The Rundown:
* 'Caesar Salad'
* Heirloom Tomato Tart
* Smoked Salmon & Gnocchi
* "Pacific Moi"
* Walnut Soup
* 'Ile Flottante'
* Poached Peaches & Verjus Sorbet
[Note from Ei-Nyung: I think my
Gruyere gougers made it out of the oven between the first and second courses. We just put them on the table to eat with everything else.]
Caesar Salad :
This is easily the most labor intensive and ridiculous salad I've ever seen, much less made. Essentially, it's the basic flavors of the salad, done up in completely differet ways. If it weren't for the novelty of its given name, I'd have called it "Parmesan Three Ways" or something similar. Essentially, the salad, from the top down, consisted of:
* Parmesan shavings
* Dressed narrowly-cut Romaine hearts
*
Parmesan Frico *
Parmesan Custard * Croutons
* Dressing
The custard was the weirdest part, essentially a standard custard with a lot of parmeggiano-reggiano(sp?) added to the mix. The dressing was incredibly punchy - a quarter cup of balsamic, garlic, shallots, anchovies, lemon, and olive oil. Good stuff. I don't think say, I'd make it again casually, simply because of the work involved. But damn tasty, and it turned out pretty well.
Heirloom Tomato Tart
Uyen & Charles brought over the tomato tart, which was apparently made completely from scratch. Their dish involved making their own puff pastry, which is no easy feat for any non-pastry chef. There were a variety of tomatoes in different states of cooked-ness -- top layer was raw to provide a fresh, cool bite, and the underlying layer was roasted in the oven to intensify in flavor -- and they all played off each other really well. The tapenade provided a high (but not too high) note and tasted kind of nutty. The puff pastry hadn't "puffed" as much as it perhaps should have, but the flavors were spot-on, and delicious. The basil dressing & fresh pepper on the baby greens provided a crunchy, cool, light contrast to the rest of the dish.
Smoked Salmon & Gnocchi
Colin & Jess smoked *their own salmon* in a cold smoker they built this past week. That was pretty ridiculous. It was spectacular - subtle, but really flavorful, and very "salmon-y" - it was one of the first times where I'd say the smoked quality of the salmon really complemented the flavor of the fish, instead of simply being a parallel flavor. I love smoked salmon, and this stuff was really good. The hand-made, hand-rolled gnocchi were a great accompaniment, and the various sauces made for a delicious blend of flavors. Chive oil, balsamic glaze, and some sort of butter & lemon-oil sauce, with a fine
bruinoise... great stuff.
"Pacific Moi"
Klay & Nana made a dish that normally contains Pacific Moi, but due to the unavailability of that particular fish, used one of the specified replacements. Klay had the uneviable job of filleting a ridiculously small fish, and managed to do an admirable job of it. The early concerns such as filleting the fish, the sauces "breaking" and some other concerns had me worried for a bit, but the end result turned out really well. The orange sauce was a little over-reduced but the fish was really quite good. The edamame and brunoise hiding under the fish was fantastically tender, and the fish's skin had crisped up wonderfully, providing a nice contrast to the soft meat of the fish. The salad on top provided a nice bite from a ice water bath, which also served to curl up the julienned scallion.
Walnut Soup
The second dish I made was a "canape dessert soup" - basically amounted to an espresso cup worth of "soup" for each person. Walnut, simmered in cream for about 45 minutes, then cooled, and blended with pears poached in a white wine/sugar/lemon mixture. There's no way that I'd ever have been able to have more than an espresso cup worth of this stuff - it was apparently originally a sauce for another dish, but people liked it enough they turned it into its own little dish. Tasty, but probably took a year off the end of all our lives.
'Ile Flottante' (floating island?)
This dish was Ei-Nyung's - a soft, slow-baked
meringue, with a
chocolate mousse center, in a pool of creme anglaise, with a
small chocolate wafer on top, chocolate shavings, and mint oil. I thought this turned out really, really well, and I'll let her describe it.
[Ei-Nyung edits post to add her comments.] If I were to make this dish over again, I'd reexamine my opinion of when "soft-peaks" are forming in my meringue, because I think I didn't really get it this time around. This dish posed a challenge for me because both the software (the components of the dish) and the hardware (the equipment) were unfamiliar to me -- I had never made a non-cookie meringue before, and because we only had four ramikins, I decided to use a muffin pan instead. This posed an issue when it came to removing the meringue.
Seppo has full credit for making the creme anglaise and the chocolate mousse, which, damn, delicious, yeah, me == incoherent from memory of taste.
The mint oil added a nice light note to the dish. It's a very rich dish, yet the lightness in texture of both the meringue and the mousse (as well as the weenie size) and the accompanying sauces kept it from feeling too heavy to follow five entrees. This dish took me about 2 hours last night and another 1 today. Not bad, compared to last time.
[Ei-Nyung steps away.]
Poached Pears & Verjus Sorbet
Uyen & Charles' second contribution to the evening - peaches poached in the same liquid as the pears from the walnut soup, and a sorbet made from verjus, which is apparently a very hard to find unfermented juice made from sour grapes. This was really punchy, bright, and 'clean' tasting - a great way to end the evening. The sorbet was perfect- not too sweet, and the peaches were delicious.
More than anything, what I love about these events is that a.) it's getting a bunch of friends together to push the boundaries - all of us are "reaching" - no one cooks like this on even a marginally regular basis, and we're all doing things that are signfiicantly more complex, and harder than we're used to. More than that, we're doing it with, and for each other, which adds a whole new world of pressure. And yet everything people made was delicious. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's *damned good*, and sharing great food with good friends... man - nothing better.
