By now my loyal readers (who I have let down in the most heinous ways by not updating more often, and for which you have my sincerest apologies) know that I’m cooking at The Metropolitan. I love it. It’s a fantastic environment, I have all the creative freedom I could want, and I’m surrounded by culinary geniuses and the finest ingredients possible. It really is amazing, and you should totally come in and see me. Speaking of which, let me give you some background info that will make your visit even more amazing!
Local’s Night – the best night at The Metropolitan for adventurous diners!
Monday night is “Locals Night” at The Metropolitan – we don’t offer our standard menu, but instead develop a 3 and 5 course tasting menu from scratch. It’s different every Monday. So each Monday when I get to work, my job is to come up with two salads, two soups, and an amuse-bouche (more on what that means later).
I’d recently read a fascinating article on consommé and the extraordinarily difficult and inordinately long and tedious process of making one. Now, you wouldn’t know it to look at it – it’s basically just a bowl of clarified broth – but once you taste it, you’ll understand the skill and artistry that goes into it.
Anyway, I mentioned to Luke (a very gifted culinary genius and excellent teacher that I am privileged to work with) that I’d read the article and was interested in trying something. He (of course) had learned the fine art of consommé from one of his master instructors and was happy to teach me.
So yesterday for the tasting menu, one of my soups was a maple bacon consommé. It started with about 2 1/2 gallons of the liquid we use to braise our candied pork belly. Perhaps I should start there: to braise our pork belly, we start with a whole belly., which means you have to first shave the skin off, teats and all. Then the belly is cut into two more or less square pieces, scored and seared well on both sides in a very large pan. Once it’s seared, we add a basic mire poix of carrots, celery and onions, as well as a large amount of maple syrup. then, we add enough water to cover everything and stick it in the oven for 4-6 hours. When it’;s done, we pull the pork out and cool it, and strain all the resulting liquid from the pan. This is the liquid we started with for our consommé, and because of the syrup, it was fairly sweet and had a nice smoky bacon flavor.
the idea of a consommé is to clarify the liquid entirely, which means extracting all the proteins. Problem is, proteins = flavor, so you’ve got to start with a pretty strong stock to begin with, and then add more proteins throughout the clarifying process. The basic idea is to fill the stock pot with all sorts of vegetables and proteins and form a “raft” on top of all the stock, that it can simmer up through and filter back down, kinda like a percolator. The stock bubbles up through a hole in the middle, and filters back down around the edges, and all the proteins that were clouding the stock stick to the raft. Sounds easy, right? Wrong! here’s how it works:
Consommé 101
Start with a pot of room temperature stock. Get yourself another pot with high sides. your average stock pot will work just fine, but a typical 5-quart pan just won’t cut it – it’ll be too shallow. Next, get together a bunch of vegetables – carrots, celery, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes – stuff you want to use to flavor your stock. Add in some herbs (fresh herbs still on the stem work best). Got it? Now, slice all the veggies into long thin strips. The goal is to prepare the vegetables in such a way that they’ll naturally weave together and form a sort of “birds nest” for the raft. Add them all to the stock pot, pour in the stock, then add about 8 oz. of egg whites per gallon of stock, as well as 1 pound of extra-lean ground meat for every gallon. If you’re making chicken consommé, use chicken. If you’re making beef, use cow, etc. Although mine was a pork stock, we used beef to get the meatiness I was going for.
Once you’ve got everything in the room-temperature pot, put the pan over medium low heat and stir constantly. The goal is to slowly bring the whole pot up to 120°, stirring the whole time to keep bits of protein from getting stuck to the bottom of the pan. As the pot slowly warms, you’ll see little bits of protein start sticking and clumping together. As soon as you reach 120°, you can relax a bit, stirring every 5-10 minutes or so. The technique changes a little here, though. During the “warm-up” period, you want to stir pretty vigorously to break up all the proteins as they warm.
Once you’ve hit this point, you want the raft to form and start doing it’s job of filtering, so using a long-handled spoon form a hole in the middle of the raft and use this hole as a pivot point to stir under the raft, disturbing all the sliced veggies as little as possible. After about 15-20 minutes, the raft should be a fairly solid mass, and as the broth heats up to simmering point, it will bubble up through the hole in the middle, and run out to the edges of the raft and filter back down, leaving the proteins captured above.
Keep this percolating action going and stir every 15 minutes or so, making sure nothing is sticking to the bottom. After a few hours, you’ll notice the liquid bubbling up has become very clear. If you can see the bottom of the pot through the liquid, you’ve succeeded!
Now, to filter everything. Get a fine-mesh strainer and 6-8 layer of cheese cloth. Place the cheese cloth inside the strainer, and gently ladle the broth through the strainer and into another clean pot. Tada. You now have consommé. It really is a labor of love, and the simpleness of it’s appearance is very misleading, especially once you’ve tasted it!
Amuse-bouche
So that was just one of the soups I made this week. The other was a caramelized fennel soup that turned out pretty well, too. I enjoy making the soups and salads and everything else, but one of my favorite things to do is the amuse-bouche. In French, that means “makes the mouth happy” , and it’s basically just a little one-bite preview of the meal you’re about to enjoy, and is presented shortly after you’ve ordered and before your first course is served. Here’s a few of my recent (and very tasty) creations:
This is a black fig, cut in half, topped with chevre cheese, wrapped in a strip of prosciutto and garnished with a micro green. The extreme sweetness of the fig was offset nicely by the acidity of the cheese and the saltiness of the prosciutto.
A dark pumpernickel crostini topped with olive tapenade (back) and honey-herbed goat cheese with orange zest. The nutty, chocolate flavors of the toasted crostini balanced the acidity and boldness of the tapenade, and the sweet, tangy, earthy flavor of the cheese with honey and herbs added a nice finish.
This is a spicy tomato bison soup with a basil crouton. The soup was made by simmering hot house tomatoes in some of the liquid left after braising our bison ribs, then spiced with cumin, chili powder, black pepper and cayenne.
An abundance of choices
The truth is, I love working in this kitchen – I have a wealth of the best ingredients, and I’m really only limited by my own creativity. I love creating new salads and soups every week, and a new amuse-bouche every day. It’s challenging and rewarding, and I really have to push myself sometimes to keep from getting stuck in the same type of food.
And I’m always open to suggestions! If you want to come in and see me, and would like something special, just let me know – I’m happy to create it for you!
