Menu change, 16th April 2010 a new blog item

I was thinking today about what to write about next, have had fun lately with some nice ideas translating into some equally nice dishes, however as you may be aware these can be sometimes spread apart, but I tweak my menu weekly generally, and we photograph EVERYTHING, much to our waiting staffs annoyance, they have to wait around whilst 3 chefs get cameras and phones out to catalogue our dishes.

So I though I would include a somewhat regular slot of some of the more interesting tweaks we do to our menu as and when it happens, not every change though as sometimes the dishes are quite simple, or we simply do not have the time to take any decent photographs.

Lets start with 'Coquille Saint Jaques'

my commmis Tom has been running away with dish ideas over the last few months with a great emphasis on foaming and jellying and losing touch with the basics that make a dish great, so I set him the challenge of recreating this classic dish. I was first concerned that I hadn't shortened the leash enough when I started seeing tuilles being made out of breadcrumbs and balls ready for spherification in his mis-en-place.

Thankfully on this occasion he pulled it off and the dish is pretty as a picture and eating quality is excellent

scallop, button mushroom, duchesse potato, bread tuille, vin blanc spherification

the sphere itself is great fun, just warm enough to burst on the plate with just the right amount of sauce, the lemon puree adds acidity against the vin blanc and the duchesse.

the spheres waiting for an order

up close and personal

Next, I gave Ricardo, my sous chef, a similar goal to recreate something a little more classical and he chose a traditional portugese meat platter, translating this down was quite a task but, like Tom, pulled off only what can be described as a fantastic dish, has everything going for it, balance of flavour, texture and whilst it is a handsome portion, still leaves you wanting more at the end of it. Well done.

Poached chicken

sausage meat with choizo and black pudding

crisp pig ear

beef fillet

carrot puree

potato

turnip

chorizo oil

(and missing from this shot) Savoy cabbage

drizzle of jus and micro parsley

Herb wrapped balotine of salmon, wye valley asparagus, new potatoes

does exactly what it says on the box, the only tweak is glueing the salmon together with activa, other than that it is designed to show off new season English asparagus (and from Monday, Jersey royals) to their very best, simplicity is key to this dish.

Sea bream, fricasse of vegetables, sweetcorn veloute, popcorn cream and chicken popcorn

The bream is simply steamed, vegetables warmed in the veloute then a splash of popcorn bubbles and for texture a few pieces of popping corn I have popped in chicken fat and seasoned whilst hot. straightforward and nice and light for this lovely weather.

Last (but in no way least) G has produced ANOTHER Rhubarb and custard variation, the versatility of this combination and how it can be presented is incredible. With this incarnation he has introduced a little bitterness in the form of a yogurt coral cake and yogurt ice cream. Oldie but goldie and our guest do not tire of it any more than we do not tire of showing off this great combination in anyway our imagination takes us.

Anyway, hope this will help keep this blog more interesting to read, we will continue with the random other things we post about, but this should lessen the occasional drought of posts that we are guilty of having more than we really should.

Thanks to the guys this week for making my life much easier by coming up with such great dishes.

Gods molecular gastronomy

Odd title, but I take no credit for the work involved in creating it

but cannot live without it, regardless of what so called health experts tell me

as a chef for quite some time, I know the effects of not enough salt, not funny

All I can say everything in moderation

unless its fantastic

thanks be to God, for the saturated pools of the Camargue

Amen!

Risotto of herbs, parsley puree, horseradish

Recently we have had the Danish club of London join our membership, this led this Welsh boy to wonder what do Danes eat?

Through many a google trawl, I kept coming up with breaded plaice, open sandwiches, mini meatballs and the like of homely comforting food, stuff I could happily include in my bar menus, but nothing that really jumped out and grabbed me as restaurant food.

