The Mind of a Chef (2012) s04e10 Episode Script
Legacy
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For Chef David Kinch, his restaurant Manresa is an incubator for his employees to develop their craft.
All cooks go through their charcuterie phase.
I did it myself.
Having a clear vision, demanding high standards, while encouraging cooks to think independently ensures Manresa's renewal.
One of the criteria of the restaurant is to make sure that the egg is razor cut.
But many of his cooks, emboldened by their experience in the techniques they learn at Manresa, will want to move on.
Just as Manresa reflects Chef Kinch's experience, so too will their future endeavors be tied to their time working its kitchen.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
You can actually taste the sun.
I don't know how we're going to top that one.
It's the fun part in cooking.
Cheers.
You're only as good as the people that work for you.
It's a team.
It's the ones building these dishes 60 times a night, and are not just going through some steps to get done what needs to be done.
There has to be a certain sense of emotional attachment to what they do.
If I perceive there is no emotional attachment, I will create some.
I want it to be slightly off center.
Breaks up the eye.
It's the oldest Japanese plating trick in the book.
It reflects well on the legacy of Manresa when people who have spent time in our kitchen go on and they create something really positive.
Especially if it has the shared values that we learned working together.
All cooks go through their charcuterie phase.
Exactly what you told me.
I did it myself.
You had those big tomes where everything was correct, but unexciting.
Mm-hmm.
You know, but they were there for a reason.
They were there to teach the craft of handling, sanitation, and ratios ratios of fat to lean.
Yeah, and then you you know, you take all that, and you start coming up with your own.
Yeah.
Jeremy Fox is a very, very thoughtful and original thinker.
The time he spent with me, he was inspired by the emotion of tradition and rusticity taking that, and adding a contemporary spin on it without overly complicating.
So I'm going to go in and just make sure it's all really well dispersed.
You know, when we stuff, we don't want big clumps of anything, so When we made this it was late at night.
We usually had nachos, so I'm a little upset that we don't have nachos here right now.
How's that feeling? Feels good.
You can add the blood.
All right.
It looks good.
Smells good.
Smells good.
An oft-overlooked part before you stuff a sausage is adjusting the seasoning.
Adjusting the seasoning.
So how do you adjust the seasoning on a fairly liquid sausage? If you're brave, you can just eat it as is, or get a little pan, get a little bit of olive oil, spoon it in, and let it cook.
Are you brave? I'm brave.
Yeah, I am, too.
Needs salt.
That should be good.
That is one casing.
Where'd you get these casings? I don't know.
Big pigs.
Ready to get bloody? I'm ready.
Yeah, we can tie that boy off.
So we want to make sure it's not too much tension, since it is very liquidy.
The hardest part is remembering which way you just went, because next time, you have to go the opposite way.
They look beautiful.
So this was actually pretty painless.
Not so bad.
They've rested, they've poached, and they chilled down and rested again overnight.
But they're still fairly delicate.
Nothing more maddening than to put that much effort into it, to work that much on it, and then have them burst.
Yeah.
Gentle heat, good way of describing it? Yeah, enough to get some caramelization.
And just kind of warm it through.
Looks like we're there, huh? We're good to go.
Beautiful.
It doesn't taste bloody by any means.
It just it tastes rich.
Yeah.
And it's a great vehicle for the spices.
It's just this, like, creamy, unctuous, pork mousse.
I'm going to show you a plating that we did.
This is our take on very traditional French style.
You know, sautéed apples and boudin together.
You know, a little bit of whole grain mustard.
A coarse gel of apples.
I guess you could call it applesauce, but it's high in vinegar.
Right on top of the mustard.
The boudin.
A couple grains of salt.
And these are buckwheat groats.
It actually pops like a popcorn, and tastes like popcorn.
Buckwheat popcorn.
A little bit of lightness, a little bit of fun, kind of hides the bloody bits underneath.
Our boudin noir with puffed buckwheat.
Alain Passard called it an oeuf chaud froid hot cold.
The egg is cut, the white is dumped out, and the yolk remains in the egg.
