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.