underbelly

Private Steak Dinner, Sept 5, 2010

2010-09-08T15:01:00.000-07:00

the Mothership

I wanted to do a test run before inviting the world to our long-promised steakhouse night. In addition, friends have been begging for something good to eat, and my girlfriend is skipping town for the greener pastures and sensory delights of ... Rwanda. So it was last weekend or never.

I enlisted our close collaborator and butcher Jeffrey Ruhalter to procure some primer-than-prime, 8-week dry aged steaks. We went mostly with tail-end t-bones, which are essentially shell steaks, and one rib-eye, just for fun (actually, it was at Jeffrey's insistance ... "you and I will eat the rib-eye," he said). But in the chaos of plating, I have no idea who got the rib-eye.

Cooking perfect steaks for sixteen guests, with no crew and four burners, is beyond my art. So I borrowed a laboratory grade sous-vide immersion circulator from our good friends at A Razor, A Shiny Knife. A couple of test runs helped determine our final method:

We salted and peppered the steaks and bagged them with cultured butter; cooked them sous vide for 2-1/2 hours at 54°C; dried them, and brushed with a solution of glucose and sodium bicarbonate (to speed the maillard reactions that give a crisp, brown crust); seared on a hot griddle for about 45 seconds per side; sliced across the grain and served on hot plates.

Thanks to the ruthless precision of the sous-vide Mothership, the meat was perfect. Imagine a sous chef who never falters, never gets tired, and never talks. You get the idea: true love. Returning her to her rightful owner may have broken my heart forever.

The rest of the menu was merely made by hand. It included a cucumber gazpacho with mint and smoked salmon (an idea pilfered from Daniel Boulud), and financier cake served with raspberry-thyme sorbet and bit of cognac whipped cream. We served the steak on a bed of Israeli cous-cous made with wild mushrooms; sauteed baby bok choy with garlic; and a brown sauce made from a very intensely flavored beef coulis, mushrooms, and sage.

The coulis took two days to prepare, starting with a simple stock made from roasted beef and veal bones, and then a slow reduction with multiple immersions of meat, herbs, and aromatic vegetables. The coulis became a sauce shortly before serving, with the addition of shallots and reduced wine, mushroom duxelles and mushroom cooking liquid, sage, and a bit of arrowroot starch and xanthan gum to adjust the texture. There was no fat or dairy to mute the flavors, although the texture was similar to a butter-finished sauce.

Wine was BYO, and friends brought impressive quantities of delicious ones, including a Barberra that I tried to hoard between coarses.

Good times! The meat was spectacular—as good as any I've ever had—deeply beefy with all the funky, nutty, and minerally aged flavors you'd hope for from 8 weeks of dry age. It was extremely tender. I'm not sure if the 2-1/2 hours of slow cooking increased the tenderness, but I'd advise against going longer than this with these cuts; you'd risk the meat becoming too tender, if you can imagine such a thing.

For our upcoming (eventually) public steak night, we're going to go one better, and have Jeffrey procure beef from three of the best farms in the country. Right now we're looking at Four Story Hill Farm, Prather Ranch, Brandt Beef, Snake River Farms, and Hearst Ranch. All have different raising and feeding philosophies and reputations for extremely high quality. We'd like to put their offerings side-by-side on the plate for our guests to sample.

Stay tuned! In the mean time, to get your hands on beef like what we're showing here, go talk to Jeffrey at the Essex Street Market. You have two choices in New York: get it from Jeffrey, or go uptown to Lobel's and pay four times as much (no exaggeration).

For advice on cooking great steaks, check out our recipes here.

This dinner was made possible by generous support from

the Levy-Dangerscissors Corporation (tm) and its worldwide partners.