A pinch of quatre épices.
A mixture of black pepper, clove, cinnamon, and ginger.
Salt, chives.
And then the egg is floated on a simmering pot of water.
The yolk will be hardened around the edges, yet still liquid, but warm in the center.
On top of this will be piped a very light cream, seasoned with sherry vinegar and salt.
And on top of that will be a couple of drops of maple syrup.
Take your spoon, put it through all the layers, all the way to the bottom, and bring your spoon up through the sweet, the salt, the sour, the bitter, the hot, the cold, which you have all in one bite.
A truly extraordinary dish.
What I'm going to make is a tribute to Chef Passard.
It has our spin on it now, but it still shows where we came from.
At times we got a little bit of flak for it, because why would you copy a dish? But we never thought of it as copying it.
It's more of an homage to him.
The first thing we do is prepare the eggshell.
One of the criteria of doing it here at the restaurant is to make sure that the egg is razor cut.
I just kind of squeeze the eggshell a little bit.
And I get my knife in here.
If you did everything correctly, it's going to pop right off.
Just like that.
The membrane's out.
It's been washed out and cleaned on the inside.
Razor-sharp edge.
Just the yolk.
We needed a savory cream.
We came up with some Meyer lemons.
Everybody has a tree in their backyard in Central California, and you'd be crazy to have to buy Meyer lemons.
And you just take the juice.
Some zests have been blanched two times in advance.
Take out a little bit of their bitterness.
Put a little bit of water in there.
After it all cooks down, you have a very basic paste.
You can even see that the peels are left whole.
And now we're going to make the cream.
Crème fraîche.
I have the Meyer lemon crème fraîche.
And now equal parts of heavy cream.
We're going to whip it.
Fairly critical stage here.
We're looking for whipped cream at a particular state, where it's soft peaks, but it still maintains a shine.
Doesn't look like it came out of a can.
It's all about softness, softness and elegance.
You know, it goes back to that age-old theory in cooking that softness and tenderness is the taste of luxury.
So it's starting to become a whipped cream, and it's thickening up.
See how it's falling off in lumps off the whisk.
And it's holding its soft peak.
This is exactly where it wants to be, right here.
First we're going to season these up.
The yolk is the richness.
A couple of grains of fleur de sel.
We like to say in the kitchen, it's like you're counting eight grains of salt.
It doesn't have to be eight grains, but if your mind's thinking that, then that's your control.
98 chives.
This is the fun part in cooking.
The egg yolk lowers the center of gravity.
And what that allows it to do is to float on the pot of the water like a rubber ducky in a bathtub.
And to me, that is perfectly cooked.
It's set around the edges, but it's still loose on the inside.
A hot poached yolk, sea salt, chives, a savory cream made with crème fraîche and Meyer lemon.
It's perfect when it leaves a little nipple in the very center of it.
Beautiful, aromatic coriander honey.
Coriander flowers.
And this is the finished dish right here.
I thought this was a perfect dish.
Its beauty was underneath.
You had to go in to find it.
I'm here with James Syhabout, a great chef, great friend of mine.
So what have we got? When I got my job here, the first dish I had was the arpège.
Something kind of etched in my mind.
You know, "Why does that dish work? What do I feel, what do I taste?" And I'm breaking down an American breakfast you know, eggs, maple syrup, cream, onions.
I wanted to distill all that into my own dish, but still be representative of terroir of California.
James Syhabout spent almost five years with us.
They were real enlightened periods in our kitchen, in which we all grew.
I knew he was going to be leaving.
He's a very ambitious guy.
So maple syrup's not really a California thing.
It's more Canadian, Vermont.
What brings it some sweetness, dates.
You know, why not smoke the dates? It's amazing.
And you can smell the sweetness and the smoke at the same time.
Very sweet and savory.
We've even smoked over applewood, just like bacon.
What is this? It's malt vinegar, and a little bit of water.
It's high in acid.
Once up to a boil, we just set it aside, let the dates hydrate.
Pass through a food processer, and tamis it into a date jam.
