Every now and then She Who Must Be Obeyed surprises me with some previously unknown tidbit about food or cooking. On more than one occasion she had mentioned that the son of one of her work colleagues was spending a year abroad in France, staying at the home of a family that ran a restaurant and was one of the region’s foie gras producers. I didn’t think much more about it until she brought home a video cassette from the restaurant, loaned to her by her friend.
Located on the borders of Limousin, Gold Country Farm continues a tradition of products through the art of ancestral knowledge. The farm, with its lush greenery in the heart of an apple orchard, raises their ducks to meet exacting tastes.
Seared terrine, torchon, or canned, this tape will deliver all the secrets of these recipes.
To celebrate your palate, all of the techniques, from cutting the duck to decorate your plate, are detailed in this film. A safe and effective method to achieve your own foie gras preparations.
I’m still having trouble with the notion of having foie gras to put up in jars. In what magical realm can one utter the phrase “extra foie gras”? I want to go to there.
No clever insights to accompany yesterday’s market run, just a list of the food: brioche loaf, chocolate banana bread, rainbow chard, cucumbers, pink potatoes, purple cauliflower, spicy lamb sausage, empire apples, and raspberries. I hope to have more enthusiasm next week. We’ll see.
I‘ve always had suspicions that She Who Must Be Obeyed was more than she seemed. I first noticed it at the 2000 Toy Fair in New York, where we both had our photos taken in a Sanrio instant photo sticker booth. The end product was a 4 by 5 inch sheet of little stickers of our faces, surrounded by Sanrio cartoon borders: mine was Badtz-Maru, hers was Hello Kitty. The size of the stickers and the lo-res quality of the camera and printing blew out most of the detail on her face, leaving just the shape of her head, her hair, smile, and glasses, not unlike what you see pictured above.
I didn’t think much of it at the time, but every now and then I’d see something that reminded me of She Who, like this image of Doctor Girlfriend from the brilliant The Venture Brothers. She hasn’t worked the Jackie O look in years, but I’ve seen that look on her face when she gets into attack lawyer mode. (While I look nothing like her, I’ve got Dr. Girlfriend’s voice down perfectly.)
While watching Read or Die (both the anime series and the movie), I noted her resemblance to the main character, Yomiko Readman. It didn’t hurt that she was a book fanatic.
I also learned that all of these animated characters were classified as meganekko, or “girls with glasses” (not to be confused with mega neko, or “giant cats”). I saw resemblances everywhere, most recently in the Shortpacked! web comic, where she bears a startling similarity to protaginist Amber O’Malley:
He Who Will Not Be Ignored is a big fan of the Brawl in the Family web comic because it’s about his favorite video games. When he ordered a t-shirt from them, the box it arrived in had a hand-drawn character on the side. When she learned that the authors would provide custom drawings by request for orders placed by a certain date, She Who requested not just Princess Peach from the Mario Brothers games, but “Princess Peach the lawyer.” This is what arrived on the box:
He Who’s reaction was “Mom, that’s you!” Now even my son could see it.
There’s no getting around it, we live with a carton character, but a very sweet one (for the most part). But I knew that from quite a while ago, as would anyone who has seen this:
This dish is actually two separate recipes from Momofuku: Pork Shoulder Steak and Fried Cauliflower with Fish Sauce Vinaigrette. They seemed to go together in my head, which lead to their being served as a single meal. Neither recipe is technically difficult, but they both have more subroutines than a WordPress installation, so I had to think a bit about the timing required to bring everything together in time to serve.
I began by assembling the pork components: a single 5/8-inch thick shoulder steak; four scallions; one each of a small zucchini, yellow squash, and red onion; a jar of pickled pearl onions; and a bottle of Kewpie mayonnaise (a popular Japanese brand).
Ramp Ranch Dressing
This dressing is served with the steak, and needed to be made first. It should be made with pickled ramps, but they are already out of season, and I didn’t have any pickled. I used the suggested substitute: a quarter cup each of finely chopped pearl onions and scallions. I mixed a cup of the mayonnaise, a quarter cup of buttermilk, the scallions and onions, and the juice of half a lemon together in a bowl. After correcting the seasoning with salt and pepper, I put the bowl in the fridge.
