Next: Terroir

Every year, one of the three menus at Next is their premium menu.  Well at least it's been this way for each of the last four years.  El Bulli in 2012, Bocuse d'Or in 2013 and Trio in 2014.  This year it was Terroir.  Terroir is a concept, not a cuisine and not even technically food.  Terroir is the concept in wine, where the environment in which the grapes are grown have an effect on the taste of the wine.

In theory, I believe this concept makes sense.  However, in practice I'm not sure the average diner can pick out the subtle differences the climate has on Chardonnay grapes grown in California vs Chardonnay grapes grown in California.  This however, did not deter the staff at Next from trying.

What was really different about this menu is that the chefs and beverage team decided on what whines they wanted to serve before they even considered what the food was going to be.  Challenging themselves culinaryly to pair the food with the wine.  Overall, this was extremely successful.

The initial place setting for the evening.  I love how Next always tries to tie how the tables are set with the theme of the meal.

Next always likes to challenge their diners and distort the rules of dining.  This meal that challenge started right away when they poured a red wine from burgandy as the first of the evening.  The picture is 2009 but we had the 2007 version.  The wine was paired with five bites to start our where were as follows:

This is a croquette of creme fraiche laced with char roe and dipped in a rye batter and deep fried.  A fun cheesy explosive bite.

This is a cornette with caramelized onion, chicken skin and chicken heart.  This was one of the early leaders in the clubhouse for bite of the night.

The third bite was a crostini that was topped with parmesan and a nasturtium leaf.  Overall this one didn't blow me away.

The fourth bite was a combination of brussels sprouts, beer and flax seed.  This was served on top of peanuts, which were not eaten at this point in time but were to be saved for a future dish.

The final bite was a fun playful dish of a prosciutto chip topped with a honey and lime cream dip.  The saltiness of the ham played very nicely with the sweet and sour of the honey and lemon.

                                                               

Right before we were going to start eating the waiter came with the second wine.  This time a white from Burgandy.  This is the 2009 vintage of St. Aubin 1st Cru Clos de la Cateniere from Domaine Hubert Lamy.  The waiter specifically explained to us that the red was to be consumer first completely before trying the white to avoid overpowering some of the flavors.

                                                                 






                                               



The next three wines is where the chef and beverage team really wanted you to taste the terroir.  Here they served three different white wines from three different regions but all made with the same grape, chenin blanc.  THe wines were from France, South Africa and California.  If I had to make a choice I would say that the French was my favorite due to its high acidity.

The second course was a piece of cold smoked sturgeon with charred scallions and various iterations of peanuts which included boiled and shelled peanuts on the bottom and the salted and roasted peanuts from the previous courses sprinkled on top.  This was a fun playful dish that I really enjoyed.





The sixth wine of the evening was an Italian red from the northeast region of the country near the Slovenian border.  This is a red that is really dark in color but extremely light in flavor.  Therefore to avoid your eyes playing tricks on the diner this was served in a dark glass that you were unable to see through to the wine.

The third course was barley risotto served with a barley chip and arugula that was then topped with a barley consomme.  I took a picture of the dish with the consomme in there but it was blurry.  I liked the flavors of this dish but I couldn't get over the chewiness of the barley risotto.  I love barley if its in beer but as an ingredient on its own, not so much.




The first of two rieslings on the evening.  This one is a sweet riesling that presented the second opportunity for the beverage team to play with what you previously thought you knew about wine.  That's because they served a sweet riesling with.....

Squab!.  That's right, Next served essentially a desert whine with a red meat game dish that was included the pigeon, beets, fennel and huckleberries.  Personally, I thought the squab got lost a bit wit the fairly assertive flavor of the huckleberry.

The riesling was also the only wine of the night designed to go across two courses.  The second of the two was the absolute home run of the evening.  The palate cleanser of pear juice in a blue cheese shell served over fresh moss (which you didn't eat) and a little dry ice and water for effect.  Just obscenely good.

At this point we had reached the approximate halfway point of dinner, and the third chance that the restaurant took to play with what you knew about wine.  Though this one ties into the first course.  The wait staff takes the granite slabs away and rolls out a fancy white table cloth for the rest of the meal and let's you know that the wine dinner is about to begin as you just finished the snacks.



This is where Next decided to bring out the champagne, rather than the traditional spot as part of the first course.  The team at Next loves this brand of champagne, it was good but after looking at prices online I'm not sure I could taste the nearly Dom Perignon type price for a bottle.

This portion of the meal started out with a trio of dishes plated within the same serving vessel.  The top is a play on chips and dip, which is something I've seen the French Laundry do, this is a combination of apple chips and potato chips with a creme fraiche dip.

The second portion of this dish I don't remember what all was is in, but I do know that it involved caviar.

The third dish was a popcorn soup.  I loved the chips and dip but the other two were sort of unmemorable dishes.  Good, but not anything that stuck out in my head.




This was the second riesling of the night, this one a dry riesling and again the team at Next decided to screw with your head a little bit because this white wine, while dry was served with a red meat.

