The Rogue Estate

text encapsulated epicurean elitism

In this post I simply want to share a recipe I came up with at work using random things I had on hand to feed myself and a couple co-workers one slow Sunday evening. My French cooking back ground came through in some of the procedure of this Udon noodle soup, but the result still very much follows the Japanese tradition of noodles in broth.

For the “guts”:

1/2 pound of shrimp, peeled, shells reserved and roughly chopped into bite-size pieces

3/4 pound of Red Snapper fillet cut into 3/4 inch cubes

14 oz. dry Udon

2 oz. Celery heart sliced thin on a bias

2 oz. Leek white, sliced thin

3 oz. baby heirloom Carrots of mixed color or standard baby Carrots, sliced thin on a bias

2 oz. Scallion, sliced thin

2 oz. (3 spears) Asparagus, sliced thin on a bias

1/2 cup Sake or Dry White Vermouth

For the broth:

2 quarts water

2 oz. or 56 grams shaved Katsuo (bonito) or 2 tablespoons instant Dashi

a 4inch length of Konbu, wiped clean

1 cup light Mirin

1/2 cup Soy Sauce

Juice of 1 Lemon

Juice of 1 Lime

6 thin slices of fresh Ginger

1 teaspoon minced Garlic

reserved Shrimp shells

To start:

Add the water to a large pot with the Konbu and bring to a simmer. In another large pot bring 3 quarts of salted water (it should taste like sea water) to a boil. Once the Konbu has come to a simmer, add the rest of the broth ingredients and bring back to a simmer. Allow this to steep on low heat for 20-30 minutes and strain, return the liquid to the pot and discard the solids (or make a “second Dashi” by steeping the solids again with the addition of another 1/2 oz. of Katsuobushi, and chill or freeze for use within a month).

Coat the bottom of a large saute pan with a small amount of soy or canola oil and place over medium heat. Once heated, add the Leeks, Celery and Carrots and lightly salt, cook over medium heat until the carrots are soft but not thoroughly cooked. Deglaze with the Sake and reduce until the pan is almost dry. At this point add half the Dashi stock to the pan and bring back to a simmer.

While that comes back up to a simmer, your other pot of salted water should be boiling. Add the Udon to the water and cook until the Udon is just past el dente. Strain and rinse the noodles under hot water if serving right away, or under cold water to reserve for later use and lightly oil the noodles for storage. All the while keeping an eye on the broth to make sure it doesn’t come to a full boil.

To finish:

Divide the noodles among 4-5 bowls. Add the Shrimp, Red Snapper, and Asparagus to the simmering broth and bring back to a simmer, then kill the heat. Allow this to steep for 3-4 minutes to cook the meats, they won’t take long and if cooked on high heat the Shrimp will get rubbery and the fish will fall apart. Divide this evenly into the bowls containing the noodles, top off with a little more of the left over Dashi stock if the noodles aren’t almost fully submerged. Sprinkle a generous amount of sliced scallions over the top of each bowl and serve with chopsticks. Place a small bowl of Chili/Garlic paste in the center of the table with a small spoon for guests to use at their discretion. I used Shiso leaves to garnish for the picture, but that’s optional, or Lime leaves would be a good substitute.

If the three soup recipes I’ve posted weren’t a clue, I am a huge fan of soups, especially Asian soups, and this one came out great. The key is in not overcooking anything so their natural flavors shine through bright and clear.

I have a few other great soups in my repertoire, so expect to see those eventually. Until next time, live well and eat better!

Jack

With this article I’d like to continue with the sauce theme and tackle butter sauces. These can be some of the most difficult to pull off, but with a little patience (and practice) there is no reason a non-pro can’t (ahem) churn these out at home.

I’ll be discussing three variants, particularly. Beurre Blanc, Beurre Rouge, and Beurre Nantais. The differences being Beurre Blanc (literally translated from French meaning “white butter”) is made with white wine, Beurre Rouge (red butter) is made with red wine, and Beurre Nantais (named so after the town of Nantes in France) utilizes cream as a stabilizer. Monter Au Beurre, or mounting a sauce with butter (again with the fancy French terms, but is essentially what a Beurre Blanc is, a mounted sauce), simply means emulsifying butter into it, most commonly done with pan sauces (see my post about pan sauces here) the term applies to any sauce that has butter emulsified into it at the last step. While Hollandaise does have butter emulsified into it, it doesn’t fall into the same category as a “mounted” sauce. Because of the presence of egg yolks and the butter is clarified it’s more akin to a cooked mayonnaise, but that’s a different article entirely.

