Recently in Poultry Category

Soft-scrambled chicken eggs, topped with hot sauce caviar, various sprouted beans (garbanzos, red peas, green peas...), toasted nuts and seeds (radish, nigella, black sesame, brown mustard, peanuts, poppy, roasted soybeans), onion sprouts, basil seeds with lemon oil. All topped with a sunny-side up quail egg, chives, and Maldon salt.

Chicken confit, deep-fried broccoli, broccoli puree, deep-fried rye bread, broccoli flowers, micro-scallions.

Foie terrine, crunchy coffee caramel, kabocha squash puree, kabocha squash balled and cooked in apple juice, raddicchio dressed with apple cider vinegar. Ocean Spray jellied cranberry sauce from a can, presented and sliced tableside (not pictured).

If I may be so bold, I make an awesome liver mousse. I served a chicken liver mousse last time I guest cheffed at Mission Street Food with chicken confit and kumquats. It was easily the best component of that dish, so I decided to feature it in its own dish. Wow, this chicken liver mousse was good. I vary the flavorings each time (the spices and wines used, whether I use creme fraiche, yogurt, cream, ricotta, or mascarpone, etc.), but the recipe for this one is below. I served it with carbonated murcot mandarin segments (clean each segment really well, then load whole segments into a siphon and charge three times with CO2, chill for a couple hours, then discharge all pressure, unscrew top, and dump out carbonated segments, then serve immediately), mandarin marmalade, endive, some griddled, crusty bread, and neutral pop rocks. The carbonation of the tangerine and the popping of the pop rocks were intended to help to keep the course light and to cut the richness of the chicken liver mousse. I'm sure that I've seen foie and pop rocks somewhere before, but I can't remember where.

Brined, Sauteed Chicken Livers

850g raw, fresh (not frozen) chicken livers
1200ml water
100g kosher salt
32g pink salt
10g sugar
.25g white pepper
.5g black pepper
3g coriander
pinch dried thyme
lemongrass
ginger

Combine all ingredients except livers and bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Simmer for five minutes then turn off the heat and let steep for half an hour. Strain then chill completely. Brine livers three hours, then rinse and dry.

Saute the chicken livers in many batches on high heat, browning the outsides and cooking the insides through to medium, being careful not to burn the fond. Pour off any remaining fat from the pan but reserve the fond for the mousse. The livers will now weigh significantly less than when you started.

Chicken Liver Mousse

600g sauteed, brined livers from above
65g sliced shallots
20g sliced ginger
2g coriander seeds
1g black pepper
45g butter
170g dry white wine
100g mirin
5g soy sauce
60g creme fraiche
20g heavy cream

In the same pans from sauteeing the chicken livers, add the butter and sweat the shallots, ginger, lemongrass, coriander, and the two peppercorns. Sweat without browning, scraping up any fond. Once soft, add the rest of the wine and the mirin and reduce by two thirds. Strain the liquid through a very fine mesh, discarding the solids left in the strainer. It should weigh about 135g. If it's more, reduce it further. If it's less, add water until it equals 135g.

Add the livers, wine, and soy sauce to the blender. Puree the livers completely, adding the creme fraiche and cream while the blender is running. Finally, push the mousse through a tamis, then mold or shape it the way you want it (I rolled it into cylinders with plastic wrap) and chill it completely overnight, keeping it covered as tightly as possible to avoid oxidation. Slice or quenelle to order (or no more than a few minutes before serving) to avoid oxidation and keep the nice pink color.

Fiddlehead ferns have very little flavor other than a generic, fresh greenness, but they have a really nice, succulent, crunchy texture. So I figured, why not play up their texture with a preparation that is all about texture: deep-frying. The first of the two nights I had my proportions a bit off and the batter turned out kinda greasy (see picture on left). That night I also sprinkled toasted nori over the fried fiddlehead, and I decided that the nori just didn't add anything. The second night, the batter was perfect and the fiddleheads turned out crunchy but light (see picture on right). I garnished with a spicy nasturtium leaf from my backyard, and the ginger aioli and togarashi went well with it.

It had been my intention to stick the fiddleheads on lollipop sticks, fry them, and present them as fiddlehead tempura lollipops. Unfortunately, I couldn't find more than a few fiddleheads large enough to withstand the insertion a lollipop stick. So, I presented them these ways. The second night was definitely much better.

The ginger aioli was made by pureeing fresh, peeled ginger with egg yolks, lemon juice, and garlic, then emulsifying with peanut oil, and pressing the aioli through a tamis to remove any ginger sinews.

