Published: Nov 5th, 2008
Comments: 1

Harvest Dinner – New English

Harvesting a Dinner from a New English Harvest

So I have a good friend of mine, who occasionally sleeps on my couch and plays music for me. He lives in a house in Boston, a refined part of Boston called Lower Alston, which, unfortunately is above most of Alston and is one of the neighborhoods where I used to live when I called Boston my home. Said friend and his lovely Italian roommate came to our Peaches dinner in July where we began speaking about creating a harvest themed dinner at their place in the fall.

Menus were discussed and abandoned and then re-discussed with renewed vigor and passion. It was all with a little bit of tongue and cheek that we decided to do a Harvest style party but that concept evolved into a full bodied and warming meal for a night that was a complete rainy and cold mess. It included some old favorites and some new things that seemed to be decent ideas at the time.

Menu (in no special order):
• Porter-Braised Pork Shoulder Steaks with Creamy Polenta
• Butternut Squash Ravioli, Sweet, Crunchy and Ricotta filling with a Beurre Noisette and Sage Sauce and Pomegranate Arils
• Grilled Mexican Corn with Aji and Lime Mayonnaise and Queso Fresco
• Southern Style Onion Soup
• Rocket Salad with Sheeted Cucumber and Radishes with a Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette
• Apple Soup with Chilled Honey Custard

Menu written with Daniel Castaño with a Honey Custard recipe from Aki Kamozawa & H. Alexander Talbot

After we ate there were some amazing performances, from some ancient sounding folk music to Dominick the dancing dish washer. Enjoy and please don’t be too critical of my point and shoot work.

Rocket Salad with Sheeted Cucumber and Radishes with a Myer Lemon Vinaigrette
This salad was just used a light foil to the heavier pork and polenta dishes we had and allowed us to showcase some of the recent techniques we had learned from Alex and Aki at Ideas in food. We were enamored by their ability to make sheets of fruits and vegetables by using pectin as a food glue and set out to try to create some “stained glass” (in the words of C. Erway) of our own.

Butternut Squash Ravioli with a Beurre Noisette and Sage Sauce and Pomegranate Arils
This is one of Daniel’s personal dishes he has been working on for years and is really an amazing adaptation of classic Tuscan style pasta. It has a butternut squash and amaretti cookie stuffing that is richened with some egg yolks and homemade ricotta. The sage and browned butter sauce is a classic but the overripe pomegranate arils created a light pop of fruit and different sweetness to counter the richness of the sauce and to dance with the sweetness of the stuffing.

Grilled Mexican Corn with Aji and Lime Mayonnaise and Queso Fresco
This was a very standard interpretation derived from a childhood of eating corn on the cob Mexican style with my mother and the delight of the stands at the Red Hook Ball fields.

This was Carissa’s favorite photo of the night

Apple Soup with Chilled Honey Custard
This Honey Custard was taken directly from Aki and Alex’s recipe book. We have made this specific recipe 3 times and each time have enjoyed it more and more. Here the monolith waits judgment and a drowned death in a spiced apple consommé.

Porter-Braised Pork Shoulder Steaks with Creamy Polenta
Braising pork and their shoulders is clearly one of our specialties, and in specialties I mean we do it all the time and love it with all of our faces. It isn’t a difficult thing to be good at, but it is massively rewarding. These torn steaks mellowed out nicely in the dark porter and aji braise, which yielded an amazing pan sauce and was a great foil for the creamy polenta.

Southern Style Onion Soup
This was a very happy accident that was born of the need to make a stock for the braise. We browned the pork shoulder bones and some lovely super sweet local onions to make a slightly syrup molasses broth. After we set the shoulders to cook we had a ton of left over stock and onions and set to task of making a soup.

Some sharp white cheese made it onto these crackers and some of the reduced pan sauce sweetened up the bowls with a chunk of trim.

Published: Oct 15th, 2008
Comments: None

The New York Times

Here Daniel is showing where the loins are located on a boar, so they can be removed and wrapped in chicken skin.

After long delay we are proud to display some additional images from the boar dinner we held on Saturday, August 15th of this fine year two thousand and eight, in the municipality of Homer, NY. I will attempt to preserve brevity in our hopes to just dazzle you with the brilliant photography of Jennifer May and our good friend Michael Knight.
Our goal for this meal was to prepare and serve a locally sourced meal based around wild boar. This brought us to Cold Brook Hunts http://www.coldbrookhunts.com/ near the ancestral site of my family’s farm. It was to be a celebration of the great pre-mythological being in whose honor we have sacrificed of all of our whole animals to this year; Lewis. He was a pseudo-deity that retained his stature from pre-history by giving the gift of smoking, straws, and other processes that were greatly improved with suction to man. In these dishes we sought to transfer the body of this boar into a meal for twenty four cooked almost entirely by ingredients sourced within a 50 mile radius of the farm personally picked up by me the day before in a great scavenger hunt.