So you slice thin onions.
I remember when Chef used to say, "You cannot slice it too thin.
" Butter, a little bit of salt.
It'll leach out its own natural juices.
The beauty and the elegance being the technique.
You can see here, just because you started cold, there's a certain amount of water in here.
And just this simple gentle stirring you're doing, it has already emulsified.
A perfect emulsion is shiny, but not greasy.
Exactly.
And then what we have here is a paper lid.
You know, we're looking for a controlled amount of evaporation.
And if you have a lid, it's going to catch all the condensation.
It's more like a braise.
But what we're doing here, it's going to reduce, and it's going to be a concentration of the flavors.
But because of the hole and because of the forced nature of the paper, it doesn't have it boil down and caramelize very rapidly.
You can see how it's almost like he's cooking in a butter sauce.
And all he added was butter.
There's no water, no stock, anything in there.
That's really beautiful.
This cooks for about half an hour.
You can see the onions are translucent, but my butter sauce, it's still emulsified.
This is exactly where I want it.
We're going to make our soup here.
It's not enough onion liquid.
Milk is our solution.
Just pass it through a fine chinois.
Catch any onion skins or whatnot.
Beautiful.
Look at that consistency.
These are oats.
Are these steel cut? Yeah, steel cut, not rolled.
Like it for texture.
A little bit of brown sugar.
I keep reminding myself how simple that arpège egg dish is, and I try not to complicate things.
Man, it smells good.
It smells like breakfast.
It's like a ski breakfast.
Are these eggs raw? These are not raw eggs.
These are already cooked.
Low, very low temperature.
You cook the egg first, and then clean the whites off.
Doing it backwards compared to arpège egg, where we clean the whites off before we cook it.
It's amazing.
There's so much detail in this dish.
Are we ready to plate? I think we are.
Since I'm not serving the egg in the shell, I still want it to resemble an egg.
So there's our date puree after it's been tamised.
This is going to be good.
Some onion soup.
It's going to mimic our egg white.
So you don't see the dates, but that's going to be the pedestal to hold the egg yolk in place.
Mm-hmm, kind of stands it up.
Granola.
What's the magic number of chives, Chef? Uh 49.
You got it that's 49.
Oh, nice, layered up.
A little crunchy salt.
That's beautiful.
Where do you serve this in the menu? Is it like the arpège, one of the first things people get? It's the first thing people get.
It's a nice warm welcome.
Something that's comforting.
"Welcome to our home.
Here's something that's familiar and different.
" Speaks the whole mantra of the menu and the restaurant.
Beautiful.
Thank you.
Manresa Bread, it happened because I had an extraordinary employee.
Her name is Avery Ruzika.
I love bread, but not as much as Avery does.
I wanted to create an opportunity to take advantage of having such a special employee.
We worked towards creating a bakery.
And we'd start at some farmers markets.
From the very beginning, we had people lining up before we opened.
The bread sold out early.
We had a lot of people who were upset that they couldn't buy bread, which was all great things.
So we decided we'd move forward with the brick and mortar place.
It's doing incredibly well.
I'm very proud of the direction that Manresa Bread is going in.
But most of the credit has to go to the partners involved.
This is rye seaweed bread.
Rye bread has always had an association, classically, with eating raw oysters.
And when I think of oysters, I think of seaweed, because of that saline brininess, tastes of the sea.
Dense, thick, hard to cut.
Just like a good rye should be.
This smells fantastic.
I can smell the rye, and I can smell the seaweed separately, and they do work very well together.
But we're going to build on that.
There's a very old traditional dish called lamb hot pot, which is an old English dish, braised lamb, that had oysters in it.
So I kind of worked backwards from there.
What I have in mind is a little tartine.
Think of it as an open-faced sandwich.
And I'm going to give it a very light toast.
So I'll give it a little bit of crispiness.
But it'll also add a little bit of structure to the dish that I want to build.
Pick a card, any card.
Okay.
Staring, staring, staring, staring We have Shigoku oysters from Washington state.
Small, but very briny, plump.
Beautiful uniform shell.
