eG Foodblog: Chris Hennes (2012) - Chocolate, Tamales, Modernism, etc.

[Shelby]

Haha really! Imagine someone throwing ingredients in the general direction of pots and pans and you have me...

*fist bump*

[Chris Hennes]

Phew. OK, sorry for the lack of updates this afternoon, but I've had literally zero downtime in this production until right now (all parts are complete, all that awaits is the final reheating and plating of the dish).

OK, there are three different "main" components going on here, plus two garnishes. We have an onion gratin, a gruyere custard, and an onion sable as the main components, plus an onion arlette and some pearl onions as garnishes.

The onions on the highest heat, and cooked the most, are the onions intended for making an onion stock: I took them off the burner when they looked like this

Add water, and simmer for an hour

In the meantime I started some lentils soaking, so I had something to serve with my tiny little onion tarts for dinner

The next batch of onions to finish are the onions in the gruyere custard: they are cooked until soft through:

The wine I am using in the gratin is this stuff:

The gratin onions are deglazed when they looked like this:

The liquid is the wine and some of the onion stock:

The first part of the custard is to make a cheese emulsion:

While that emulsion is chilling, starting some pearl onions:

OK, at this point I have a sous vide rig set up at 65°C to cook the egg yolks for the sable:

Those are cooked for seven minutes, then used to make a sable dough (the dough is made with the onion butter I made up yesterday, as well as some freeze-dried onion powder, so it's very onion-y)

OK, the dough has to rest, let's bag up the pearl onions with some water, champagne vinegar, honey, and salt

And finish the gratin. All the liquid has been cooked off at this point, so a ton of parmesan is stirred in, along with some lemon zest and pepper. It's supposed to then get molded into a block that is 1/2" tall, so I set up a candy mold:

Uh oh. That mold is 2" wide, and I am supposed to be getting four servings that are 2"x4". I got one. What happened?! So, gonna have to change up the plating, I need two servings at least. Well, too late now. Back to the pearl onions, get them cooking at 85°C for an hour :

Roll out the sable dough to 1/16" (um, yeah, so my rolling skills are non-existant, way too thick in the middle)

Cook for ten minutes or so:

Cut while hot. Yup, way too thick. Oh well, press forward!

Next up: store-bought puff pastry. For shame, I know, I know. But it's a garnish!!

OK, I got ahead of myself here. I was so excited to finally be making these that I completely skipped a step. You're supposed to brush each layer with butter and sprinkle them with the onion sugar. I just plowed into forming the little onion shapes. Make a pyramid:

Fold/roll it up:

Now the arlette dough gets 45 minutes in the freezer to prep for the next step, so now I am making the grueyere custard. The next step there is to add some carageenan to the remaining onion stock, disperse it, then combine it with the cheese mixture from earlier. This then gets heated to 203°F for three minutes to hydrate:

Then poured into molds. Fancy molds, eh?

That took 45 minutes, time to slice the arlettes:

Of course, even sliced like that they are too thick, so I get to practice my rolling pin skills.

Yep, still suck at rolling, these are also too thick. Oh well!

Finally these are sprinkled with the onion sugar and baked:

I guess I better get back into the kitchen, time to start thinking about assembly.

[Chris Hennes]

You are one seriously organized chef!

Believe me, this is very unusual for me. But a MC V5 recipe is a daunting task, and I didn't want to get confused about which onions were for which component!

[ScottyBoy]

Holy sh*t man, I would kill to taste this final dish!

[weinoo]

You ought to get one of these...will help your rolling skills tremendously.

Or you can try a set of these rolling pin rings if you don't want to get a new pin!

[kayb]

Good Lord. And I just complained about a pear upside down cake because I thought it was too fussy. That's more complexity than I can handle in the kitchen -- but damn, I'd love to taste it.

