What have I learned so far?
Dear Chef Bourdain;
Believe it or not, this isn’t JUST a plea for attention – no, I actually set out to learn about what’s been missing from my culinary skills. So it makes sense to think about what I’ve learned from the dishes I’ve made so far. I’m only a fraction of the way through the book, with all of the most challenging recipes yet to come. But still, if I haven’t learned anything at this point, then I’m basically a brick with lips and should probably hang it up.
Gratin Dolphinnoise
Dear Chef Bourdain;
If the tart alsacienne was a miss, the gratin dauphinoise was a hit, for sure. An easy recipe without a ton of ingredients and none of them hard to find – and really delicious. The biggest strike it has going against it is trying to pronounce the name, to be honest. Do French people find it hard, too? Is it a tongue twister in any language, or is it just my Yankee barbarian accent? I was a little disappointed to find out that it’s actually named after the Dauphine region of France, rather than a French prince who demanded potatoes or something. I made up this whole story in my head about the poor, harried chef who had to come up with fantastic potatoes or like, get the rack or something. As per the usual, the real world is considerably less interesting than the one in my head.
I made both the tart and the potatoes at the same time, as well as your chocolate hazelnut tart, and prepping for coq-au-vin and frisee aux lardon on Monday. This required a list – you recommend lots of lists in your forward and it’s good advice. So I put all the ingredients I’d need, plus a timeline of when things had to go in and for how long so they’d finish at the right time. I also put the page numbers for the recipes I’d be using at the bottom for easy reference. Here’s the list, next to your book, which I had to fish out of the recycling bin because I carried it with me to Costco and inadvertently left in a box that we tossed. I had a pretty nervous time trying to figure out what the heck happened to it. Basically what I’m saying, Chef, is you spent the night in a trash can, and I’m guessing it wasn’t the first time.
Never mind my awful handwriting, look at that smug bastard on the cover!
Stock day and poulet roti video
Dear Chef Bourdain;
With many apologies for its amateur nature, I present the video I made on stock day. I also apologize for my drunken ranting after Nathan from Ikillit.com and I broke into the third bottle of wine. But, for your entertainment, “Stock Day”.
Man. The camera puts on more than ten pounds!
Davy
Tart Alsacienne
Dear chef Bourdain;
Today I made your tart alsacienne from the “Les Halles Cookbook”. It didn’t turn out so well. This is my first “miss” so far, so I’ll chalk it up to my inexperience – after all, I don’t know what I’m doing and importantly, don’t know what a proper tart alsacienne should look or taste like. So I’m just following your instructions as carefully as I can.
I started with your “basic pie crust” – because even though it’s a tart, your recipe calls for a “pre-baked pie shell.” (Note: you don’t say what “pre-baked” means in this context. Given that you’re so careful to explain what everything else is, this was an omission. Fortunately, google is my friend.) Here’s what it looks like when the dough is put together, chilled, and then rolled out:
I pre-baked it, and that’s where things started to go wrong. I planned ahead for Monday night’s dinner and also made a tart crust for the chocolate-hazelnut tart – and while the pie crust picked up and moved over to the pie plate with relative ease, the tart crust was an unholy mess. It shattered, fragmented, smooshed, ripped, you name it. I might as well have not rolled it at all, but instead just thrown the wrapped tart crust in the tart pan and pushed it to the edges with my fingers. I did my best – then I covered both with parchment paper and weighted them down with rice. This is allegedly to keep the bottom from puffing up too much and the sides from collapsing – but since none of this is in your cookbook (coughcoughoversightcoughcough) I’m just guessing it was the right thing to do. Both of them came out looking more “puffy” than “flaky”. Oh and burny.
After that, I cooked the apples in butter and sugar on a parchment-paper lined cookie sheet.
I covered these in the cream custard, and baked it for 20-ish minutes. However, the custard hadn’t set, and I had to take it across town to MLF’s brother’s 30th birthday party, so it really needn’t to not be sloshy. I left it in for another nine minutes, and it was set – solid but not burned, golden brown on top. I was pretty psyched to try it, especially since the gratin daupinois rocked my socks so much. But I couldn’t really sneak a slice without it being super obvious that I’d sampled it. So I waited.
Here is the finished tart. It was insipid and bland, though it had nice texture and looked quite nice.
