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Woosday Food Shots: Egging a Dinner Party
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Charleston Dave
Posts: 571
I enjoy combining a variety of cooking techniques when cooking for my friends, and my original motivation in getting an Egg was to be able to use smoke as an ingredient when cooking. I did a seated dinner party at home Sunday night and managed to work the Egg into two of five plates. Here are some pics for Woosday:
Amuse: Egg-smoked fennel and red-pepper vodka flight, with a single garlic crouton and prosciutto-wrapped cantaloupe (Egg used to smoke-roast fennel and red bell pepper)
First course: Sous vide shrimp over homemade lemon peel fettucine (I mixed microplane-grated lemon peel into the pasta dough). Served with a 1994 Sterling Sauvignon Blanc.
Intermezzo: Granita
Second course: Sous vide lamb finished with a high-temp Egg sear and bourbon barrel smoke, plated with a risotto of spring pencil asparagus and fresh portabella mushrooms, plus wilted spinach. Served with 2004 Salento Enzo di Settte Rue Primitivo.
This might be one case where chips work better than lumps for smoking. The lamb is already cooked and I’m turning to the Egg for an aesthetic sear plus a quick smoke. The chips give lots of smoke quickly, so a sear of a minute or so per side is enough to impart smoke flavor concurrent with the sear. Wood chunks might not be able to produce enough smoke that rapidly. BTW, lamb prepared this way is outrageous.
Dessert: Vanilla ice cream on my peppermint brownies, topped with homemade brown sugar bourbon caramel sauce.
For those interested in sous vide (hot tubbing gone to college), here’s what the racks of lamb looked like when bagged with a compound butter:
The bags were immersed for four hours at 130ºF then sear-smoked on the Egg as indicated.
I’m working on a technique to make ice cream with the Egg…stay tuned.
Amuse: Egg-smoked fennel and red-pepper vodka flight, with a single garlic crouton and prosciutto-wrapped cantaloupe (Egg used to smoke-roast fennel and red bell pepper)
First course: Sous vide shrimp over homemade lemon peel fettucine (I mixed microplane-grated lemon peel into the pasta dough). Served with a 1994 Sterling Sauvignon Blanc.
Intermezzo: Granita
Second course: Sous vide lamb finished with a high-temp Egg sear and bourbon barrel smoke, plated with a risotto of spring pencil asparagus and fresh portabella mushrooms, plus wilted spinach. Served with 2004 Salento Enzo di Settte Rue Primitivo.
This might be one case where chips work better than lumps for smoking. The lamb is already cooked and I’m turning to the Egg for an aesthetic sear plus a quick smoke. The chips give lots of smoke quickly, so a sear of a minute or so per side is enough to impart smoke flavor concurrent with the sear. Wood chunks might not be able to produce enough smoke that rapidly. BTW, lamb prepared this way is outrageous.
Dessert: Vanilla ice cream on my peppermint brownies, topped with homemade brown sugar bourbon caramel sauce.
For those interested in sous vide (hot tubbing gone to college), here’s what the racks of lamb looked like when bagged with a compound butter:
The bags were immersed for four hours at 130ºF then sear-smoked on the Egg as indicated.
I’m working on a technique to make ice cream with the Egg…stay tuned.
Comments
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Dave....Without a doubt, a beautiful dinner!!! :woohoo: Your plating is gorgeous!! That lamb....well, my mouth is still watering! The shrimp and homemade fettucini....I would pay money for as well! You had some very fortunate guests, to say the least! Excellent job!
(IMO...a bit of carmelization on the procuitto would have been very effective with the amuse.)
Overall, very impressed!! Nice job!!! -
Beautifully done!
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WOW! Just great Dave!!
MollyMolly
Colorado Springs
"Loney Queen"
"Respect your fellow human being, treat them fairly, disagree with them honestly, enjoy their friendship, explore your thoughts about one another candidly, work together for a common goal and help one another achieve it."
Bill Bradley; American hall of fame basketball player, Rhodes scholar, former U.S. Senator from New Jersey
LBGE, MBGE, SBGE , MiniBGE and a Mini Mini BGE -
As always, a great job! I'd be proud to show that cook! 2 questions; How much does the sous vide set up cost?, Did my invite get lost in the mail?
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Outstanding!
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An amuse bouche thats a first since I've been on the board. Awesome Meal! The lamb looks incredible. 4 hours seems like a long time where did you find the cooking time?
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WOW!
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second wow!
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I'm free for the next dinner party.
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Sheesh, and I was going to show a picture of a Hot Dog.
Good cookin' -
That was a GREAT presentation Dave!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ross -
WOW! Very impressive. Was nice to meet you in Ocala.