I’ll start with Beurre Blanc. A classic French sauce that goes well with fish, shellfish, chicken, or any mild flavor that has little to no fat content of it’s own. This is a very tricky sauce, however, and does not reheat well without alteration, so be sure the recipe you use will yield the quantity you will require for the meal with little to spare. More on reheating in a minute.

The basic Beurre Blanc is really nothing more than white wine, a little vinegar, herbs, and butter. So why all the fuss? It’s the way these ingredients are combined, the technique, that will make or, quite literally, break the sauce. So here’s a basic recipe for Beurre Blanc (Beurre Rouge is made exactly the same, just substitute red wine for white):

1 750 ml bottle semi-dry white wine, Chardonnay works best

1 cup good gelatinous chicken stock (optional, but if chosen don’t use anything prepackaged, homemade or not at all is the way to go)

2 tablespoons vinegar, tarragon vinegar is killer for this, champagne or standard white wine vinegars work well too, simple white vinegar need not apply.

1 teaspoon Tabasco (not generally used in the “classic” method, but I like the little added zing it provides)

2 shallots sliced fairly thin

1 tablespoon crushed garlic

5-6 thyme stems, whole

2-3 bay leaves, depending on size

1 tablespoon whole black pepper corns

1 pound butter, unsalted, cut into 1/2 inch cubes and well chilled

Salt to taste

Yield:

2.25 cups, or 18 oz., standard portion size for a dinner plate around 2oz.

Begin by coating the bottom of a heavy sauce or saute pan with a little oil and heating over medium heat. Sweat the shallots until very soft, but not browned and add the garlic, pepper corns and bay leaves. Crank the heat up a little and saute this until the garlic is fragrant and deglaze with the whole bottle of wine (remember to have the wine uncorked and close at hand lest the garlic brown you you have to start over). With the wine, add the vinegar, Tabasco, and herbs. Reduce this on high heat until the pan is nearly dry, down to about 2-3 tablespoons total volume. If using the chicken stock, add that and reduce again. Cut the heat back to medium and slowly start whisking in the chilled butter cubes. This is the tricky part. You need to maintain a constant temperature to get the proper emulsification. Just under, but not quite boiling. If it boils it breaks, and you’re left with a puddle of melted butter and acid. Adding the cold butter to the reduction will drop the temperature significantly at the beginning when the total volume is very small. So go slowly, adding one or two cubes at a time and whisking until almost fully incorporated. As the volume of the sauce increases with the addition of more butter, so too does it’s ability to absorb the thermal shock of adding the cold butter to the hot sauce, so gradually increase the speed at which you add it. When all of the butter is fully incorporated, kill the heat and run the sauce through a fine mesh strainer. Hold in a hot, but not boiling, double boiler until needed.

If done right, you will be able to hold the finished sauce for quite a while at nearly boiling without it separating or “breaking”. The key is maintaining the temperature at just under a boil. If the sauce does break on you, there is little you can do to save it.

Beurre Nantais is nearly identical to Beurre Blanc with the addition of cream as a stabilizer. After the wine is reduced simply add 1 pint of heavy cream (as per that recipe above) and reduce that down to about 1/2 cup total volume before whisking in the butter. This increases the stability so well that a lot of restaurants will add cream to all of their butter sauces that need to be held hot for hours on end. I, personally, despise this…. If the cook in charge of making the sauce in the first place is taught proper technique and doesn’t rush through it there’s absolutely no need to add cream to a Beurre Blanc, turning it into a Beurre Nantais. The flavor and texture of a proper Beurre Blanc, or Beurre Rouge, is like satin. It glides off the tongue and leaves a very clean finish. Beurre Nantais, because of the added cream, does not. Not that I’m against Beurre Nantais, it just needs to be used differently. Most applications for Beurre Blanc require that smoother texture and cleaner finish.