But basically it sucked, Chef. It just had no flavor – the apples weren’t very sweet, and the custard was really bland. The pie crust was nothing to write home about. Now, one of the two of us is clearly not a pastry chef. Possibly both. I talked this over with MLF’s mother, who is a very accomplished chef d’maison herself – we agreed it need a little kick. Cinnamon and nutmeg may be painfully American pie spices, but there’s a reason, ya know? Alternatively, I might add some Calvados, though this would be mixing yer basic Brittany coast with yer basic Alsaice-Lorraine, and I’m not sure if that’s the sort of mongrel-ry up with which the French would put. So maybe rum? But then it wouldn’t be a tart alsacienne, would it – it would be like… a tart buccanier or something. Which, come to think of it, sounds better.
‘Cause this tart? It was nasty.
Regards,
Davy
Meaty Meat McMeaterson
Dear Chef Bourdain;
This weekend it’ll be tart alsacienne and potatoes dauphinois. That last one is a serious bitch to pronounce if you’re not French. I think it means “Prince potatoes” but I’m going to call it The-Artist-Formerly-Known-As-Potatoes. But a friend of my lovely fiancee’s will be coming to dinner on Monday night, so since I’m already making a tart and I got a pie pan and tart pan, I’m going to go ahead and pre-make a pie shell for use Monday.
Now, MLF’s (My Love Fiancee) friend is a fairly bohemian lass, who designs latex and fetish clothing for a living. I assumed she was a vegetarian, and despaired of finding anything veggie-friendly in your cookbook. I know how you feel about vegetarians, but dude, I live in Los Angeles. We can’t discriminate out here, it’s just a numbers thing. And even your salads have meat, Chef!
As it turns out she’s not a vegetarian and so all is well. I’m thinking I’ll Coq-au-vin and potatoes gratin and then…some kind of veggie. As discussed, your cookbook isn’t the greatest for that. Sunday I’ve got the day to myself so it’s a perfect day to tackle a more time-consuming project like the coq-au-vin. Of course, that also means I’ll be drinking alone. Because you can’t make coq-au-vin without drinking, am I right? Even Assistant Chef Bourdain will be out of town. Not that he’s a great drinking companion – such a lightweight.
I’ll work something out, I’m sure. Heck, it involves chicken, wine and pie, so it can’t be too bad a day!
I’m ready to coq some vin;
Davy
Low Hanging Fruit
Dear Chef Bourdain;
Quite a lot of your recipes call for ingredients that are hard to come by. My brother-in-law-to-be is having his birthday this weekend, and I’ve been invited to contribute a dish or two to the celebration. He’s a good guy, so I figure I ought to do something pretty good, rather than just phoning in an apple pie or something. So instead, I’m going to work on a couple of recipes from Les Halles, to keep on schedule.
But Tony – can I call you Tony when I haven’t been drinking all the cooking wine? Tony, seriously, there are no vegetable recipes in this book. Does no one in bistros eat veggies? Or is it just that they’re such a given, a little olive oil, sauteed, a bit of sea-salt, that the recipe isn’t called for?
So, I wanted to try for one of the more ambitious dishes, since I have the weekend to prepare. But I still haven’t found a proper butcher here in LA, and when I ask the guys over at Whole Foods or Gelsons for stuff like caul fat, they look at me like I’ve just asked for a cake with baby in it. Funny story, that happened once – I was trying to get King Cake for Mardi Gras a few years ago, and I asked the woman at the bakery counter at a supermarket if they had it. Her English wasn’t very good, so she wasn’t sure what I meant. So I clarified; “King Cake – you know, the cake with the baby in it?” She looked utterly horrified and said “With BABY in it?”
I left it at that, it was clear they didn’t really have it there, so far more amusing to let her explain to her coworkers some mad cannibal was looking for cake. Anyway, trying to get the more esoteric cuts around here is about like asking for cake with baby in it.
So I’m going with low-hanging fruit – apple tart with custard and potatoes au gratin. But I have to stop with the easy stuff, and get working on tracking down the harder stuff locally. If anyone else who’s reading this – both of you! – knows a good butcher or meatmonger of any sort in LA, let me know.
Happily, some of the harder recipes involve cooking with wine. I like that. Let’s do more of it!
Cheers;
Davy
Spiced Pears in Red Wine
Dear Chef Bourdain;
Well, best laid plans and all that. I had planned to start with a proper meal with all the various courses today, Nov. 1st, and keep going throughout the year until I’m done. And then I got wickedly sick and was flogged up and down the length and breadth of Los Angeles by my cruel, cruel (but lovely! and kind! and wonderful! [shhh, she’s reading this]) fiancee. As a result I’m still sick today and still a little overhung from yesterday’s Halloween celebrations. Someone should have told me that Calvados is Bretonnian embalming fluid.