Fish Sauce Vinaigrette
To make the vinaigrette, I measured out the juice of one lime, a half cup of fish sauce, a quarter cup of sugar, a minced garlic clove, a thinly sliced Thai bird chile, two tablespoons of rice wine vinegar, and a quarter cup of water.
I tossed everything into a lidded container, gave it a vigorous shake, and let it sit at room temperature until needed.
Fried Cauliflower
And yet another collection of ingredients: one head of cauliflower broken into florets (about four cups), two tablespoons of thinly sliced cilantro stems, a half cup of cilantro leaves, a half cup of puffed rice, and a half teaspoon of shichimi togarashi (Japanese seven-spice powder). I omitted three tablespoons of chopped mint since I didn’t have any (and failed to notice it in the recipe).
I tossed the puffed rice with the togarashi and a half teaspoon of canola oil, then toasted the mixture in a hot skillet until it darkened slightly.
I filled a wide skillet with an inch and a half of canola oil over medium heat, and brought it up to 375° F. I fried the cauliflower in two batches, removing each when the florets started to develop brown spots, about five minutes.
When the cauliflower was done, I fried the cilantro leaves until crisp, about thirty seconds.
Pork Shoulder Steak
Here’s where the timing came in. When I started heating the oil for the cauliflower, I also put a grill pan on high heat to get it “scorching, hellfire hot.” Â I aggressively salted the steak, then pressed it into the pan when I started the first batch of cauliflower, cooking for about four minutes on the first side, and three minutes after flipping it over.
I let the steak rest for five minutes while I finished the other frying.
Final Plating
I sliced the steak into half-inch thick strips, smeared a large spoonful of the ranch dressing on the plate, and fanned the steak over the dressing I topped the meat with the raw vegetable garnish. I tossed the cauliflower and cilantro stems with the fish sauce vinaigrette, plated the mix, and topped it with the puffed rice and cilantro leaves.
I’m not a person who adulterates good meat with sauces very often, but the pork/dressing combination is a winner. The richness and tang of the ranch dressing was cut by the acid and heat of the cauliflower. Much to our surprise, He Who Will Not Be Ignored ate all of his vegetables without complaint, swabbing them in the dressing before wolfing them down. I don’t know how often I’ll make this particular dish again, but I expect to have a steady supply of vinaigrette and ranch dressing in my fridge from now on.
My cookbook shelf in the kitchen had managed to overflow onto the sideboard in the dining room, a situation She Who Must Be Obeyed advised me wouldn’t be tolerated for long.
Unfortunately IKEA stopped manufacturing the twenty four inch wide Billy bookcase (why?), so I was forced to have something custom made. After two days of sanding and sealing with polyurethane I installed the replacement and promptly filled it, leaving a bit of room for expansion:
The extra height on the shelves allowed my to organize the books by topic, rather than by size. What’s on the shelves? From top to bottom:
Shelf 1
A complete run of Cook’s Illustrated from 1996 – present, including index; The Dessert Bible; The Cook’s Illustrated Guide to Grilling and Barbecue; The Cook’s Bible, The America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook; Good Eats: The Early Years; The Professional Chef (Seventh Edition); Larousse Gastronomique; and The Visual Food Encyclopedia.
Shelf 2
Two binders, one labeled “Cook,” the other “Bake,” each holding printouts of recipes found online; Coco: 10 World-Leading Masters Choose 100 Contemporary Chefs; Sunday Suppers at Luques; In the Heat of the Kitchen by Gordon Ramsay; Yes Chef!: 20 Great British Chefs, 100 Great British Recipes; The Flavor Bible; Culinary Artistry; Sous Vide for the Home Cook; The Splendid Table; Fundamentals of Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan; and Molto Italiano, Molto Gusto, and Italian Grill by Mario Batali.
