French Laundry at Home: Oysters and Pearls

Sometimes I hate that life gets in the way, but this time I swear business is a good thing.  My daughter made her appearance a couple weeks earlier than anticipated which hasn't really affected my cooking too much so far, but has delayed this blog post since I made this dish over two weeks ago. 

Like most oyster dishes this is one I wasn't particularly looking forward to, mostly because I'm not a huge fan of oysters.  Let's dive into the pictures.

The first step necessitated soaking dry tapicoa pearls in some milk until they were slightly soft.

The recipe had called for Malpeque Oysters which apparently aren't in season right now so I got some Blue Points which I shucked and reserved the meat, while adding the juice to some cream and milk and the soaked tapioca, pictured below.

The next step was to make the sabayon that would get mixed into the tapioca mixture.  A sabayon is an egg yolk based sauce that is brought to temperature over a pot of boiling water.

I poured the completed custard base into a ramakin and finished the prep for the remainder of stuff to be baked off for the final dish. 

The final garnish of the dish included butter, vermouth, white wine vinegar and shallots.

All the ingredients were simmered together until the liquid was basically evaporated.

I added the osyters to heat them through.

The last garnish was some caviar.

The custard mixture was baked with the oysters and then garnished with the shallots and caviar.  Overall, this dish missed the mark for me.  The first couple of bits were good but then the texture sort of wore on me and made it very difficult to eat.

Alinea at Home: Cucumber, Mango, Several Aromatics

So back to the Alinea cookbook we go.  I had to take a few weeks off because my wife and I moved into a new house.  But now I have a lot more room to play and maybe pick up some new toys to help me make these dishes much more effectively.  This was the case for this dish.  Alinea and Next and a number of other restaurants use dehydrators to make various components of their courses.  At the old house I never had the space to buy a dehydrator something that I'm admittedly not going to use particularly often.  But now I have space and I decided to pick one up. 

Since the calendar has now slipped past June 21, I moved into the summer dishes in the cookbook and this one was the first one up. 

First up was the mango leather, essentially a mango fruit roll up.  This is a mango and salt.  The mango was chopped and then placed in a blender and pureed as can be seen below.

The puree was spread on acetate sheets.  If you're old like me and remember the overhead projectors in school, it's the same thing the teacher used to write those awful math problems.  I actually had to do this part twice.  What's shown in the picture was spread too thin and after the prescribed two hours at 125 degrees I had mango crisp and not anything I could use.

While the mango leather was dehydrating the second time I worked on the cucumber portion of the dish.  I sliced the cucumber as thin as I possibly could on my mandolin.  The water, white wine vinegar and sugar were combined in a sauce pan to make a pickling liquid.

One of the garnishes was ginger.  I sliced it very thinly and cut it into a bite sized triangle.

The second and third garnishes were coriander salt and clove salt.  I ground the spices and then mixed them with the salt.

This is the completed leather.  Naturally, this time it was a little under done but I didn't have time to wait around to finish it the way I would have liked.

The cucumber and mango leather were rolled together and then garnished with the ginger and the salts.  I served this bite with a not so special pinot grigio out of California.