bilrus
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Ditto, *Deborah*
I also have been lurking. Bilrus, this was truly fantastic. Thanks for letting "eat" with you. Was there any part of this process you would not want to do again?
No, I'd do it all again - although not right away.
If I was just looking to make a meal, even if I was entertaining and I wanted to impress people with my cooking ability (which isn't very often) I don't think this is the route I would go. I'd rather cook some things that I am more comfrotable with combined with a few things that take me out on the edge a little bit. I might use some of the recipes from the book and work them into the meal or I might use techniques or certain elements in other dishes.
In fact I've already got an idea in my head of making a gazpacho gelatin with tomato water this summer.
But one of the things I got out of it and one of the reasons I'd do it all again is the idea of setting my mind to this, in an area I'm not entirely comfortable and accomplishing it, almost without a hitch. It was a challenge to myself and I passed it.
But this makes this all seem like a very serious, self-help workshop kind of thing and it wasn't. I had fun. jenrus and I ate some good food. And I think I entertained a few of you along the way.
I said in my first post:
I hope a few people enjoy following along (actually my first goal is for me to enjoy this, and then my wife who has to eat the dinner, but you are all a close third).It worked.
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As a side note to all of this, my microwave is now functioning again thanks to a replaced thermostat and $175 to the repairman.
$175 to repair?! You must have one kick-ass microwave, my friend! For that fee, you could buy two of our microwaves and still have money left over for a couple dozen NY system weiners!
I know - It is the over-the stove type that is also the light and the exhaust fan for the stove. The cheapest I found a new one online was $400 unistalled and the other sourses were like $550. So this seems like a bargain. The repairman was probably more expensive than I needed to pay - he was straight from GE - but it was pretty painless.
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As a side note to all of this, my microwave is now functioning again thanks to a replaced thermostat and $175 to the repairman.
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Great job Bill. I have some questions.
The pea soup looked awesome - how long did it take to schuck the peas? I don't have the book with me in work - did the recipe call for one pound of peas or more? Do you think you had enough to serve six people?
The duck breast - how thick was the finished product before cooking? How did you purchase this - was it packaged from D'artangan or another producer?
Thank you for sharing - great project. Certainly deserves the Hall of Fame!
Rich
The recipe calls for 3 pounds of (what I assumed to mean) unshcuked peas. I think it took my wife about a half hour or so to shuck them while she was watching TV. Busboy recommended doing this while sitting on a rocking chair on the front porch. I could see that working too. Pretty mindless work.
If you had a good tamis (rather than a standard strainer), you could probably get a little more puree than I did. I ended up with about 1 and a half cups of finished soup. It could probably serve six as an amuse - like in a demitasse cup or the "Oysters and Pearls" bowl I used in the picture.
One thing I didn't mention about the soup earlier. The parmesan crisps looked very nice, but neither of us really liked them as an accompaniment to this soup. Maybe if we served it warm, it might have made a difference.
The duck breast I used was a prepackaged one from d'Artangan. It was about 7 inches long and the closest I can come to describing its circumference when rolled is about the size of a golf ball.
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I'm humbled that my virtual bust has been enshrined. Do I get a hideous yellow sportcoat like the Pro Football Hall of Fame?
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[...]I now want to go back to FL desperately. I'm amazed by the amount of thought and work that goes into putting a meal like this, much less a nine course tasting menu, then doing it for 30 or 50 or 100 tables a night, six our seven nights a week. And on top of that the pressure of turning out these complex dishes consistently and excellently all the time is staggering to me.[...]
Sure, it's quite an undertaking, but remember that they are able to do things in a kind of assembly line fashion, whereas you did all this almost by yourself.
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The cost of labour(cooking and shopping) would increase the cost beyond 180.50, assuming you had to pay yourselves.
. Just a random thought! -
I've put pen to paper and done some estimating (to the best of my memory, since I threw out my receipts) of the cost of the ingredients used in the meal. I'm not going to include the cost of a new microwave for these purposes.
