Stuffed Tenderloin

This is another one of those simple dishes that are oh so welcome when stuff really hits the fan in life.  Due to circumstances beyond my control, for the next two weeks myself and one other person are wearing about 8 different hats at work to make sure things continue to run smoothly.  So needless to say I'm a bit frantic right now. 

This is a dish which was in on of the Good Eats cookbooks and includes a portion of a beef tenderloin that is stuffed with blue cheese.

Everything you need for the roast.  Blue cheese, salt, pepper, olive oil and the head of a whole beef tenderloin.  If you didn't want to buy a whole beef tenderloin I'm sure there are other roasts that you could find at the store that would suffice.

So I butterflied the roast and then seared it off in a bit of olive oil after seasoning it with a bit of salt and pepper.  From here I let it rest for about 15 minutes to let the juices redistribute a little bit.

Once the seared roast had rested I sprinkled one side of it with blue cheese and then tied it off with some butcher's twine.  The roast went back into the pan and into a 450 degree oven for about 20 minutes which resulted in the roast being rare in the middle. 

The roast after spending 20 minutes in the oven.  I let it rest for another 10 or 15 minutes before slicing and serving.

The final plate.  At the last minute I decided to boil off some yukon gold potatoes and toss them with some butter and rosemary.  Overall a very delicious way to complete a stupidly hectic day. 

Alinea at Home: Chestnuts, too many garnishes to list

As I teased on facebook last weekend I made another fantastic dish out of the Alinea cookbook.  I wasn't able to blog about it at the time because the power cord for my computer finally called it quits, so I was sans computer until the new one came in. 

Of course not having a computer didn't stop me from cooking, but I've done so much of it I'm not sure I could catch up so I may just put of posts of a few of my favorites and then hopefully hit the reboot button this week. 

Ok, enough of my endless rant, on to what has turned out to be one of my favorite dishes so far in this project.  Going into it I wasn't sure what to think, there are a lot of components that I love individually but wasn't sure how well they would play together. 

The first step in this dish was to work on the dishes namesake, chestnuts.  To start I needed to make a puree.  The recipe calls for fresh chestnuts, which only makes sense because this dish is in the autumn section of the book.  Needless to say chestnut season is over so I decided to go with dried.  In order to start the puree I needed to simmer off the chestnuts in a mixture of salt, cream, butter and bay leaves. 

The result, this is why the dried chestnuts turned out to be a mistake.  I thought I had simmered them long enough, somewhere in the 30-45 minute range and started to puree them in the food processor.  The recipe didn't say to add anymore liquid but it wasn't even close to puree status with the liquid left.  I ended up adding almost a whole other container of cream just to get the result you see above. 

Now time to make the brussels sprout cup for the truffle puree.  This part was simple enough just took a couple of leaves off the outside and blanched it in some salted water for a minute or two and set it aside until serving.

Truffle puree time.  I have black truffles before in restaurants but never had the privilege of working with them myself.  To make the puree, the ingredients included a yukon gold potato, sherry vinegar, truffle oil, truffle juice, black trumpet mushrooms, salt and the lovely black truffles.

All the ingredients went into the food processor.  It looks unappetizing but dear god this was so flipping awesome.  And of course the ingredients that went into it were so flipping expensive I actually saved what I had left over.  I'm still figuring out a use for it other than eating it by the spoonful. 

The next component was marsala gel.  The one thing I really like about this project is that it allows me to enter into a world that I've been fascinated with ever since I first saw Homaru Cantu on Iron Chef America.  The world of molecular gastronomy.  Molecular gastronomy allows you to get food to do things it doesn't necessarily do in nature.  This component is a perfect example.  Here we have marsala wine and Kelcogel LT 100 which is a gelling agent. 

Now the recipe called for Kelcogel JJ which is different version but I couldn't track it down.  But based on how things turned out I can figure out what some of the differences are.  Oh, well it still did what I needed it to.

This is where the different gel sort of went wrong, the LT100 appears to be a gelling agent that doesn't need heat which the recipe called for.  So I really had to watch this one closely .

And you can see why I had to watch this.  This didn't end up nearly as smooth as it should have before it went into the fridge to finish setting up. 

Now time for the nutmeg mousse.  This one was also pretty easy, creme frachie, salt and nutmeg.  When you mix it all together:

You get this.

Time for more molecular gastronomy.  This version is in the form of foam.  Bay leaf foam to be exact.  I took water, salt, sugar and bay leaves and steeped the bay leaves in boiling water for a while to extract the flavor.  I set the bay leaf flavored water aside until ready to serve.  This I brought the mixture back to a boil and added the soy lecithin.  Took the immersion blender to it and resulted in

This.

So if you cant tell by now there are a ton of components to this this, but none of them are stupid complicated to complete.  This little portion of the dish is a chocolate covered sugar cube. 

I melted 72% dark chocolate over a double boiler until it was liquidy and then I tossed the sugar cubes in it.  Once fully coated I stuck the sugar cubes in the fridge to set up and I was ready to serve the dish. 

The start of the parsnip sauce.  This sauce is essentially a parsnip flavored beurre blanc.  Parsnips which were to be turned into juice, cream, butter and salt.  Only problem with this, I don't own a juicer.  Generally, I've had pretty good luck by just shredding the item to be juiced in the food processor and then squeezing the crap out of it.  That didn't work this time.  So I improvised, I shredded the parsnips and then steeped them in boiling water to get the flavor.  I steeped them twice for about 20 or 30 minutes each time.  I'm sure I didn't end up with enough parsnip flavor but hey I had to roll with the punches.