Light Tempura Batter
25g corn starch
50g rice flour
25g AP flour
50g Trisol
1 egg, lightly beaten
160g cold soda water

Mix the dry ingredients well. Add salt to taste. Add the egg and water all at once and stir gently but quickly until barely mixed and still lumpy. Dip fiddleheads (or other things to be fried) into the batter with chopsticks or tweezers, then fry at 350F.

First I served a miniature turkey pot pie. Just large enough for one bite, each one had some small dice of carrot, celery, and turkey breast, and the filling, instead of being a bland bechamel, was intensely roast-poultry-tasting.

These were pretty good, with one of my helpers, Aimee, being entirely responsible for the extremely tender, flaky crusts (which were based a buttermilk crust from Shirley Corriher's book Bakewise). They were made a little hastily on the afternoon of the dinner, and I think I could have tweaked the consistency of the filling a bit for a better result, but they were still quite delicious.

If you don't have Bakewise, by the way, I highly recommend it.

The dinner went pretty well, with posts to follow. For now, look at this gorgeous photo and drool. This was my breakfast the morning after. It's a Soul Food Farms egg that had been stored with white truffles for a week at Far West Fungi, fried in butter, topped with chives and shaved black truffle. Wow.

ROASTED CAULIFLOWER
Deep-Fried Chicken Stock | Vadouvan | Pea Shoots | Grana Padano

This was my favorite savory course of the night (and one of my favorite things I've ever made). It was very refined, but so damn delicious. This course was basically a meditation on browning, both caramelization and Maillard. It started out with the deep-fried chicken stock, which I wrote about a couple weeks ago. That stuff is the essence of Maillard. It's pure, crispy, deeply browned bits. They're right on the line between browned and burned, smelling almost like coffee. They're way too intense to eat on their own, but they are a perfect condiment. Anyway, I wanted to find things to pair with the deep-fried stock bits. Roasted cauliflower seemed right. The plan was originally going to be to puree some roasted cauliflower with the brown stock bits, and to top it with some pieces of roasted cauliflower. I decided that wouldn't showcase the stock bits enough. Jeanette suggested curry as an additional pairing, and it immediately sounded right.

Vadouvan is the French interpretation of curry, which, it turns out, is just curry with shallots. I toasted and ground all the spices for vadouvan (other than the hot peppers, which I did not want in this dish), and instead of slowly roasting the shallots with the spice mix, I kept the spice mix separately so that I could have more control over the amount of curry flavor in the final puree. I just cooked down the shallots in a pan. I roasted some cauliflower using my standard method: cut a head of cauliflower up into chunks no bigger than maybe an inch and a half cubes, toss with salt, a bit of sugar, and some olive oil, roast at around 425F for around forty minutes, tossing a couple times. I added the roasted cauliflower into the pan with the shallots, added some cream, and cooked until the cauliflower was extremely soft. If I hadn't done that, the puree wouldn't have come out as smooth. Finally, I pureed all of it together, adding the spice mix carefully until it had the perfect amount of curry flavor, and pushed the puree through a chinois. It was luscious and delicious.

To complete the dish I roasted some cauliflower a la minute with some salt, a bit of sugar, and some olive oil. That was the toughest timing issue in the dinner, since I had to start it roasting about 40 minutes before serving (though there's some leeway there, as it can stay hot in the oven for 10-15 minutes). Roasted cauliflower doesn't reheat well at all, in my experience. The stock bits were sprinkled over it, then the whole thing was topped with some pea shoots which had been tossed with a very light balsamic vinaigrette. I decided at the last minute to grate some gratuitous grana padano over it, which added even more nuttiness.

It was fantastic. Jeanette and I sat in the kitchen basically licking our plate, with eyes rolling back in pleasure. I could have eaten about twenty of these plates. The next step with these deep-fried stock bits is figuring out how much different they'd be if I used vegetable stock (or other stocks). I think that the gelatin in them may contribute quite a bit to their final texture, but I'm not certain. I'm also wondering how much the more subtle flavors in other stocks will come through. Would deep-fried duck stock taste different from deep-fried chicken stock? What about white veal stock? Deep-fried mustard stock would be the most amazing hot dog or sausage topping!

