So this is the start of what is going to be a very long series that I teased a while back. I'm going to cook my way through the Alinea cookbook. I'm planning on doing one dish per month so all told this is going to take me a little over 2 years, but if the first attempt was any indication of what this is going to be like, oh boy, the next two years are going to be a blast. Alinea is a restaurant in Chicago that is owned by Grant Achatz who also owns Next.
I didn't get as many photos of this dish as I would have liked because it got worked into a six course meal that I made for some friends Friday night, so the final prep was done while trying to maintain a sense of timing for the entire meal.
The first step was to roast the shallots, here we have the shallots, salt and grape seed oil. The shallots went into the oven for about 45 minutes or and hour, basically until they were soft.
The second component of the dish was the apple gel. This is the start of it, apple cider, granny smith apples salt and agar agar.
All the ingredients went into a pot and simmered until the apples got soft. The agar agar is a modified starch and actually started working while the mixture was still in the pot.
After simmering, the mixture went into a blender.
From the blender into a plastic wrap lined baking dish and then into the fridge to set. The recipe said it would take two hours to set, mine took about 10 minutes, which was awesome.
The completed apple gel, for some reason it didn't have the kick of apple flavor I thought would be there but still delicious.
These are the completed shallots.
I left work early on Friday to finish the prep and apparently in my frenzied pace for 3 and a half hours before my friends came over, a pace which included two trips to Meijer to get ingredients, I forgot to get any pictures of the pheasant.
The pheasant though was pretty easy, I took the breast of the bird and put it into a vacuum bag with salt, pepper, thyme and butter. The whole bag went into a 160 degree water bath for about 25 minutes. Then it sat in an ice water bath for a bit to cool down. I then cubed the breasts and a piece is on the end of the skewer here with several slices of apple gel and a piece of shallot.
I again forgot to get pictures of the batter. I mixed together a dough of flour, baking powder, corn starch, and club soda, coated the skewers and then deep fried them. I'll tell you what, deep frying is no fun when you gotta stand there holding the skewer getting splattered with hot oil. The picture above is the skewers after they came out of the oil.
At the actual restaurant they served this dish in a squid dish, it has little wire tentacles and the skewers are actually oak leaves which they then set on fire and blow out quickly to give off an oak scent at the table. Well, the leaves here haven't started to turn and I decided not to gross out my guests by using actual oak leaves. So instead I filled a bowl with oak smoking chips for barbecue and lit that on fire, covered the bowl with foil, poked some hole and served the pheasant on top. It actually worked wonderfully.
Overall, this was a pretty big favorite of the group, none of us had ever had pheasant before and after having this dish I'm looking forward to doing something with the left over legs that I have in the freezer right now.
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