Brined Roasted Rack of Pork

I decided to do this rack of pork since it's been while since I pulled off anything that could be considered a main course. Why the rack of pork and not any of the million other main courses in the book you might ask? Mostly because I'm very lacking in the stock department right now and nearly every other recipe requires some kind of stock or sauce. That's what we call, in the business, foreshadowing so keep your eyes peeled.

The first step was to brine the pork. That's not quite true. The first step was to go and buy it. This was, aside from possibly turkey at Thanksgiving, the largest piece of meat that I've ever purchased. The nice people at Whole Foods were kind enough to cut me a piece almost exactly the size that I needed, which just happened to be four and a half pounds.

There it is in all its lazy, flopped over glory. After the pork had been brined for a day, rinsed off and patted dry, I cut a shallow crosshatch pattern into the fat on the topside of the roast. This helps the rendering of the fat as well as makes it a bit easier for the meat to absorb some of its accompanying flavors.

Next up was to tie the roast to force it into a uniform shape that would allow for consistent cooking throughout the entire piece of meat. The Keller method involves using a needle threaded with kitchen twine, which I did not have. I made do, somewhat successfully, by just tying the twine around the entire roast and pulling it fairly tight. It forced the meat into more of a round shape. It wasn't perfect since I was still wrapping the twine around the ribs, but it was certainly an improvement. Check out the difference between the first and last pictures of this post and you can see the different shapes of the chops.


Once the meat was tied up I seasoned it with salt and pepper and let it sit at room temperature for about an hour. After that, it was time to cook.

The first step was to sear the roast. I used my fancy dutch oven for this, and it worked absolutely perfectly. I added just a bit of canola oil to the heated dutch oven, followed by a tablespoon of butter, and then seared the pork on all sides for a total of about 5 minutes. I threw in a little bit of thyme and some whole garlic cloves and let them cook in the oil for a few minutes.


I turned the roast meet side up and covered it with some of the thyme and garlic. Into the oven it went for 15 minutes, after which I added a bit more butter to the pan, basted the meat, and returned it to the oven. The recipe said it would be done after just fifteen more minutes, but I found that it took close to an additional 30 minutes after that (an hour total). I took out the roast and let it sit for about fifteen minutes to allow the juices to distribute themselves and for a bit of carryover cooking.

It looks pretty good, right? After the fifteen minutes were up, I quickly snapped off the twine and sliced the meat between the ribs into some pretty large chops.


That looks really good. And it was. In fact, it was better than really good. It was probably the best pork I've ever had, save maybe some BBQ, but that's a totally different animal. Not literally, figuratively. It was incredibly juicy, tasted of the herbs and garlic, and perfectly cooked. The inside was ideal and the sear on the outside was great as well. When we ate it for lunch the next day I was expecting your typical dry, reheated pork. Somehow though it was still juicier than almost any pork I'd had previously. All of this for probably only 20 minutes of active cooking time and maybe 90 minutes total. It would have easily served six or eight people, so it could be a great dinner entree.

Steak Frites - Flatiron Steak with Herb Butter and French Fries

I ordered steak frites when I went to Bouchon last October, thinking that I should order the stereotypical bistro dish. Every single bite was worth it. That's saying something, considering the giant pile of fries that come with your steak. I've made this dish before, but not this particular recipe. Those endeavors were not exactly failures, but they were nothing spectacular either. I prepared this recipe in a completely interleaved manner that would be 100% impossible to understand if I wrote this post chronologically. So you're going to get the steak, and then the fries, and then everything all together. Say thank you. You're welcome.

The choice of steak seems to be up for debate, or at least personal preference. Keller says Bouchon uses flatiron. Hanger steak (aka onglet, Anthony Bourdain's choice) or top sirloin are suitable substitutes. The grocery store I was at had a single flatiron steak, so I bought a top sirloin steak as well.

The two steaks I bought were very thin. This worried me since the recipe calls for browning on the stovetop and then finishing them in the oven. My worries were not unfounded. I preheated the oven to 450 anyway. The ingredients here are pretty simple. A couple of steaks, a few tablespoons of butter, a ton of shallots, and some thyme.