Shelf 3 Smoke and Spice and Born to Grill by Jamison & Jamison; The Barbecue! Bible by Steven Raichlen; The Thrill of the Grill, License to Grill, and Let the Flames Begin by Chris Schlesinger; The Summer Shack Cookbook; The Les Halles Cookbook by Anthony Bourdain; The River Cottage Meat Book; Variety Meats by Richard Olney (part of the old Time/Life The Good Cook Techniques & Recipes series, a rare find); Charcuterie; The Whole Beast and Beyond Nose to Tail by Fergus Henderson; Ratio by Michael Ruhlman; On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee; and Cookwise by Shirley Corriher.
Shelf 4 How to Cook Everything and The Best Recipes in the World by Mark Bittman; The Joy of Cooking; Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs, Mastering the Art of French Cooking volumes 1 and 2, and The French Chef Cookbook, all by you-know-who; Jacques Pepin’s Complete Techniques; I Know How to Cook (Je Sais Cuisinier) by Ginette Mathiot; The Perfect Scoop by David Liebovitz; Well-Preserved by Eugenia Bone; The Joy of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich; Jam It, PIckle It, Cure It by Karen Solomon; and The Ball Blue Book of Preserving.
Shelf 5 A Return to Cooking and On the Line by Eric Ripert; The French Laundry Cookbook, Bouchon, Under Pressure, and Ad Hoc at Home by Thomas Keller; Alinea; Au Pied de Cochon: The Album; Gourmet Today; Momofuku (not pictured); The Kitchen Sessions by Charlie Trotter; Blue Ginger, Ming’s Master Recipes, and Simply Ming by Ming Tsai; Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by Andrea Quynhgiao Nguyen; Sushi for Dummies; The Wagamama Cookbook; and The Complete Book of Sushi.
Those are the cookbooks in active use; there’s another bookcase in the Belm Utility Research Kitchen Reference Library with about as many books that have been retired from – or have never been brought into – active duty.
After examining the shelves, a friend noted “For an atheist you sure have a lot of bibles in your kitchen.” I do. And I swear by them.
Summer is officially over, but the market stands haven’t noticed, as evidenced by the abundance of corn and tomatoes still available. I bought neither, out of concern for He Who Will Not Be Ignored’s orthodontia for the former, and bacause She Who Must Be Obeyed brought home a basket of the latter from a co-worker.
I did buy more granola, a bunch of assorted radishes (red, white, and purple), fingerling potatoes, cortland apples, orange cauliflower, a tiny head of romanesco broccoli (my favorite fractal garnish), a loaf of ciabatta, and a chunk of fresh mozzarella, which has already been consumed as lunch with the bread and aforementioned tomatoes.
I ran into Tse Wei from Journeyman, who was buying vegetables for this evening’s menu. It’s pretty cool to be able to walk twenty feet from your kitchen and buy things that you need that were still in the ground the same morning. You can’t get any more local than that.
Today was also delivery day for the meat CSA, where I received a chuck steak, two thick-cut pork chops, bacon, two lamb shanks, and a whole chicken. I also placed my order for a fresh turkey to be picked up a few days before Thanksgiving.
Since I was in the neighborhood, I stopped by Central Bottle to see if my esteemed culinary consultant was working today. She was, and suggested I try one of the boxed Italian wines, which she let me taste. For me that store is like an upscale crack den, so I left with the wine, a bottle of cider made from heritage apples, a bar of Mast Brothersfleur de sel chocolate, and a chunk of parmigiano reggiano for snacking. If you see me sprawled on the floor of my kitchen, I’m in the throes of a phenylethylamine overdose.
If you’re thinking “It has pork and rice cakes, it must be another recipe from Momofuku,” then you’re correct. In the interests of accuracy, the full name of the dish is Spicy Pork Sausage & Rice Cakes, Chinese Broccoli & Crispy Shallots. I was looking for something else to make with my abundance of ground pork, and this fit the bill.
