My friend G’s birthday is this coming weekend, so J and I invited her over to the apartment so we could have a birthday dinner for her. Also, this was an excuse to drink some wine. The apartment is starting to look more and more like a wine store these days! It’s time to drink up! It was a Wednesday, but I wanted to make something nice, so I settled ahead of time on 4 courses, preceded by a couple of tapas snacks (in the El Bulli style), finishing with a taste of cheese and a simple dessert. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to make, and decided on a soup course, a fish course, an egg course and a meat course.
The choice for the soup course is pretty standard for me. Usually when I make soup it’s always Garbanzo Soup with Chorizo and Smoked Paprika, a recipe from many years ago I found on Food and Wine that has been a crowd pleaser ever since.
For fish, I already had in mind a sashimi style fluke recipe from David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook. I’ve loved every recipe I’ve made in that book and thought this would be a unique one for G that she'd never had.
I love how rustic an “egg course” can sound, which is why I decided to include it on this menu. My favorite egg course is the Momofuku Ko Smoked Egg with Herb Salad, Fingerling Potato Chips and Onion Soubise.
Finally, for my meat course, I decided to Sous Vide some Grass Fed fillet from Freshdirect (my Manhattan grocery delivery service), Frenchify it with some Cotes du Rhone demi-glace and pair it with some brussels sprouts hash.
I had also decided ahead of time that this would be a bread-free meal. Minimize the carbs and people get full less quickly!
Sound daunting for a Wednesday after work? Why yes! Which is why I started on Monday making the soup. Even for beginners, this recipe is pretty easy. And very tasty. The most difficult part is to plate it so that it looks like the picture in the recipe. That involves making a dome of the garbanzos and adding just enough liquid to cover around it--like a volcano coming out of the ocean. You will notice in my pictures of the soup it wasn’t plated quite as nicely!
A few recommendations for this recipe: first, get the best quality beef stock. It makes a huge difference. Feel free to mix some low-sodium with regular to control the salt content if you wish. Also, for the chorizo, the best I’ve found to work with is the Goya style latin kind, the kind eaten by Cubans. It slices easily and renders and toasts firmly. Spanish chorizo will be too dry and American versions of chorizo (D’Artagnan as an example) just don’t have the same taste. Also, triple the amount of Chorizo! Trust me, it works.
The second recipe was David Chang’s Fluke, Buttermilk and Poppy Seeds with Chive Batons. I couldn’t find this recipe online and I don’t want to lift the text from Mr. Chang’s cookbook, so I am going to have to skip a recipe for this. But it’s in the Momofuku cookbook, which I recommend!
In any case, this is thinly sliced Fluke sashimi, placed on a buttermilk, sour cream and Sriracha sauce that is then topped with a white soy sauce vinaigrette, poppy seeds and chive batons. This one is usually a hit, just make sure you slice the Fluke as thinly as possible and that it is as fresh as possible. I made the sauces Tuesday night (they are easy and take about 5 minutes) and I sliced the Fluke just before plating. I got my Fluke from Freshdirect and had it delivered Wednesday morning. The rest I had delivered on Tuesday. Pictures of this are to follow. Also the white soy sauce vinaigrette entails quite a number of specific Asian juices and condiments that may not be readily available at the local store. That's why I use Amazon.com!
Now for the more complicated course, the Momofuku egg. I should have taken pictures of the process every step of the way. Next time I will! The egg is a very time-consuming recipe. Here is a picture from Bon Appetit a couple of years ago.
This is a show-stopper of a recipe--unique and so tasty! You first need to make the onion soubise, which takes a while to cook down into the buttery sweetness of a savory onion marmalade. Careful not to let the onions brown too much. You then make the eggs. Soft boiled eggs are a b**** and a half to peel. I recommend using eggs that are at least 2 weeks old and following his instructions to the tea. It is very easy to break the white and have a deformed egg. But be careful, these maimed eggs can sometimes betray you in the rewarming and plating process! Try to get them as perfect as possible when you peel them so that they can smoke overnight (in the liquid smoke bath) and then be gently reheated without breaking on you. Don’t give up; I have gone through 16 eggs just to get 4 right for this recipe. And I often peel and smoke an extra egg, just as insurance. The result is well worth the trouble.
Finally, I ordered 2 Hudson Farms grass fed fillet’s which I seasoned with salt and pepper and then lightly vacuum-sealed to be cooked in my Sous Vide Supreme. To go with this I was making a reduced Cote du Rhone sauce, which was essentially reduced Cote du Rhone wine and veal stock finished with some butter. This sauce goes very well with beef carpaccio, too!
