Next at Home: Tour of Thailand: Practice Watermelon

I know two posts in one night, someone pinch me.

This dish was the palate cleanser and transitional dish of this meal, to take you from the spicy conclusion of the savory portion of the meal to the desert.

The base of this dish was watermelon, lemongrass and gelatin sheets.

I took half of the watermelon and broke it down and placed it into a blender.  I think sliced down the lemongrass.  I soaked the gelatin in some ice water and took a portion of the watermelon and lemongrass mixture and put it along with the soaked gelatin into a sauce pan to dissolve the gelatin.

The cooked mixture joined the rest of the watermelon puree and lemongrass and went into a dish and then into the freezer until solid.

The frozen mixture then went upside down over a colander to drain.

The result was a clear watermelon water that had a hint of lemon in it.

This is a great way to calm down all the spice that's going to be in your mouth after that beef dish.

Next at Home: Tour of Thailand: Practice Beef

So this was a dish that I was really looking forward to making as soon as I saw it in the cook book.  This is a braised beef cheek served in a Thai Curry sauce.  I was definitely not disappointed in this dish.

So, beef cheeks don't exactly show up in your butcher's case very often, so I first turned to the internet and I successfully found a couple places online that would ship them to me.  Then I remembered that there's a locker here in town that does custom processing of beef and hogs a few times a week, surely they'd be able to save me a cheek off of one of the cows, no such luck, but they did steer me to a locker in a small town about 20 miles away that would sell me some.  I placed my order and five days later, I had my 20 ounce beef cheek all for $5 and an hour of my time.  What a steal.

So the first step was to cure the cheek, the cure was a mixture of salt and sugar that was spiked with nutmeg, coriander, dried Thai chiles, lemongrass, garlic and ginger. 

The salt and sugar went together.  The rest of the ingredients went into a food processor until they formed a paste and then they were mixed in with the salt and sugar.  The beef cheek went into a pan and then was crusted with everything.  Then the whole mixture went into the fridge. 

This is what the beef looked like after curing.

A component of this dish was the penang curry paste.  This paste was used to flavor the beef during its long cooking process as well as the base for the penang curry sauce that the beef was served in.  The paste included peanuts, salt, cilantro root, water, lemongrass, galangal, ginger, shallots and dried Thai chiles.  All the ingredients went into a food processor and were combined.

So the paste was done and it along with the beef went into a vacuum bag and into 194 degree water to cook sous vide, scheduled for four hours, I let it cook 4 1/2 hours and it probably should have been 5 or 5 1/2. 

While the beef cooked I dealt with probably my least favorite ingredient in the kitchen, the coconut.  These effers are a pain in the ass to open for so little pay off in flavor and deliciousness.  I needed the water on the inside and flesh to juice.  Thankfully the cookbook provided a trick to get additional juice out of the coconut after you've run the flesh through a commercial juicer once.  Well since I don't have a juicer and don't plan on buying one I used the trick for the first level of juice.

Time to make the curry sauce.  This included, coconut juice, palm sugar, coconut water, fish sauce, the chilled fat from the beef cheek, thai chiles, kaffir lime, the reserved paste and shrimp paste.  If you're noticing a pattern there is a lot of chiles in this dish.  This was about the time I realized the same thing and how spicy this dish really was going to be.

So rather than oil I heated up the beef fat from cooking the cheek as the oil for this and then added the paste and cooked it until brown.

Then the palm sugar went in until everything had carmelized.

Then the rest of the ingredient went in and cooked for about 20 minutes.

Garnish time, bell peppers a little bit of red yellow and greens.

The next garnish was baby corn, so this menu actually ran during the summer in Illinois which made fresh corn easy to come by and ironically enough, the recipe specifically states that canned isn't really acceptable, but what the hell does Grant Achatz know. 

I sauteed them up in some grapeseed oil until just charred.

As a final garnish, I took fresh Thai chiles and took them for a spin with grapeseed oil, as if this dish needed more spice.

