Chez Dad

Notes from the kitchen

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Dinner No. 5: Koji Butter, Hay-Smoked Carrots, Beef Wellington

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I promised myself and Steph that I wouldn’t grill or light any fires in our backyard, but man, sometimes you just see a pack of organic alfalfa hay at the pet store in Sonoma and it’s a deal too good to turn down.

And then you pick up some carrots the morning of dinner #5 and flash forward to 10:15pm, you find yourself crouched in your overgrown backyard by your father-in-law’s old canoe, frantically sparking an old worn out white bic lighter, trying to make a hotel pan of dry hay catch fire to imbue these delicate carrots with the whiff of a smoky barnyard.

You’re surrounded by a few guests/friends, and you think you maybe got away with it, and then your neighbor complains that the smoke is wafting in through her window and do you, uh, mind? Besides what are you even lighting on fire down there?

Smoked Black Cod Bottarga

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Blessed are the bottarga. Bottarga is mullet or tuna roe, cured with salt and air-dried, and in my top-5 favorite ingredients. It’s BIG in Sicily and I think there’s also a decent Bottarga scene in Florida where the mullet run wild like the Salmon of Capistrano.

One of the reasons I’m writing this blog post, dear reader, is because it’s surprisingly hard to find a good recipe for bottarga. Using this recipe as a starting point, I covered the roes in kosher salt for 3 days, then a quick rinse and up they went to hang in the garage for 2+ weeks. Then I smoked them in the Weber at 225 degrees over applewood for about 3 hours.

[Read more…] about Smoked Black Cod Bottarga

Dinner No. 3: Ling Cod Brandade Fritters, Chicken Liver Mousse & Lime-Cured Trout

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Steffo dough & cultured butter

Alert the media: I’m still sticking with the tried-and-true formula of the Skyr culture but I’ve upgraded my cream to Alexander Farms this go around. Good stuff, might be the best batch yet.

Chicken liver mousse, persimmon, sake gelée, buckwheat

A small buckwheat tartlette, topped with a pretty silky chicken liver mousse, a brunoise of persimmon, and a gelée of sake and rice wine vinegar, garnished with sorrel/oxalis.

Puffed nori rice chip, lime-cured trout, crème fraiche

Puffing rice = good, clean fun.

I overcooked koshihikari sushi rice, blended and dehydrated, then fried the chips to puff and dusted with nori powder and salt. Topped it off with little slices of cured trout in the style of a gravlax, crème fraiche, nasturtium, and radishes.

Salted ling code brandade fritter, meyer lemon aioli

Major hat tip to the Camino cookbook for the recipe, which I more or less stuck to, and Monterey Fish Market for the Ling Cod. Love me some brandade.

Cauliflower soup

The simplest dish of the night. I cooked the world’s largest cauliflower from the Ferry Building farmers market (I think two heads weighed in at 15 lbs total) with some leeks and shallot, covered with water, and fortified with some white miso at the end, pre-vitamix.

Potato & pumpkin millefeuille, buttermilk, trout roe

This was my favorite dish of the night: a pavé or millefeuille (not really but sounds good) of layers of mandolined russet potato and and an heirloom pumpkin variety, cooked in a bit of cream and butter, then pressed overnight, sliced and seared off. Served with a bit of my fresh buttermilk and some house-cured trout roe. Nice dish.

Squash agnolotti, shinko pear

For the dough, I used the French Laundry’s recipe featuring a boat load of egg yolks. The filling was roasted squashes with miso, aleppo pepper, and a bit more of that buttermilk. The sauce was a beurre monté.

Pork belly, vinaigre celtique, celeriac & quince

A minor grease fire on the stovetop topped off with a fire alarm made for an inauspicious start to this course. The night before, I had braised a pork belly which I pressed in the fridge all day, then sliced off and finished in a pan. The vinaigre celtique is a reduction of apple cider vinegar and cider (50/50), macerated with licorice root, a bit of cinnamon, and some star anise I think. I looked at the ingredients for Olivier Roellinger’s bottle and winged it a bit. It’s similar to an apple balsamic but with a Christmas-y vibe.

Honey madeleines

Hat tip to Claudia Fleming for the recipe.

Caramelized meyer lemon tart

I busted out the torch for this one and lets just say there were some issues with the structural integrity.