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Dave,
I used to live in Orange County NY and had a neighbor who loved to prepare over-the-top dinners such as this. On his birthday he invited my wife and I over for a five course meal with recipes all taken from the French Laundry cookbook. Based upon your pictures, I think you've managed to match that meal. Outstanding! -
Dave, that dinner is absolutely faboulous!! The Sous vide shrimp over homemade lemon peel fettucine looks delicious. You don't miss a thing with your dinners. I'm just curious how long it took you to put this together. The pictures are outstanding also.
It was great meeting you in Ocala. If you get a min. I would love to have the recipe for your version of abt's. They were delicious. -
Amazing!
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Great looking meal!
What did you use to cryovac the lamb? Foodsaver or a chamber sealer?
What do you use to control the water bath's temp?
cheers! -
Thanks for your kind words, LC.
Your suggestion is apt. The prosciutto and cantaloupe were an impulse purchase when I noticed them both on sale at the market. One of my guests was unfamiliar with prosciutto and asked why I was serving raw bacon. So, your suggestion would have been helpful.
I don't have a huge amount of experience with that ingredient and have never tried anything other than using it raw. Always more to learn... -
I use a consumer-grade FoodSaver to Cryovac. Keller claims that restaurant results can't be achieved with these, but honestly I have never had a problem. I have developed a technique that makes it work with liquids without the bother of freezing first. I think the expensive chamber sealers are helpful for transforming structure (think compressed watermelon, for example) but functionally the $100 machine gives you 95% of the effect of the $1500 machine and takes up a lot less counter space. I've noticed mine is wearing out, though, so the expensive machine is probably justified for heavy-use environments like restaurants.
The lamb ends are covered in foil to avoid piercing the plastic.
For maintaining temps I use a PolySci immersion circulator that I got a great deal on. it would be possible to rig a Guru to do the same thing with perhaps $50 in parts. If anybody's interested I could sketch it out for you. I have been meaning to do that anyway as I have wanted a second circulator to do vegetables while my meats are cooking. -
Tom, that's something I like about sous vide. The lamb sat in 130ºF water for three hours. Two of my guests called to say they would be an hour late, making it four hours. That would be a disaster for an oven roast, but for sous vide, no problem (except that you'll note the risotto ended up being a bit overdone, can't really hold that stuff for an extra hour).
I'd say the minimum to do lamb sous vide is around 3 hours, although the precise calculation would depend on meat thickness. The finishing smoke sear took about 3-4 minutes a la minute, which is reasonable when I'm entertaining guests. All I had to do was plate the risotto and put the lamb on top so it wasn't like I was stuck in the kitchen. -
I use the same setup... will be using a chamber vac sealer for the restaurant though... I agree on not being able to do the compressed watermelon on the foodsaver... :pinch:
What do you do for liquids? hang it over the counter and seal as soon as they begin to want to go out?
cheers! -
Wow, :huh: I feel so inadequate :(
Incredible job -
OK I'm voting to ban Dave from being able to post pics on the forum untill he can play nice with the rest of us poor slobs!!! :laugh: Just doing a quick forum check and saw all the replys. WOW All I can say is OUTSTANDING JOB Dave!!!
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JL you aint got nothin to hang your head about. I envy your cooks too. Nothin wrong with the poor slob method
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Wow, Dave! This is the first time I've ever seen a Woosday post where no one has posted any follow up pics.
Beautiful pictures. I'd never be late for one of your dinners!
Patty -
I had some shots to post today, but how can you follow that dinner with anything else !! :ohmy: :silly: :woohoo:
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just amazing the menu the plating and the photos
i agree with jl your setting the bar too high for us mere mortals.everyone else is too intimidated to post for woosday...
absolutely beautiful and an inspiration.
thanks for posting
bill -
Those are some very nice shots!
Mike -
Dave how do you maintain temps on your sous vide bath? Do you have an immersion circulator?
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Exactly! Use the manual (pulse) mode and watch carefully. Arrange the Foodsaver so that it is on the edge of your kitchen counter and the bag is hanging vertically over the edge of the counter. As soon as you see the liquid beginning to advance up the channels, stop the vacuum and push the manual seal button. You will have a tiny amount of air still in the bag, but it's not enough to affect cooking.
It also helps to choose the "wet" seal option. My understanding is that this gives a slightly longer heat cycle, helping to boil off any liquid that might weaken the heat seal line closing the end of the bag.
With the lamb, I made a compound butter so there wasn't much of a liquid issue, but I had put a bit of olive oil on the shrimp so it was more important with that bag.
The "textbook" approach to using a Foodsaver with liquids is to pre-freeze the liquid into portioned blocks. If you do this, you would presumably keep 1-tablespoon cubes of frozen chicken stock, flavored oils, etc. in the freezer. This just seems like a lot of bother to me.
I've also seen chamber vacuums used to drive liquids into products. That's something that requires more power than the Foodsaver offers. I've tasted an heirloom tomato salad that was done this way that was so good I wanted to cry. -
Fire, I'm with you on that. I've never seen JL post anything that didn't look absolutely delicious.
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