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.