So this dish is called, lion's mane, Bison and truffled soil, the big black thing on top is a bread meringue where the restaurant took sourdough bread dough and charred it.  Anyway, the bison was cooked perfectly, overall a fun and interesting dish.

                                 

This was by far the most unique wine of the night.  This is a gual from the Canary Islands in Spain.  This isn't a region you typically think of when you think about wine, but it was fun and tasted good, so it worked.

The gual was paired with a hamachi tartare, ginger and fermented gooseberries that was also topped with a few slices of thai chiles.  This dish was an absolute hit, the subtle fruitiness of the gooseberries played very well with the light citus notes of the wine.


                                                  

                                                        

This wine was the favorite of the night for both my brother and I.  While I typically prefer whites, especially a good sauvignon blanc, my brother and I both love really big and bold reds.  When talking about it at the table, I thought back to the red we had with the steak during the Chicago Steak Menu which was a huge open fermented red from Tennores in Spain.  That wine is easily one of the best reds I've ever had, this one comes pretty close.

Given the wine you'd expect that it would be served with another red meat, but they servied this one with snails, artichokes and pine aroma.  The food is the little cup in the middle that is surrounded by pine needles, very hot rocks to aereify the aroma of the pine needles and snail shells.  This dish was delicious, though I'm thinking the only actual snails in ti were the snail caviar.  Maybe that was the point.

                
The bottle says 1998, but the version we had was from 2009.  Overall, not a very memorable wine.

The course for this wine was a roasted lamb loan with olives, which was drizzled with a little bit of lamb jous.  A really nice way to end the savory courses for the evening.
                             
                            

 

A madeira is a classic way to introduce the desert courses for the evening, and Next outdid themselves this time serving this one from 1971, yes 1971.  Honestly, I'm not sure I could taste anything different in this one than a younger madeira, but it's still pretty cool to drink something 12 years older than yourself. 

 The first of two deserts was a molasses cake, cottage cheese and bayleaf with some candied oranges.  Obviously that description doesn't make you say yummy, but you would be oh so wrong my friend.  This was delicious. 

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The final wine of the evening, is the stereotypical way to end a meal, an extremely sweet wine.  However, what wasn't stereotypical was that this is from Hungary not France.  The premise is the same though, serve a sauterne.  

This is another dish that when I saw it I wasn't sure what to think.  THis is a tea cookie, flan with a caramelized white chocolate noodle and garnished with a little bit of saffron.  However, when I bit into this dish, holy cow.  What a wait to end.

So this is the fourth year that I've been to Next, I've now attended 12 of the 15 menus they've done.  I'm going to close this post with my power rankings.

1.  El Bulli - Former best restaurant in the world now closed, I was one of only a handful of people to experience those exact dishes again.

2. The Hunt - Classic no nonsense food reimagined for high end dining.

3.  Trio - The birthplace of Alinea, so cool to see those dishes again.

4.  Terroir - The restaurant managed to take a concept that I was skeptical about and make me think a little harder about it.

5. Kaiseiki - A cuisine that I'm obsessed with done so well, still waiting for my time to travel to Japan.

6.  Chicago Steak - A very standard menu, but executed very well with top notch ingredients.

7.  Vegan - A meal without meat just simply can't be higher than middle of the pack.

8.  Tapas - Another method of eating that I adore, but I think this fell short of what I would expect the experience would be in Spain.

9.  French Bistro - I liked the concept they were going for and I know why they structured this meal the way they did, but I would have much rather paid a higher price to get some of the upgraded courses in the standard menu.

10.  Modern Chinese - Again a place I'd love to travel to sometime and taste the real thing because this meal just didn't strike that chord with me.

11.  Boscuse d'Or - More bark than bite.  As a premium menu for one of the years this one left me wanting more.

12.  Sicily - I hate ranking this one last, but I just can't shake the feeling that the staff sort of mailed this one in.

Until 2016 Next, the menus should be released soon along with season ticket renewals and I can't wait to get my hands on them. 

Alinea at Home: Prosciutto, Passion Fruit, Mint

So that's not actually the title of this recipe, well it's 99% of it, but the mint should be replaced by zuta levana.  Of course I have no effing idea what zuta levana is, despite the foodie nerd I am, but in my research I found it was kind of a cousin to mint.  Besides its such a small component of this dish so who the hell cares.

Anyway, this is technically a summer dish, which naturally summer is over.  This my friend is part of the reason it took so long to get to this.  When you can't get a main ingredient for a dish in your local store and then the first shipment you get from Florida is completely inedible and you have to wait for a second shipment, time can get away from you.

In theory, this dish is super simple, but when you have supply issues, simple becomes two weeks. Go figure.

Ya'll know what prosciutto looks like, so I took what I got from the store and rolled it up into a sausage and then wrapped very tightly in plastic wrap and froze much longer than originally intended but the recipe recommended overnight.