• Buttermilk-fried duck confit, with Trisol in the batter, as described in the previous post.
• Buttermilk biscuits, pulled into chunks.
• Olallieberries. They're similar to blackberries, but if you care to know their exact lineage, there is a chart on the olallieberry Wikipedia page.
• Olallieberry jam.
• Broccoli Rabe, sauteed with some butter, finished with a bit of buttermilk, and lots of salt.
• Radish.
• Chervil.
• Puree of fresh peas. This did not taste good with the other flavors. Everything else was delicious, and this was just weird with it. I should have known, but I thought it might work. It didn't.

• Fried chicken - Chicken thighs, deboned, skin reserved, pounded out and then rolled in its skin into a tight ball. Cooked sous vide, 2 hours at 150F, then chilled and reserved until use. To finish, dredge in buttermilk powder, then buttermilk-egg mixture, then in flour, and fry at 350F until golden and heated through, about six minutes, turning occasionally.
• Buttermilk pudding - Similar to soft chocolate, but no chocolate, buttermilk instead of water, and some salt.
• BBQ Sauce Sheet - I used the Alinea sheet method, but cut out 2/3 of the agar, resulting in a much less jello-like, softer, better-flavored, more pliable sheet, that also had better flavor release. Basically barbecue sauce + water + a teensy bit of agar + gelatin, then poured onto acetate and moved around acetate to cover in a thin layer. Then chill a couple minutes until set, cut, and cover already-plated buttermilk pudding, being very careful not to tear sheet.
• Crispy Collard greens - Ribs removed, then cut into 1/4" strips and pan-fried in hot bacon fat.
• Southern-style Buttermilk and Bacon Cornbread, baked in tiny metal baking dishes that I'm beginning to love. The dishes are about 4" long and 2" wide. Very useful for preventing waste.
• Barbecue-maple sauce - Barbecue sauce + maple syrup, reduced a bit.

Is there any question whether this was delicious? It's super-crispy fried chicken with the silkiest internal texture, served with things involving buttermilk, bacon, and barbecue sauce. It's tough to screw up.

On the other hand, I will say that a ball of fried chicken is tougher to eat than other shapes, unless it's 1 bite or smaller. This was many bites, and so yes, it was a bit tough to eat. Next time I'd make a plank of fried chicken, I think.

This dish was inspired by me craving my mom's ham steak. She would put a ham steak in a baking pan along with the juices from the package, rub in some brown sugar, top with a couple pats of butter, then broil. Once done, she'd reduce the juices to thicken it to a nice sauce. That flavor inspired me. So I brought in a meyer lemon puree to balance out the sweetness of the brown sugar glaze, and a red onion confit to bump up the earthy, savory qualities while also functioning as a different kind of sweetness. The dish comprised:

• Sous vide duck breast
• Duck cracklin
• Meyer lemon puree
• Brown sugar glaze
• Red onion confit
• Mustard flowers (they don't taste of mustard)

This post represents the shortest time from dinner to press in the history of EatFoo. This was tonight's dinner. And not only was it tonight's dinner, it was a late dinner. I didn't get home until around 8:15pm (yay law), and we didn't eat until about 9:30pm. I temporarily placated Jeanette's and my hungry bellies with some quick garlic bread, and then set about making this dish, which took a little under an hour to pull together.

Yesterday a friend told me, after looking at this blog, that he was surprised that I do this kind of cooking so often despite holding down a fairly time-consuming job. And well, it's not all roses, and the posts here gushing about how delicious something was sometimes hide the really crappy aspects of this hobby:

Sometimes dinner is late. Sometimes I have something awesome planned, only to have to repurpose my ingredients toward something that can be made in twenty minutes. Sometimes I give Jeanette a hot dish and resign myself to eating a cold one so that I can spend five minutes photographing it for the blog. Sometimes I buy great ingredients and then am forced to let them spoil and be thrown away because something critical comes up at work that slams me for a couple days. And one thing that I can't do anymore is that I can't stay up late night after night trying shit just for the hell of it. These days, if I'm putting my time into making something, we're damn well eating it for dinner. So it better be good. And when it's not, it makes it that much more disappointing.

On that note, I'm going to lead with the best thing about this dish: it looks great. The second best thing about this dish was the concept. It was a solid idea, and I would revisit it in a second. In a distant third place came the taste. It was good, but not great. In addition to encountering hitches outside my control, I also just plain screwed up some of the execution. That isn't to say anything went horribly wrong. It didn't. All the components were delicious individually. It was seasoned well. The duck was tender. There were just a number of imperfections that nag me.

After the jump: how I made this, and the problems it had...