Here's everything I needed to put the dish together, the beef, the curry sauce, the chili oil, bell peppers, lime juice, fried basil, sweet corn and a lettuce leaf.

The final plate, everything about this was delicious.  I made the mistake of making this as sort of an appetizer when I had another dish on the menu for dinner.  But this dish had everything a Thai dish should have, sweet, spicy, sour everything.  I can't wait to make this for my brother and his family to see what they think of it.

Next: Trio

Three words for this meal, oh.my.god!  This was amazing, especially for a meal where my frame of reference for the meal was a restaurant that takes the inspiration from Trio and made it even better.

A bit of background before we get into the food.  Grant Achatz got his start as a chef at The French Laundry in Yountville, CA working for Thomas Keller.  When Achatz decided that it was time to become an executive chef the only gig he was able to get was at Trio in Evanston, IL.  At Trio the owner gave him pretty much free reign to do the food that he wanted to do, avant garde, taking food we know and love and twisting, basically modernist cuisine.  Trio closed in 2006, but during Achatz's time there he served a meal to entrepreneur Nick Kokanos.  The meal blew Kokanos' mind to the point where he reached out the Achatz to form the restaurant that would become Alinea.  Alinea opened in 2005 and in an effort to pre-celebrate the 10th anniversary Next decided to look backward and inward and do a menu centered on some of the most influential dishes to come out of Trio which have changed the face of American dining.

The playbill surrounded your napkin for the evening when you arrive at the table.

Course #1 Brook Trout Roe, Avocado, Sugar and Lime.  The avocado, sugar and lime were turned into a sort of yogurt and topped with plenty of brook roe from Blis.  Chef Achatz and the people at Blis go way back to Achatz's and Blish owner Steve Sallard's days as kids in the Grand Rapids, MI area.  So, Alinea, Next and Aviary all use a lot of their products.  This was a fun way to start, salty, sweet, sour.

Course #2 Rock Shrimp, Cranberry, Meyer Lemon, Vanilla Bean.  This is a fourth version of this dish that I've had, twice, at Alinea, once at home and once tonight.  The versions I've had before have included Woodcock, Lingonberry, Shallot with burning oak leaves, Pumpkin, Maple, Pumpkin Seed and Smoldering Cinnamon, Pheasant, Shallot, Cider with burning oak leaves and then last night with the vanilla bean burning.  This is a single bite dish where the fruit was turned into a gel or two gels with the meat and then tempura battered and fried.  I've loved every version of this dish that I've had.

Course #3 Crab, Coconut, ten bridging garnishes.  This is crab meat served underneath a spherication of coconut milk.  Spherication is a method that Feran Adria mastered where a liquid is contained within a skin of itself.  The garnishes around everything included things like mango gel, enoki mushrooms, whole grain mustard, cashew, lime and several unidentifiable things.  All the flavors were intended to go well with both crab and coconut.  This is a dish that has morphed into a dish I've had twice at Alinea called either duck?????????? or lamb??????????  Those dishes had three different preparations of the protein and 60 different garnishes.

Course #4 Chestnut, baked potato, bitter chocolate, quince.  This was the first of the real holy shit moments of the night.  The first picture is how the plates came out to the table from the kitchen.  The second is after the waiter pulled the test tube off of the contents.  This is a dish where Chef Achatz plays with your mind.  Warm chestnut puree is on the bottom and ice cold baked potato ice cream is amongst the garnishes including quince and bitter chocolate, as well as a roasted chestnut and celery.  I've had dishes that play on this same idea before but none of them stack up to this one.

Course #5 Ice Cream Sandwich, Parmesan, Olive Oil. black pepper.  This is a dish that won Chef Achatz an award at some sort of of Food and Wine Magazine competition.  It's an olive oil ice cream surrounded by essentially a parmesan, black pepper soft cracker.  It's a dish that really shouldn't work, but it does.