So I mentioned earlier having to get two shipments of a primary ingredient.  That ingredient happened to be the passion fruit.  The top picture is what I received on the first attempt.  Not a single piece of those fruit were edible.  Most of them were dried, rotted and generally unusable for what I needed to do.  So I fired off a not so nice email to the vendor, who I purchased through thanks to their partnership with Amazon. THey got back to me quickly and sent out the stuff in the bottom photo.  Night and day if I do say so myself.

Once I had dealt with the passion fruit it was time to make the passion fruit simply syrup that was needed for a future component.  Passion fruit shell, water and sugar.

Earlier I had pureed the flesh of the passion fruit, now it was time to mix that with some water the passion fruit simple syrup and a gelatin sheet.  From here this mixture would be whipped, albeit poorly and as a failure, to stiff peaks in order to make the "sponge".

So the top part is what the whole thing was supposed to look like.  Sometimes, I run into issues because I cut these recipes from 8 servings to just 1 since it's usually just me eating them.  The issue with this one was that the amount of liquid for the sponge wasn't enough to be whipped by my mixer so I did it by hand, but that took forever and the sponge didn't turn out the way I would have hoped.

I pulled the prosciutto out of the freezer and sliced it thin to be dehydrated into chips.

Once the prosciutto had dried sufficiently I prepped everything for plating.  Two prosciutto chips for the top and bottom went around the sponge and I garnished with a little bit of mint.  The fourth item on the cutting board is thyme which went on the plate as a bed for everything.

This was a really really good one bit dish that I served with a Gewurztraminer wine from Albert Mann.  This is a french white wine from the Alsace region that is very fruit forward and paired nicely with the fruit sponge.  This is certainly a dish that could be adapted very easily throughout the year for the fruits that are in season as the saltiness of prosciutto plays very nicely with many different fruits. 

Til next time when I go back to the French Laundry cookbook for a dish that from what I've read could be quite intimidating. 

Ad Hoc at Home: Chicken in Tarragon Sauce

Of the three books that I'm cooking my way through, I think I'm enjoying Ad Hoc the most.  Obviously Alinea is fun because of all the cutting edge techniques, but being a self-trained home cook some of those present problems.  In the French Laundry the techniques are simpler but the flavors of some of the dishes hasn't been there for me.  The dishes in Ad Hoc are simple family style dishes and that means I can use these dishes to actually have a family meal with my wife and serve to friends when they come over.

Naturally I started with the chicken breasts.  Boneless, skinless in this case.  From there, I portioned them down a little bit to make sure I had enough for everyone and pounded them thin enough to cook quickly in the pan.

Once the chicken was ready I got the ingredients for the sauce ready which was butter, chicken broth, shallots, tarragon and sauvignon blanc.

I seasoned up the chicken breasts with salt and pepper and put them in a hot sautee pan with oil until gold brown on both sides.

Once the chicken was done I put some of the butter in a dry pan and fried up the shallots.  From there I layered the flavors of the wine, chicken broth and tarragon and reduced the sauce slightly before plating.

So the sauce never got to the thickness I wanted to, but overall it turned out well.  It's always an honor and a privilege to cook for my family and my friends.  Especially those that don't care to spend a ton of time on cooking meals like this on a regular basis.  This one was a hit with everyone in the room.

French Laundry at Home: Linguine with Clam Sauce

Well hello again, I'll save you the standard spiel on why I haven't posted.  This is a classic pasta preparation that I'll admit that I've never had, mostly because clams generally scare me.  Overall, I've had pretty good experiences with them when I have had them in restaurants.  I think it's generally been my failures at home with other bivalves that has kept me from trying to make them at home.

The first step in this dish was to make the pasta.  Classic pasta preparation on olive oil, flour and eggs, and a little milk just in case I needed the extra moisture (I didn't).

I used the traditional well method to bring the pasta together and once it all came together I wrapped it in plastic wrap and let it rest in the fridge until everything else was ready.

The stuff for the clams/clam broth.  Littleneck clams which I happened to get from my preferred seafood purveyor in central Illinois who happened to open their store here in Normal the week I was making this.  In addition to the clams, I had sauvignon blanc, thyme, garlic, shallots and bay leaves.

I put all those ingredients into a sauce pan and cooked covered just until the clams opened.

The clams that opened I pulled out of the pan and set aside and then shucked.  The remaining liquid I let simmer and reduce for a few minutes.

Prior to everything you see here I had roasted a head of garlic and that came into play here for the actual sauce.  This got combined with the broth from the clams and butter for the clam sauce.

So I missed a few pictures, but once the sauce was completed I tossed some with the pasta which had been freshly rolled, cut and cooked while I put the clams in the rest to reserve keep them warm.  THe picture above is the dressed pasta with some additional parsley.

To plate, I had reserved some of the clam shells and then filled them with pasta then topped with the reserved clams.  This was served over a bed of rock salt.  To drink, I actually thought outside of the box and served this with a Vinho Verde or green wine from Portugal.  This is an unaged, low acidity, low alcohol wine, which paired perfectly with this dish.  My one complaint would be that I oversalted the water that the pasta was cooked in which caused the pasta to not be as good as I might have liked.