The t-bones and shell steaks

The rib eye

bagged, air sucked out, replaced with mounted, cultured butter.

searing

the coulis simmering

sage chifonade for garnish

crisp crust and bright pink edge to edge

color and translucency of the sauce

A Day at Le Bernardin

2010-03-18T17:21:00.000-07:00

I've been corresponding with Michael Laiskonis, Le Bernardin's executive pastry chef, for over a year. I found him through his blog, where he explains his approach and techniques with unusual eloquence. There are other pastry chefs with James Beard awards and three Michelin stars, but Chef Laiskonis is the first I've encountered with a combination of great vision, deep technical curiosity, and the ability to speak easily about both. Like many creative titans, and all of my friends, Chef Laiskonis is a poor judge of character; he invited me to work in his kitchen in spite of my obvious lack of credentials and housbreaking.

Such a rare opportunity demands preparation, which in my case consisted of a full week chanting, "don't knock anything over." I've had a chance to study Chef Eric Ripert's book, On The Line, which details everything backstage at Le Bernardin, including the 10 by 14 foot pastry kitchen that cages up to six pastry chefs and production people, who craft individual pre-desserts, desserts, tasting menus, and petits fours for up to 300 guests a night. The possibilities of elbowing a chef in the eye, stepping into a bucket of glucose, or capsizing an entire speed rack of tuilles and spherized pear nectar seemed almost infinite. Happily, the training worked; drama seekers will have to wait a little longer for posts about self-inflicted palette knife wounds or kitchen evacuations.

The greatest barrier between the average schmo and the kitchens of Le Bernardin may not be their standards but their architecture. Finding the kitchen required trips up and down different stairwells, U-turns through basement catacombs, and conflicting directions from a cook and an elevator repairman. I thought of the scene in Spinal Tap, where the band wanders the bowels of the venue in search of the stage. At one point Maguy Le Coze, co-owner and co-founder of the restaurant, stormed past me in a subterranean passageway before pushing through an unmarked door. She looked appropriately sleek, intense, and French; as one would expect, she didn't look up at the hapless stranger wandering the stairs.

When the kitchen doors finally appeared around a corner, it was only a matter of minutes before I'd been introduced to the crew and handed a chef jacket and propane torch. There was some mention of a tour, which never materialized (when I got home, 12 hours later, I realized that I never even saw the bathroom). Instead, production went into full swing. It was a slow night; the restaurant was somewhere around half capacity, but still every guest gets a pre-dessert, a dessert and a plate of petits fours*, and at least one table had arranged for a special dessert tasting menu.

I spent most of my day working on the petits fours, which consisted of a round financier with pistachio and a macerated cherry in the middle, a chocolate cup filled with praline cream and sprinkled with ground toasted almonds, a beignet, and a wafer of white chocolate topped with a duo of gummy cubes (mango, and ... something red). My accuracy on some of the ingredients may be off; I only nibbled on broken ones and that was during the tunnel vision of production and assembly. While the plate of petits fours comprises 4 bites, there are actually 10 components, each of which has to be prepared separately, sometimes in several steps, before final plating. The morning production crew had already prepared many of the ingredients and components for us to assemble. By the time you pop one of these scooby snacks in your mouth, it's probably been worked on by five or six people over the course of many hours.

The work requires some precision, but perhaps not as much as I'd first assumed. Ricardo, the sous chef, would typically show me one example and then cut me loose to do the rest. In my effort to perfectly duplicate his, I occasionally resorted to using tweezers where he'd used a plastic spoon. I loosened up a bit when I saw him laughing at me.

We cranked out the fours in waves, stopping when we ran out of plates, starting up again when a fresh stack came back from the dishwashers. I spent much of my downtime observing others plate the main desserts—a skill I would like to acquire, and one I'm ecstatic that I didn't have to fake in that setting. Every dessert has multiple components, some of which are delicate tuiles or disks or other brittle constructions. The saucing is a mix of geometric precision and loose brushwork and squeeze-bottle painting. The overall effect conveys sophistication and a bit of playfulness, and remarkably avoids the over-constructed, self conscious displays that were in vogue in the 90s (and never quite went away). I have philosophical issues with some kinds of saucing (like small dots of sauce, or piles or smears of dry powder), but when Chef Laiskonis uses these techniques he does so with restraint and to such great esthetic effect that I found myself wanting to steal some of his designs.