One thing that struck me as I was making my preparations is that there were a number of ingredients where the recipe calls for a small amount of something, but as a home cook, we have to buy the item in relative bulk. For example, the duck is rolled in leaves of chard or savoy cabbage. For my one roulade I made yesterday, I needed ONE leaf. So I spent $2 for a whole bundle of chard for that one leaf. Granted, I now have a whole bundle of chard minus one leaf in my refrigerator, but I think to be fair I need to count that against the cost of this meal. A restaurant of course would probably need to buy several bundles of chard and use them all just to prepare this dish for multiple diners, thereby reducing their per dish food costs. Probably half of the items here fall under that category - the parmeggiano, truffle oil (I actually did happen to have this in my pantry), parsley, dill, chives, daikon, allspice, dill, mustard, mache and mascarpone. And we still have six servings of tart in the kitchen (well, actually five since I am eating a slice for breakfast this morning).
I made this meal for two, but making if for four, for example, would probably only increase the costs a small percentage.
I ended up making five trips to three different grocery stores. But this could have been reduced to three trips if I had better planned my time and menu.
Here is the breakdown of my food costs:
Soup
Peas $9.00
Veg Stock $2.00
Parmeggiano $10.00
Truffle Oil $10.00
$31.00
Crab
Cucumbers $2.00
Gelatin $1.50
Dill $2.00
Cream $1.50
Mustard $2.50
Crab $20.00
Frisee $1.50
Daikon $2.00
$33.00
Duck
Duck $10.00
Allspice $2.00
Chard $2.50
Corn $2.00
Cream $1.50
Morels $10.00
Duck Demiglace $5.00
Shallots $0.50
Chives $1.00
Parsley $1.00
$25.50
Cheese
Beets $4.00
Cheese $3.50
Mache $2.00
$9.50
Tart
Pine Nuts $6.00
Lemons $1.50
Mascarpone $4.00
$11.50
Staples $10.00
Total spent on food $120.50
Wine $60.00
Total spent $180.50
Over the course of five days I figure I spent 10 hours cooking and another 2 and a half hours shopping or driving to stores.
So this certainly wasn't inexpensive in terms of money or time spent. But the cost for two at French Laundry these days, with the wines we bought would probably end up being about $600 including tip.
But the point of making a meal like this at home isn't to duplicate the restaurant experience. Going to French Laundry was preceded by anticipation and the time spent there was as much about the pampering and service and the overall experience as it is about the food. And the food is excellent.
The food in last night's meal was very good, but it almost certainly wasn't done with quite as much "finesse" (to use one of Keller's favorite words) as it would have been at the restaurant. And the pace and flow of the meal was not nearly the relaxing, transporting experience that it would be at the restaurant.
I think the value in this lies more in the goals I set out for myself at the beginning of this thread. They were:
• I want to see if the book is really as difficult to use as many have said it is (I'm not doubting that it is, but I want to try it out anyway).
The short answer to this is, no it was not as difficult as I thought it would be going into it. Some things require multiple steps for minimal gain - like the beet powder I mentioned a few posts back. But I think the point of the book and the goal of Keller's philosophy is to take things to their extreme - "So what if it takes an hour and a half to make something you are going to sprinkle on a plate and not eat it or you need to spend a few extra dollars to add 1 teaspoon of an ingredient. If it enhances the experience in the least, then it is worth it." Some might find that a frustrating mantra and I probably would on a daily basis, but every once in a while it is worth the effort.
• I'd like to give my cooking skills a good test - I feel like I've been coasting lately, and want to give myself a challenge.
There was no coasting going on here, that's for sure. I used techniques that I have never or have seldom used, like making the sabayon or the method for cooking the roulade. I've never even made my own whipped cream before - couldn't be easier and I did it twice for this meal. I strained and skimmed more than I ever have. I obsessed over the right consistency of a reduction. Now I am looking forward to going back to my simpler every day style of cooking, but I hope that some of these lessons will make their way into my day-to-day and improve everything I cook.
• I'd like to integrate some of the lessons in the eGci Plating Course into my cooking. In looking back at my posts on the Dinner thread - most of my dinners are of the one-bowl variety - pastas, Asian stir-frys, stews, soups, salads. This is the way I prefer to eat, but it tends to be of the "plop it in the bowl" style of plating.