Yeah, beauty.
That's a beauty.
That also fought me when I opened it.
Mmm.
Got my name on it.
Lean lamb, from the leg.
Spring lamb, suckling.
It is not gamey in any sense.
It is quite tender.
I'm taking an oyster shell.
I'm just going to shred the meat.
And the oyster shell is actually scraping it off the tendon and leaving it behind.
It's just really beautiful.
I don't want to overpower it because of the delicacy of the dish.
Not going to work it too much.
Just kind of fold the meat.
A couple drops of champagne vinegar, which might not be the first choice that comes with raw lamb, but it certainly is the first choice with oysters.
The fleur de sel.
Slightly warm rendered lamb fat.
It's going to add the mouth feel, the richness.
The last thing is three, four drops of oyster water.
It actually is pretty good.
And we have a beautiful freeze filtered lamb consommé.
We're going to thicken it with a natural gelatin and a little bit of gelatin we added to it as well.
I'm going to start mimicking the actions of an ice cream machine.
The liquid is spinning in a cold environment, and I keep it moving with the spoon.
So no air at all is incorporated into it.
As you can see, the way it's coming off the spoon now, it is starting to thicken.
So what we're going to create is a Jell-O of lamb consommé.
You can see it's thick, but it's still flowing.
So now we're going to complete the dish.
Crème fraîche.
Couple of crystals of salt.
Crushed black peppercorns.
Marinated crispy raw onion.
We have our long chives.
A little bit of whipped crème fraîche.
On top of the oyster, jellied lamb consommé.
And a little bit of glucose, to cheat on my balancing act.
This is a lamb and oyster tartare with seaweed rye bread.
I don't decide on my own legacy.
People who have worked for us and moved on, they're the ones that will decide.
I had a lot of very talented people come through.
Jeremy and James, they reached that point where they were no longer challenged or compensated.
Other chefs, perhaps people more ambitious than myself or smarter than myself, would have opened up a restaurant to keep them in the fold, as opposed to having them go off and become the competition.
So maybe I've learned that lesson.
Support your PBS station.
For Chef David Kinch, his restaurant Manresa is an incubator for his employees to develop their craft.
All cooks go through their charcuterie phase.
I did it myself.
Having a clear vision, demanding high standards, while encouraging cooks to think independently ensures Manresa's renewal.
One of the criteria of the restaurant is to make sure that the egg is razor cut.
But many of his cooks, emboldened by their experience in the techniques they learn at Manresa, will want to move on.
Just as Manresa reflects Chef Kinch's experience, so too will their future endeavors be tied to their time working its kitchen.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
You can actually taste the sun.
I don't know how we're going to top that one.
It's the fun part in cooking.
Cheers.
You're only as good as the people that work for you.
It's a team.
It's the ones building these dishes 60 times a night, and are not just going through some steps to get done what needs to be done.
There has to be a certain sense of emotional attachment to what they do.
If I perceive there is no emotional attachment, I will create some.
I want it to be slightly off center.
Breaks up the eye.
It's the oldest Japanese plating trick in the book.
It reflects well on the legacy of Manresa when people who have spent time in our kitchen go on and they create something really positive.
Especially if it has the shared values that we learned working together.
All cooks go through their charcuterie phase.
Exactly what you told me.
I did it myself.
You had those big tomes where everything was correct, but unexciting.
Mm-hmm.
You know, but they were there for a reason.
They were there to teach the craft of handling, sanitation, and ratios ratios of fat to lean.
Yeah, and then you you know, you take all that, and you start coming up with your own.
Yeah.
Jeremy Fox is a very, very thoughtful and original thinker.
The time he spent with me, he was inspired by the emotion of tradition and rusticity taking that, and adding a contemporary spin on it without overly complicating.
So I'm going to go in and just make sure it's all really well dispersed.
You know, when we stuff, we don't want big clumps of anything, so When we made this it was late at night.
We usually had nachos, so I'm a little upset that we don't have nachos here right now.
How's that feeling? Feels good.
You can add the blood.
All right.