I spent some downtime watching the hot kitchen. Compared with some high end kitchens I've seen, Le Bernardin's is austere; it's about as small as imaginable for the size of the brigade (slightly smaller, actually ... the canapé station is a pair of wheeled carts with portable burners, tied to the end of the pass). The equipment is all solid and immaculate, but traditional and decidedly un-fancy. I saw no hint of induction hobs, anti-griddles, or rows of chefs plating microgreens with surgical tweezers. It looks like a restaurant, in the most traditional sense.

The hot kitchen feels like a war room compared with the pastry kitchen's operating room calm. All the cooks I watched handled the onslaught easily. There were no losses of control or focus or communication; everyone performed like a rock star. The sauté station in particular stood out. I have doubts if my wee brain could handle such simultaneous demand for volume, spontaneous organization, and perfection.

Back in the pastry kitchen, I handled some miscellaneous jobs like unmolding frozen goat cheese hemispheres (which would then be spherized in sodium alginate), and unmolding and cutting to size small logs of corn custard that had been formed with various hydrocolloids. Whenever I found Chef Laiskonis taking a break from running the ship, I pestered him with questions, on everything from his opinions on the Michel Cluizel chocolate varieties they use, to ice cream theory, to the finer points of reverse-spherification of fruit purées. His loyal lieutenants, Ricardo and Jesus, were able to shut me up a few times over the course of the evening by handing me a beautifully plated dessert and a plastic spoon. Of course, after indulging in such a creation I only had more to talk about. There are maxims about keeping one's eyes open and mouth shut; alas, there are also compulsions that keep one's life interesting while keeping one mostly unemployable.

One unexpected surprise was Chef Ripert's visit to the pastry kitchen. He was as gracious and charming in person as he is on television; he seemed like a boss who wants to create an environment where his workers feel comfortable and motivated to do their best work. I don't know how many chefs of his caliber spend as much time as he does in the kitchen ... I suspect not many. I didn't see him micromanage, but I saw him observe, and check in many times with the heads of various teams. When introducing us, Chef Laiskonis said, "Paul's been stalking me for about a year now." Chef Ripert replied, "I understand. I had to stalk Michael for two years to get him to come here."

Our final plates went out around 11:30 pm. We had already cleaned up most of the pastry kitchen; an easy task compared with the near-demolition going on next door on the hot side. Six pastry technicians making tiny sculptures just don't make the same scale mess as forty pirates slinging a thousand pounds of fish through a million BTUs of fire. And the line cooks are denied the most rewarding cleanup task of all, which fell into my hands: putting away the ice creams and sorbets. I first knew Chef Laiskonis as a long-distance ice cream guru. Having my hands on all dozen flavors of his daily stockpile felt like some kind of industrial espionage (except, of course, that I am without anything resembling an industry). I came away with two flavors I'd like to shamelessly ape (crème fraîche sorbet and praline citrus ice cream) and a much more rounded sense of what my guru's up to.

We said our goodbyes after Chef led me through the catacombs and back to the real world. I don't think I expressed enough gratitude to Ricardo and Jesus for their patience and friendliness in the kitchen; they helped make a potentially nerve-wracking experience both comfortable and educational.

I may have an opportunity to do a similar stage on the hot side of the kitchen ... stay tuned!

* literally "small oven" ... these confections were invented in 18th century France as a way to take advantage of residual heat in the coal ovens at the end of the night. Thanks to the modern convection oven, we can now work on them all f'ing day.

Some of the little buggers in process and getting plated.

A typical dessert plating. Stolen off the restaurant website; I didn't want to get in the way with my camera.

Pantry Items include various sea salts, xanthan gum, sodium alginate, isomalt powder, dextrose, pectin, citric acid, locust bean gum, calcium lactate, and powdered microwave popcorn.