As with most Chinese-based recipes, there was quite a bit of prep involved. I rounded up eight ounces of silken tofu, a pound of ground pork, three large thinly-sliced onions, a tablespoon of light soy sauce, six tablespoons of water, a tablespoon of sugar, a tablespoon of kochukaru (Korean chile powder), two tablespoons of toban djan (Chinese chile and black bean paste), a tablespoon of Szechuan peppercorns, two and a half teaspoons of salt, two sliced garlic cloves, one and a half ounces of dried red chiles, and half a cup of sliced shallots. The recipe calls for pre-packaged crispy fried shallots (the Asian equivalent of canned french fried onions), but my local market didn’t have any, forcing me to make my own.
I began by cooking the onions and a half teaspoon of the salt in two tablespoons of oil over medium-high heat. After ten minutes, I lowered the heat to medium and turned the onions every five minutes.
While the onions cooked, I browned the pork in a tablespoon of oil over medium high heat for ten minutes, until it lost its pink color. After breaking the meat up as it cooked, I transferred it to a bowl where it rested as I prepared the sauce.
I warned up five  tablespoons of oil in the pork pan over medium heat, added the dried chiles and stirred them for a minute, then added the garlic and cooked for an additional minute until fragrant. Off the heat I added the Szechuan peppercorns, kochukaru, and toban djan, stirring to combine.
I fried the shallots in a cup of oil and drained them on a paper plate.
By this time the onions were finally browned. I could have let them cook for another ten minutes, but I got impatient.
I added the onions, pork, water, soy, sugar, and remaining salt to the pan with the chiles and stirred to combine.
On to the last bit of prep: I drained the tofu, chopped two cups of Chinese broccoli, and cut eight long rice cakes into inch-long segments.
I added the broccoli to the sauce and cooked for about three minutes, until the greens were tender.
While the greens cooked, I whisked the tofu until it became liquid and creamy.
I also boiled the rice cakes for three minutes.
To assemble, I added the rice cakes to the sauce, followed by the tofu, then gave everything a few good stirs.
I plated in bowls, and topped with chopped scallions.
If you can imagine a head-on collision between ma po tofu and pasta with bolognese sauce, then you know exactly what this dish tasted like. The onions and pork provided the sweet component, complimented by the creaminess of the tofu, but the rest of the sauce brought on some serious heat. This dish showed up the rest of my family as lightweights when it come to aggressively spicy food. She Who Must Be Obeyed liked the dish, but couldn’t finish it; He Who Will Not Be Ignored took a cue from Man Vs. Food (in his eyes the perfect television show, and a glimpse of a future career in which he travels around the country eating chicken wings and hot dogs) and supplemented his meal with a glass of milk to cut the heat. If I make this again, I’ll have to cut the chile and peppercorn amounts by half.
I’m thinking about other uses for the sauce without the greens or rice cakes, perhaps pairing it with thick udon noodles.
This is a story of not one, but three failures, all revolving around what should have been a simple recipe. Two of the failures were those of technique, the direct result of my (third) failure to remember crucial information.
But first, a digression about the title. “Brawn” is the English name for what the French call fromage de tête and what we call head cheese. My first exposure to this piggy by-product was the version you could find in the supermarket deli case, buried in the back of all of the other yellow plastic prepackaged Oscar Meyer cold cuts. It looked like a block of translucent stuff with bits of pink meat in it, which, to a first approximation, is an accurate description. I managed to avoid it – it’s not difficult – until last year, when I wound up eating it twice in the span of a few weeks.
My first taste set the bar quite high, as it was the Crispy PDC Salad at Au Pied de Cochon. The second version, Crispy Fromage de Tête, was part of last year’s Whole Hog Dinner at Craigie on Main. I remember thinking I’ll have to make this someday.
That opportunity came when half a pig’s head was delivered along with the rest of the half hog I split with my neighbor. I left the head in the fridge to thaw for a few days while I researched a recipe. I chose to use Fergus Henderson’s brawn recipe from The Whole Beast, but, since he can occasionally be lacking in important details, I consulted Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie as a backup.