[Chris Hennes]

At long last: the plated dish. Note that this is actually only 2/3 of the size of the one the book actually calls for (I used two custard cubes instead of three) because I didn't have enough of the onion gratin (the bottom layer). Despite all the mistakes I made during the process, the finished dish was still relatively successful, in my opinion. A few thoughts: first off, don't use crappy store-bought puff pastry for the arlettes. If you can get one whose flavor you are happy with, go for it, but damn that Pepperidge Farm stuff is bad. The arlettes tasted mostly like crap puff pastry, you barely got any of the taste of the onion sugar, even though it was over-caramelized. Roll stuff thin: my sable was too thick, so it wasn't crispy, it just sort of crumbled into the dish. The taste of the sable is excellent, though. I skipped the chive blossom garnish because my chives aren't in bloom yet. No problem. But don't skip the lime zest "garnish" it actually adds a great flavor layer. And 8 minutes at 160°F is not enough to warm fridge-temp custard, even in 1" cubes.

Out for the evening on this note:

[andiesenji]

Chris, for "fiddly" rolling of things like this (and also for rolling hot "lace-type" cookies), there is nothing better or easier to handle than one of

these

Long before these were made for kitchen use, I used to buy brayers like these to use for pastry, fondant, marzipan and etc., because there was nothing like this available - back in the dark ages.

I still use an acrylic one from Michael's for sticky stuff.

Everything looks beautiful and tasty too. Very impressive!

Edited February 26, 2012 by andiesenji (log)

[rotuts]

Utterly fanatastic

now about those labels .... I did notice there was an 'open bottle' of wine in the kitchen ....

when i do 'open bottle' cooking, I sometimes use the microwave timer to remember things ...

[David Ross]

I agree Chris, the frozen Pepperidge Farms puff pastry is really not good. It lacks flavor and never really "puffs" up very well. Trader Joe's has a decent frozen puff pastry and Dufour Kitchens sells their frozen puff pastry at Whole Foods and on the web. I personally don't care to spend the time and effort to make it at home, so I'll buy the frozen stuff--but I imagine the freezing process has an impact on the interaction that takes place between the butter and flour when it's baked.

[gfweb]

Love that PA Turnpike ruler. Vintage.

You from the Keystone State?

[David Ross]

I agree Chris, the frozen Pepperidge Farms puff pastry is really not good. It lacks flavor and never really "puffs" up very well. Trader Joe's has a decent frozen puff pastry and Dufour Kitchens sells their frozen puff pastry at Whole Foods and on the web. I personally don't care to spend the time and effort to make it at home, so I'll buy the frozen stuff--but I imagine the freezing process has an impact on the interaction that takes place between the butter and flour when it's baked.

And I might add a dish worthy of a place at any fine dining restaurant. Gorgeous.

[annabelle]

Kudos, Chris! Long gone are the days that I had patience (or time!) for fiddly stuff like this lovely plate.

[nickrey]

...

Or you can try a set of these rolling pin rings if you don't want to get a new pin!

I'm with Mitch on this, these rings make rolling pastry evenly a lot easier.

[kayb]

That is a gorgeous meal. And this has been a marvelous blog. Thanks!

[Keith_W]

I have really enjoyed this blog Chris. I have MC but I haven't tried some of the more ambitious recipes. I am looking at your onion dish with slack jawed amazement ... even if I had the time to do it, I wouldn't have had the determination. Your eyes must really hurt from chopping up all the onions?

Well done, and thanks for a great week.

[heidih]

I think Chris still has a good 24 hours to go!

The onion dish certainly looks cool and interesting. Did you find that there was enough variety between methods of preparation and textures to keep it interesting in taste as well?

[Chris Hennes]

The onion dish certainly looks cool and interesting. Did you find that there was enough variety between methods of preparation and textures to keep it interesting in taste as well?

Yes, with the caveat that the garnishes helped a lot: the pearl onions were almost a pickle they were so acidic, and the lime zest was a perfect counterpoint to the richness of the custard in particular. This isn't going to be a full meal I don't think, but as one course on a menu it's excellent.

[Chris Hennes]

In the interest of "keeping it real": I just drove through Taco Bell for a snack, had a Volcano Burrito. On purpose. Because I like them. If you saw the state of my kitchen you'd understand!

[paulpegg]

Chris,

Thank you very much for this fantastic blog. We discussed this dish on the Sous Vide forum earlier in the week and I am still grappling with the quantities for each component. I am planning on having my men's cooking club prepare this dish as part of a tapas style dinner we will be doing in two weeks (32 half servings). We will certainly be doing a lot of pre-prep on this one.