Dinner No. 2: Chawanmushi, Black Cod Collars, and Chicken Roulade

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Today I return with tales from our second dinner, and what has to be the most ambitious meal I’ve ever cooked, which is really saying a lot. 10 people, 8 courses. I think dessert was time stamped around 11:30 and we had just one casualty: a humble celeriac agnolotti that just never really came together. RIP celeriac agnolotti.

First bite? You guessed it. Bread and butter, baby. Playing the hits is a great way to appease your guests as you furiously restart your wifi connection because the sous vide circulator you bought last year needs the internet to turn on for some reason and said internet is on the fritz just as the early-comers arrive.

The bread here is all Steph, based off a Tartine recipe with Koji rice. The combination has me thinking about using koji, probably along with a dairy culture, to add some funk to the next batch of butter I churn up. Mmm, funk.

Oh shit, now it’s palate cleanser time! Oysters (little Sweetwaters™ from Hog Island that took me 30 minutes to open) with an herbal granita (blended seedless cukes, meyer lemon juice and zest, some thai basil, and purple nasturtiums, froze in a sheet tray, and fluffed with a fork when I remembered).

The third dish of the night was carta di musica with cultured butter and cured trout roe, inspired by an old April Bloomfield dish at the John Dory and a trip to Sardinia way back when. We baked the semolina crackers–also known as pane carasau–on the Baking Steel, brushed with *our* butter, and topped with the roe, which I cured earlier that day in a quick 10 minute brine with sea salt. It was my first time working with McFarland Springs Trout roe. 10/10, would cure again.

A really smooth soup always has a place at my table and in my heart. This one featured a bunch of roasted heirloom squashes from the market (baby butternut from Tierra Farms and two other I’m blanking on. In my defense, the farmer I bought them from was also extremely high) cooked down with cider, blended with a dashi made from the roasted skins and some mendocino konbu, and fortified with some miso and cider lees. The garnish was a kumquat kosho I made earlier this year for a bit of citrusy heat.

I followed that crowd favorite with a dish that, er, challenged some Western palates: chawanmushi, a steamed Japanese egg custard with dashi. We’re still a bit light on serving dishes, so I made do with some old terra cotta yogurt cups I bought in France years ago. How rustic. We served the custard at room temperature with sea urchin from Bodega Bay, and garnished with Asian pear, dashi vinegar, and more of those nasturtiums.

Ooh! Beets and yogurt was technically an off-menu item. The beets were roasted and then dehydrated for four hours, then glazed in beet juice, rose geranium vinegar, and a bit of butter. Served over a house-cultured yogurt (used Skyr culture to mixed effect) and garnished with fig leaf oil.

Next up, wifi issues finally in the rear mirror, it was time for that chicken ballotine (french for tube of poultry!). I used the ChefSteps Buffalo Bill technique of removing the skin in one piece, removing the breasts and rolling them in the skin with a dusting of transglutaminase, an enzyme that binds proteins together. Fun fact, I had tried to order it from Amazon to no avail. I ended up calling the fine folks at Commis, the fanciest restaurant near my apartment, and convincing the kitchen to let me “borrow” a couple of tablespoons. Sure enough, like any good Michelin-starred neighbor would do, they came through in the clutch. Shouts to them.

I cooked the ballotines/roulades sous vide at 65 C, then fried to order and sliced into half moons. Served with braised radicchio, a quince mostarda, and a chicken jus. Pretty nice dish!

The final savory course was a “grilled” black cod collar, marinated in shio koji. And by grilled, I mean cooked under my anemic broiler as I cursed the industrial designers at GE. I had some time to think and reflected on my 7am drive through the pier of Fisherman’s Wharf, dodging seagulls and crab pots, to pick up all my order at TwoXSea. I picked up some black cod roe because why not for a bottarga experiment. More on that in a later post.

For dessert, we baked and chilled a persimmon pudding, then sliced into tranches and griddled in butter. Served with a simple whipped cream.

Dinner No. 1: Indian Summer

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Well folks, the inaugural Chez Dad came and went and let me tell you, it was a real doozy.

The idea to start a pop up restaurant inside my own apartment has been something I’ve been threatening to do for years. Yes, there have been plenty of elaborate dinner parties where I procrastinate until 4pm and serve fried chicken for 15 people at 11:15pm. But it wasn’t until our recent move to Oakland and seeing those sweet sunset views over Lake Merritt that I though, yeah, this is the ideal setting to push for a Michelin star from the comfort of my own kitchen.