As previously discussed, the poulet roti was a fantastic success. I still hunger for it. In an effort not to start out completely behind the proverbial power-curve (curiously, the proverbial power-curves were in sharp display by my fiancee in her Batgirl costume) I decided to make something that would be easily done in an afternoon, and serve well as something at the party – preferably with some thematic element to go with our zombie theme. So, zombies, naturally, made me think of spiced pears. Eh, not really but I figured we could put ’em in a tube and call ’em embryos or something.
Your recipe for spiced pears in red wine seemed just the ticket – only a few ingredients, none of them terribly hard to find, and a prep time that doesn’t measure in days. I gathered the ingredients, and after being whipped back and forth across the house to do the cleaning, re-tar the roof, build a brick shed out back and all the other stuff Herself demands of the deathly ill, I got my “meez” together.
There’s the pears, peeled and sliced, the spices in a prep bowl, and a bottle of two buck chuck boiling with a cup of sugar. Actually I doubled the yield so it’s two bottles of two buck chuck (four whole dollars – American! – in wine!) and two cups of sugar.
It was nice having everything together when I was putting it together, even for something as dead simple as this. Once the wine had been boiling for five minutes, I put in the spices and lowered the pears in. I had the presence of mind not to just drop the pears in, because I didn’t relish the thought of boiling hot wine splashing all over me. Though come to think of it, it would have been pretty authentically zombie looking. Maybe next year.
Here’s the pears, boiling in the pot. I let them simmer, covered, and took them from the heat when they were nice and tender. I removed the pears with a slotted spoon, but I felt like the wine wasn’t really properly “syrup” since it was still quite liquid and didn’t really stick to the side of the pot or the spoon at all. So, I deviated from your recipe just a bit, and brought the liquid back to a boil for a while, until it was nicely thickened.
I then put pears, spices (except for the bay leaves) and the syrup into a canister that looked sort of mad-sciency, but this was just because it was a Halloween party. When we served them up, they were very well received. They were tender, with just a hint of the grittiness that pears have, but all of the nice autumnal flavor. The star anise and juniper berries contributed a nice, smooth warmth to the whole flavor – it was delicate and complex, and really quite delicious. A friend and I agreed that if served hot with a dollop of nice ice cream on them, they’d be even better, but then I suppose we’re filthy Yankee barbarians, and pretty much anything sweet seems like it ought to be better with ice cream on it.
I’ll add this to the “success” list, which is so far everything I’ve made. There won’t be a big fancy dinner tonight, but if I’m going to stay on schedule I need to do at least two items a week, and with the pears and the chicken, I’m on schedule. Three, if you include the herb butter that went into the chicken. I finished veal stock, chicken stock and demi-glace, too.
I’ve been picking the low-hanging fruit so far – next I have to try for something with some more obscure ingredients. My friends have so far been fixated on escargot as the weird stuff, but heck, snails are easy to find, just go outside after it rains. Or is that slugs? Same difference, right?
Have some Calvados, Tony;
Davy
How do you say “chicken of the gods” in French?
Dear Chef Bourdain;
Initial results are on the side of your cookbook being frickin’ amazing. While cooking up some veal stock, I made my first recipe from your book, poulet roti. I’ve roasted a lot of chickens in my day, and I thought Alton Brown’s “40 cloves and a chicken” was about as good as it gets. But this was so simple, so fast, and so amazingly good. Nathan and I had to force ourselves not to bolt the whole thing down when we sat down to eat, or my lovely fiancee would have had none. Eventually we found ourselves refusing to get up from the table, but using buttered bread to sop up the last bits of gravy and jus.
Seriously, Tony, if I can use your first name – that was some goddamn delicious chicken. The recipe is so easy, the ingredients so readily available, I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t have this sonnet of chickeny deliciousness all the time – but if this little project does anything to sing the praises of your methods, maybe I’ll have gotten us a little closer to a world full of perfect roasted chickens. We took pictures and videos, so you can see at least the beautiful golden brown of the skin, the deep amber of the gravy, and the ridiculousness of following your instructions about pre-cooking chicken-yoga. I’ll post all those soon enough, but what you’re missing is the divine aroma and the piquant, deep, complex flavor of the chicken. But what am I saying – it’s your cookbook, of course you’ve had it!
