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Lazy Bear entered the Lamb Takedown this Sunday, a competition pitting 20 professional and amateur chefs against each other with dishes made from various cuts of lamb. I made two kinds of "McNuggets" (please don't sue, McDonald's, thanks): sweetbread nuggets, and lamb shoulder nuggets. And I accompanied them with three sauces: hot sauce (which I called "Angry Bear Hot Sauce"), ranch dressing aioli, and a nuoc mam barbecue sauce. All of the sauces were delicious, but my favorite is the combo of ranch dressing and hot sauce (borrowed from the soft shell crab dish at the last Lazy Bear dinner.

There were a lot of great entries. My favorites were a Tunisian saffron-braised lamb shank, and a lamb rillette croquette from the boys at Restaurant Marche. Sadly, neither of those entries got as much love as they deserved.

With the lamb shoulder nuggets, I went for maximum visual and textural similarity to McDonald's chicken McNuggets. I hit it spot on (recipe below). Still, with a few exceptions, everyone's favorite seemed to be the sweetbread nuggets. They were tender and flavorful, but with a super crispy outside. Importantly, we fried everything a la minute, so everything was warm and crunchy.

And, in what might have been the crushing blow to our competitors, we presented our McNuggets in the appropriate containers: McDonald's-style to-go containers. They looked pretty damn sweet, though they take FOREVER to make since we do them by hand (that means printed at home, cut with an x-acto knife or scissors, hand-folded, and hot-glued). I often serve mignardises in this style container, so we have to make twenty or thirty at a pass. In this case we had to make 250 of them! Pretty ridiculous. Still, it was worth it for the glory.

One of the judges, Amy from Cooking With Amy, articulated the conceit behind my dish better than I ever have: it's a highbrow, luxury ingredient (sweetbreads), but presented in the most democratic, lowbrow way possible.

The hot sauce started out very traditional: pickled red fresno chiles, aged at room temperature for a couple weeks to allow some natural lacto-fermentation, which adds a lot of complexity to the flavor. It's like kimchi made of hot peppers. Then the peppers get pureed and the puree gets passed through a tamis. Then, in this case, I made the puree more rich and mild by adding cream, seasoned with salt and a bit of worcestershire and soy sauce, and thickened it with xanthan gum and Ultratex-3.

The nuoc mam barbecue sauce was a homemade barbecue sauce spiked with lots of fresh lime juice and fish sauce.

Here are some of the recipes:

McNugget-style Tempura Batter
75g corn starch
100g rice flour
100g AP flour
20g sugar
25g Trisol
2 eggs
275g flat water

Mix all ingredients together until uniform (unlike normal tempura batter). Dip flour-coated items briefly into batter until fully covered, let drip for a second, then dip directly into 375F frying oil.

For this competition, I needed to put out 250 portions (two nuggets each) in an hour and a half, so I pre-fried all of the nuggets. Frying a la minute wouldn't have been that bad, but battering would have been very messy and time-consuming. Anyway, each McDonald's gets all their nuggets pre-fried, so I feel that my method was authentic. So, after frying the nuggets (which Jeanette pitched in to help with), I let them cool to room temperature, then refrigerated them. I re-fried them at the competition for about one minute to get them hot and crispy again.

Sweetbread McNuggets

Sweetbreads are like little sponges. When you buy them, they are basically full of, unfortunately, blood. I soak them for 24 hours in cold water, changing out the water every few hours. That will gradually get the blood (and the iron-like taste it has) out of the sweetbreads. Then I brine the sweetbreads in a 10% brine for about an hour. It doesn't take long because, again, they are like sponges. Then I seal them up in vacuum bags. Don't worry about crowding them or adding any extra liquid--they'll expel lots of liquid and shrink once they get heated. I cook them sous vide for 1.5 hours at 67C, then chill them down. Once they are fully chilled (overnight, preferably), remove them from the bags and clean off all of the obvious membranes and sinew. In the case of lamb sweetbreads, you don't have to be quite as careful as you do with veal sweetbreads since the membranes are thinner and less noticeable when you eat them. Then just chill the cleaned sweetbreads until you're ready to fry them. At that time, toss them in rice flour, then into tempura batter, then fry.

Lamb Shoulder McNuggets

15 pounds lamb shoulder, lean only
7 pounds lamb shoulder, boneless, lean and fat
100g Activa RM transglutaminase ("meat glue")
200g kosher salt
800g lamb stock

To get 15 pounds of lean lamb shoulder, start with about 25 pounds of boneless lamb shoulder. Trim it very well, removing all of the fat, connective tissues, and sinew. Dice all of the lean lamb shoulder into 1/4 inch dice. Slice the 7 pounds of whole lamb into strips suitable for grinding, then toss them with the salt. Chill it very well in the freezer for maybe half an hour, then grind as per the usual procedure. Chill the ground mix again. Mix all of the ground lamb with the diced, lean lamb. Working in batches, mix in a proportional quantity of the Activa and the stock, then roll up the mix in roulades in plastic wrap, about one pound per roll (they should be about two inches in diameter), then chill the rolls overnight. Cook the rolls sous vide for 6.5 hours at 75C. More time will yield a slightly better, more tender product, but it'll be less like McDonald's McNuggets. Chill the rolls completely. Finally, unwrap the rolls and cut about 1/4-inch off two sides to yield a cylinder sort of shape but with two flat sides. Then slice into 1/3-inch slices, about 16 per roulade, and just under an ounce each. Toss these nuggets in rice flour, then batter and fry.

For this course, I was inspired by two things: one was my stage at McCrady's, where I had lots of fun breaking down several whole country hams, and the other was this post on a summer squash terrine by Chris Windus at bluezoo restaurant.