So a few months back, we had 10 friends join us for a seven course meal. A mere two hours earlier, Steph had returned from Ikea with foldable chairs so no one would have to sit on an upturned plastic beer fermenting bucket like they sometimes had to in our old place. Praise be that we had invested in the Chez Dad monogrammed steak knives years earlier.

Alas, I forgot to take pictures except for the night’s crowning achievement: the sight of one perfect little puffed potato in my palm, a neat little trick I practiced (mostly unsuccessfully) all week.

I’ve been accused of using a lot of french words on menus and listing ingredients people have never heard of and I stand guilty of that charge today. In the spirit of transparency though, I’ve gone into some detail below on the products, techniques, and the thought process behind them:

Steph’s bread with house-cultured butter, fermented with an assist from some fancy Icelandic yogurt. Decent tang, but could’ve gone even funkier. Next time, next time. Steffo Dough™, always a hit.

Puffed potato, also known as a pomme soufflé. Served with crème fraiche and za’atar. Let me tell you, puffing potatoes is not for the faint of heart. I had a really excellent version at Momofuku Ko last year and finally worked up the gumption to email them for their recipe, which calls for frying the spuds at three different oil temperatures, all while vigorously swirling the oil in clockwise circles. I think we got six more or less perfect and that was a win in my book. This video really captures the magic.

Gilda with pacific anchovies, purchased from the good people at Sea Forager and cured in the style of boquerones (hat tip to State Bird Provisions’ recipe and the one at Hunter Angler Gardener Cook). Served with red shishitos from Happy Quail Farms, a rare-ish find.

Clarified apple soda (zero proof) made with local gravensteins from Stan Devoto’s farm. Following a technique from Dave Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence, I clarified with pectinase, an enzyme that, you guessed it, breaks down pectin, and then force carbonated in plastic bottles. Boy, did it foam like a bastard. Tasty, but a bit on the sweet side for dinner, I probably should’ve watered it down a bit.

Halibut crudo with agrumato, apple, radish. I cured the halibut overnight in konbu, a type of seaweed. It’s a Japanese technique called no kobujime, where you soak the konbu sheets in water until they’re pliable, rub them down with a half lemon, salt the fish, and then wrap them up into snug little green packages, and refrigerate overnight. Agrumato is extra virgin olive oil with whole citrus thrown in the press for good measure. This one had some citron in it.

Gazpacho with tomato, husk cherry, and Jimmy Nardello pepper. The soup was a recipe from the French Laundry cookbook (no bread, heavy on the cuke). We poured this one tableside like all the cool kids are doing these days. I have to say, Nardellos are truly the king of peppers. Husk cherries, like a sweet little tomatillo, were a nice addition as well.

Rockfish kasuzuke with shichimi togarashi, honey & lime emulsion. Kasusuke is another Japanese fish-curing technique, this one using sake lees, or the dead yeast at the bottom of the barrel which sounds less appealing. It adds some sweet sake undertones and is an all around classy touch. I gave my sous chef Steph the wrong instructions for this and she whisked it all together instead of properly emulsifying it so it was loose but still tasty and no one knew that secret until just now. The original idea was from a meal I had at Spring in Paris way back when.

Stuffed chicken wing with sticky rice, fermented pluot-fresno hot sauce. You learn a lot about yourself when you spend your night boning out chicken wings at 2am and suddenly realize your podcast stopped a while back so you’ve just been working in monkish silence for hours. I stuffed the wings with sticky rice mixed with shallot, white shoyu, mint, and opal basil. They were roasted and glazed with the hot sauce and garnished with Thai basil. The hot sauce was a mash of fresnos, pluots, garlic, and 7% salt, fermented for 3 weeks, and then blending with pineapple and apple cider vinegars.

Duck aiguillette with lacto-fermented peach, tokyo turnip, olive. Man, few things beat the excitement of getting an overnight delivery of eight duck breasts to your door. I salted, scored, and air-dried them overnight in the fridge to dry them out a bit. The lacto-fermented peach (2% salt, 5 days) was blended and emulsified with some olive oil.

Tarte aux quetsches with fig leaf crème anglaise. Prunes, man. Pretty good, pretty good. I toasted the fig leaves, crushed them a bit, and then let them steep in the crème anglaise. It’s a dead ringer for coconut.

Thanks again to everyone who came. We’ll be announcing new dinners in the near future. Sign ups are over here.