This was a fun part of this. jenrus and I debated and diagrammed (and even argued) over how to plate some of the dishes We had to wipe up several attempts at plating the beets. That juice is a pain to get clean. I've been posting pictures of my meals to the dinner thread and the Weight Watchers thread for a while now. But it did make me more aware of how my food looks on the plate and also how it photographs (not that that is a big consideration for most home cooks). I also added two of the rectangular plates that I've been coveting to my collection, just for the duck dish.
• And not least, I want to get an appreciation of just how much work does go into a meal like this. I've eaten at both TFL and Per Se (in addition to many other similar places) and this sort of task might help me get more out of those meals and not take them for granted. (Yeah, I know how jaded that sounds - see, I need help here).
I now want to go back to FL desperately. I'm amazed by the amount of thought and work that goes into putting a meal like this, much less a nine course tasting menu, then doing it for 30 or 50 or 100 tables a night, six or seven nights a week. And on top of that the pressure of turning out these complex dishes consistently and excellently all the time is staggering to me.
So, I did get out of the project what I set out to get. Plus I gained confidence in my own cooking, which is something I've lacked in the past.
Would it be worth it for someone else to do this? That's up to you, but it doesn't hurt to try, even in small steps. It doesn't have to be five courses of expensive dishes. Make one dish from this cookbook or any other cookbook that you normally wouldn't because it seems too hard or would take too long or is too far out your ordinary routine. It won't kill you and it may make you appreciate it all that much more.
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Nice bird.
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Well certainly worth the wait. Nice pictures. I had same issue with the tart but I don't know if extending the cooking time would of helped. I thought it would brown too much and ruin it and I could not chance it.
So the unanswered question was the results worth the effort overall?
Will you be pulling together other menus from this cookbook in the future?
I was actually thinking about the cooking time of the sabayon itself, while still in the double boiler.
It was defintely worth it.
I have had a blast doing the shopping, cooking, posting, photographing, discussing and obsessing. And the support and response from everybody on here has been great and unexpected.
I still have a few questions I want to answer in depth, but I am pretty tired and a little tipsy. So I am going to do some more posting tomorrow morning. I want to look at the costs, both in terms of time and money and compare this in my head to the actual experience at the restaurant. And I want to talk about the cookbook itself. And whether I achieved the goals I outlined in my first post on the thread.
So be prepared for more of me blathering on. But not tonight.
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Fantastic photos and notes. Thanks! Where'd you get that soup bowl?!?
That was a souvenir from our meal at French Laundry that jenrus bought me as a gift. It is from Keller's line of China and is the bowl that they use to serve the Oysters and Pearls.
I've had it for two years in our china cabinet and have been waiting for just the right occasion to use it.
It is actually a pretty small bowl - more like an amuse sized serving. My bowl was a little bigger - jenrus got served the dishes that we took pictures of - and I thought the bigger bowl was a little overkill. Keller uses these soups as amuses and I can see why.
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So on to dinner. I want to post my initial thoughts on each dish now, and then follow up later with a little more in depth look at what worked and what didn't and my overall impressions.
Soup: Puree of English Pea Soup with White Truffle Oil and Parmesan Crisps, page 37
This felt like "spring in a bowl." The preparation did nothing to diminish the "pea-ness" of the dish. I didn't end up doing the side-by-side tasting with the frozen peas, but the fresh peas have to be the way to go. The recipe calls for cooking them in a salt and sugar solution that really brightens up the flavor. Even cold, this is a luxurious soup, made all the more so when you whisk in the truffle oil.
Appetizer: Dungeness Crab Salad with Cucumber Jelly, Grainy Mustard Vinaigrette, and Frisee Lettuce, page 92
This was the one "miss" of the night. The textures of the whipped mustard cream in the crab and combined with the cucumber gelatin was just plain strange - no other way to put it. jenrus made the comment that she's gotten used to strange preparations as we've eaten our way through various tasting menus, but this was strange in a bad way. It was unexpectedly bland and would have improved quite a bit with the addition of a heavy hand of salt in the gelatin (there isn't any in the recipe) and a lot more mustard in the crab salad. This isn't irredeemable and it is a beautiful dish, but it is certainly unusual.
