a razor, a shiny knife » Thomas Helmick

A Stark Meal

Michael J Cirino — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:32:00 +0000

At the end of October we sat down with our good friends Alex and Aki from Ideas in Food and wrote up a menu for a seven course meal that we had been kicking around for a little while. It was a difficult balancing act getting four such divergently creative minds to come together to create seven dishes that would then form together a cohesive meal.

It was also difficult preventing Alex from adding courses when we weren’t looking as he was full of ideas that just weren’t able to be realized in this meal.

This meal was the first of a style of event and also marked the first instance where we felt that we were able to really balance the theatre of the event with the open and warm social atmosphere as well as food that was executed the way we had imagined it.

Menu:
1. Cervidae Tartar with Smoked Onion Rings and Cranberry
2. Chioggia Beets with a Roasted Red and Yellow Beets Pasta Salad, Beet Curd, Aji Amarillo and Passion Fruit
3. Pumpkin Seed Risotto with Coffee and Ham Hock Lardons
4. Olive Oil Poached Halibut over Celery Leaf Gnocchi in a Lobster Mushroom Ragu
5. Skirt steak with Brussels Sprout Kimchi, Apple and Chicharrones
6. Pierre Robert with Walnut Ribbons and Pear Mostarda
7. Lime panna cotta and banana rocks with a banana sponge cake and key lime

Menu Written with Daniel Castaño, Aki Kamozawa & H. Alexander Talbot

Executed with H. Alexander Talbot, Daniel Castaño, Thomas Helmick, Cathy Erway and Kathryn Mahoney

Photos:

Cassidy DuHon
www.duhonphotography.com

Cervidae Tartar with Smoked Onion Rings and Cranberry

The tartar was made from the leg of a deer. We did a coarse chop with a set of knifes and got it into a proper 1980’s tartar texture, and tossed with some olive oil, mustard, salt, pepper and herbs. The onion rings were compressed in smoke brine instead of hot smoking them to give them a nice smoky flavor but to also get them to be nice a crisp. The smoke brine was then carbonated and used to make a tempura batter which also helped carry the smoky flavor as well. A sweet and tart cranberry sauce was put on the plate to help soften the flavors and bring a smooth richness in texture.

Chioggia Beets with a Roasted Red and Yellow Beets Pasta Salad, Beet Curd, Aji Amarillo and Passion Fruit

The Chioggia beets were glued into a sheet and the red and yellow beets were unpeeled using a planner and compressed with a spicy passion fruit dressing under vacuum. They were then cut into cut into linguine shaped strips and dressed on either side of a firm Yellow Beet curd that is vegan.

Alex and Aki pioneered this process of using pectin or sodium alginate and calcium to create a fruit and vegetable glue that can impart flavor while holding things together. Here we created a dressed beet sheet that was sliceable.

Pumpkin Seed Risotto with Coffee and Ham Hock Lardons

The process of pressure cooking pumpkin seeds to give them a risotto like consistence was another invention by Alex and Aki, while on vacation somewhere silly. In this iteration they were cooked with coffee and pumpkin stock. After cooking they were cooled and mounted to order with butter and the cooking liquid, dressed with ham hock lardons which gave the dish a nice smoky flavor. Sous Vide pumpkin balls where topped with a little pumpkin powder and parmesan cheese.

Olive Oil Poached Halibut over Celery Leaf Gnocchi in a Lobster Mushroom Ragu

This is first step in the evolution of a dish we have been working on since august. It was conceived as a surf and turf style dish where the surf is represented by a lightly cooked flaky white fish and served over a earthy flavored pasta dish, here done with celery leaf gnocchi (double cooked potatoes with celery leaf juice used in the beginning of the dough making similar to spinach) in a lobster mushroom beurre blanc.

We have since seen this dish evolve into an almost entirely black dish with black trumpet mushrooms and a black truffle beurre noir, where the fish is topped with black caviar and purple basil is grated on top like cheese. (more to follow on this soon)

Skirt steak with Brussels Sprout Kimchi, Apple and Chicharrones

Double Thick Skirt Steak is a real treat. Skirt Steak is a very flavorful yet cheep cut of beef that when bonded into a double cut piece becomes otherworldly. Fresh off our Korean Pig Roast we really excited to get some of our left over Kimchi into some more forms. In this dish we compressed halved Brussels sprouts in a Kimchi puree to get the flavoring into all of the cracks. We then seared them off on a flattop to create a nice caramelized flat edge to them. This was pared with a Kimchi Chicharrones made with tapioca flour and Kimchi and a touch of water. These crispy vegan treats played the crisp spicy role in this dish while a smooth apple puree lent a touch of sweetness to the bottom of the plating.

