for instant hollandaise.  Next up: their selection of recipes for smooth purees.  Out of the five fruits and vegetables listed, three are prepared sous vide.  I decided to do those first, because any chance to use my vacuum sealer makes it worthwhile for it to take up a huge chunk of my counter space.  The saute recipes will be covered in Part II.

The recipe

Let's Get Smooth

The recipe for pureed fruits and vegetables is an example of what they call a parametric recipe.  This type of recipe gives a basic concept with several variations in an at-a-glance format.  This way you can understand the basic concept and run with it.  As they say in the excerpt:

We feel the parametric recipe is a strong concept for an instructional cookbook. Such a recipe does more than merely suggest methods for making one dish the same way again and again— it reveals the pattern and reasoning behind the chosen ingredients and methods, and thus makes it clearer how to apply those lessons in other circumstances. The parametric recipe thus takes the master recipe to a more detailed level, and serves as a launching point that allows you to change ingredients and quantities in a number of ways to produce dozens of variations.

That’s right up my alley – taking these new techniques and understanding the fundamental idea behind them, so they can be applied to whatever I’m cooking.  I love this book already, and it’s only a PDF file.

One: Artichokes

Artichokes

Well, wouldn’t you know it.  Artichokes are out of season around here at the moment (the peak season is August through October).  But we have a variety of different grocers; there must be someone who has some.  Sure enough, Whole Foods had some packaged baby artichokes available.  Is one package enough?  I eyeballed it and thought it looked OK to me.

The process was simple enough: get the hearts out and thinly slice them, vacuum seal them with vegetable stock and olive oil, and drop them in a sous vide bath.  The scaling directions are so great.  You set the veggie to 100%, and add the other ingredients in the correct proportion, no matter how big or small the quantity.  In my case, these baby artichokes didn’t give up much in the way of meat, but I dutifully went ahead and prepared them.

Sliced Artichoke HeartsSealed artichoke hearts

After sitting in the water bath for 45 minutes, I put them in the blender, and promptly had my first puree fail.

Puree Fail

Does This Look Smooth To You? Yeah, Me Either.

Turns out that you really need more than a few baby artichokes to create the volume necessary for the blender to blend well.  I’m just a guy cooking at home and this recipe is aimed at culinary professionals who need to crank out 400 covers a night.  The recipe just doesn’t account for single servings.  Fair enough.  I’ll have to wait until they’re back in season and try it again. It was a decent enough spread and I ate it within a few bites.

Two: Beets

Undaunted, I moved ahead to the next one on the list (and conveniently needing the same temperature water bath). Once again, the first part of the directions was simple enough: peel and thinly slice some beets.

BeetsSliced Beets

The next ingredient was interesting: cooked beet juice.  Why cooked beet juice?  As the book isn’t published yet, I don’t know.  Well, OK then. I juiced a beet and cooked the juice.  All this fuschia foam developed and floated on the juice.  Should I discard it?  Probably.  So I skimmed the top, added the juice to the beets with butter (all carefully measured with a digital scale of course) and sealed it up.

Beet JuiceSealed Beets

After an hour in the sous vide bath, I pulled it out and put it in the blender, where unlike the artichokes, it did its magic well.

Beet Spin

I had my first puree of sous vide beets.  It definitely had that earthy beet flavor, and an intense bright color , but the texture was a bit…oh, grainy?  Maybe sandy is a better word.  Somehow I was expecting a texture like pudding – perfectly smooth.  Is this the correct texture?  Perhaps when the recipe calls for a commercial blender, they mean a Vitamix or Blendtec mixer.  Most likely it’s meant as a base for something else, and not meant to be eaten alone. I don’t know for certain, but certainly, it isn’t bad at all – just not what I was expecting.  As a matter of fact, I see a borscht in my near future.

Beet Puree

A Beautiful Beet Puree

Three: Apples

So the final recipe that called for sous vide was the apples.  These required no other ingredients.  Just slow cooked apples.  I like the simplicity.  I chose a mix of Red Delicious and Granny Smith apples.  Peeled and quartered, I sealed them up and put them in.

Sealed Apples

Apples Sous Vide

After they were done I blended them together and…wow.  Sous vide apple sauce.  So smooth, so creamy.  Just ridiculously good.

Smooth Apple Puree

This Tastes So Good. Whoa.

It’s funny how the texture improved with each progressive recipe.  I felt like Goldilocks – “Ahhh, this porridge is just right!” And now, because of the parametric recipe, I know how to apply it to other fruit and vegetables like pears and carrots as well.  I am loving this cookbook that isn’t published yet.  Awesome.