A Manifesto Condemning Vanilla Sex

2010-02-12T16:19:00.001-08:00

The expression, not the act: why would anyone, when suggesting blandness, invoke the most complex and exotic of spices?

At Underbelly, little turns us on like a dark, aromatic Madagascar vanilla pod.

Consider: Vanilla encompasses 100 odd species of the tropical orchid Vanilla V. planifolia. First cultivated by the Totanac Indians along the coast of Mexico near Veracruz 1000 years ago, the spice migrated north to the Aztecs, and then to France via Spain.

The vanilla orchid gets naturally polinated only by insects native to Central America; it couldn't be grown in the Old World until a Belgian botanist devised a technique for polinating it by hand, flower by flower. This innovation allowed the French to plant vanilla on the islands of Madagascar, Réunion, and Comoros, off the southeast coast of Africa. These islands collectively produce what we call Bourbon Vanilla. Mexico and Tahiti produce the remainder of the world's highest quality crops.

Perhaps the misconceptions of blandness come from an ironic coincidence: the same colonialism that sent this exotic spice south from Europe did the same for Christian missionaries (and their associated position).

Vanilla demands prolonged foreplay: production starts with hand polination and six to nine months of growing. The pods are killed, then cycled through alternating periods of heat and wet wrapping for several days, to stimulate enzymatic flavor development. The pods are then straightened and smoothed by hand, air dried for several weeks, and finally cured for up to several months.

The result is the second most expensive spice in the world, behind saffron (which costs as much as $5000.00 per pound)

Some tasting notes: bourbon vanilla has a round, slighly sweet, deeply layered flavor. Mexican vanilla tends toward spiciness. Tahitian vanilla has the weakest flavor, but an assertive, complex, floral aroma. All of the vanillas are unusually layered and complex compared with other spices.

Vanilla has also been used for centuries as medicine. Clinical studies suggest antibacterial potential. Others show that vanilla stimulates epinephrine production, and can therefore be mildly addictive. In traditional medicine it's been used both as a fever reducer and (most significantly) an aphrodesiac.

If anyone describes you as "vanilla," thank them. Then bolt for the door of their boudoir / motel room / dungeon. Think about it: they don't know what's going on in your pantry. Why would they know what's going on under your covers, or in your spicy mind?

But is the future ready for us?

2009-12-10T15:22:00.000-08:00

Architect's rendering of proposed Underbelly kitchen remodel.

If you're like me, you've been thinking, "immersion circulators and antigriddles were cool back in the '90s ... but what I really want is a large hadron collider."

Because, after all, with the particle physicists' recent world record of smashing two protons head on, each charged with 1.2 trillion electron volts of energy, you could really work some magic in the kitchen.

Well, not so fast. I just calculated that roasting a single 4lb chicken requires on the order of 1.3 X 10²⁴ electron volts. In other words, you'd need almost 2 trillion proton collisions to cook the bird. It's also unclear if the chicken would succumb to any undesireable quantum effects (like being blown, literally, into next week. Or last week).

I'm checking with friends at Alinea and Fermilab right now, but it's starting to seem somewhat less practical than an oven. Stay tuned.

Thanksgiving

2009-11-30T17:40:00.000-08:00

There are many takes on thanksgiving dinner. One is about nostalgia: cremate a Butterball turkey, whisk lumps of flour into the the fatty pan drippings, cut open cans of translucent cranberry substance, add water to the stovetop stuffing, and finish off your loved ones with a wrecking ball of mashed potatoes. Bury them under pie.

Another approach is elite, postmodern: set the immersion circulators, disassemble the turkey, cook bird parts separately sous vide for varying numbers of days, reasemble with enzymes, hydrocolloids, or classical galantine or ballantine configurations, as layers, confits, forcemeats, or entirely new creations, brown in gallons of frying oil, or with a roofing torch, or with lasers ...

We attempted the middle path: turkey that looks like a turkey, but tastes strangely ... good.