Lastly, I read the Brawn post by Ryan Adams in his excellent blog, Nose to Tail at Home. His first attempt had failed, so I emailed him to let him know what I had planned, and what steps I was going to take to make sure the recipe turned out well.
It was finally time to assemble my ingredients. For the cooking stock, I needed two peeled onions, three medium (or two large) peeled carrots, two leeks, two stalks of celery, the zest from two lemons, a bundle of thyme, two bay leaves, and a “scant handful” of black peppercorns.
That container of frozen stuff? It a quart of trotter gear, which I held in reserve as an extra punch of pork gelatin if needed.
I cleaned the half pig’s head, and augmented it with the tongue and the trotters and hocks left over from my last venture into whole pig cookery, retrieved from the Belm Utility Research Kitchen Deep Storage Facility.
I tossed all of the ingredients into a large stock pot – the head just fit – and added water to cover. I simmered the conents for three hours, skimming occasionally to remove the foam and sludge that rose to the top. I also wound up skimming off the lemon zest, so I added the juice of one lemon to compensate. If I make this again, I’ll use a peeler to make large strips of zest instead of my usual microplane grater.
I should point out that it’s quite disconcerting to see foam oozing out of a pig’s nose while it cooks, but that’s just a result of the pressure differential between the water and open air.
I removed all of the meat from the pot to let it cool.
While I waited for a cooler head to prevail, I strained the aromatics out of the simmering liquid and set it to a rolling boil to reduce it.
I removed all of the meat from the trotters and head, making sure to get every last bit of porky goodness.
I wound up with a few cups of meat. The lighter pieces are from the cheek, the darker are from the rest of the head.
While I was separating the meat, I kept replaying a scene from The Simpsons in my head. Homer buys a bag of ice from the Kwik-E-Mart and discovers that it has a severed teddy bear head in it (eventually revealed, via a Citizen Kane flashback, to be the head of Mr. Burns’ long-lost teddy bear, Bobo). When he call Apu’s attention to it, he replies “Oh, that’s a head bag. It’s chock full of heady goodness!” I was expecting nothing less than heady goodness myself.
After a few hours of reducing, I had a gelatin-enriched stock which I seasoned aggressively with salt and pepper. I tested its setting ability by pouring a few tablespoons into a small bowl and chilling it in the fridge. According to Charcuterie, it should be “firm, but not rubbery or hard … a sliceable gel, but not as hard as a rubber ball.” Satisfied that I had a gel at the right consistency, I opted not to include the trotter gear.
Ruhlman also suggested that the meat be cut int half-inch dice, advice I followed to the letter, as Henderson had no opinion on the subject. I lined a terrine mold with plastic wrap, filled it with the chopped meat, then poured on enough of the stock to just cover.
Failure the First:
Two days later, just before I planned on serving it for dinner, I unmolded the terrine.
It seemed to have a firm texture, so I let it warm up slightly while I prepared a salad of lettuce in balsamic vinaigrette, walnuts, tomatoes, and bacon lardons. I was ready to cut a few thick slices to plate on top of the salad when disaster struck:
The chunks of meat were so thick that they dragged through the gelatin and ripped the terrine into pieces. I didn’t have a plan B for dinner, so I served the mess anyway, my plates mow resembling a 1970s cookbook photo of an “exotic” aspic dish.
It tasted good, it just looked a mess. I wrapped what remained tightly in plastic and returned it to the fridge.
Failure the Second:
Still swooning over the torchon I ate on Sunday at Journeyman, I resolved to create my own crispy fromage de tête. A few hours before dinner would be served, I placed the wrapped brawn in the freezer, figuring that a short chill would firm up the gelatin enough to make it sliceable. It almost worked, in that I was able to get a few solid slices from either end, but the center hadn’t solidified enough to retain its shape.
I soldiered on, dredging each slice in flour, then egg with dijon mustard, and finally panko crumbs.