Entree: Roulade of Pekin Duck Breast with Creamed Sweet White Corn and Morel Mushroom Sauce, page 172-173
This took a lot of work to put together at the end, and I initially undercooked it significantly. I had to re-wrap it and put it in for another good 8 minutes more than the recipe called for. My guess is that the problem was the cheesecloth. This isn't specified in the recipe, but an eG'er suggested it. It made the roulade easier to roll and unroll, so I think it is worth using it, but adjust your cooking time accordingly. I also should have asked "WWTD (What would Thomas do?)" because I should have made my own "quick duck sauce". The demiglace from d'Artangan (my one cheat) didn't have enough of the natural gelatin that a good stock has and never got thick like it should have.
Because things didn't turn out right at first, I was pretty apprehensive about how it would taste, but that wasn't a problem. The duck was very flavorful and I can only hope I get corn as sweet as this sauce all summer long.
Cheese: Ashed Chevreaux with Slow Roasted Yellow and Red Beets and Red Beet Vinaigrette, page 239
This was a lot of work - beet juice, roasted beets, beet powder - I spent more time on this cheese course than any other, by far. And of course, I didn't end up finding Yellow beets. But I started with a very nice cheese - an ashed, Humboldt Fog chevreaux. This was like two cheeses in one - a gooey, running outer layer surrounding a tart, almost crumbly fresh chevre in the middle. The beets helped offset the tartness of the cheese. But the beet powder was a waste of time. It didn't add anything to the dish, except a little visually, and certainly wasn't worth frying my microwave for. We both felt this was a better cheese course than we had at either French Laundry or Per Se, which we found to be the weakest course both times.
Dessert: Lemon Sabayon - Pine Nut Tart with Honeyed Mascarpone Cream, page 294-295
Yes, this was as easy as it looks, although I probably could have cooked the sabayon a few minutes longer. It didn't set as firmly as I would have hoped, making it a little tough to cut. I couldn't get it out of the tart pan whole. But the flavor is sweet and tart and the honeyed cream balanced out the tartness well. Keller says in the book his inspiration for this was a cup of tea. I can see that, but I've never had a cup of tea this rich and good.
The wines worked well. The white is a very smooth drink. There was some concern about this one matching with the crab, but even though it says "grainy mustard vinaigrette" in the title, there isn't actually any vinegar in the recipe. The red was interesting. My first reaction was that it tasted like cranberry juice, but by my third glass
the character had changed and was not as tart and a little deeper tasting. (see - I never claimed to be Robert Parker). -
Things were getting pretty hectic towards the end. I did some of my plating of items that could sit at room temperature for a bit, like my cheese course:
As I was getting the duck ready, I had all four burners going:
And then we cracked open the bottle of white burgundy and it was time to serve.
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Sorry to keep everybody waiting. Let me deal with my pics and I'll have a post up in about 10 minutes. Plus the wines - both very good - have my feeling a little "funny" right now.
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That single Wagyu steak, which was widely distributed was defintely the highlight and would give anything at Ray's a run for its money.
My pizza crust was a little limp (that didn't stop my from scarfing up all but one piece of the pie) but a plate of the chocolate hazelnut "Kit Kat" bar more than made up for that one small misstep.
Thanks to the staff for putting up with us and taking care of us so well.
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My dog was just trying to get up on the table at the Lemon Tart. If he had gotten to it, I'd be posting to see if anyone wanted to adopt a miniature schnauzer. But he's safely sequestered now.
Corn juice is something I've never even thought of, but the result of this process is a very sweet essence of corn. I didn't have all white corn, this is the bi-color variety. It would probably be a pretty good ingredient for other recipes. I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but maybe baking? Anyway, this is the base for the corn sauce that goes with the duck.
I've also rolled the the duck in the red swiss chard, then cheesecloth and then plastic wrap and have them waiting to be cooked. One thing that was not clear to me in reading the recipe is that when they call for a "whole duck breast", they mean both sides, not just one boneless breast, which is what I bought. That works fine for me, since I'm only serving two, but keep that in mind if you make this one.
This will probably be my last post before plating. Everything else that I have to do is a la minute. At this point I need to cook the duck and the two sauces, with the mushrooms, and plate everything. I'll post the final prep and plating pictures after dinner, along with the final plated dishes.
I'm off to relax for a bit before I "bring it on home strong".
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Where did you source your crab? And, as everyone has said, those morels look marvelous.
Like probably about 75% of the ingredients I bought the crab at Wegman's - the really big grocery stores based out of upstate New York.
