Private Steak Dinner, Sept 5, 2010

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

a little overindulgence in the saucing?

Thanksgiving

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'm sad to report that this last item, thrown together at the last minute when I couldn't find any celeriac, tasted a bit 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 dollop of leftovers will be used to spackle the bathroom. I'm reconsidering the future of sunchokes in my kitchen.

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.

March 22 Dinner

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

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.