52 replies to this topic

[Broken English]

mm84321, I take it you do this for a living?

I was going to ask that, those dishes look amazing.

[mm84321]

Oyster Vichyssoise.

"Fantasy of Eggs"

Scallop Ceviche with Fennel ,Tangerine and Tarragon.

Pink Snapper Poached with Pears, Parsnips and Razor Clams.

[jane@eatyourbooks]

Wow, mm84321, your presentation and photos are awe-inspiring. For anyone who doesn't yet own the book but would like to know more about it, we have just indexed it on Eat Your Books http://bit.ly/vWufoE. It's worth a look - 376 recipes and many of them have over 30 ingredients (and we don't list the basics). I'm looking forward to getting the book back from the indexer though for me it will be more a good read than to cook from, spare time being what I'm lacking these days. One of the best meals of my life was at EMP and I can see why when you see from the book the time, effort and expense that goes into every single dish.

[mkayahara]

I have a question for mm84321 (or anyone else who's made it) on the Beef with Bone Marrow Crust, Swiss Chard and Chanterelles: I see that the recipe for the Bordelaise sauce calls for 4 cups of veal jus, which is then reduced to 2 cups. Did you find that you actually used that much sauce when plating the dish? I ask because it's not easy for me to get veal bones, so if I can scale back the veal jus recipe, I'd like to do so.

Edited by mkayahara, 02 January 2012 - 07:38 PM.

[mm84321]

I have a question for mm84321 on the Beef with Bone Marrow Crust, Swiss Chard and Chanterelles: I see that the recipe for the Bordelaise sauce calls for 4 cups of veal jus, which is then reduced to 2 cups. Did you find that you actually used that much sauce when plating the dish? I ask because it's not easy for me to get veal bones, so if I can scale back the veal jus recipe, I'd like to do so.

Good question. If you follow the exact quantities for most of the sauces in this book, you will end up with much, much more than you actually need. And veal jus is not exactly a cheap, or quick, ingredient to make. You are basically reducing the amount of jus by half to obtain your sauce. So, think of how much sauce you will need (maybe 1/4 to 1/2 cup for 4 people) and use double that amount of jus in place of the recommended 4 cups. Then just add the other ingredients to taste.

[mm84321]

Making "veal jus":

Edited by mm84321, 02 January 2012 - 07:46 PM.

[mkayahara]

Thanks for the comprehensive and prompt reply! That's sort of what I figured. I was planning to make a half batch. If even that ends up being too much, I assume I can always freeze the remainder.

[mm84321]

Thanks for the comprehensive and prompt reply! That's sort of what I figured. I was planning to make a half batch. If even that ends up being too much, I assume I can always freeze the remainder.

No problem. You'll enjoy making it, I think, at least once. The production of roasting 25 pounds of veal bones, and reducing a liquid for over 12 hours is always healthy every now and then. If you lived closer I'd let you borrow a container. But that might take out all the excitement of doing it yourself!

Yes. It can be frozen for later use. Thank heaven.

Edited by mm84321, 02 January 2012 - 07:52 PM.

[mkayahara]

I finally made the beef with bone marrow crust dish this past weekend. Definitely a lot of fun to make, and a delicious dish. I omitted the yellow chard sprouts, and substituted maitake for the chanterelles, which I can't get locally. I think the recipe is out to lunch calling for 3 bottles of wine to marinate 2 pounds of oxtail, and 8 cups of veal stock to braise it, so I reduced it to one bottle of wine and 3 cups of veal stock, and still thought the results were delicious. It was a challenge at serving time, when I realized I needed about 7 burners to put the dish together (I have only 4): one for the mushrooms, one for the swiss chard, one for the oxtail, one for the sauce, one to melt the marrow fat, one for the garlic-thyme butter, and one for the potatoes. So I melted the marrow fat directly in the sauce, warmed the butter in the microwave, and heated the oxtail through, then set it off to the side while I finished everything else.

[mm84321]

Good job, mkayahara.

[mkayahara]

Did up another EMP dish for dinner last night: Malt sorbet with olive oil and black pepper. It was a little tough quenelling the sorbet; clearly the recipe wasn't formulated for a home ice cream maker. (I should probably have endeavoured to find some liquid nitrogen...) Sadly, while I was dehydrating the meringue, my dehydrator died... luckily, it finished the job before it went kaput!

[ChrisTaylor]

The 'chilled' corn soup is very good. Even when you don't quite follow some pretty important instructions.

For example:

-- Corn juice. I don't own a juicer and, yes, I know, I know, I could just blitz a metric shit load (or perhaps imperial, given Humm's favouring of an uncivilised measurement system) of corn kernals and strain the resulting pulp, but I didn't. I upended a bag of just-thawed frozen kernals (decent quality, sure, but still) over the pot and, at the end, made sure I blitzed extra well. It seemed to work. I can understand why the recipe specifies juice--they're shooting for a fine, smooth, silky, high-end restaurant soup texture, but for home use, in impolite company, it worked well enough.
-- The heat factor. It's a chilled soup in the book. And yet, right now in Spring, it's still cold. This soup is as nice hot as it is cold (I tried both). I'd make the soup again.