I seasoned the steaks with salt and pepper and heated a skillet over high heat. When the pan was nice and hot I added in a film of canola oil. A few seconds later the steaks and a teaspoon of butter when in. I started to let the steak brown on the first side but it became apparent almost instantly that the steaks were just too thin to allow them to brown completely. I flipped the steaks pretty early.


I basted the top side of the steaks with the butter and oil while the bottom side 'browned'. I had to deviate from the recipe at this point. The recipe said to drain the excess fat while the steak was still browning and then add the shallots, thyme, and a tablespoon or so of butter. They should cook with the steak for a few minutes before the steak is removed and shallots are finished. I took the steaks out immediately and cooked the shallots on their own. I put everything onto a baking sheet when it was done.

See how nice and browned those steaks are? The steaks were cooked all the way through by this point, so there would be no finishing them in the oven. I turned the oven off and used it just to keep the steaks warm while I finished the fries. It would not be long.

I started the fries but cutting the russet potatoes into matchsticks that were probably close to 4 inches long and 1/4 inch cross sections. I soaked the potatoes in cold water for about fifteen minutes to removes some of the excess starch. Here's the first possible chance for things to go wrong, but more about that later.


I went out and bought a gallon of peanut oil to make these since everyone seems to think that peanut oil is the best for frying. I would not argue that one bit. I put probably 80% of the gallon in my brand spankin' new dutch oven and heated it to 320 degrees Fahrenheit. It made this cool ripple in the pot, so I took a picture of it.

After draining the potatoes pretty well on paper towels, I added a bunch into the oil. The instructions said to cook them for 5 to 6 minutes or until they were a very pale gold. This is where my problems started. My potatoes were a pale gold in about 2.5 minutes.


I took them out and drained them on paper towels again while I finished the other batches. When the entire set of fries were through the first cooking, I heated the oil up to 375 degrees. The fries are supposed to get cooked for another 2 or 3 minutes at this higher temperature (it crisps the outside now that the insides are already cooked), but my fries only made it about 15 seconds. Weird. My only guess is that I didn't soak the potatoes for long enough and that they were too dry. If it's not that, I have no idea.

Whatever the cause, I sprinkled the fries with some salt and assembled everything. Assembly here means put a steak and some fries on a plate and then add a tasty slice of herb butter to the steak. It's almost time to eat.




Between the overly colored fries and underly colored steak, this was not as nice as I expected it to be. In case you wondering what all the green stuff is, it's chard. It has nothing to do with Bouchon, but it may have been the best part of this dinner. By no means were the steak and fries bad, they were perfectly acceptable. It was not, however, restaurant quality. One thing that was very noticeable was that the flatiron steak was much better than the top sirloin. It was beefier without being any tougher and it stood up better to the fries and butter.

Our consensus was that maybe this is a dish, at least the fries part anyway, that is best left to restaurants. For $3 you can have a plate full of golden brown deliciousness, and there won't be a gallon of oil on your stove a week and a half later. I'd give it a shot again, but probably only one more. It's a reasonably big mess to deal with too often. Still tastes pretty good though.

Macaroni Gratin

Who doesn't like macaroni and cheese? Really, is there anyone? I didn't think so. This is a pretty amazing, and fairly simple dish to put together. Keller talks it about it being "a standard side dish in bistros, but in my bistro it's the whole dinner. It's very rich, but every bite is worth it.

Just to set the bounds a little bit, I should mention that this recipe offers the chance to make the macaroni gratin your own by adding in things like mushrooms or ham. I decided to go the boring route and just make it plain, and I'm kind of glad that I did. I tend to like my food simple; the fewer the ingredients the better. You can add ham or mushrooms to yours, it just won't be as good as mine was.

The shopping list for this is pretty simple, and nothing you wouldn't expect from a macaroni and cheese recipe. Well, a Thomas Keller macaroni and cheese recipe anyway. We've got elbow macaroni, nutmeg, thyme, Comte cheese, and panko breadcrumbs.

You're also going to need some mornay sauce. You're not going to find that at the store, so go read about it here.

Step number 1: Make the macaroni. This requires absolutely no explanation other than to note that after you cook it, rinse it in cold water and drain it on paper towels. Let it hang out there while you're busy doing other things.

