01.26.07

Foie Gras, My Way

Posted in The Story, Recipes at 2:18 am by Chef Matt

“So wait, what are you doing with the foie gras?…”

Foie Gras - another dish that I have to ask: “Who is the first person who thought eating THIS would be a good idea?…”

I must have heard this a dozen times while making this dish, but I held by what I was thinking from the start. Word came in that we were getting some foie gras, and we wanted to run it as an appetizer. Our pasty chef, Amy, had just poached some pears, and she suggested I use the liquid to make a sauce for the foie gras with it.

Using my bible of the kitchen - Culinary Artistry - I figured I should accompany the foie gras with toast and grapes, which would go well with the pear sauce. But while this book is helpful in giving some sense of the flavor ideas that will make the final product taste great, it is a whole different game trying to put the actual dish together.

So first the sauce. I was reducing the pear liquid, and I wanted to give it a nice herb flavor. But at the same time, I didn’t want to put all kinds of “specks” in the sauce. I wanted to keep it clear and smooth. Well, the easy way to do this is to wrap the herbs you want to use in a cheese cloth, and steep them in the sauce as it boils. I decided I wanted to use tarragon and black peppercorns.

“Hey Jay, where’s the cheesecloth?”

“We don’t have cheesecloth, Jackass.”

OK, so now it was time to improvise. I could boil the tarragon and peppercorns in the sauce and then strain it, but I personally hate straining. I don’t know why, I just do. So I went over to the coffee station, got a coffee filter, put in the herbs, tied it up, and we were in business. The sauce reduced beautifully, and with a little cornstarch to thicken things up, the sauce was nothing short of fabulous.

The next element I wanted to add was some cherries. Cherries and foie gras go together amazingly well, so I asked Jay if he could order me some. The price quote came back at $35 a case, so that was a no go. Time to improvise again. We had some dried cherries in house, so I figured I could reconstitute them. Using warm water, a touch of brandy, a splash of vanilla syrup and some mint leaves from my dessert station, I plumped them back up to “fighting weight”. And to tell you the truth, I was amazed how well they turned out. Hell, the main reason I am writing this down here is so I don’t forget this combination. These turned out mush better than expected, and really added a nice, full bodied touch to the dish.

Sure, turning them into wine is nice as well, but these were destined for another purpose.

Now it was time to work on the grapes. I halved some red and green grapes, and was planning to sauté them in butter with some rosemary. But as I was slicing the grapes in half, something occurred to me about this dish. Here I had all these soft, flavorful fruity elements, but nothing with any sort of crunch, and nothing with a “different” flavor. Sure, the toast points (Amy ordered brioche to give the dish a little class) would offer a little bit of these characteristics, but nothing else on the plate would offer any sort of resistance to the teeth. I remembered that I once had foie gras with walnuts in France, and I double-checked good old Culinary Artistry - yup, walnuts go well with both foie gras and with grapes. So a quick sauté of the nuts in butter and then the grapes and rosemary joined the pan. I finished them off with honey and bourbon. A little “fire in the hole” flambé, and the grapes were ready as well.

Now came the tricky part. I had to configure the layout of the dish on a plate for service. While I am good with flavor combinations for a superior overall taste to a dish, I am severely lacking in the plating department. I just don’t have a good artistic eye. I was blessed with a great flavor sense, but quality plating is just not my strong point. So I began to test some layout concepts on a sample plate - using some oval-shaped pieces of toast as my “mock foie gras” for placement purposes. I must have gone through 8 or 9 different configurations, cutting the toast in different ways, arranging the plate with mixed greens, stacking elements for height… I just couldn’t come up with anything I was very happy with.

Finally Joy came over and suggested that the brioche should be in the form of points - since that was a classical presentation style - and the three main elements - toast, foie gras and berries (I was combining the grapes and cherries together) be centered in the plate simply so as to focus on the quality of the dish itself. If I overworked the presentation, that may take away from the total experience of the dish. Then when Dave came in (he is a fantastic plate designer) I asked how to best work those three elements, and he came up with a design in about 20 seconds that was just perfect. Foie gras at 9 o’clock, grapes and cherries in the center, and toast points out to the side at three o’clock just barely sticking out over the edge of the plate. The pear glaze was then simply drizzled on the top, and we were a go for dinnertime.

All this work for one dish on the appetizer menu. And this is to say nothing of the calculations I made to help determine the right price to charge for the plate, or how I had to weigh out every portion (since foie grasis very expensive, we couldn’t just “eyeball” or “guesstimate” it…), or how we cooked up some samples to make sure the whole dish tasted OK. It really blows my mind how much effort can be put into one dish, all for the sake of making sure it is perfect for the customers. But as it turned out, it is really worth the effort.

Sure, Chicago may have outlawed foie gras, but that’s only because they saw cute pictures of geese, and didn’t try what we came up with…

The first customers who ordered this plate: my parents. Yes, they came in this evening, and since they knew the foie gras was my creation, they were both kind enough to order it. They of course were also kind enough to say it was fantastic, but hey, what were they going to say? “Hey, we ordered ‘foie gras‘, not ’shit on a plate’!” Not likely. While I appreciated the praise, I needed an independent, third-party judgment.

Three other people ended up ordering the foie gras this evening, and when one of our servers came back into the kitchen and said, “Hey, rave reviews on the foie gras!” I knew I had really come up with something great.

Or had I?…

See, at every point in the generation of this dish, there were other people in the kitchen who were asking me what the heck I was doing, and they were doing this to help to give me ideas, pointers and feedback into my foie gras creation. If I had truly been able to do whatever the hell I wanted in my own encapsulated little world, I am sure what I would have come up with would have been much different - and nowhere near as great.

So maybe this really wasn’t foie gras MY way after all… but it was good to know that people enjoyed the final result, no matter whose idea it was.

Matt

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