I am particularly interested in the quantities of each component vis a vis the quantities spelled out for four servings on page 5-261. For example, 561 specifies that you need 80 grams of the custard to make four servings yet the recipe on page 264 shows that the yield is 670 grams, which would be 8 times more than required. How did you handle this problem? Did you follow the detailed recipe as shown or did you cut it down to make 80 grams. Also, did you serve 20 grams per person? or did you make the whole 675 grams and split it up equally among four plates?

This same problem arises with the Onion Gratin since 60 grams is in 261 and the recipe on 265 makes 250 grams.

These issues may not be a problem when making four servings but could be a disaster when making 32 servings.

Thanks again,

Paul

[dcarch]

Mind boggling blog!

Thanks for taking the time.

dcarch

[rotuts]

Again, a fantastic blog.

im a student of the Dinner! thread, but its so interesting to see the step-by-step on some of those '4 star restaurant' dished.

Kudos for all the work you put into it.

BTW: I covet that slicer!

[Chris Hennes]

I am particularly interested in the quantities of each component vis a vis the quantities spelled out for four servings on page 5-261. For example, 561 specifies that you need 80 grams of the custard to make four servings yet the recipe on page 264 shows that the yield is 670 grams, which would be 8 times more than required. How did you handle this problem? Did you follow the detailed recipe as shown or did you cut it down to make 80 grams. Also, did you serve 20 grams per person? or did you make the whole 675 grams and split it up equally among four plates?

This same problem arises with the Onion Gratin since 60 grams is in 261 and the recipe on 265 makes 250 grams.

I made exactly the quantities listed in the recipes (or rather, I used the exact quantities listed in the recipes and took whatever yield I got). For the main components:

• Custard—the recipe as stated made 22 1" cubes, enough to make 7 servings with one extra. I tried to plate mine with the same ratio of custard:gratin that are listed in the recipe, and am glad I did.
  
• Gratin—the recipe made, for me, only enough gratin to form one 2" x 4" x 1/2" rectangle, with a bit to spare, so instead I served it as a 2"x3" rectangle and got two of them. I have no idea why this quantity was off so badly. Perhaps I overreduced the onions. You will definitely want to do a dry-run of this to see if you have the same experience. Also, I suggest giving the onions a rough chop once they are sliced, they were a little unwieldy to eat, sort of like a tangled mass of pasta.
  
• Sable—if I had rolled this thin enough I think I could have gotten 50 sables out of a single batch of the dough. At one per plate, that was a lot extra. I just ate them as cookies all afternoon, they taste great.
  

For the pearl onion garnish, I suggest going by the number of onions you need, not by the weight (and make sure you use red pearl onions for good visuals). Allow about 25% extra for onions that fall apart on cooking, and then scale the rest of the recipe to match. I didn't weigh out anything for the arlettes, except the sugar. I probably have enough leftover sugar to make 1000 more arlettes, so don't scale that recipe at all. Just make sure you use good-tasting puff-pastry, mine were basically a loss. And roll them really thin, they would have looked much better.

ETA: I was surprised by just how large this came out, even at 2/3 portion size. It's a pretty big "tapa".

Edited February 26, 2012 by Chris Hennes (log)

[Chris Hennes]

Oh, another detail I forgot: the quantity of onion butter that you wind up making was a lot more than is needed for the sables, so everyplace else where clarified butter was called for I used onion butter instead. I decided not to re-emulsify the butter when it was cold, I only used the butterfat portion in the sables, which seemed to work fine.

[Chris Hennes]

This morning I made (or I should say, attempted to make) an omelette using some of yesterday's leftovers:

In the large container in the back is some leftover onion butter. The tin mold contains the gruyere custard, and the glass bowl is the remainder of the onions from making the onion butter.

I might have overfilled the omelette just a little bit, as you can see: it tore to shreds when I rolled it. Oh well, the taste was fantastic. In particular, the texture of the just-barely-melting gruyere custard as an omelette filling was really excellent. And those onions... oh man.