I had made the mornay sauce the previous night so I had to reheat it. I took the books advice and added a little extra cream as it warmed because it was more than a bit thick. That warmed up well, and I added the macaroni then seasoned it with some salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. This is also where the ham, mushrooms, lucky charms, or whatever else you had laying around to ruin the macaroni and cheese would go in. But you're not going to do that, right?

It all went into the nice casserole dish that you saw in the picture above. While the pasta was cooking I had mixed together the thyme, cheese, and breadcrumbs for the topping. I sprinkled that across the top of the casserole dish, and into the oven it went. I think I kept it in for about 20 minutes and then broiled it for a few more to attempt to brown the top. I only partially succeeded with the browning because my casserole dish is labeled, quite prominently, NO BROILER. So I left it in there until I has far surpassed my comfort zone, and this is what popped out. Not too shabby:


It was thick and gooey, yet crisp on the top. The one improvement that I would have made would be to increase the amount of breadcrumbs and cheese in the topping. It was a little thyme heavy for me. More importantly though, I really like that crisp topping. It also served as lunch the next day, where it served it's role admirably. The sauce may have lost a little of its original creaminess, but it was still well worth eating. Overall this was an incredibly good and pretty easy dish to make, even if i did spread it over two nights.

I've been saying most of the recent dishes have been easy. That either means my skills are advancing, or the end of this little venture is going to be very difficult. Hopefully it's the former.

Trout with Haricots Verts and Almonds

I like trout. I ate a lot of it growing up in Upstate New York and spending a lot of time fishing on Lake Ontario. That was a solid 15 years ago though, and this was probably the first time that I have had it since then. It's certainly the first time I cooked it.

My squirmy-ness quotient for foods that look like animals and not like food was tested for the first time here. When I first flipped through Bouchon, there were a few things that I was (and still am) a little afraid to make, mostly because they are unfamiliar to me. Not necessarily in a taste kind of way, but in the preparation of the dishes and in experiencing the work that needs to occur to transform animal into food. These included the foie gras, frog legs, and whole fish. Whole fish was pretty far behind the other two, but looking your dinner in the eyes is an odd thing to do, so it still makes the list.

Enough with the introduction. This is another very simple dinner that can probably be made in under an hour. It's hard for me to tell since I have to arrange everything nicely to provide you with the (not so) pretty pictures. Even given all that extra work, I don't think this took more than an hour, so that should be pretty beatable.

So, who wants to take a guess what kind of ingredients we're talking about here? What would someone put in Trout with Haricot Verts and Almonds? How about trout, haricot verts, and almonds? Close, but I substituted plain old green beans for haricot verts. Now someone who actually knows these things should weigh in below, but from what I can find there are fairly small differences between green beans and haricot verts. Mainly a language translation. That, and haricot verts may or may not be longer and thinner with a slightly more complex flavor than green beans. I wouldn't know because I could only find green beans at Whole Foods. The picture is rounded out with a lot of butter, lemon, and parsley.


The first step of the recipe is pan-dressing the trout. This is especially easy when you buy your fish already pan-dressed. The only work left for me was a quick snip of the dorsal fin and to chop off the tail. All done. All the bad stuff was previously removed. I ended up with something like this. Well not something like this, this:

Time to prep the green beans. Blanch 'em for about five minutes, drain, stick 'em in some ice, drain again. Next.

Completion of this dish cost me three burners. It's a good thing the other dish, Sauteed Spinach with Garlic Confit, was a single burner dish. I guess I need to invest in a nonstick saute pan large enough to accommodate two fish at a time if I'm going to be making this a lot. Here's a shot of everything (for both dishes) in place:

My stuff, as they say, is in place. Let's cook. Wait, not quite yet. Now is when I realized that I needed toasted, and not raw, sliced almonds. Into the oven they went for about 15 minutes and then it was time to cook. I took the now salt and peppered trout and added them to some preheated and pre-oiled nonstick skillets, skin side down for four minutes. You only cook these babies on one side. This was a new idea for me, and it requires adding something pretty hot on the top of the fish to complete the cooking process, but it worked out just fine.

While that was going on, the beans, some butter and some water went into a pan. I heated it for quite a few minutes until the water had evaporated and the green beans were nice and butter-coated. Want a picture? Ok...