Course #6 Black Truffle Explosion.  Th is is the quintessential Achatz dish.  I don't think it ever leaves the menu at Alinea and I've had the privilege of eating it twice there.  I also failed miserable at trying to make it at home.  It's a raviolo filled with liquified black truffles and topped with wilted romaine and a slice of parmesan.  Perfect bite of food.

Course #7, Duck, Lavender Salt Lozenge, foie gras, plum. This was duck prepared two ways, roasted breast on the top left, below that is a seared chunk of foie gras served over a duck rilette the red sacue is plumb sauce and then on the right is sprigs of lavender topped with the lozenge that was flavored with more lavender designed to cleanse your palate at the end of the course.

Course #8, pizza.  Quite possibly the smallest course I've ever eaten on any of these escapades.  This is simply edible paper topped with the flavors of pizza.  This was terrible, it doesn't taste anything like pizza, it's tomato flavored plastic essentially.  I believe the edible paper is the same stuff that they make those Listerine Pocket Packs out of.

Course #9 Poached Leg of Lamb, Floral Infusion. Artichoke, Orange.  This was essentially lamb two ways, leg of lamb on the right with nasturtium.  On the right was a chilled lamb consomme.  I can't remember what was topping it.  I thoroughly enjoyed the leg of lamb, the consomme was a bit too much in the texture department for me.

Course #10 Cheese and Cracker.  According to the wait staff this was Chef Achatz's grown up version of the handi-snacks he ate as a kid.  For those of you old enough to remember those were the snacks with the processed cheese product and the red stick to spread the crap onto crackers.  This was a very interesting one bite course.

Course #11 Salad "Red Wine Vinaigrette" this was the traditional spinach salad flavors but in granita form.  Essentially, the veggies were juiced and the partially frozen then scraped then partially frozen again and then scraped until the consistency was what they wanted.  The waiter when he left mentioned a surprise which I think was supposed to be that the dish was completely frozen, but I'm not 100% sure.  Mostly because I've been to Achatz restaurants enough before to realize that this probably wasn't going to be actual finely chopped spinach leaves.

Course #12 Raspberry, Tapioca, Rose, Lemon Basil.  This was a very fun dish partially because I got a souvenir for my wife (though I think she left it at the hotel) and the dish was delicious.  You took a wife of the rose and then took the test tube with the side on the left went into your mouth.  Then you pushed on the lemon basil jello on the right side to create a vacuum and you get a shot of raspberry puree and other flavors. 

Course #13 Pushed Foie Gras, Pear, Sauternes, Salt Roasted Pear Sorbet.  This is a foie gras disk at the bottom of the plate which was topped with a pear and sauternes sorbet and then garnished with a dried pear slice.  This was an amazing dish a perfect balance of fat, sweet and a little bit of tart from the pears.

Course #14 Passion Fruit Mustard.  This was a bit of a palate cleanser and a dish that made my brother and I both wonder, how the hell does someone come up with a dish outside of being stoned at 3 AM.  This was a passion fruit sorbet topped with a dijon mustard sorbet.  Two flavors that shouldn't come up in the same sentence let along the same course. This, however, was a damn near perfect bite.  A stroke of stoned genius. 

Course #15 Smoked Persimmon, Endive, Pancetta, Coffee.  At the botto om the plate there is persimmon which is a fruit common in Japanese cuisine.  This was topped with a roasted slice of pancetta and then an endive salad.  I didn't hate this dish, but it also wasn't that memorable, hard to tie it to anything else I've experienced at Alinea.

Course #16 Lobster, Wild Mushrooms, Rosemary Vapor.  This is a plating method that Achatz is famous for.  The plate comes out and then quickly followed by nearly boiling water which is poured over the rosemary.  The idea being that as you eat you use your sense of smell to add another level of experience to the food.  This dish was tons of fun.

