Alinea at Home: Sour Cream, Smoked Salmon, Pink Peppercorn

Dish #2 out of the Alinea cookbook and the timing couldn't have been more perfect.  It's the first weekend of the NCAA tournament and I have to cook a dish out of the cookbook.  What's a more perfect dish than something that takes probably 5 minutes of active cooking time.  This is actually a dish I've made before for a dinner party with some friends.  Simple, yet fun.

The first step to this dish was the simple syrup.  A basic combination of sugar and water.  I combined equal parts of each into a sauce pan until the sugar dissolved.

Once the simple syrup was done, it was time to make the sour cream mixture that formed the base of this dish.  This was a combo of sour cream, simple syrup and a bit of salt. 

So the three ingredients described above were combined and then placed into the serving dish and frozen.  Now the recipe calls for the use of an antigriddle.  Given that this piece of equipment costs about $7,500 retail I'm not going to buy one, as much as I  might like one.  The jerryrigged antigriddle utilizes a half sheet pan, a kitchen towel and dry ice.  Unfortunately, my wife deeply frowns upon the idea of me going to Pekin and getting 10 pounds of dry ice.  Probably because I'd use the leftovers to make homemade liquid nitrogen.  Silly girls getting in the way of a nerds fun.

 Once the sour cream had frozen it was time for the garnishes.  This includes smoked salmon that I had put in the freezer to freeze a couple days ago.  Chives, even though the recipe called for sorrel.  I didn't use sorrel because it's stupidly expensive online and pink peppercorns.

This is the final plate.  So my goal with this and the French Laundry cookbook is to pair as much as I can with the appropriate wine.  There are plenty of websites out there now that help you pair wine with food.  Unfortunately none are tailored to the food at Alinea.  I had some luck with sour cream but it was mostly desert stuff.  So given that I chose a 2013 bottle of Mer Soleil Silver Unoaked Chardonnay.  I was looking for something relatively sweet and buttery to cut through the sourness of the cream.. Overall I think I succeeded, but this is definitely a wine that needs a food pairing, it's a bit bitter on its own.

French Laundry at Home: Cornets

So I started in on the French Laundry cookbook last night and I did the very first recipe in the book; Cornets.

Cornet is actually the cone that can hold whatever you want it to hold.  In this case I made a red onion cream and topped it with salmon tartare.

Here are the ingredients for the cornet dough.  I thought it would a normal enough dough, flour, sugar, salt, egg white and butter.  Then, however, I started weighing out the ingredients and realized this batter is like 75% butter.

Here is the dough after mixing all the ingredients together.

So the key to this is to make the dough into a four inch round.  In order to do that I got a chance to use measuring tape and a box cutter.  I measured out a four inch round in a piece of parchment paper and cut out the circle for the mold I then put a clean sheet of parchment down and placed the mold over the top.  From there I spread the dough as evenly as possible in the mold.   The baking sheet then went into a 400 degree oven for about 5 minutes until the dough had slightly set.

From there I rolled the dough around a piping tip as quickly as possible because the dough was very hot.  Then the roll went back into the oven until crispy.

If I had to do it over again I'd try to get the dough a little thinner, and probably roll the cornet over about halfway through the cooking process as the side that was on the baking sheet ended up a little burnt.

The onion cream consisted of salt, sour  cream (the recipe called for creme fraiche but no one here in Bloomington sells it and I didn't have time to make it) white pepper and red onion.  I mined the red onion really fined and combined it with the other ingredients to make, this:

The final component of this dish was the salmon tartare.  The tartare included salmon, chives, salt, olive oil, red onion and white pepper. 

Just to show my awesomeness I only needed 1 ounce of salmon for this dish and the rest was going to be used for another salmon dish this weekend.  So I cut a slice off the main filet you see above.  To make sure I had the right amount I weighed the sliver I took

I hope you can read that, but that's 1 ounce exactly.  Boo yah!

I chopped the salmon as well as the other ingredients and mixed them together.

I filled the cornet with the onion cream and then topped it with some of the salmon tartare and then a final garnish of chive. 

The wine pairing for this dish was actually a sparkling wine.  Nothing special, but I had a bottle of Korbel Extra Dry that was chilled and the intro to this dish in the book mentioned that champagne would be a good pairing so I ran with it.