Guided by the belief that good turkey starts with a good turkey, I procured an 18 lb heritage breed free range bird from Bo Bo poultry, through our master butcher and minor celebrity Jeffrey Ruhalter. Judging from her eyes, she might have been walking around as early as Wednesday morning. Judging from her hand-sized tallons, which, thanks to Jeffrey's packing job were hanging out of the top of the shopping bag, she might have been somebody's landlord or ex.

The Chinese passengers on the J train smiled in approval while everyone one else cleared a path.

I salted her and left her loosely covered in the fridge for 24 hours. Then sewed her up with some stuffing made from mixed wild mushrooms browned in duck fat, homemade duck and pork sausage, toasted almonds, and dried cherries.

I cooked her using a range of techniques I've been refining over the years. The first step I learned from chef Georges Perrier from Le Bec Fin in Philadelphia: poach the bird before roasting. Very gentle, moist heat, in a flavorful court bouillon does wonderful things for poultry. After this, I pulled her out of the pot (no trickier than rescuing a fat friend from a boiling lake), dried her, brushed her with garlic-infused butter, and put a bit of that under the breast skin.

The next step is key: bard the breast meat. White meat is ideal at 147F at most; the dark meat likes three to five degrees more than this, and is harder to reach with the heat. Barding is the old practice of covering the bird in fat before spit roasting; smart chefs learned to selectively bard the breasts. I used a latice of Niman Ranch bacon, followed by a triple layer of foil. The bird went in a shallow roasting pan on top of a bed of onions and her own head and feet. The oven was cranked to 500F. After half the roasting time the barding comes off, so the breasts get browned and crisped. A propane torch touches up any unevenness.

Mahogany brown, buttery juicy goodness, nothing dried out, none of that god-awful wateriness that gets sold as juiciness by the church of brining. What's most striking about this kind of bird is the white meat: it's not just moist and well textured, but flavorful. It tastes bright, herbal. Friends who've claimed that white meat lies below unseasoned tofu on the evolutionary ladder have fought over breasts of a well-cooked Bo Bo.

I'm a whore for sauce, so I did a lot of whoring. I started with a duck coulis, made by simmering multiple immersions of browned duck leg and mirepoix vegetables in veal stock, gradually adding more stock as it reduced. My 6 cups of stock gave me just over 2 cups of coulis, which had much more depth and three dimentional flavor than any traditional demi-glace. I bound it very lightly with a gram of xanthan gum. The duck meat and fat went into the stuffing. On game day, I deglazed the roasting pan drippings with madeira and cognac, reduced with some parsley, and strained this into the coulis. No added cream or butter ... the consistency was a perfect light syrup, and even though it was defatted it gave a real impression of richness—but without any dairy to mute the flavors. This is one of the nicest sauces I've ever made, and I'm delighted there are still a few spoonfuls in the fridge.

We also had roasted butternut squash and garlic soup, sautéed rainbow chard, cranberry and Grand Marnier relish, a fantastic salad made by my girlfriend with produce she ran over straight from the Park Slope food coop, Peter Reinhart's insanely great and impossible-to-improve-upon bacon and buttermilk cornbread, and a puree of fennel and sunchokes. I must admit that this last item, thrown together at the last minute when I couldn't find any celeriac, tasted revolting ... like something I'd imagine coming out of a baby bottle. But the guests lapped it up and even asked for seconds. What can I say? The small tupperware of leftovers will be used to spackle the bathroom.

For dessert I made an apple tart with multiple layers of paper thin apple slices, bound by a spiced apple puree heavy on calvados and cardamom. This has become my favorite tart invention. I served it with some homemade cognac ice cream. We also had a delicious concoction called a Nantucket pie, brought by a family friend ... kind of like a financier embedded with fresh cranberries, served with a dollop of chantilly cream.

I had a great time fussing around the kitchen for this, and then eating and drinking and drinking some more with my friends. For anyone interested in the turkey technique, it's posted here.