My background is in 5 star hotels, running minimum 2 AA rosette kitchens and like to feel that my food has not diminished by moving 'behind closed doors', I still carry the same culinary ethos and try to improve what I do each and every day, even if I do not sell a single dish to 'the general public', so consequently cannot be judged by the guide books. Not that I necessarily agree with these guides, they are, whether you like them or not, a benchmark by which we are judged. Some of my old restaurant customers indeed chose to dine with us, purely because they had found us on the AA website.

Anyway guidebook digression aside, our restaurant food is a little more refined than our bar offering, and as we do not cater for a huge amount of guests each day, I do not have restrictions on the amount of effort necessary to produce each dish as we have the time to do so. This does not come at the expense of flourishing the dish more than is genuinely required, the question is always asked 'does it need anything else', as long as it ticks all the flavour and texture boxes and it is visually appealing then it is good for the menu, sometimes however this can take 8 or 9 visits to the plate, but hey we have the time 'generally'

back to the dish at hand, I came accross this from Foodsnob's blog which is a great write up about one of Denmarks leading restaurants Noma, and was inspired by the razor clam dish to utilize these flavours in my own interpretation, during the testing I used razors which were fantastic, however for my current menu I had a scallop dish already waiting which made me re-think and produce a vegetarian version, where I have utilized salsify rather than razor clams, the result is a heavenly combination of the herbs, the aldente bite of the rice with the crisp rye bread, finished with the earthy salsify and creamy horseradish.

herb risotto (parsley, chervil, tarragon)

parsley puree

braised then roasted salsify

horseradish fluid gel

beet gel

crisp rye bread

olive oil

micro parsley

wood sorrel

Easter eggs, the long good friday

I have often wanted to make my Mrs. an egg for Easter, but usually opt for a last minute Lindor or Wispa egg on my way home from work on Easter Saturday, as I am now in a job that shuts down for bank holidays and left with a 4 day weekend I had finally run out of excuses to put my money where my mouth is.

One teeny problem, having always been well staffed in the pastry department, I have not had the neccesity to temper my own chocolate i realised for over 15 years, sure I have come up with desserts, but with the constraints of everyday work have often asked of my pastry section to do the nitty gritty of the mis-en-place before I step in at the 11th hour and take the credit for the creation, slightly different here, G is a great teacher and a chef who always pushes himself to the limit regardless of business levels, so I have taken to producing my creations and re-learning the pastry section piece by piece.

So Thursday, I jump on with G to make a god awful mess (I mean make eggs for our members with him), during this time (a whole 3 hours, where G tempered all the chocolate for me, so didn't practise any myself), I picked his brains on tempering, decorating and making the eggs themselves.

Armed with this new(ish) knowledge, and about 3kg of chocolate and some moulds in my bag I set off home with the express mission to make my darling Mrs. an egg within an egg within an egg. oh did I tell you how much experience I had? Not!

Firstly I did not think of one small issue, that would be my one small kitchen, if I thought I had made a mess at work with my ample stainless steel surfacing, my wooden worktops (tiny), and the ins and outs of family life over the Easter holidays certainly didnt mean that I was lessening the mess, quite frankly the opposite, and we will be cleaning that up for some time, a lot of it on the Good Friday hence the title

All that said, quite soon I had all my varying size moulds full of appropriate size chocolate shells, awaiting extraction (the tricky bit), and after trashing the first go of the larger shells had enough chocolate still to keep going.

I am happy not to have had to dash out to a 7-11 at the last minute, and managed to produce exactly what I had aimed for, but I have learned a valuable lesson that my Father always told me, and that was to never ask someone to do a job that I am not capable of doing myself, and from now on I think I will set out to teach myself some of the basics that we chefs can neglect from time to time, especially when we run larger brigades It is fine to utilize someone elses expertize, but not when you have no idea yourself, learn it then delegate, my new kitchen ethos.

note the safety tea-towel holding the egg off its stand at the front, probably the most nerve racking moment was removing this just seconds before presenting the egg

and as you can just see, the middle egg inside. took Mrs. W. 2 days before she would crack this layer