If your first attempt at making Beurre Blanc fails (and most of the time the first attempt does) there is a way to salvage the effort, though it won’t hold for long at all and isn’t always successful. Dip a spoon in it several times over the course of whipping in the butter, if it doesn’t coat the back evenly, it’s starting to break. If you notice this before you finish adding the butter, pull it off the heat immediately. In a separate pan, start reducing the pint of cream used in the Beurre Nantais recipe. When reduced to 1/2 cup start whipping the remainder of the cold butter into it, slowly as before. When you’ve run out of butter, slowly drizzle in the broken Beurre Blanc and add a little more salt to make up for the added fat content, effectively making a Beurre Nantais. Strain as before and use ASAP.

If you do end up with left-over Beurre Blanc, you can chill it and reheat it for later use. However it involves the same process for fixing a broken sauce, again, turning it into a Beurre Nantais. Simply reduce your cream, as before, and treat the left-over, chilled sauce as you would the cold butter in the original recipe, whipping it in slowly then adjusting the seasoning.

Once you’ve got the technique down you can start experimenting with different varieties to better tailor the sauce to the dish at hand. At one of the first meetings of the Estate I made a variation on Beurre Blanc using beer instead of white wine and adding tomatoes and sliced scallions at the very end. This was poured over steamed Mussels and was quite a huge hit. At another, more recent meeting, I made a Beurre Rouge with strawberries instead of shallots and garlic to be served with seared Salmon. The variations are limited only by your imagination and creativity, so by all means ignore what your parents told you and play with your food!

Jack

An interesting challenge:  pair two wines to a bacon vinaigrette, an onion and bacon pie, and an Asian seasoned braise of pork belly.

I was intimately familiar with the pie:  bacon, an obscene amount of onions, Gruyere, and custard.  This is the nexus of flavors from the area where Switzerland, Germany and France approach each other (north of Basel, past Colmar, to Strasbourg).  I’ve been there and had only one choice–Alsatian Pinot Gris.

It paired perfectly.  The best option locally was Trimbach’s Pinot Gris 2002 Reserve.

Classic citrus and melon flavors clean the palette, but the Alsatian slate and herby notes make this so much more interesting than similar California or Italian options.  Red wine drinkers: this is your white (especially with cheese).  Trust me.  It even stood up well to the vinaigrette, but only because John had the foresight to demand enough mustard and bacon.  About $18.

So, what do we do with a braised pork belly?  I opted to punt, and picked a local sparkler, a Michigan Rose in fact.

L. Mawby makes one that they named “M. Lawrence SEX”.  About $14.  Bacon and sex?   Yes, please.  The bubbles and acidity helped, but there just wasn’t enough going on otherwise to recommend the pair.  But like they say, sex is like pizza—even when it’s bad…

I’m eager to move on to reds, cheap and rich.  Is it barbecue season yet?

At the behest of our ring leader this will be a simple post this time around containing the recipe for a soup I made at the most recent meeting of the Estate. The theme was spring, and all the bounty Michigan provides for that season (sadly, though, our resident forager was unable to get his paws on any Morels). It was a fresh Pea soup with mint, lemon and Ramps. It turned out to be the hit of the gathering, and it was the simplest dish I prepared that evening! Proving once again that simplicity in most cases is key. Chef/owner of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo in Chicago, Rick Bayless, has been quoted as saying, “how many ingredients can be taken away?” and still have a perfect dish. This recipe very much follows that philosophy. So, without further boring you with quotes and rambling:

Spring Pea Soup:

3 pounds fresh Peas, without husks

1 bottle semi-dry white wine (Chardonay, Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc, ect.)

1 tablespoon fresh mint leaves, roughly chopped

Juice of 2 lemons

4oz. butter, cut into 1/2 inch cubes

Ramp stalks, sliced very thin

Salt to taste

Water

Procedure:

Start by reducing all but 4oz. of the wine in a 1.5-2 gallon heavy bottomed pot over high heat, reserve the remainder of the wine. When reduced by 3/4 add the peas and enough water to cover them by an inch or so and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat to medium and cook until the peas are soft, 15-20 minutes after a simmer is reached. Kill the heat and add the mint. Pour into a kitchen blender (in batches if needed) and puree until smooth, or to the desired consistency. We left ours just a little chunky, but that’s a point of preference. Were I making this in a restaurant I would have made it as smooth as possible and then ran it through a fine sieve to get a satin smooth texture.