Apple Puree

Jethro

elBulli At Home: Pumpkin Oil Sweet

07 Sunday Nov 2010

Posted by jethro in recipes

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

candy, elBulli, Ferran Adria, induction cooktop, isomalt, pumpkin oil

Pumpkin Oil Sweet

A lot of modern cooking techniques call for exact temperatures and measurements.  This is more akin to baking rather than cooking, where a pinch here, a dash there, and phrases like “until a golden brown” is sufficient to get you where you need to go.  I tend to paint with broad strokes over the detail of a single-hair brush, but I always try to do the hard stuff, if only to challenge myself.  This endeavor was no exception.

Caramelo de Aceite de Calabaza: Pumpkin Oil Sweet

The Cast Of Characters

The Cast Of Characters

I really wanted to tackle a dish from elBulli, voted Best Restaurant in the World five times.  Paging through my copy of A Day At elBulli, everything required six detailed components or access to exotic equipment like freeze dryers and superbags.  I wanted to start simple, and found the pumpkin oil sweet: two ingredients.  Exotic ingredients to be sure – Isomalt and pumpkin oil – but I could work with that.  Yes, this should be interesting.

Isomalt is a sugar substitute derived from beets.  It is half as sweet as sugar and has remarkable properties for molding, and most sugar sculptures are made using it.  Pumpkin oil is just that, and found mostly in Eastern Europe.  Neither can be found easily.  I ordered the Isomalt online but found the pumpkin oil here in a specialty store in Seattle.  Seattle is good like that most of the time.

The process is simple:

  1. Melt the Isomalt.
  2. Dip a pastry cutter into the Isomalt so a thin film covers the bottom.
  3. Pour a teaspoon of pumpkin oil onto the film.  The weight will force the film to wrap around the oil and drip down below.
  4. Cut off the thin strand of Isomalt attached to the pastry cutter.

So I began.

Melt the Isomalt in a pan over a medium heat until the temperature reaches 120 C/250 F.

I dumped the Isomalt into the pan and turned on my new induction cooktop  (Did I say new?  I meant to say used.  On Craigslist.  For $60 – less than half the price for a new one.  There’s rarely a reason to pay full price for anything – even weird kitchen equipment.  Just keep your eyes peeled and who knows what you’ll find.). Now it doesn’t hit 250F exactly.  It has ten settings, and each setting increases the temperature by 30F.  So I could get to 240F or 270F, but not 250F.  Close enough, though. Right?

Melting Isomalt

Wrong.  In order to create a thin film on the pastry cutter that is still pliable enough to drip down after the oil is added, the Isomalt needs to be at exactly 250F.  If it was warmer, it was too liquid, and no film would form.  If it was colder, it would thicken up and no film would form.

Film of Isomalt

My Kingdom For A Thin Film

Of course, since I couldn’t maintain this exact temperature, I had to play this game of Heat Up and Cool Down to get it just right.  Sometimes, the temperature would be where I could make a thin film, but within a second it would harden, and the oil would just sit in it.

Sometimes, it was too weak, and wouldn’t hold the oil and just collapse immediately into a pool of oil and sugar shards.   So, most of the time, I just made a frickin’ mess.

And another challenge: if I tried to let the pastry cutter sit for a moment in the Isomalt so I could get a decent film, it would heat up and burn my fingers.  But I persisted and managed to figure it out.  That they are able to pump out dozens of these a night perfectly shaped at elBulli is quite humbling.  Trying it myself just heightens my admiration for their creativity and execution.

Pumpkin Oil Sweet Closeup

I ended up with a rouge’s gallery of misshapen candies as well.  They reminded me of the artwork of H.R. Giger, who designed the alien in Alien.  They would have made very creepy candies to give out on Halloween.  “Eat these right now, my pretties!”  I don’t think their parents would go for it.

The Rogue's Gallery

How to eat:
Pick up a sweet carefully with your fingers and place in your mouth. Without chewing it, let the sugar melt and the pumpkin seed oil flow out.

It is definitely tasty.  The Isomalt cracks open and the oil glides onto your tongue, with what would be an unexpected and surprising flavor, unless you’ve been trying to make them for the last hour, in which case the flavor is well known to you.  This happens.  But the pumpkin matches well with the leaves falling from the trees here in Seattle, and becomes a perfect autumnal sweet, a half a world away from its birthplace in Roses, Spain, at elBulli.

Autumnal Sweet

Jethro

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