Ad Hoc at Home: Chicken in Tarragon Sauce

Of the three books that I'm cooking my way through, I think I'm enjoying Ad Hoc the most.  Obviously Alinea is fun because of all the cutting edge techniques, but being a self-trained home cook some of those present problems.  In the French Laundry the techniques are simpler but the flavors of some of the dishes hasn't been there for me.  The dishes in Ad Hoc are simple family style dishes and that means I can use these dishes to actually have a family meal with my wife and serve to friends when they come over.

Naturally I started with the chicken breasts.  Boneless, skinless in this case.  From there, I portioned them down a little bit to make sure I had enough for everyone and pounded them thin enough to cook quickly in the pan.

Once the chicken was ready I got the ingredients for the sauce ready which was butter, chicken broth, shallots, tarragon and sauvignon blanc.

I seasoned up the chicken breasts with salt and pepper and put them in a hot sautee pan with oil until gold brown on both sides.

Once the chicken was done I put some of the butter in a dry pan and fried up the shallots.  From there I layered the flavors of the wine, chicken broth and tarragon and reduced the sauce slightly before plating.

So the sauce never got to the thickness I wanted to, but overall it turned out well.  It's always an honor and a privilege to cook for my family and my friends.  Especially those that don't care to spend a ton of time on cooking meals like this on a regular basis.  This one was a hit with everyone in the room.

French Laundry at Home: Linguine with Clam Sauce

Well hello again, I'll save you the standard spiel on why I haven't posted.  This is a classic pasta preparation that I'll admit that I've never had, mostly because clams generally scare me.  Overall, I've had pretty good experiences with them when I have had them in restaurants.  I think it's generally been my failures at home with other bivalves that has kept me from trying to make them at home.

The first step in this dish was to make the pasta.  Classic pasta preparation on olive oil, flour and eggs, and a little milk just in case I needed the extra moisture (I didn't).

I used the traditional well method to bring the pasta together and once it all came together I wrapped it in plastic wrap and let it rest in the fridge until everything else was ready.

The stuff for the clams/clam broth.  Littleneck clams which I happened to get from my preferred seafood purveyor in central Illinois who happened to open their store here in Normal the week I was making this.  In addition to the clams, I had sauvignon blanc, thyme, garlic, shallots and bay leaves.

I put all those ingredients into a sauce pan and cooked covered just until the clams opened.

The clams that opened I pulled out of the pan and set aside and then shucked.  The remaining liquid I let simmer and reduce for a few minutes.

Prior to everything you see here I had roasted a head of garlic and that came into play here for the actual sauce.  This got combined with the broth from the clams and butter for the clam sauce.

So I missed a few pictures, but once the sauce was completed I tossed some with the pasta which had been freshly rolled, cut and cooked while I put the clams in the rest to reserve keep them warm.  THe picture above is the dressed pasta with some additional parsley.

To plate, I had reserved some of the clam shells and then filled them with pasta then topped with the reserved clams.  This was served over a bed of rock salt.  To drink, I actually thought outside of the box and served this with a Vinho Verde or green wine from Portugal.  This is an unaged, low acidity, low alcohol wine, which paired perfectly with this dish.  My one complaint would be that I oversalted the water that the pasta was cooked in which caused the pasta to not be as good as I might have liked.

Alinea at Home: Croquette, Smoked Steelhead Roe, Endive, Radish

I teased this post on Facebook over a week ago and just now ;getting around to writing about it.  I've had a couple different versions of this dish on my various trips to Next and Alinea and was always very curious on how they pulled it off.  Fish eggs are very delicate and don't hold up to heat very well.

The star of the show, a tin of steelhead roe.  The recipe called for smoked and I could have gotten smoked but I checked the wrong box on the website I ordered this from.  The roe is from BLIS which is one of Alinea's and Next preferred product providers when it comes to roe and some other specialty items.

In addition to the roe, the interior of the croquette had small cucumber balls.

The final part of the filling was what brought everything together, this is a mixture of salt, creme fraiche, water and simple syrup.

The creme fraiche mixture was all simmered together and then some gelatin to get set the whole mixture.

In the bottom of the hemisphere mold I put a small dollop of steelhead roe and then but a cucumber ball in.  The whole mixture was topped with the creme fraiche mxiture and then went to the fridge to chill out until the mixture was set.

While the interior was setting in the fridge, I started in on the garnishes.  First up was candied endive.  This is a belgian endive, which is a relative of the cabbage which simmered in a water and sugar mixture for about 45 minutes.

Ad Hoc at Home: Chicken Pot Pie

The family style recipes in the Ad Hoc cookbook are, surprisingly enough, a very nice change of pace from the uber fancy preparations of Alinea and French Laundry.  Chicken Pot Pie is one of the perfect family style dishes that most every red blooded American loves.  Given that Thomas Keller is the owner of Ad Hoc this is obviously a little more fancy version of the classic but it was still delicious.

The first step was to make the dough, butter salt, and flour and a bit of water to bind everything together.  Once combined it went into the fridge until I was ready to use it.

The first hit of vegetables included pearl onions and carrots, flavored with some bay leaves and peppercorns.  All the ingredients were boiled together until tender for about 10 minutes then set aside to cool.

The second round of vegetables included celery which were boiled in a separate pot of water until tender.

I took half the dough and rolled it out for the base of the pie and put it in the pie dish.

The sauce that went inside the pie was a bechamel which was is a combination of milk, flour and butter.

I made a roux out of equal parts of the flour and butter.

Once the roux had cooked down for a little bit I added the milk and let the whole mixture cook for about 45 minutes.

A chicken pot pie wouldn't be anything without a chicken.  I bought a whole roasted rotisserie chicken from Fresh Market here in town and chopped down enough of it to go in with the vegetables for the pie filling.  The egg in the picture was beaten to be used as an egg wash on the top of the pie.

I added salt, pepper, thyme, parsley and cayenne to the final bechamel for the last bit of flavoring.  This went into the bottom pie shell with the cooked vegetables.

I topped the bottom shell with the top and brushed it with the egg wash and put it into the oven for about an hour.

And the completed pot pie.  It was delicious, though I wish I had put in some potatoes.

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.