Those big splotches aren’t oil, they’re the liquified gelatin leaking out as the slices cooled. Once again, I was committed to serving what I made, so I plated the slices on a simpler lettuce, tomato, and radish salad.
Still tasty, and this time crispy as well, but ultimately disappointing because it lacked the unctuous mouthfeel from the gelatin.
Failure the Third:
What I tell you three times is true.
Both of these disasters could have been avoided if I had read Ryan’s post all the way through. In retrospect, I committed a series of cumulative errors:
I did not chop the meat finely enough
I did not keep the fat and skin to include in the mixture, which resulted in a too-high ratio of gelatin to meat.
After the first failure, I didn’t re-render the meat and gelatin and re-process it into a denser mix, at which point I could have added the unused trotter gear.
Lesson learned, but I will not concede defeat. My neighbor is already making noises about ordering another half hog in a month or so, which means another head will be delivered to my doorstep. And when it arrives, I’ll be ready.
Postscript – Insult to Injury:
As I prepared to write this post, I returned to Nose to Tail at Home to check the original post, where I discovered a link to this video:
That’s right, not only is it a MasterChef clip – a special “Master Class” feature unique to the Australian edition – featuring Fergus Henderson, but it shows a plate of his brawn with crispy pig’s ear salad. Does his plate look anything like mine? Of course not, it’s his dish. Now I know how he expects it to look. I can do that.
Last summer I experimented with putting up tomato sauce in jars. I used the last of eight jars a few weeks ago, which meant it was time to repeat the process, but on a larger scale. I called one of the farmer’s market vendors and asked for a box of plum tomato “seconds” – tomatoes that had a few dings or bruises which prevented them from being sold at the market – and asked to pick them up at Davis Square. It was a bargain, I got twenty pounds of tomatoes for fifteen dollars.
You can see some of the bruising, which would have no effect of the final product:
I spent the next two hours answering the question What does it feel like to be a prep cook at an Italian restaurant? as I cored and quartered all of the tomatoes – one hundred and fifty five by my count – and loaded them into my largest stock pot.
I discarded the cores into a strainer set over a bowl, this let me rescue the juice that slowly squeezed out of the pulp. I wound up with a quart of tomato juice.
I cooked the tomatoes for about an hour over medium heat, stirring every now and them to soften the batch, then applying a potato masher to pulverize the pulp and separate the skins. I passed the contents of the pot (in batches) through a strainer, then ran the pulp left behind through a food mill. I added the puree and the tomato juice back to the pot with the strained tomatoes, and cooked to reduce by about a third. I added nothing else to the tomatoes – no salt, oil, garlic, or herbs – because I want to be able to use the result as a base upon which I can build the sauce I might need for a particular dish.
I prepared a dozen jars by cleaning them and filling each with a teaspoon of salt, a quarter teaspoon of citric acid, and a whole washed fresh basil leaf.
I ladled the hot sauce into each jar, fixed the lids and bands in place, and processed the jars by boiling them for forty minutes.
After a solid day’s worth of work, I wound up with eleven pints of sauce.
The sauce was a much deeper red than last year’s batch, and also quite a bit sweeter. She Who Must Be Obeyed arrived home as the jars were cooling, had a taste of some of the leftover sauce, and said “I think we need more, don’t you?”
It wasn’t a question. Three days later, I repeated the whole process, and now we have twenty jars, which should get us through the winter and spring.
Since the demise of eat and the Union Square Bistro, there has been a lack of fine dining establishments in Union Square, which is full of pubs and ethnic eateries. If you wanted creatively prepared cuisine in a pleasant setting, you had to go to (in order of distance) EVOO (now Bergamot), Hungry Mother, or Gargoyles on the Square (Davis Square, that is). When I heard that a new restaurant would be opening just steps away from eat’s old location, I dared to get my hopes up.