It was a container of jumbo lump meat. It is blue crab from Venezuela, not Dungeness as the recipe calls for, but it is very sweet. Not cheap (I'm planning on totaling up my expenses at the end, although I didn't keep receipts), but when is crab ever cheap?
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I'll be interested in what you think of the Vero, from my memory (which is bad!) it is a new style done by the Joseph Drouhin family, for some reason I actually thought it was a north Willamette Pinot?? Anyway I hear very good things!
I'll try, although I'm more like the Thomas Haden Church character from Sideways - "I like it" or "I don't like it".
I'll do my best though.
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Nice to see my DC “homies” are “in the house.”
I'm a little ahead of schedule at this point. Actually I left a lot of pad time in the schedule that I haven't needed - yet.
The soup is chilling ready to be plated (or bowled, actually). A few things on the soup - first, Busboy was spot on about needing more peas than the recipe calls for. I ended up with about 1 1/2 cups of soup, which is plenty for two but would make a very small serving for four. I know this is usually how they would serve it in the restaurant, in a demitasse. But unless you are serving it as an amuses, go for more peas. The picture below is of me pushing the puree through my makeshift tamis. It worked, but it was a lot of pushing. This is the point in a normal meal where I would have said "Screw this, this looks smooth enough." But that's not what we're about here. I took a little bite of the un-tamised peas and, although they looked fine, they were pretty fibrous and gritty. The final result, going through all the steps however, is a different story - smooth as cream.
The crab salad is also together, ready to go on the cucumber gel.
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Biggest score at the store today - MORELS!!!
I also ended up deciding to go all Burgundy, all the time tonight, based on conversations with many eGer's at the aformentioned Rocks and Rolls bash lst night.. This is what I picked up. Don't know much about it, but the guy in the wine shop at Wegman's concurred with the choice. Apparently it's been written up in the Wegman's magazine, for whatever that's worth - either it's good or they're trying to get rid of it.
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That could have something to do with it - but I've never had a hangover with a sore throat and congestion.
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I woke up with a pretty good cold this morning, so I'm dragging a little and didn't make it to the farmer's market like I'd hoped. But I am about an hour into my prep time as of 11:15 EDT. I've made my schedule and hope to stick to it pretty closely, although I didn't really build posting time into the schedule.
10 Make Sabayon for tart
Cook Tart
11 Shuck Peas - jenrus
Roast Beets
Defrost Stock
12 Go to store to finish shopping
1 Cook Peas
Puree / Blend Soup
2 Make Crab Salad
3 Make Cream Corn
4 Prep bruniose / Shallots
5 Relax
6 Peel/Cut Beets
Cook Duck / Mushrooms
Cook Creamed Corn
7 Begin Plating
7:15-7:30 Begin serving
I've made the sabayon and cooked the tart - it seems to be setting up pretty well:
The beets are in the oven:
Jenrus is shucking peas:
And I'm off to the store to buy my last few ingredients.
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Bill, the cucumber jelly looks lovely. And the wine...mmmmmm.
I bought this bottle after first tasting it (or at least a version of it) at the eG dinner we had at 2941 a while back. It was one of the many bottles of not very cheap wine poured that night, but it was damn good.
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Tonight I started a few of the tasks that could be done in advance. Things started well, but I've had one slight problem.
First the setting: this is my kitchen - not very big - probably 8 x 12, but I do have a pretty good amount of counter space. As they say on MTV Cribs when they enter the bedroom - "This is where the Magic happens."
[
bilrus: Is that a GE Profile stove I see? It looks just like the one I just got about a month ago.
Yep. It was basically the best stove I could buy from the builder when we bought the house. I particularly like the fact that the front right burner is high output and the back right burner is for simmering.
Five courses from the French Laundry Cookbook
in Cooking
Posted · Edited by bilrus (log)
The recipe calls for using, in order - a food processor, a tamis, a blender and a chinois. Using the blender first would have made it go through the tamis/strainer easier, but it also would have let a lot of the relatively fibrous outer layer into the soup.
I mean, it would work just boiling the peas and putting them into the blender and then straining it, cutting out two steps, and it would probably taste about as good, but the texture would be a little different. This was really the texture of heavy cream, whitout any cream in the soup at all.