A New Mountain Cookery

Pop rocks

Also known as, "Dammit, it's 4:50 and I don't have an amuse yet".  It's funny to see how much people like them.  Any connection to childhood memories that you make as a cook tends to be a good connection, and who didn't love pop rocks as a kid?  They're good with dehydrated olives and orange zest...or with Parmigiano...or with red wine syrup and micro coriander...or with pretty much anything.  They're going to be clutch for our New Year's menu in a few days.  Stay tuned for pics of the 15 course dinner that we'll be doing, if we can manage to get out of the weeds long enough to snap any decent pictures.

Cocktails

I love a good cocktail, especially inventive ones.  We've been trying to create a cocktail menu, but it's been hard to do considering our lack of bar space.  The bacon bourbon turned out a little rough, so that's out.  The tonic water we made was equally as harsh, although it was interesting.  Luckily there's always experimentation.

Hendrick's martini with kaffir lime and thai basil.  This was tasty, and the gin would be really good infused with the lime.  The lime and the basil were both from Planet Earth Diversified, who has pretty much anything you could ever want, and everything is amazing.  Just make sure to let your servers (donkeys) know that the kaffir limes aren't the ones you cut up for lunch service.  

NYC

I went to New York a last weekend to reconnect with some friends and eat.  I had high hopes to go to Momofuku Ko, but getting reservations there seems to be impossible, but I did go to WD-50, Lupa, and Momofuku Ssam Bar. 

Lobster leg dish from WD-50 with brussels sprouts, charred lily bulb, and banana kimchee.  I felt badly for the cook who had to prep the little legs for service, but they were totally worth it.

Foie gras torchon with passionfruit center and chinese celery.  The crumbles were a dehydrated financier cake that was really tasty.  I had forgotten how much I love celery.  

Caramelized brioche with a toffee center, sage foam, brown butter ice cream.  This was killer, Alex Stupak is really, really good at what he does.  His station had so much mis en place and he was running it all himself.

Thanks to my excellent server Mars and the rest of the WD-50 staff, I had a really good time.  Thanks for the kitchen tour as well, it's a really cool setup, and Chef Dufresne was very hospitable even at midnight when they were still going strong during service.  The restaurant is incredibly unassuming from the outside and the atmosphere is so laid back for a restaurant of this caliber.  I'll definitely be back.  

Virginia getting some street cred at Murray's Cheese.  This place was awesome and had the best finocchiona I've ever had.  I ate a quarter pound of it while I was lost walking around in the snow looking for Lupa.  Luckily I found it.  

Pickled veal tongue that was made in house and some finocchiona from Mario Batali's dad.  Really good.  

Sardines with bulgur wheat, lemon, and olive oil.  This was so good.  There was a garde manger station in the dining room where all the charcuterie plates and cold dishes like this one came out.  They had not one, but two meat slicers, including one of these bad boys.

Brussels sprouts.  Yum.

Lupa is the type of restaurant where you don't want any of the dishes to end.  Everything was so solid and had such integrity and nothing in the restaurant, from the food to the service, was done in a half-assed manner.  It sucks that Italian food in America has been so bastardized into something unrecognizable from the food at Lupa and Vetri and so many other places that are doing it right at the moment.  This meal was definitely the culinary highlight of the trip.  

Number three on the list.  Momofuku is a cook's restaurant.  

Like all of my New York trips, I have gone, gotten my ass totally kicked by the city and the events contained within, and come out a better person afterwards.  I can't wait to go back once there's less snow on the ground.

Vegetable Ash

We just recently had this at the Town House dinner at McCrady's, and we've been more or less obsessed with it ever since we got back to Virginia.  Sean Brock described the process, where you just char onions and leeks until they're black, then blitz them into a powder.  We throw onions into the drip tray of our grill (while it's not being used obviously), and Bob's your uncle.  

We used the resulting powder to coat fried tapioca pearls, which turned out pretty well.  

It would be cool to turn the ash into a puree.  Perhaps for our 15 course New Year's menu.

Bone Marrow

From the Potter family at Buffalo Creek Farms.  We're doing a dinner with them on January 11th to showcase their amazing beef.  We served this with some braised beef tongue, charred tapioca, cauliflower, and a barbecue sauce made with plum jelly from Planet Earth Diversified.  

Thickened Olive Oil

Straight out of the Alinea book, baby.  We subbed corn syrup for glucose and honey for trimoline, which worked out well since this was going on a dessert.  The chocolate on the dessert is actually Alinea's recipe as well, and it's killer, super pliable and a great chocolate texture.  Too bad no one buys a dessert with olive oil in it.  

Town House at McCrady's

Team RH went down to McCrady's last weekend for the guest chef dinner that they hosted with the chefs from Town House.  It was an amazing experience and we had a great time.  Probably too great of a time, judging by how we felt the next day.

Sean Brock's chicken liver dish with apples, hazelnut, and cocoa.  Incredible.  Chef Brock cryo-juiced the hazelnuts and then reformed the juice back into a ball with maltodextrin, so it still had the flavor of raw hazelnuts, but with a new texture.  

"Blackened" short rib.  So good, the vegetable ash was "dericious".

Squab with flavors of root beer, golden egg, thai basil.  Save for dessert, I had just recently had all of the dishes that Town House brought, but they were even better this time, and the drink pairings were great.  This was paired with a cocktail made with sassafras and vanilla infused dark rum with Mug root beer.  

Thanks again to the John Shields, Karen Urie, Sean Brock and the rest of the McCrady's for the great hospitality, it was a really great experience and certainly worth the whirlwind trip down to Charleston.   

Bacon cotton candy

I got a cotton candy machine of ebay almost solely for the purpose of making bacon cotton candy.  I got some help from John Shields about making a bacon sugar with Glice and Sucro, but since I lacked those two hard-to-find and expensive ingredients, I dove deep into the internet and found this post.  

The recipe seems pretty foolproof, and the sugar seems to be able to take a fair amount of fat emulsified into it.  This is what it turned into:

The finished product rolled out onto a sheet tray:

More to come...

Slow nights

What do you do after you've prepped, cleaned, cleaned again, dicked around plenty, and cleaned some more?  You don't have much to do but stand around and think.

There are the more conceptual approaches, i.e:

Ask ourselves what we're doing wrong?

Wonder what other people are doing right?

Walk around the town to see who else is busy?

et cetera

We all hate the lulls that are present in any restaurant environment.  But we all really hate that deeper feeling in your gut when you know that at that moment in time, you're more or less helpless. It certainly doesn't help at all that our staff has all put a lot of effort into the restaurant (not to mention the fact that we all moved for the job), and when people aren't as receptive as we think they should be, well, it sucks.  Like what was said last night, however, I'm just gonna cook.

So then there are the food-related questions like:

Try to figure out how to use kuzu starch?  Really weird stuff.

What's a good SV beef tongue recipe?

How much can you get a good curing refrigerator for?

et cetera

"Just make the food look sexy".

Best of both worlds

Benton's bacon+booze

This should be ready to go in a few days...hopefully it won't taste terrible.