Thanks for an amazing meal, Chef Bourdain. More details to follow!
Davy
P.S. The stock turned out quite well, too!
P.P.S.: Here’s a picture of the finished chicken, resting before we made the gravy.
Chicken of the gods
Stock Day
Dear Chef Bourdain;
I know, I said my next post would be some sweet, sweet knife-porn. Which isn’t anywhere as dirty as you’d think. In fact, somebody somewhere just googled their way into something a *lot* different than what they were looking for. Anyway, this isn’t about knives, it’s about stock.
I’ve always used the stuff that comes in those flimsy waxed boxes, but the once or twice I’ve made my own stock, it was palpably better; and that was just chicken. So I’m …somewhat excited that this coming Sunday is going to be stock and demi-glace day. I’m going to make some chicken stock, and dark veal stock. I’ve only got one stock pot big enough, so for one day that’s enough. Oh, and some demi-glace, too.
Unusually for Los Angeles, it’s been cool and rainy this week. This is what we’d call Winter weather, but anywhere would be like…early Fall. But that’s pretty much perfect for making a good soup. My woman will be off at a baby shower for her sister-in-law, so it’ll just be me and Assistant Chef Bourdain (my dog) in the house making stock and drinking the left over wine. I’m going to start the day at the Venice farmer’s market to look for some good, locally sourced veggies in season, too. Maybe they’ll have some veal bones, too – but if not, the local Whole Foods does. I have mixed feelings about Whole Foods – they do have some good ingredients, but they’re heavily priced and owned by a deep Right Wing Libertarian who stands for almost everything I’m against.
But hey, any business is owned, by definition, by either a corporation or a business-owner, almost all of whom have a vested interest in making a profit and relatively few in being responsible community partners. So I’m just going to get the best stuff I can get wherever I can get it, and try my best to get it local and in-season. Fortunately California has an awful lot of really amazing stuff locally. In your book you sneer at Californian strawberries, but I have to say, we grow a mean berry out here, and they only have to come from Ventura, which is the next county over. Local enough for me!
I’m also going to grow my own thyme and parsley. Well, I say “I” but what I really mean fiancee, who unlike me is capable of growing more than just a cactus or succulent, unlike me. Her parents have a bay tree in their yard, too, so we have all the fresh bay leaves we might ever need. And that’s what I need to make “bouqet garni” which is in, I might point out, every damn recipe in your book. What’s up with that? I mean, if there’s going to be one thing in everything I make, it would probably be garlic.
But you, sir, are the chef. So I’ll do it your way and see how it turns out. Especially the parts where it says “and drink excessive amounts of good burgundy”. I’ll have to just brace myself, and do as you instruct.
Into your hands, I commend myself, Chef – now let’s fuckin’ cook!
Davy
(again, obligatory f-bomb.)
Reading the Book
Dear Chef Bourdain;
Thanks to the good graces of Amazon, I got the hardbound edition of your book delivered to my house yesterday. In the evening, and when inevitably I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep, it made good reading.
Initial observations – I’m going to be eating a crapload of mussels, apparently. You have at least five recipes for mussels. I think that’s going to be the hard part for me, since I don’t really like mussels, and vaguely fear them- my mother developed a spontaneous and deathly allergy to them in her 30’s, despite loving them all her life. But I’m in this to follow through, dagnabbit, so mussels I shall eat.
On another note, Chef – I’ll be quoting your book here, but I’m not going to reproduce your recipes in whole. There’s the obvious legal reasons; while quoting for the purpose of criticism is clearly “fair use” and legal – flat out copying them isn’t criticism, it’s just reproduction. (Not that kind of reproduction, sicko.) Also, I figure it’s probably not just you, Chef Bourdain, that’s reading this. Actually, I figure you’re not reading this at all. Who, then, am I talking to? Mysteries abound. Maybe I’ll start calling the dog “Chef Bourdain” and just solve the problem!
Anyway, to anyone else who is reading this and following along – get the book! Here it is, Les Halles Cookbook, on Amazon.com. Either that, or contrive to have yourself invited over for dinner. I understand the cook takes good wine as bribes.
Next up, I’m going to talk about knives, as well as start to pick my first few recipes and look for ingredients.
Regards;
Davy
Letters to Bourdain
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Letters To Bourdain 