Upcoming Events

2009-05-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

Later this summer, for one night only, we're going to be the best, funnest, cheapest, and least abusive steak house in the country. With that end in mind we've been researching the finest beef in the land, making some friends in green places, and conspiring. I'm having a strategy session with our butcher, Jeffrey Ruhalter, next week. We're going to order rib steaks from six of the best farms and ranches, from Pennsylvania to California, and narrow down our choice to the best of the best of the best. After Jeffrey works his dry aging magic, it will be time to eat. Be ready for a simpler menu and wine list, and a friendlier price than last time.

We're also thinking about combining meals and classes. How would you like to come to hog butchering class, led by Jeffrey, followed by a Berkshire pork roast and Belgian ale tasting? Let us know what you think.

And I wanted to share the menu from a private dinner we just served, the first of the summer:

-white neapolitan-style pizzas with prosciutto, fennel, and ramps

-bourride (Mediterranean fish soup with sea bream, leeks, swiss chard, aioli),
side of kale with shallots and blood orange

-mixed greens and edible flowers, honey grenache vinnaigrette

-financier cake, vanilla cognac ice cream, fresh berries

March 22 Dinner, pictures and press

2009-03-27T15:23:00.000-07:00

We've posted some pictures here. All the pics in the top and bottom row are by Jothan Cashero.

Maggie Shi wrote about the meal on The Scout.

And Nikoya Lightbourne has posted a full reoport on her blog.

Stay tuned for more!

March 22 Dinner

2009-03-23T15:32:00.000-07:00

The dishes have been washed and stowed, the candle wax has been scraped from the windowsills, wine glasses have been recovered from odd corners of the loft, and the last remnants of lamb coulis and celeriac purée have been scoured off the copper pans and the ceiling. Surveying our notes we see there were no fisticuffs, no looting, and nothing but bare bones sent back on the plates to the kitchen.

In other words, a fine evening.

Special thanks to Jeffrey Ruhalter, our master butcher and sideshow artist, who secured for us a lamb from one of the two most lauded farms in the country for pennies on the dollar, and then stepped in to help on all fronts when the director of the eGullet society cancelled his appearance. Jeffrey was so enamored with the food and beautiful, drunken guests, that he wants to forge a permanent partnership with underbelly. So look for announcements about future collaborations.

And many thanks to chef Mitch Weinstein, for the hors d'ouevres, for the many strategy consultations, and for his tireless help on game day. And to the lovely Elizabeth Spackman, who kept the dinner running smoothly and kept smiling in spite of near-hallucinatory sleep deprivation.

Thanks most of all to everyone who came for dinner. Without you it would have been a pretty lame party.

For a copy of the night's menu and wine list, click here.

First Dinner, Sunday March 22

2009-01-13T15:58:00.000-08:00

We're going to launch with a recession-friendly dinner later this month.

We've been working hard these last few months sourcing ingredients from the Hudson Valley and Pennsylvania, and making special arrangements with our friends and local purveyors.

The menu will include:

assorted hors d'oeuvres

corn chowder with porcini cream

roasted rack of Jamison Farm lamb,

lamb coulis with lapsang souchong,

hen of the woods mushroom

celeriac and fennel purée

salicornia with lemon butter

home made bread with farm butter by Saxelby Cheese

chocolate marquise with ginger

banana tart with black sesame, brown butter cognac ice cream, salted butterscotch

a succession of four wines selected by our sommelier to make you very happy.

(details may change subject to ingredient availability and last minute tinkering)

The lamb is being raised by what we believe to be the best lamb farm in the country. It will dry aged for us by our master butcher, Jeffrey Ruhalter.

The suggested donation is $70.

(the wine alone would cost more than this at a restaurant!)

To make a reservation, please send an email to dine@under-belly.org. There will only be fifteen seats so please reply soon.

A portion of the procedes will benefit the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts and Letters.

The dinner will take place at our home base in a rustic, Civil War-era Brooklyn brewery that's been taken over by artists, We'll send you all other details when you RSVP.

2008-12-30T09:37:00.000-08:00

Welcome. This blog will report on past and future goings on at underbelly. Stay tuned.