It looks good.
Smells good.
Smells good.
An oft-overlooked part before you stuff a sausage is adjusting the seasoning.
Adjusting the seasoning.
So how do you adjust the seasoning on a fairly liquid sausage? If you're brave, you can just eat it as is, or get a little pan, get a little bit of olive oil, spoon it in, and let it cook.
Are you brave? I'm brave.
Yeah, I am, too.
Needs salt.
That should be good.
That is one casing.
Where'd you get these casings? I don't know.
Big pigs.
Ready to get bloody? I'm ready.
Yeah, we can tie that boy off.
So we want to make sure it's not too much tension, since it is very liquidy.
The hardest part is remembering which way you just went, because next time, you have to go the opposite way.
They look beautiful.
So this was actually pretty painless.
Not so bad.
They've rested, they've poached, and they chilled down and rested again overnight.
But they're still fairly delicate.
Nothing more maddening than to put that much effort into it, to work that much on it, and then have them burst.
Yeah.
Gentle heat, good way of describing it? Yeah, enough to get some caramelization.
And just kind of warm it through.
Looks like we're there, huh? We're good to go.
Beautiful.
It doesn't taste bloody by any means.
It just it tastes rich.
Yeah.
And it's a great vehicle for the spices.
It's just this, like, creamy, unctuous, pork mousse.
I'm going to show you a plating that we did.
This is our take on very traditional French style.
You know, sautéed apples and boudin together.
You know, a little bit of whole grain mustard.
A coarse gel of apples.
I guess you could call it applesauce, but it's high in vinegar.
Right on top of the mustard.
The boudin.
A couple grains of salt.
And these are buckwheat groats.
It actually pops like a popcorn, and tastes like popcorn.
Buckwheat popcorn.
A little bit of lightness, a little bit of fun, kind of hides the bloody bits underneath.
Our boudin noir with puffed buckwheat.
Alain Passard called it an oeuf chaud froid hot cold.
The egg is cut, the white is dumped out, and the yolk remains in the egg.
A pinch of quatre épices.
A mixture of black pepper, clove, cinnamon, and ginger.
Salt, chives.
And then the egg is floated on a simmering pot of water.
The yolk will be hardened around the edges, yet still liquid, but warm in the center.
On top of this will be piped a very light cream, seasoned with sherry vinegar and salt.
And on top of that will be a couple of drops of maple syrup.
Take your spoon, put it through all the layers, all the way to the bottom, and bring your spoon up through the sweet, the salt, the sour, the bitter, the hot, the cold, which you have all in one bite.
A truly extraordinary dish.
What I'm going to make is a tribute to Chef Passard.
It has our spin on it now, but it still shows where we came from.
At times we got a little bit of flak for it, because why would you copy a dish? But we never thought of it as copying it.
It's more of an homage to him.
The first thing we do is prepare the eggshell.
One of the criteria of doing it here at the restaurant is to make sure that the egg is razor cut.
I just kind of squeeze the eggshell a little bit.
And I get my knife in here.
If you did everything correctly, it's going to pop right off.
Just like that.
The membrane's out.
It's been washed out and cleaned on the inside.
Razor-sharp edge.
Just the yolk.
We needed a savory cream.
We came up with some Meyer lemons.
Everybody has a tree in their backyard in Central California, and you'd be crazy to have to buy Meyer lemons.
And you just take the juice.
Some zests have been blanched two times in advance.
Take out a little bit of their bitterness.
Put a little bit of water in there.
After it all cooks down, you have a very basic paste.
You can even see that the peels are left whole.
And now we're going to make the cream.
Crème fraîche.
I have the Meyer lemon crème fraîche.
And now equal parts of heavy cream.
We're going to whip it.
Fairly critical stage here.
We're looking for whipped cream at a particular state, where it's soft peaks, but it still maintains a shine.
Doesn't look like it came out of a can.
It's all about softness, softness and elegance.
You know, it goes back to that age-old theory in cooking that softness and tenderness is the taste of luxury.
So it's starting to become a whipped cream, and it's thickening up.