If blending in batches, pour into a mixing bowl or other temporary container until all the peas have been pureed. Add a little water to the blender if the mixture gets too thick to properly mix. This done, return to the pot over medium heat and add water until it’s the desired consistency, loose enough to pour off a spoon but not runny. Slowly reheat, stirring often, we don’t want to cook it too hard or we’ll loose that freshness of the peas and the color will turn to the all too familiar dull “army green” of canned peas. Once steam starts to rise from the surface, add the butter and stir until fully incorporated. Now, bit by bit, and tasting between each addition, add the lemon juice. You may not need all of it, you just want enough to barely taste it through the peas and mint. That done, add the salt, again, bit by bit, and tasting between each addition. You shouldn’t need all that much. Stir in the remainder of the white wine and cook for another 5-10 minutes.

That’s it! Bowl it up and garnish with the sliced Ramps! Here are a couple alternative garnishes that will work just as well, if not better:

Wash the Ramp greens and cut across into 1/2 inch strips. Dredge in corn starch and deep fry until just crisp. Season with a pinch of salt as soon as they leave the hot oil.

Saute some fresh Morels in butter until soft. Add the sliced Ramp stalks and cook for another 2 minutes. Then add the Ramp greens (cut as for the previous suggestion) and cook for another minute. Season with a pinch of salt.

Delicate cooking and simplicity are the key to this recipe. I would normally use stock instead of just water but for this soup it would have dulled the impact of the star ingredient, the fresh peas. The whole idea of this dish was to showcase their freshness at the height of the season, leaving their flavor as bright, vivid, unobscured and fresh as possible. The result is a recipe that even a retarded monkey could pull off successfully, and a soup that’s worthy of any fine dining restaurant menu.

Until next time, live well and eat better!
Jack

I have an unhealthy relationship with wine. I find it endlessly fascinating, and sometimes infuriating, I find it good in moderation, and better in excess. It’s one hell of a tasty hobby.

But I’m no wine expert. I know, everyone says that in their first post to try and sound like a “regular guy”, not some kind of wine Einstein. Wine can be intimidating. There’s too much to know out there, ever. Even if you were the expert of experts, there’s always some crafty vineyard owner working in his lab to perfect a new blend, or breed a new varietal, or bring something new to the party. That’s what makes wine fun…an endless variety of sensations, and endless invention. There’s always something more to learn and new curiosities along the way, like Alice’s rabbit hole.

I’ve had no wine training, and I’ve only been to a few informal tastings. But what I do have (on top of my fascination) is practice. Malcolm Gladwell made a popular observation that the difference between proficiency and mastery of anything we do is about 10,000 hours of practice. I’m pretty sure I’ve logged well over that amount with my nose shoved deep into a half-full glass…

So you can understand that I was happy to be invited into the Rogue Estate’s inner circle of epicurean miscreants…if just to share a little of that enthusiasm with them, and with you.

For my first Rogue’s dinner, I offered to pair a couple bottles to the menu, which was described to me simply thus:

“1st course:
Littleneck clams on the half-shell w/ cold Ramp green puree

Soup course:
Fresh Pea soup, Ramp white garnish

Main course:
Seared Salmon, Strawberry Beurre Rouge, Balsamic Roasted Asparagus, Lemon-Ramp Rice”

Here’s what I showed up with and a few tasting notes.

http://www.atozwineworks.com/pgris.html

Willamette Valley Pinot Gris are what I usually reach for when there’s shellfish in front of me. Extremely light in color–think straw with a faint green/grey hue. Supple citrus flavors dominate, mostly lime, with a background of honeysuckle and honeydew. A great palate cleanser, and suited to simple mild flavors–light cheeses, vegetables and a hit with littlenecks on the half-shell. About $13.

http://www.lavieilleferme.com/rose.php?langue=en

Lovely color–a bright pink with just a hint of amber.. Consistently receiving a score in the upper 80s by most reviewers this wine represents a serious value. Bright strawberry notes and a watermelon freshness that’s irresistible (lack of oak helps here). A hint of caramel on the moderate finish. A great foil for fresh spring vegetables and fish. Just enough acidity to stand up to Jack’s beurre rouge. About $8.

Picking a good wine to pair with a dish is fun, but not something I’ve done a lot of. I expect that there will be good nights and bad nights. I encourage you to ditch the rulebook and remember that the best wine to drink with anything is the one that tastes good to you.

Now, are you interested in coming along with me to see how deep this rabbit hole goes?

- Ian