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.