Welcome to the EGGhead Forum - a great place to visit and packed with tips and EGGspert advice! You can also join the conversation and get more information and amazing kamado recipes by following Big Green Egg to Experience our World of Flavor™ at:
Facebook  |  Twitter  |  Instagram  |  Pinterest  |  Youtube  |  Vimeo
Share your photos by tagging us and using the hashtag #BigGreenEgg.

Want to see how the EGG is made? Click to Watch

Woosday Food Shots: Egging a Dinner Party

Charleston Dave
Charleston Dave Posts: 571
edited November -1 in EggHead Forum
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)

IMG_7024.jpg

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.

IMG_7025.jpg

Intermezzo: Granita
IMG_7026.jpg

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.
IMG_7027.jpg

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.

IMG_7028.jpg

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:

IMG_7018.jpg

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.
«1

Comments

  • Little Chef
    Little Chef Posts: 4,725
    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!!!
  • Gandolf
    Gandolf Posts: 906
    Beautifully done!
  • cookn biker
    cookn biker Posts: 13,407
    WOW! Just great Dave!!
    Molly
    Molly
    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
  • Big'un
    Big'un Posts: 5,909
    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? :whistle:
  • TomM24
    TomM24 Posts: 1,366
    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?
  • I'm free for the next dinner party.
  • Cpt'n Cook
    Cpt'n Cook Posts: 1,917
    Sheesh, and I was going to show a picture of a Hot Dog.

    Good cookin'
  • That was a GREAT presentation Dave!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Ross
  • Rib Bones
    Rib Bones Posts: 449
    WOW! Very impressive. Was nice to meet you in Ocala.
  • Roudy
    Roudy Posts: 431
    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!
  • reelgem
    reelgem Posts: 4,256
    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.
  • PWise
    PWise Posts: 1,173
    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.
  • PWise
    PWise Posts: 1,173
    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!
  • Firetruck
    Firetruck Posts: 2,679
    Wow, :huh: I feel so inadequate :(

    Incredible job
  • JLOCKHART29
    JLOCKHART29 Posts: 5,897
    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!!! :whistle:
  • Firetruck
    Firetruck Posts: 2,679
    JL you aint got nothin to hang your head about. I envy your cooks too. Nothin wrong with the poor slob method ;)
  • 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
  • Misippi Egger
    Misippi Egger Posts: 5,095
    I had some shots to post today, but how can you follow that dinner with anything else !! :ohmy: :silly: :woohoo:
  • lowercasebill
    lowercasebill Posts: 5,218
    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
  • Lawn Ranger
    Lawn Ranger Posts: 5,467
    Those are some very nice shots!

    Mike
  • Cactus Doug
    Cactus Doug Posts: 341
    Dave how do you maintain temps on your sous vide bath? Do you have an immersion circulator?
  • 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.