See how it's falling off in lumps off the whisk.
And it's holding its soft peak.
This is exactly where it wants to be, right here.
First we're going to season these up.
The yolk is the richness.
A couple of grains of fleur de sel.
We like to say in the kitchen, it's like you're counting eight grains of salt.
It doesn't have to be eight grains, but if your mind's thinking that, then that's your control.
98 chives.
This is the fun part in cooking.
The egg yolk lowers the center of gravity.
And what that allows it to do is to float on the pot of the water like a rubber ducky in a bathtub.
And to me, that is perfectly cooked.
It's set around the edges, but it's still loose on the inside.
A hot poached yolk, sea salt, chives, a savory cream made with crème fraîche and Meyer lemon.
It's perfect when it leaves a little nipple in the very center of it.
Beautiful, aromatic coriander honey.
Coriander flowers.
And this is the finished dish right here.
I thought this was a perfect dish.
Its beauty was underneath.
You had to go in to find it.
I'm here with James Syhabout, a great chef, great friend of mine.
So what have we got? When I got my job here, the first dish I had was the arpège.
Something kind of etched in my mind.
You know, "Why does that dish work? What do I feel, what do I taste?" And I'm breaking down an American breakfast you know, eggs, maple syrup, cream, onions.
I wanted to distill all that into my own dish, but still be representative of terroir of California.
James Syhabout spent almost five years with us.
They were real enlightened periods in our kitchen, in which we all grew.
I knew he was going to be leaving.
He's a very ambitious guy.
So maple syrup's not really a California thing.
It's more Canadian, Vermont.
What brings it some sweetness, dates.
You know, why not smoke the dates? It's amazing.
And you can smell the sweetness and the smoke at the same time.
Very sweet and savory.
We've even smoked over applewood, just like bacon.
What is this? It's malt vinegar, and a little bit of water.
It's high in acid.
Once up to a boil, we just set it aside, let the dates hydrate.
Pass through a food processer, and tamis it into a date jam.
So you slice thin onions.
I remember when Chef used to say, "You cannot slice it too thin.
" Butter, a little bit of salt.
It'll leach out its own natural juices.
The beauty and the elegance being the technique.
You can see here, just because you started cold, there's a certain amount of water in here.
And just this simple gentle stirring you're doing, it has already emulsified.
A perfect emulsion is shiny, but not greasy.
Exactly.
And then what we have here is a paper lid.
You know, we're looking for a controlled amount of evaporation.
And if you have a lid, it's going to catch all the condensation.
It's more like a braise.
But what we're doing here, it's going to reduce, and it's going to be a concentration of the flavors.
But because of the hole and because of the forced nature of the paper, it doesn't have it boil down and caramelize very rapidly.
You can see how it's almost like he's cooking in a butter sauce.
And all he added was butter.
There's no water, no stock, anything in there.
That's really beautiful.
This cooks for about half an hour.
You can see the onions are translucent, but my butter sauce, it's still emulsified.
This is exactly where I want it.
We're going to make our soup here.
It's not enough onion liquid.
Milk is our solution.
Just pass it through a fine chinois.
Catch any onion skins or whatnot.
Beautiful.
Look at that consistency.
These are oats.
Are these steel cut? Yeah, steel cut, not rolled.
Like it for texture.
A little bit of brown sugar.
I keep reminding myself how simple that arpège egg dish is, and I try not to complicate things.
Man, it smells good.
It smells like breakfast.
It's like a ski breakfast.
Are these eggs raw? These are not raw eggs.
These are already cooked.
Low, very low temperature.
You cook the egg first, and then clean the whites off.
Doing it backwards compared to arpège egg, where we clean the whites off before we cook it.
It's amazing.
There's so much detail in this dish.
Are we ready to plate? I think we are.
Since I'm not serving the egg in the shell, I still want it to resemble an egg.
So there's our date puree after it's been tamised.
This is going to be good.
Some onion soup.
It's going to mimic our egg white.
So you don't see the dates, but that's going to be the pedestal to hold the egg yolk in place.