And here is the completed sauce.  Like I said I'm pretty sure it tasted nothing like it could have if I had been able to properly juice the parsnips but it worked.

The start of what ended up being one of the more involved steps of the whole dish.  Bacon powder.  Ideally, this would have been made with bacon that wasn't sliced, but I've never seen that in any store anywhere.  So again I improvised, I bought thick cut bacon.  So in getting this component ready I stuck the whole package of bacon in the freezer until it was frozen solid.

Once the bacon was frozen I grated it onto a prepared baking sheet and put it into a 200 degree oven until it was dry and crispy. Honestly, I got a little scared as this was cooking, because I had a lot of fat on the bacon and it looked like it was all going to melt away.

But as you can see here I got enough to do what I needed to do, but this step also took way longer than the recipe said it would.  Of course its bacon so it was totally worth it.

The second to last component.  The eggs.  Salt, pepper, cream, and eggs.  I separated the egg yolks from the whites and then mixed in a little cream, salt and pepper.  From there I put it in a vacuum bag and cooked it sous vide at 180 degrees until it was set.

This was the result.  I portioned this off and set it aside until ready to serve.

And the final component, celery root chips.  I took a celery root, peeled it and then sliced it on the mandoline.

And here are the completed chips after being fried off in some peanut oil.  Not pretty I know, probably had the oil too hot, but hey they tasted pretty good.


Well, if you're still with me after reading all of this, you may have more issues than I do.  But thanks for sticking with me.  I know there was a lot to this dish, but it was so worth it.  Normally when I eat I like to try and keep the different components separate, but I just couldn't resist mixing everything into a giant pile.  I'm so glad I did, because everything was so delicious together.  Oh yeah, I owe you a picture of the final plate.

The only thing I would change about this is that I would have used a smaller plate.

Hot and Sour Soup

So like I said in my last post, life has just been insane these last couple weeks.  When I get this busy cooking becomes kind of a chore.  I still try to do it to maintain my schedule and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.  Either way I certainly like seeing easy dishes like this one on the docket during times like this. 

Now if you've read this blog for any length of time you know my disdain towards vegetarians.  Given that knowledge, a logical conclusion is that tofu would be like my kryptonite.  I almost feel embarrassed when I buy it.  But I toughed it out and cooked with it this time.

The other primary ingredient in this dish was pork.  So hopefully the food gods will forgive me for using tofu.  The pork was sliced thin and marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil and a bit of corn starch.

This is the rest of the ingredients for the soup.  Chicken broth, bamboo shoot (which were surprisingly easy to find), shiitake mushrooms, green onions and the sour component balsamic vinegar and red wine vinegar.

So I think I missed some pictures along the way, but this is the base of the soup.  Chicken broth, bamboo shoot and the mushrooms.  I let this mixture simmer for a few minutes until the mushrooms were cooked.

I then added the pork, vinegar and green onions and again let it cook until the pork was cooked through. 

I put the mixture in a bowl and hit it with a bit of fresh green onions. 

Like I said this was a nice easy dish on a very busy night.  It's also nice to see that a dish that is so poorly done in faux chinese restaurants can be done so well at home.

Steak au Poivre

I'm so sorry dear reader, the last  week or so has been pure insanity.  Work has been crazy, and on top of all my responsibilities there I was asked to assist in a Dale Carnegie class that I took last summer.  That class if from 6-9:30 every Thursday night until the end of April which of course eliminates another night per week of cooking.

Last Sunday night I made a classic dish called Steak au Poivre.  This dish is really simple, filet mignon crusted with pepper and served with cream sauce.

 So if you've read this blog for any length of time you know I tend to work through things systematically.  This results in a lot of similar dishes over the course of a couple weeks.  In this case I'm working through the Tender is the Loin episodes of Good Eats.  These are two episodes completely dedicated to the wonderful piece of meat called a beef tenderloin.  In the picture above is a whole tenderloin cryovaced.  It comes this way from the meat packer.  It looks huge and it totaled about 8 pounds or so, but it's also $5/pound cheaper than the cut filet mignon and you get the added fun of chopping it up yourself.

And this is the broken down tenderloin.  In the front is the head roast, this will be used in a recipe next week.  The middle is the actual tenderloin where the steaks would be cut from and the top is the chain meat which will be used in a couple weeks.

And here is everything you need for this dish.  I cut off two steaks from the tenderloin and everything else includes butter, salt, pepper, cream, olive oil and cognac.

I seasoned the steaks with some salt and then crusted them with cracked pepper.

The steaks went into a pan that had the combined olive oil and butter and seared for a few minutes per side.  You can see the awesome carmealztion that I got.

It didn't matter in the final dish, but as a semi pyromaniac this is where the dish went horribly wrong.  The fun part of steak au poive is that once the steaks are cooked you get to light highly flammable alcohol on fire.  In this case cognac.  Well in my attempts to get a cool video of this I the pan get too cold and I couldn't light the booze.  Oh well.  The picture is the start of the sauce. 

Once the cognac had reduced a bit I added some cream and let it reduce for a bit and I put a fresh hit of cognac in.

The final plate.  This dish is an ultimate classic and I love it every time I make it.