Look how green they are! They got the salt and pepper treatment as well and then placed on the side to wait patiently for everything else.

Just about done at this point. You have the option of cutting off the heads of the fish at this point, but that wouldn't be any fun, would it? They went on to a plate. I even remembered to warm the plate for once, I guess I am learning around here. The fish were topped with the green beans. The only thing left was some brown butter sauce. You may remember something similar from the gnochhi post, and it's pretty easy. Melt and then brown a bunch of butter, add and brown the almonds, add in some lemon juice and parsley. Serve.


I couldn't get the head to stay upright, which led to looking at the inside of the head and nothing else. That wasn't great or intended. Oh well. The fish itself was very good. The almonds provided a nice crunch and the green beans some texture. The fish was light, not too fishy but not too plain. The butter sauce was rich, but the lemon provided just the right kick. All in all, a definite keeper than can be finished with not problem in about the time of two servings of Chicken and Egg Sammies Deluxe.

Mussels with Saffron and Mustard

Mussels are probably one of my favorite creatures of the sea. Really, it's anything that comes in a shell, followed by tuna, a long chasm of emptiness, and then everything else. This dish, as I'm making a habit of in the early going, was pretty simple. That does not bode well for the end of this little Bouchon saga but we'll deal with that when we get to the end.

Here are the ingredients:


Starting with the mussels and going clockwise, we've got mussels, parsley, butter, shallots and garlic confit, mustard, and salt and pepper. There's also a bottle of wine involved, but that was already opened and somewhat consumed, so good photography it would not make. What's that in the middle? That enriched uranium. Not really, it's saffron, but it should of been for how expensive it was. One gram of it will set you back about 5 bucks. Five bucks isn't bad though, so what am I'm complaining about? Let's change from dollars/gram to the more American friendly dollars/pound. How does $2,270 per pound sound? It sounds absurd to me. Wikipedia has all sorts of facts about how little saffron you can get from a flower. There's also an insanely scientific way for quantifying the quality of saffron. So scientific in fact, that it sounds like everybody skips it for the more tangible 'How does it taste?' test.

Ok, back to the cooking. This is a one pot deal, so you're going to need a big pot.
Melt the butter, then add all of the dry ingredients. Cook that for a bit, then add the wine and mustard. Cook that for a bit more, and the saffron, put on the top, and stop cooking that for a bit. Wait somewhere between 5 minutes and a few hours.

Let's prepare the mussels. I was introduced to mussels by James, and I still take most of my muscle mussel advice from him. This seems reasonable, since he's from here. Where there's water, there are mussels, right? After a brief discussion on de-bearding them, we decided that it looked like it was already done. Hint for later: They weren't.

Meanwhile, I was bringing the broth back to a simmer. This didn't take too long because I waited much closer to five minutes than a few hours. In went the mussels, mix it up a little, cover, and cook. Three or four minutes later it was time to throw on some parsley and pepper and head for the table. Here's what we ended up with:


They were very good, if not beard-y. It was incredibly easy to make, and pretty inexpensive as well. My unrefined palette had a tough time finding the saffron, but I chalk that up to not really knowing exactly how much 4 pinches is. I probably did not use enough because each little thread is worth more that the rest of the dinner combined, so that may have been my fault. Other than that though, everything was delicious.

Gnocchi with Mushrooms and Butternut Squash

Gnocchi, part 2. I wanted to write gnocchii or gnocchies or gnocchis, but I couldn't figure out which one was correct. This is the first actual finished recipe I've made from the book, so hopefully these reports get a little more interesting as time goes on. Not to say this one is going to be boring...

This dish is basically prepared in three steps. First comes the squash, then the mushrooms, then the gnocchi. After all was said and done, it was really pretty easy to put together. That doesn't mean it turned out perfect, but that wasn't the recipe's fault. Here's the 'before' picture:



Preparing the squash consisted of cooking it in a skillet with some butter, sage, salt and pepper. Very simple really. The recipe says to cook it for four to six minutes over medium heat and then to lower it and cook until done. I managed not to wait long enough and the squash was a bit underdone. I don't totally blame myself for that though. Given the 4-6+ minutes guideline, I cooked them for a solid 15 minutes. I thought they would have been done by then, and in fact some of them were. Either way, it was decided that the squash was probably the best component of the finished dish. It could easily be a side on its own. So two lessons here:

• Cook stuff until it tastes like they're done, not by time.
• Dice your food evenly, or else half will be done and half will still be rock solid.
  