Mm-hmm, kind of stands it up.
Granola.
What's the magic number of chives, Chef? Uh 49.
You got it that's 49.
Oh, nice, layered up.
A little crunchy salt.
That's beautiful.
Where do you serve this in the menu? Is it like the arpège, one of the first things people get? It's the first thing people get.
It's a nice warm welcome.
Something that's comforting.
"Welcome to our home.
Here's something that's familiar and different.
" Speaks the whole mantra of the menu and the restaurant.
Beautiful.
Thank you.
Manresa Bread, it happened because I had an extraordinary employee.
Her name is Avery Ruzika.
I love bread, but not as much as Avery does.
I wanted to create an opportunity to take advantage of having such a special employee.
We worked towards creating a bakery.
And we'd start at some farmers markets.
From the very beginning, we had people lining up before we opened.
The bread sold out early.
We had a lot of people who were upset that they couldn't buy bread, which was all great things.
So we decided we'd move forward with the brick and mortar place.
It's doing incredibly well.
I'm very proud of the direction that Manresa Bread is going in.
But most of the credit has to go to the partners involved.
This is rye seaweed bread.
Rye bread has always had an association, classically, with eating raw oysters.
And when I think of oysters, I think of seaweed, because of that saline brininess, tastes of the sea.
Dense, thick, hard to cut.
Just like a good rye should be.
This smells fantastic.
I can smell the rye, and I can smell the seaweed separately, and they do work very well together.
But we're going to build on that.
There's a very old traditional dish called lamb hot pot, which is an old English dish, braised lamb, that had oysters in it.
So I kind of worked backwards from there.
What I have in mind is a little tartine.
Think of it as an open-faced sandwich.
And I'm going to give it a very light toast.
So I'll give it a little bit of crispiness.
But it'll also add a little bit of structure to the dish that I want to build.
Pick a card, any card.
Okay.
Staring, staring, staring, staring We have Shigoku oysters from Washington state.
Small, but very briny, plump.
Beautiful uniform shell.
Yeah, beauty.
That's a beauty.
That also fought me when I opened it.
Mmm.
Got my name on it.
Lean lamb, from the leg.
Spring lamb, suckling.
It is not gamey in any sense.
It is quite tender.
I'm taking an oyster shell.
I'm just going to shred the meat.
And the oyster shell is actually scraping it off the tendon and leaving it behind.
It's just really beautiful.
I don't want to overpower it because of the delicacy of the dish.
Not going to work it too much.
Just kind of fold the meat.
A couple drops of champagne vinegar, which might not be the first choice that comes with raw lamb, but it certainly is the first choice with oysters.
The fleur de sel.
Slightly warm rendered lamb fat.
It's going to add the mouth feel, the richness.
The last thing is three, four drops of oyster water.
It actually is pretty good.
And we have a beautiful freeze filtered lamb consommé.
We're going to thicken it with a natural gelatin and a little bit of gelatin we added to it as well.
I'm going to start mimicking the actions of an ice cream machine.
The liquid is spinning in a cold environment, and I keep it moving with the spoon.
So no air at all is incorporated into it.
As you can see, the way it's coming off the spoon now, it is starting to thicken.
So what we're going to create is a Jell-O of lamb consommé.
You can see it's thick, but it's still flowing.
So now we're going to complete the dish.
Crème fraîche.
Couple of crystals of salt.
Crushed black peppercorns.
Marinated crispy raw onion.
We have our long chives.
A little bit of whipped crème fraîche.
On top of the oyster, jellied lamb consommé.
And a little bit of glucose, to cheat on my balancing act.
This is a lamb and oyster tartare with seaweed rye bread.
I don't decide on my own legacy.
People who have worked for us and moved on, they're the ones that will decide.
I had a lot of very talented people come through.
Jeremy and James, they reached that point where they were no longer challenged or compensated.
Other chefs, perhaps people more ambitious than myself or smarter than myself, would have opened up a restaurant to keep them in the fold, as opposed to having them go off and become the competition.
So maybe I've learned that lesson.