The chefs and owners, Tsei Wei Lim and his wife Diana Kudayarova, kept the curious updated and built a local buzz with their Facebook and Twitter posts, as well as their website/blog. Even The Boston Globe got in on the act, publishing a multi-part story on the trials and tribulations of opening a new restaurant (part 1, part 2). To make things even more interesting, the restaurant is mere steps away from the Union Square Farmer’s Market, so every week I’d poke my head in to see the progress that had been made in converting a sauce factory into a restaurant.
Journeyman finally opened for business last Wednesday. I rarely go to a new restaurant during its opening month, but I wanted to show my support as well as satisfy my curiosity, so She Who Must Be Obeyed and I, along with out neighbors, made a reservation for this past Sunday.
I won’t say a lot about the space itself, which is cozy and sparsely decorated in the Danish modern style, but the window, seen above, is also the location of the herb garden, a series of wine boxes ranked on shelves with lighting and a drip irrigation system. You can access each box via a rolling ladder, which has led to my referring to the setup as the “herb library.”
There is only one choice to make about the menu: do you want the three-course meal or the five-course meal? (Vegetarian and gluten-free options are also available on request.) Once you’ve made that decision, you can sit back and let the chefs control the pace of the meal. Here’s what we ate (I don’t have a menu to refer to, so the names of the courses are from memory and a few hastily scribbled notes.):
Amuse: pig tongue confit
A ribbon of thinly-sliced confited pig’s tongue, served on bread with a dot of mustard, this dish announced the evening’s menu theme. I have run into Tse Wei quite a few times this summer, so when I told him last week that we had a reservation, his response was “I hope you like pork.” Our server explained that the restaurant had procured two heritage breed Tamworth hogs, and named them Lenin and Stalin. (Tamworths have reddish skin and bristles.) We would be eating various bits of Stalin throughout the evening.
Amuse: smoked ale
This was a shot of Norwegian Wood by HaandBryggeriet, a beer made with some smoked malt and preserved with juniper rather than hops. I don’t know if it was available from the wine list, but we all agreed we would have happily continued drinking it for the rest of the meal.
Late Summer Salad
A little of everything: a very pretty plate of carrot, radish, bean, beet, and an assortment of tomatoes, all tied together with buttermilk zucchini dressing.
Torchon: pear, kimchi
A crispy fried torchon of meat from the pig’s head, served over kimchi-marinated pear slices with a smear of miso butter. I loved the combination of the fatty pork with the Asian flavors and a hint of heat from the kimchi. This is the kind of dish I’d expect to find on the menu at Momofuku.
To clear our palates before dessert, we were presented with this bit of science from the kitchen: a gel made from tonic and Beefeater’s gin, with a spoonful of cucumber sorbet on top. Now that I know how to manipulate hydrocolloids, I’ll be stealing this idea.
Plum: coffee, meringue
It’s not often that a dessert appeals to my inner science geek, but this plate managed to do that and be delicious as well. The stewed half plum was accompanied by four foams: solid meringue, solid steamed pudding, liquid coffee, and frozen kaffir lime/white chocolate ice cream.
Mignardises
Our meal concluded with a few more sweet bites: miniature brownies, peach jellies, and shortbread biscuits.
Wine:
There wasn’t a suggested wine pairing to accompany the menu, so I chose a 2009 Gobelsburger Gobelsburger Grüner Veltliner  for the first three courses, and a 2008 Roagna Dolcetto d’Alba for the pork and dessert.
Did I mention I had a full view of the kitchen while I ate?
This was the quietest kitchen I’ve heard in a while, which belied the just-opened status. Both Tsei Wei and Diana, when visiting our table, assured us that they were far from calm, but I never noticed. They looked like pros in there, all the more amazing given that they’re both self-taught. (Were I twenty years younger I’d be begging for a job.)
The menu for the next few weeks will take advantage of more pieces of Lenin and Stalin; I was told that this week would feature shoulder and belly. I believe the overall plan is to change the main ingredient every month and run variations on it for for weeks. Although there have been references to having three-, five, and seven- course choices, we may have to wait for the seven-course menu. That will just give me another excuse to return to what could quickly become my favorite neighborhood restaurant.