Course #17 Burnt PIneapple, Smoked Salmon, Soy, Togarashi, This is another one of those one bit dishes that was tons of fun to eat.  this was a hands free dish where you bent in and took it down in one gulp.  Delicious.

Course #18 Short Rib, Root beer flavors.  This was the final truly savory course of the night.  Braised short rib on the bottom with sassafras flavors and a creamy mixture that when combined with the sauce at the bottom tasted a bit like a root beer float. This was a great way to end the savory portion of the evening.

Course #19 Transparency of Manchego.  This is Achatz's version of a cheese course.  I've actually attempted to make this dish at home because Alinea has done it in the past.  When I did it though I couldn't get the cheese thin enough to get the proper effect.  Underneath the Manchego which is a hard, Spanish sheep's milk cheese.  There are roasted red peppers, anchovies, olive oil croutons and dried olives for sure.  There are also a few other things in there too.

Course #20 Huckleberry Soda, Five Flavors Gelled.  This was sort of a transitional course, some savory some desert components.  The restaurant gave you a bottle of  home bottled huckleberry sode and the waiter told you to pick an end of the stack of gels to start from and stick with that order.  From left to right we have thyme gel, fennel gel, smoked cream, chocolate and hazelnut.  The strip underneath I believe is a huckleberry gel.  This was an interesting dish, some of the gels worked others didn't.  I definitely  enjoyed the sweeter gels more.

Course #21 Maragda Chocloate at 94 Degrees, Flaxseed, Yeast, Bear.  So Alinea has done a version of this dish where chocolate is warmed to 94 degrees is right at the temperature before it starts to melt and go all over the place.  At 94 degrees its soft like a ganache but holds its shape.  On the spoon is what was essentially a beer ice cream.  Made with yeast and flaxseed, it had all the flavors of beer but I don't think any alcohol.

This was definitely one of my favorite meals at Next.  It was so much fun to see the roots of so many of the dishes that I've had at Alinea in my two trips there. 

So this was my 9th trip to Next, each of the three menus each of the last three years and the menus for 2015 will be announced in probably two weeks, which I can't wait for.  I'm really looking forward to it and I hope there's at least one menu where my wife can join me.  Given that year #3 is in the books let's rate them.
  
#1      El Bulli      
      This is easy and it's not even close.  Too much history and food nerdism coming out of me for this meal to ever be topped. 

#2      The Hunt
     This one was so different but in a well thought out way.  We got so many dishes that I've never had before and too many chefs are scared to put them on the menu.  It made the meal whimsical and fund

#3     Trio
     I was able to see the origins of many of the newest most influential dishes in all of cuisine.

#4     Kaiseiki
     Traditional Japanese cuisine has such a pull on my heart, it's one of those cuisines that I know I'll never fully understand but have so much love and appreciation for the traditions, rules and expectations that go along with it.  It's definitely why Japan is way up on my bucket list of places to travel to.

#5     Chicago Steak
     A cliched menu but delicious none the less.  Hard to do a menu on something as narrow as this with so many perceived rules, but the quality of the ingredients really helped overcome the inherent problems.

#6     Vegan
       I love meat, simple as that.  I'm perfectly happy if a vegetable never hits my plate.  But I was pleasantly surprised by this one.  Plenty of unique flavors and textures that I never really missed the meat once in the 24 courses.

#7     Modern Chinese
      I wanted to love this and this is another cuisine that I won't understand and a place I would love to travel to.  For some reason though the menu left me wanting more.  Seemed a bit dumbed down for American palates

#8     Bocuse d'Or
      For a meal and contest steeped in such tradition I expected more and this one was just kind of there.  No real memorable dishes.

#9     Sicily
      This one was a real let down, partially because of timing.  It's impossible to live up to El Bulli especially less than 8 weeks later.  Sicily is another place I would really really love to travel to and real Italian food is something that I love deeply, this one just missed the mark for me.

Til next year, Next.  I can't wait to see what you throw my way between the restaurant and hopefully multiple cookbooks.