Menu
1. Wild Boar Rillette with a Pot-lickies Gelee and Duck Skin Crackling
2. Sweetbread and Offal Raviolo with Wild Boar Ragu
3. Chicken Fried Wild Boar Loin, Succotash Custard, Molasses Kimchi, and Soju Watermelon
4. Smoked Wild Boar Ribs with Collard Green, Mac and Cheese and Black Eye Peas
5. Aleppo and Vanilla Ice Cream with Amish Mellon and White Peaches

Menu created with Daniel Castaño, Andrew Rosenberg and Mark Low.

First you start with a whole wild boar. Slightly chilled and very wild.
Photo by Michael (Santi) Knight © 2008 www.photo.sarcfilms.com

Then you cut the ribs apart at the sternum and break the ribs off the spine using only shear force and maybe a cleaver later on if things get dirty. Either way you make Tom very happy.

If you plan on wrapping chicken skins around the loins you first need to skin the birds making sure this doesn’t happen.

After the skins are free from their flightless carcasses you may now wrap them around the loins and bond them using Activa RM. Roll into a tight torchon, vacuum pack them and drop them into a water bath at 55C for 6 hours. Water that is just cool enough not to kill the Activa enzymes but high enough to pasteurize the chicken skins after 131 minutes of cooking.

While the pork is cooking make fresh ricotta and be slightly sad that you couldn’t find sweetbreads anywhere in Cortland County that weren’t processed in Ohio or south of the Mason Dixon Line so your ravioli will just have to be filled with the creamy richness of raw milk ricotta and basil.

Grind the shoulders, hams and all of the extra fat into a 70/30 lean/fat ground boar, with a touch of pork and beef fat thrown because it was fresh. Dice up some fresh vegetables that you picked in your aunts garden and some jarred tomatoes from last year’s harvest and make up a Bolognese base.

Take the wild boar liver and kidneys as well as some left over pork, chicken and duck livers and simmer them with some caramelized onions, thyme and a bottle of red wine until glazed and slightly crisp. Add cream and puree until smooth.

Make pasta dough, then make 100 ravioli and let them rest.

Add pâté to Bolognese right before serves and lay lightly cooked ravioli on top with a light chiffonade of basil.

The night before it would have been wise to take a little extra Activa RM and bond the leftover chicken skins and purposely cleaned duck skins into a tight torchon and refrigerate overnight. Only to freeze in the morning, sliced wafer thin on a deli slicer and then deep fried in beef tallow. Add salt and enjoy.

Or to place on top of the wild boar shoulder rillette that you confit in pork fat for the last 12 hours and formed over a slice of spicy and floral pot lickies gelée that you made with Agar-Agar later that same morning right after the boar was butchered but before the pasta making.

While you are at it the night before you might as well also cut 4 types of melon into steaks and spend an hour compressing them in a vacuum with a little salt and lime juice to give them a bright color and smooth consistency.

Once done in the sous vide take the chicken skin wrapped boar loin out of the bag, batter dip it and deep fry it until golden brown. Slice it into thin rings (here you can see both tenderloins bonded together to form a larger loin sized cut).

Actually the most important thing you should have been doing right after they were broken out of the carcass was getting the ribs into a pork confit to soften for 4 hours and then into a smoker with layers of boar belly stacked on top of them and hickory smoke circling past the glassy meat.

Whip up a mac and cheese, some collard greens and a black eyed pea and aji mash and you have a rib entrée and hopefully a tiny bit of room for desert.

And serve those over the molasses kimchi with melon and scallons

Wild Boar

Published: Oct 8th, 2008
Comments: None

Dinner Theatre

Jonny and I after hours of negotiations

About a month ago I was relaxing with a friend of mine named Jonathan over a long late summer weekend, drinking Korean beers that taste enormously like Miller High Life and enjoying the lack of breeze. We were sitting in my back yard, watching my dog viciously lie in the sun and while talking about nonsense we stumbled into a conversation about dinner and theater.

