L2O Blog

Champagne Noodles

Champagne and seafood can be for early morning or late night. Both schedules are great. I like to start diner at the restaurant with a glass of Champagne. It is pleasant, gives a little appetite and wakes up the gustatory senses.

Cooking with Champagne is very attractive, and also exquisite. In the old cookbooks, Champagne was combined with the most succulent pieces of fish, like turbot and dover sole, or shellfish like lobster and oysters. In the kitchen where I learned cooking there were always a case of Champagne in the dry storage ready for any occasion to be opened.

Today I started with a distilled champagne (the process removes the excess alcohol and keeps the tannin) and was able to fix it as a solid block. But it has an elastic quality, so the mandolin didn't work very well to slice it finely. The micro-plane was successfully eating the block at every stroke. The very fine consistency and crunchiness of the noodles made them very light and likable.

I tried them with fluke for its softness, and liked the combination of the noodles and fish. The last component was the seasoning: a touch of Murray salt and a drop almond oil were quite invisible on the plate. It is served extremely cold.

King Crab

We are in king crab season now which officially runs from October 15 to January 15 next year. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is in charge of monitoring the commercial harvests. They set the season dates and the fishing quotas. This year the total limit for king crab was set at 20.3 million pounds. 

We receive the red king crab directly from Dutch Harbor Alaska once a week on Friday. It is already cooked; we are just removing the shell from the meat. 

We are serving it in mostly cold preparations. The legs are served either with a Dijon mustard custard and Swiss chard leaves, or covered with an Ossetra caviar cream, the ultimate decadence of cold eating.

We use the knuckles in a warm preparation where they are just warmed in melted butter and served in a bouillon.

Wasabi

Fresh wasabi is an ingredient that we always have in the kitchen. We order it from Japan along with our fish. I store it in a air tight box to keep its natural moisture. To prepare it,first  I peel the bottom part to remove about 1-inch of skin.

Then I use a shark skin grater to create a paste.  You hold the stick of wasabi strongly in your hand and make a circular movement over the grater. The paste is ready to use with raw fish or part of a cold preparation. We grate it fresh every time we need the wasabi.

Frozen Marshmallow

You can easily become addicted to marshmallows. When I was a kid I used to buy them in a small candy store with friends, and of course would eat the whole bag. I don't do that anymore but I still really like the texture. We make them in the restaurant, passion fruit is the current flavor. Now we are in the process of making a different frozen marshmallow.

Our first flavor is a ginger marshmallow. We start by blooming gelatin in a ginger syrup. Then it is placed in a bowl mixer and emulsified while the hot sugar/glucose syrup is poured over it. When it reaches a high temperature of 20°C it gets that magic gummy consistency. We leave it to set and cool down between sheets of acetate.

We decided to use the marshmallow as a sugar and an emulsifier with meyer lemon juice. It is blended and frozen in a pacojet container, then spun twice. At this point the mix turns into a cold silky consistency, but it is the right cold where you can easily eat the whole container. Meyer lemon and ginger turned out to be a well balanced combination.

We'll be serving it soon as one-bite as part of our pre-dessert menu, and will expand to different flavors.

Lobster, Yellow Curry, Smoked Coconut, Carrot

Lobster, The Cooking Process

Maine lobster are at their peak during the cold season, the shell is thicker, the meat is denser and the flavor cleaner. The saltiness of deep and cold water make seafood taste differently, which is the opposite of warm water seafood. I guess that the sweetness of the meat increases during the winter due to the natural elements around the lobsters and also the change in what they eat.

We receive our lobsters live twice a week directly from Maine. We can use up to 150 pieces a week. Preparing lobsters for service is usually done in the morning, so we can use the shells to make bouillon and sauces. After putting them to sleep in a blast freezer, we steam the tail for two minutes in a combi oven at 130°C.  Then we remove the meat from the shell and cool down immediately. We do the same for the claws, but they are steamed for just four minutes. The ends of the tails and claws are trimmed, and the lobsters are stored in a cooler.

During servicewe cook the lobster at two different temperatures. The first higher is set at 85°C in the combi oven on steam. The lobster is placed intoemulsified butter for 4 minutes. This higher temperature creates an envelope that keeps the natural crunchiness of the meat.

Then the lobster is pulled from the oven, placed into another container of emulsified butter that goes into a water bath set at 62°C. The lobster rests for five minutes and heats up to the serving temperature which is around 50°C in the center. Holding the meat at a lower temperature allows it to continue cooking, but also lets it rest and become softer.

 

Black Cod, Matsutake, Houba Leave, Black Sesame Crumble

L2O Wine Blog

It has always been one of our goals to develop a wine blog to share information with our guests about our wine service as this blog shares information about the food. A restaurant opening takes a lot of the personal time from each of us working here. When things settle in and begin to run smoothly, then there is the time to expand ourselves into new projects.

Chantelle and Doug, our sommeliers, are running the wine program at L2O. They are the experts who will share their daily experiences about the selection of wines, organizing the cellar, the service,wine pairings and stories.

A portion of the wine cellar is in fact located in the kitchen, so food and wine have always shared the same space here. Like the food that we serve, the wines and the cellar are always changing and evolving from our experiences and the experiences of our guests.

L2O Wine Blog

Last Monday

 

It turns that we didn't sell to many stripped bass Sunday night and we had mussels left over that go into the dish. The fish on Monday night was frozen for us as a seafood family meal. We have also had a lot of foie gras trimmings from the portions, so we decided to work on a dish to combine both components.

I'll never forget the caramelized flavor of the pan fried mussels served at Guy Savoy when I was working there. I also personally like the combination of poultry and shellfish, like lobster and squab, or pan fried sweet bread with raw oyster. We infused pieces of foie gras in a lobster bouillon, emulsified it and added mussel juice to it just before drizzling it over the mussels. The saltiness of the mussel juice and the richness of the foie gras give another layer of depth to the mussels. We add a few croutons, made with pan fried brioche. It made a satisfying dish. I don't know if next Monday we'll come up with a new preparation, as this was very spontaneous and based on memories.

Exotic Kale

 

I have to admit that I discovered kale at the green market in Unions Square, NYC, when I first arrived from France, along with other products like fiddelhead ferns, ramps and 20 different varieties of squashes.

Kale is widely cultivated in North America and in the northern part of Europe. It is a highly nutritious vegetable that grows in colder climates. Fall is the season to use it. I do like the sweetness of the leaf with a hint of a mild cabbage flavor. Young leaves, prepared as a salad are my favorite. In the same family of flavors I like braised broccoli and roasted cauliflower because they exude wonderfully caramelized flavor.

Farmer Jones in Ohio is cultivating these interesting exotic kale leaves with a bright purple color. They of course come in five different sizes in little boxes. These young leaves are very mild and turn out to be a well balanced combination with seafood. They bring a hint of cabbage to scallop, lobster or a braised fish bring in the combination. But kale remains a component where just few bites are satisfying.