I made a couple of the other elements--the lobster, the pickled baby corn--and made half-arsed subs at a couple of the others. The carefully-made discs of toasted brioche sounds simple enough, but if the only brioche you can get your hands on locally, without a car ride that's very much out of the way when talking about a couple dollars worth of bread, comes in the form of a tiny muffin-shaped thing, well, you improvise. So croutons it was. I also didn't want to travel to find quail's eggs, so I just poached a couple of chicken eggs and artlessly used those. I also didn't make the bavarois, even tho' it's simple and I probably should've. I'll make this again in summer, when I can maybe actually serve this chillied, and then I'll try it with the bavarois, which I suspect will lift the soup to the left level. I'll also sub the lobster out and replace it with, say, yabbies or marrons (the Australian crustacean, not the nut).

EDIT

Has anyone dove into that (brilliant) section at the back of the book, with all the gels and everything?

Edited by ChrisTaylor, 19 August 2012 - 04:30 AM.

[Baselerd]

mm84321 looks amazing!

I too have been on an Eleven Madison Park cooking binge. I will say these are some of the most challenging (but tasty) recipes I have attempted in my life. The nice thing about these recipes is that they make insane amounts of leftovers, and most components keep well for at least a week.

Pork Belly with Peas, Mint, and Lettuce (I used a full-sized belly since suckling pig is just too expensive)


Quail with Dates, Endives, and Juniper.


Marble Potato Confit with Pork Shallot Crumble. For this recipe I could not get my hands on any malt-vinegar powder or truffles. So I ended up combining the concepts and just made truffle powder with truffle oil + N-zorbit M.


Smoked Couscous, compressed melons, lemon vinaigrette


Lemon and Basil Parfait, [melting] Strawberry Sorbet, meringue.


Roasted Beets with Goat Cheese Foam and Rye Crumbles/Tuiles


Chocolate and Milk Textures. This was by far the best dessert I have ever made. Making the frozen chocolate foam with the LN2 was a lot of fun as well, and my first time doing real cooking with LN2 (other than using it in chemistry labs for ice cream). A nice display of my lack of quenelle-ing skills.

Edited by Baselerd, 28 September 2012 - 08:30 AM.

[mm84321]

Nice stuff, Baselerd. I really liked the orange flower sauce with that quail dish. The couscous looks great.

[mm84321]

I posted these in the dinner thread a few weeks ago, but not here. The pork neck was one of my favorite things I've made from the book. The avocado roulade was good, but it would have been even better during the heat of summer. I've made the cauliflower once last year, and it is delicious, just quite a bit of work.

[mm84321]

And, by the way, the poorly shaped balls of sweet potato on the pork dish is a result of ordering the wrong size parisian scoop and resorting to carving them by hand.

[Baselerd]

Thanks, your stuff isn't too shabby either. Your plating is almost identical to that from the book - which is to say awesome!

[Baselerd]

And another. This is the Sweet Potato Beignets with chocolate-chestnut honey ganache, cocoa nib crumble, brown butter ice cream, sweet potato sauce, and orange pate de fruit. I unfortunately was out of soy lecithin so I had to skip the orange foam. I substituted honey for chestnut honey (I know it's not the same thing - but I didn't feel like going online to get some) and the result was excellent, but the honey flavor was mainly overpowered by all the others. Not that it was a problem, this dessert was excellent. I probably say this every time I make a new type of ice cream, but anyone who owns this book owes it to themselves to make the brown butter ice cream - simply amazing.

Edited by Baselerd, 18 October 2012 - 12:44 PM.

[ChrisTaylor]

Preparing the hare royale component of the game medley. An impulsive thing: I was walked past a poultry store and they were selling hare considerably cheaper than what I've paid in the past. I figure I'll do something involving porcini to stand in for the truffle toast.




As per the recipe the hare is sitting in a marinade comprised of red wine, carrots, onion, celery, juniper berries, allspice and black pepper.

[Baselerd]

Awesome, better post your results!

[ChrisTaylor]

I realised at maybe 3am that I forgot to actually take a photo. Anyway. I had no plans to serve the dish as it's described in the book--I was going to serve it and a couple sides and leave dinner at that--but I wanted to retain most of the elements in some form. I prepared the ragu as it was detailed in the recipe, altho' I did have to braise it for the best part of three hours before the meat was happy to part from the bone. Altho' that sort of variation is normal: could be, the (wild) hare I had was a just that little bit older and tougher than whatever they buy in for the restaurant.

I didn't use any pig's blood in the sauce. The only butcher I know of that sells the stuff has plastic tubs of 'blood jelly' sitting around for very long periods of time (it's not a popular item, as you can imagine). I wasn't too confident about using such a product. Next time I'd probably make up for the lack of blood flavour in the sauce by maybe buying some nice blood sausage or something.

For the torchon I used a bloc of foie mousse I had sitting around. It did the job.

In place of the truffles I had a side of nice mushrooms jacked with a little porcini powder and in place of the potato mousse I made some retrograded mashed potatoes (purely because I don't have a siphon).

I was happy with the dish overall, altho' next time I think I'd lose the corn starch from the chocolate sauce and sub in some xantham gum or something. Or, you know, just allow the heavily reduced chicken stock to do its thing and thicken the sauce without any added ingredients. One thing that drives me nuts about the book, and possibly prevents me from using it more often, is the cups/tablespoons business. Who the shit measures currants by volume?

[Baselerd]

Yeah, it's a bit annoying - although he uses weight measurements for the stuff that really matters (modern thickeners & gelling agents) usually. I can usually just use my intuition on most other things ... no real harm is done if you have a 5% error on your currant measurement.

[rotuts]

finally got this book out of the lib.

mm: these guys have been stealing your stuff!

outrageous !