Chris's squash terrine looked awesome, and we had an abundance of gorgeous squash in SF, particularly from The Peach Farm and Balakian Farms. Loosely following the procedure he outlined, I made this terrine, and it turned out awesomely!

The squash terrine was set on a bed of Iacopi Farms English peas, raw diced summer squash, and braised dice of Benton's ham, all warmed in a ham cream sauce. It was garnished with thinly sliced squash and nasturtiums, and then further sauced with foamed up, heavily reduced Benton's ham stock (made by browning the trim of the ham, then simmering in chicken stock).

To make the terrine, I sliced a ton of summer squash thinly on a mandoline, laid out the slices on paper towels on sheet pans, salted them, waited around an hour, then dried the slices with fresh paper towels, pressing to get as much water out as possible. It took occasional work all day, around twenty sheet pans worth to yield one hotel pan of summer squash terrine. Then I layered them in a hotel pan, brushing each layer with a mix of heavy cream and egg white (direct from Chris's post). I baked the terrine in a water bath for about two hours with a weighted pan on top of it pressing it down. Then I took the terrine out of the oven and drained the copious amount of water that had collected--a couple quarts!--by simply tilting the pan while keeping the other pan on top of it pressing it in place. Then I returned it to the oven (still in a water bath, but now uncovered) to bake for another hour or so to evaporate additional liquid. Finally, I returned the weight pan to the top of the terrine and cooled the whole thing in an ice bath followed by the refrigerator. I portioned it out and held the portions on a sheet pan which I baked in a medium-hot oven for about fifteen minutes just before serving. It held together beautifully, and was so flavorful!

As for the ham, I learned to break down a whole country ham at McCrady's. They serve a ham tasting course, so I ended up slicing about 30 portions of five different hams. The Finchville ham they were serving was new, so I had to break down the whole ham, and one of the line cooks graciously showed me what to do. Finchville hams are amazing, by the way. It gave the McCrady's housemade ham a run for its money. When I came up with this course, it was partially just a good excuse to get a whole Benton's ham, which I'd been wanting to do for a while!

So delicious. It's a shot of intense "barbecue juice," with a couple balls of fresh peach, topped with a snack of puffed barbecue sauce wrapped in smoked peach leather and garnished with a hyssop leaf, barbecue sauce, and a peach puree.

The barbecue juice was a byproduct of making a ton of barbecue for an event I catered a few weeks ago. I took sixty-five pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs, rubbed them with a dry rub (recipe below), hot smoked them for about an hour over mesquite charcoal and hickory chips, gave them a bit of char as well, then put them in hotel pans with some chicken stock and a bit of barbecue sauce. After an hour or so, they were falling apart. I pulled them, and made sure to add back in plenty of the braising liquid. Still, I was left with quite a bit of that awesome, smoky, barbecue flavored liquid. So I reduced it down from about 12 quarts to 3 quarts and froze it. That liquid, served hot and adjusted for salt, was this shot.

The diners were instructed to eat the puffed snack first, then sip the shot. The puffed snack was puffed barbecue sauce. However, normal barbecue sauce contains too much sugar to puff adequately. See here for details. So I had to make a mostly sugarless BBQ sauce. Not an easy feat. Here's the recipe I used:

Sugarless BBQ Sauce
70g tomato paste
70g apple cider vinegar
5g smoked salt
20g worcestershire sauce
15g soy sauce
10g Crystal hot sauce
20g molasses

I took that (full recipe) and added 250g tapioca flour to make a dough. After kneading a bit to make the mixture uniform, I roll it out flat, steamed it for about 17 minutes, then let it cool and cut into strips, then dehydrated the strips. Once dehydrated they'll keep indefinitely. To finish, fry them at about 335F. If you fry them at a higher temp (425F or so), they'll puff more, but then they'll burn too quickly before they are fully puffed.

I wrapped the puffs in peach leather:

Peach Leather
850g peach puree
175g sugar
5g yellow pectin
2g citric acid

Follow the usual method to incorporate and hydrate the pectin. Spread out the warm puree on acetate, then dehydrate only until flattened but still pliable. Apply some smoke, off the heat, then peel off acetate and roll up in parchment paper like a fruit roll-up.

Hyssop is a very medicinal herb up front but with a minty aftertaste. I knew it would work well with the BBQ flavors, so I asked Joseph from White Crane Springs Ranch if he had any. He did, so he clipped some and brought it for me the following week to the market. Indeed, it worked well, though I suppose it probably wasn't worth the extra hassle.

This was the final version of this dish. I was pretty happy with how it turned out. It's really unfortunate about that previous version with the liver mousse and all. It was just not tasty at all.

Anyway, this was awesome. It's a luscious sweetwater oyster from Hog Island, here in the Bay Area.

It's topped with a very small piece of Boccalone (also Bay Area) lardo that has been torched to render some of the fat, alter the texture, and give it some char. The fattiness of the lardo plays really nicely with the fresh and silky briny qualities of the oyster.

Watermelon adds some sweetness and texture, while lovage provides some herbal notes. The lime added some acidity and, thanks to the inclusion of the peel, some bitterness. Finally, since the oyster lost a bit of its brininess with all the oyster flavors present (especially the fattiness), I added some back by sprinkling on some Maldon salt.

This weekend's Bear-B-Que sold out within a day or two of announcing it. We've got a great crowd coming, and the food is turning out to be very tasty.

I made a bit extra of the sausage, and have more than I need, so if you're coming to the Bear-B-Que, you can take home a pack of four links of the lamb-leek sausage for $8 $5. It's delicious. The lamb flavor really comes through.