Next up was the mushrooms. Same general principle here, except for use shallots and thyme instead of sage. Mistake number two came in here. The recipe called for 1.5 teaspoons of salt. As I was pouring it over the mushrooms I thought to myself, 'Man, this little adventure is going to raise my cholesterol by 50 points.' Well, they were very salty. So here's lesson number 3:

• Trust yourself. If it looks like more salt than you'll like, it probably is.

So now you have some squash and mushrooms hanging out with nowhere to go. We'll remedy that by putting some of the already made gnocchi into a skillet with some olive oil and butter. Heat those mustard-y pillows of dough up until they're nice and browned on all sides. This again was longer than I thought it would take and longer than the recipe seemed to think as well. Who knew recipes could think? Anyway, once they're finished add in the squash, mushrooms, and some chives until everything is nice and warm. Almost done...

The last step is to make a brown butter sauce. I had cooked the two gnocchi in two skillets for space reasons. One was stainless steel, one was nonstick. Since the stainless steel one was larger, all the gnocchi went into there. That means the butter for the sauce went into the nonstick skillet. Cool right? Not so much. It turns out that it's really hard to see when butter has browned if the skillet is black on the bottom. So after a half minute or so and a smell that was suspiciously close to the smell of burning I added the parsley and a spray of lemon juice. And that was that.

Add the vegetables and gnocchi to the plate, spoon on some sauce, and it's dinner time. Everything turned out deliciously well. How could it not with a stick of butter involved? I decided that if I had received this in a restaurant it would have passed, but probably only with a grade of B- or so. That certainly wasn't the recipes fault though. Almost all of the points lost had to do with my ability to tell when things were finished cooking, with the exception of the salt on the mushrooms.

So we'll end it there, blaming it on the book. Yeah, the book. Here's the picture, which I was pretty proud of:


Update: I made this again with the rest of the frozen gnocchi. After showing a little more patience and a more judicious use of salt, it was absolutely fantastic. I used cremini mushrooms instead of shiitake, but I believe that was the only deivation. Right now it holds the claim to the best Bouchon recipe yet.

Gnocchi a la Parisienne

First up, Gnocchi a la Parisienne. That, for the record, was the last bit of French you're going to get here. This is mostly because it's one of the few in the book that I could actually say. From now on you get the English names, in this case it's herb gnocchi. See, who knew that a la Parisienne really mean herb? Hint: it doesn't.

I chose this first mostly for reasons of convenience. I'm lacking somewhat in the pots and pans department, and my new dutch oven won't get here for a few weeks. That left me trying to find a recipe that does not use stocks or stock-based sauces. That's harder than it may seem in this book, but gnocchi will work just fine.

The ingredients here are pretty simple; some pate a choux (think profiterole dough and hence the a la Parisienne), mustard, herbs, cheese. That's it. Sound boring? It kind of is, and I probably should have already pointed out that these gnocchi are the base of another recipe. Everything looked like this before I had my way with it:


I'll be making Gnocchi with Mushrooms and Butternut Squash out of it. That brings me to the next point. I'll be making Gnocchi with Mushrooms and Butternut Squash out of half of it. And then the two of us will eat about 10% of that. It makes a lot. Like 240. Next time I'll be adjusting. In the meantime, the rest are nice and frozen.

The recipe takes a fair amount of time to make, but it's by no means hard. Putting the dough together took maybe half an hour, but the actually poaching took a long time. Not just a boring long time either. A long time during which you consistently splash 200 degree water on your arms. Fun stuff! Seriously though, between the mostly active cooking time and the waiting, it took a touch under three hours.

Anyway, you cook the little dough balls for a couple of minutes (remember that they get cooked again later), drain them, and put them in the fridge or freezer. Couldn't get any easier. How were they, you ask? Well, if you've been playing along, you've probably caught on that this recipe is just the base for another. Translation, I have no real idea yet, but they sure look like they have potential. I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, so you'll have to wait for the follow on recipe to get a look.