I planned to complement the beef with brussells sprouts hash that I sliced up finely with a rotary blade in my food processor. I would then sauté this "hash" with some olive oil and already cooked sliced bacon (although diced pieces of medium thickness pancetta work a lot better).
I would make the two tapas to begin the evening once G arrived. The cheese and dessert would be made as we were finishing the meat course.
So Wednesday night came along and the dinner party started!
We began with a half bottle of Champagne from Duval Leroy (non-vintage). This is an inexpensive and tasty way to soothe the Champagne bug! We paired this with our two tapas. The first was a Spanish Bonito Salad with Potato Chip; essentially, Spanish tuna with a little bit of mayo that is then placed on a whole potato chip and topped with a strip of pimento. It’s pretty and tasty. Spanish tuna (as is Italian tuna) is delicious.
We followed this tapa with #2, which was Caviar on a Blini. I used American Paddlefish Roe from Caviar Russe here in Manhattan, which was delivered by Freshdirect, and put that over crème fraiche and a pre-made blini I bought at the Amish market around the corner. This was especially tasty with the Champagne.
Next, we started the soup course as we finished the Champagne. The soup was tasty, but since I wasn’t able to find the beef stock I normally use I found it slightly lacking--although, my guests didn’t mind. Also, the chorizo was a bit too browned. Like Julia Child would say, "That's how we like it."
At this point we opened our next wine, which was a Prager Riesling 1998 Klaus. For those who do not know the pleasures of Austrian Rieslings from the Wachau, you are missing out. This dry, smooth and delicious wine exhibits its characteristic petrol and peaches/apricot aroma but goes down as a velvety smooth and dry elixir that is hard to top. This wine in specific has aged very nicely, although somewhat cloudy in the glass. It has a lot of sediment.
Next was the Fluke sashimi. Pretty and delicious. Again, try to slice the fluke as thinly as possible. Freshdirect delivered a fillet that I then had to slice at an angle with a sharp knife to get thinner pieces of to plate. A local fishmonger might have thicker fillets that may be easier to slice vertically.
I took a quick prep break at this point to fry the fingerling chips for the egg dish. I cut these with a mandolin, but they always come out a little too thick. I wish I had the knife skills to get them thinner! In any case, I fried them in grapeseed oil (make sure the oil doesn’t fall below 375 degrees) until they were golden.
Then it was time to plate the Smoked Egg, which, for some reason, happened to leak most of its yolk while plating. It was still delicious, though. And the combination of flavors that comes from the salad, the fingerling chips and the yolk and caviar are amazing.
As we were finishing this dish we opened our next wine, which was a Kongsgaard 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon. I’d heard a LOT about this wine and really wanted to try it. It turns out I was able to get a couple of bottles on Winebid.com a month back at less than a hundred dollars and was looking forward to opening one. The wine surprised me. It had elements of a slightly aged Australian Syrah, yet balanced and velvety. Though delicious and interesting, it left me a bit perplexed. I didn’t feel it had many of the high-end California Cabernet characteristics (big fruit, balanced acidity, velvety mouthfeel). It was almost a little boxy, if that makes any sense. Although balanced, with well integrated fruit and acidity, the taste profile just didn't seem like a Cab. I’m wondering if the bottle was off. I guess I will find out when I try the second bottle at some point.
Now it was time to sauté the broccoli with the bacon I’d already sliced and fried and quickly brown the beef fillets in a pan. I sous-vided them at 127 degrees for almost 2 hours, but I think from now on, for fillets that are an inch thick, the most I will sous vide is for 1:15. I felt they were a little over-cooked, above medium-rare. In any case they did have a very nice red color, which the sous vide machine accentuates. However, the demi glace didn’t really add that much to the medallions. Maybe the beef itself was a little bland? Maybe the sauce needed more salt? Not quite sure. In any case, the hash was delicious
The evening wound down with a bite of Societe Bee Roquefort, paired with a Gutierrez de la Vega Casta Diva 2001 from Alicante, Spain. This is a delicious Satuernes style dessert wine. It was full bodied and had aged nicely, but these probably can’t age for more than 10 to 12 years. So if you have them, it’s a very good time to drink them! This wine is very hard to find in the US. I bought this from Winebid.com and the other ones I’ve had I’ve bought in Spain and brought back with me.
And that was Wednesday. G was very pleased and thanked me and J. And then it was time to sleep and go to work the next day!