Lime panna cotta and banana rocks with a banana sponge cake and key lime

Lime custards for this dish were set in a sphere mold and arraigned with some freshly torn banana sponge cake that Aki made in absentia. We had a little Liquid Nitrogen left from powdering the cheese so we froze whole banana and shattered them into rough chunks and then let them come back to room temperature to give them an insane and unpredictable shape. It was topped with a little key lime zest.

Pierre Robert with Walnut Ribbons and Pear Mostarda

This was/could be my favorite cheese course ever. I know I am partial and everything but it just came together in perfect balance. The Pierre Robert was frozen with Liquid Nitrogen and then crushed into a snow like powder. It was placed next to a candied walnut ribbon and topped with a fruit leather of slightly spiced pear mostarda.

This is just a bad ass picture of our white room with a white table in the back ground and a black shirted tom being a bad ass in the front.

A Stark Meal

The New York Times

Michael J Cirino — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 07:17:00 +0000

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

June 15th, 2008

Michael J Cirino — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:29:00 +0000

Dinner on Sunday June 15^th, 2008

This was the first attempt at proper service here in the lab and it seemed to work out spectacularly.

Menu:

Savory Pasty

Bouef Roulade de canard et de champignons

Fennel Smoked Sole

Cheese Puff

Cheese

Coffee and Cigarettes

This menu was written & executed with Mark Low and would have not been possible without help from The Genus and Tom

Photos By Missy Sue http://forkthis.blogspot.com

To be honest when we thought of this dish we were going to make doughnuts and it would have been amazing, then we forgot that doughnut dough has to sit overnight and it was already 3pm on Sunday so we embraced my Italian roots and made some zeppoli. If we are still on this honesty tip then you should also know that when I made the powdered salt, I used MSG coated salt. I am not sorry.

“You can’t sit at the table if you aren’t going to bring nothing to it.”

Blackberry Beret

Bouef Roulade de canard et de champignons – We unpeeled this beef tenderloin and stuffed it up with braised duck and softened wild mushrooms. It was then confitted in duck fat and finished in the deep fryer to give it that tasty browning. Served with Curried Sweet mashed Potatoes and Crisp Kale, and some of the delightful duck, cabernet and blackberry demi-glace

We originally had planned on wrapping it in duck skin but we ended up not having enough to wrap up the 3 of them so instead of leaving some people envious we scrapped the whole idea and ate the skin after everyone left while cleaning up.

Todd normally is in charge of protecting the meat products that are left out on the counter during prep from the straying fingers of the cooks. He might not look it but is super vicious.

Fennel Smoked Sole Filet w/Raw Mustard Greens, Tomato Caviar topped with Wasabi Tobiko, Chive Flowers (they actually taste great and last for a least a week in the fridge) dressed with Lemon and Olive Oil. This is a part of the ever evolving green menu and was extremely well balanced.

Someone with two X chromosomes said it was the best thing she had ever eaten, I told her I thought that was just her being hyperbolic and she told me to go to hell because it was good, take that interaction for what you will.

Fennel Pollen Dust

Unexplainable, but know this. It was lost and then found in michele’s bedroom which was the last place any of would have thought to look.

Cheese Course (Instrumentally orchastrated with Julie at Formaggio South End) – Pierre Robert a Triple Cream Delight with an aged goat cheese Leonora, which is named after a friend of mine, or at least i am pretty postive it is, with a soft vegetable ash. Strawberries are cheap and tasty; candied walnuts are a total pain in the ass to make, buy them other people are better at making them then you, well most likely, unless you are one of those people who are really good at making them, but then I would assume you would have to be deficient in some other area like non-sticky fingers.

Coffee Granita with Whipped Cream – This was thought about while reminiscing with Cortney about Sicily and was built by Danielle. Thank you both for your inspiration and construction.

Cigarettes were in bowls and were smoke after in proper fashion