We were speaking about our plans for the fall and some of the events that we were working on. I explained about the dinner on the first of November and the Autumnal Harvest and Pig roasting extravaganza in October, while Jonathan went on to explain about his plans for acting and writing throughout the fall.

Sometime around the middle of the afternoon it occurred to us that we had nothing yet planned for September and with a little bit of mental wrestling we discovered that there were some dishes that need to be tired and some of his plays that needed to be worked on. It was in that moment that we decided to take a stab at Dinner Theatre.

We wanted a lounge feel, with smoke and cocktails. Jonny thought it important to include some multimedia in the event and decided that he would like to bring in a dance performance as well as the thespian display. I felt strongly about cooking for each act and leaving dessert for the after whisky. What we eventually came up with, through the great help of our friends was this night of Dinner Theatre:

Menu:
Snacks: Candied Bacon, Crisp Garbanzos and Spiced Nuts
1. Dark Roux Sausage Étouffée with Caramelized Onions and Pega
2. Black Tempura Prawns in Green Curry Custard with Key Lime and Cilantro
3. Sweet Braised Short Rib, Country Pâté Brulée over a Horseradish demi-glace with Alsatian Munster whipped fondue, Enoki mushroom and quail yolk purses and charred Japanese scallions
4. Tobacco Crisps with Coffee crème and whisky dipping sauce
5. Cigar – Dominican Metropolitan

Menu created with Daniel Castaño and Eugene Edele.

Executed with Daniel Castaño, Eugene Edele and Cathy Erway; and special thanks to Kristen Hager, Kirsten Larson, Nora Sherman and Leah Viens-Gordon for all of their help in coordination and execution.

Wines and Spirits by Jesse Salazar:
Bodegas Llopart 2005 Rose Brut Reserva Cava
Wingut Hirsch 2006 Riesling Gaisberg
Scholum Project 2007 Naucratis Lost Slough Vineyard
Elmer T Lee Single Barrel – Buffalo Trace

With performances of:
“The Confidence Man” adapted from Herman Melville’s novel by Ben Rose and Jonathan Cristaldi and performed by Jonny Cigar and Abraham Danz.

“Awakening” choreographed by Ori Flomin and performed by Amanda Wells and Ori Flomin

“Kammerspiel!” Written, directed and performed by Jonny Cigar while featuring: Abraham Danz, Phoebe Oglesbee, Zach Bernstein and Another Girl.

Video Installation by Tyler Coburn www.tylercoburn.com

Photos by:

Fried Garbanzo

This is a simple snack that was common place in my childhood in many different forms. Here we just fried the canned Garbanzo beans until crisp and then tossed them with coriander, cumin, cayenne, Balinese long peppers and dried lemon rind. Citrus juice to flavor.

Gratuitous sausage. These cubes were shaped for the Étouffée. The shape held well, our next goal is to get casing to fit the outside. I imagine it shaped like a wrapped present.

Due to some dietary restrictions in the audience we were able to provide the Étouffée in both a sausage and more traditional shrimp versions.

A collection of black batter dipped shrimp.

This was just a standard tempura batter that we added shrimp brains and sepia for additional flavor and color. After we had it balanced and seasoned we bottled it and carbonated it to 50 psi to too make the batter extra light and crisp. The coating was airy and light and the brains gave the crisp a full flavor.

Short Ribs with a liberal amount of pâté

Short Ribs being caramelized

This is a shot of the short ribs from our test kitchen the Sunday before the performance. Here we exchange the Obrato for Phyllo dough.

We eventually settled with Enoki and Slow Poach Quail Egg wrapped in soy wrapper and flashed fried crisp and awaiting steak

I know it might seem obvious in this setting and maybe even trite being that the performers name is Jonny Cigar but we have been working on this Coffee and Cigarettes style dessert all summer and this iteration seems to work well. With crisp cookies and Cathy’s indulgent Sanka Cream custard the cookies we absolutely delightful on their own but with a dip in the whisky syrup everything became divine.

Published: Aug 29th, 2008
Comments: None

NY Times – Article

A couple of weeks ago we spent a weekend in the country and had a feast based around a wild boar. The New York Times was gracious enough to come and write about it, here is a link to the beautiful photography and words that told the story of Lewis and our gastronmic appreciation of him.

More to follow in our words and photos but please follow Daniel’s snack to see theirs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/dining/27boar.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=dining

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Harvest Dinner – New English

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Harvest Dinner – New English

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Dinner Theatre

NY Times – Article

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Video

In small dosages

Chronological Archives

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A Sellection of Choices

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