Rescued Recipes #4: Foie Gras au Torchon with Cognac Jelly and Truffle Brioche (Plus Surprise Math Lesson)

 

Jesse Sutton---

Hi all, and welcome to another addition of Rescued Recipes, the feature where Nate and I amuse ourselves by recreating and recording recipes from our past.  Sometimes they are from places we worked at back in the day, sometimes they are from places we frequented and miss desperately, and sometimes they are dishes that represent a great idea with crappy execution, and we just decided they could use a little spit shine.  (For instance, Nate's take on Dutch Lettuce gave a tired dinosaur of a dish a much-needed update.)

This dish is a throwback.  It has its origins at Avenues Restaurant at the Peninsula Hotel, Chicago.  You may remember it as the place that Graham Elliot Bowles and Curtis Duffy spread their wings, before opening up very, very successful independent restaurants, but before that, it was a fine-dining seafood place helmed by two of the world's unsung (and, sadly, under-promoted) culinary heroes, Dave 'Hollywood' Hayden and Charlie McKenna.  They were both young (hell, we were all young), and a couple of the rowdier gentlemen I've worked for.  Dave ended up heading abroad, and Charlie now runs a very successful barbecue, Lilly's Q, out of Chicago.  It was a great time, they were great guys, and I learned a ton from them.  They were the team that took me from 'just-off-internship' to 'seasoned professional,' or at least, close enough to keep getting hired places.

I wanted to recreate a dish we did there, both to honor my mentors, and because cooking is fun.  There were a lot of dishes there I enjoyed, but a lot of our menu relied on incredibly exotic seafood.  See, anyone that reads this knows how much I appreciate local seafood, but that's not what Avenues ran on.  Part of the issue is that it was in Chicago.  Not a ton of local seafood in Chicago.  However, price was no object, so we got John Dory and langoustines from New Zealand, lobster from Maine, spiny lobster from Florida, diver scallops from New England, bluefin and hamachi from Hawaii, loup de mer from the Mediterranean, sole from the English Channel, and wild-caught turbot from the North Atlantic.  So much of the cuisine was showcasing these amazing products as they were, that without access to the seafood, it would hardly do it justice.

However, we did have one dish that started burning a hole in my imagination recently.  Actually, it was less of a dish, and more of a formula.  The dish was Foie Gras au Torchon, with Cognac Jelly and Truffle Brioche.  Now, this dish is a riff on a tried-and-true formula: a cold slab of foie gras, some toast to put it on, and something sweet and slightly acidic to set the chord off.  

Now, I realize I normally give recipes for the dishes, but for this one, I'm going to do something a little different.  You see, I wasn't really taking notes back in those days.  It was a bad habit, and I got better.  Nate and Tarver beat that into me pretty good.  Before then, I'd write down the odd ratio, but didn't keep recipes.  As a result, I was going to have to reverse engineer this recipe from the ground up.  

It all came out great, especially considering this was all out of my home kitchen, from products available locally.  But I reached out to Charlie, the guy who engineered this dish, and asked him if I could give him a mention.  He said sure, and told me that this recipe was featured in a book he's written, that's due to come out next year.  He said he didn't mind me putting up the back-engineered recipes that I worked out, but honestly, that didn't sit well with me for two reasons.  One, why would y'all want my arguably compromised recipes, when you can just wait and get his?  Two, I had to tweak recipes from books to get here anyway, and they are books you all probably have.  So this will be less of a grammed-out-step-by-step, and more of an explanation of how I got to these conclusions.  I'll give you everything I had to go on, and everything I did to fill in the blanks.  Anyone have a specific question, leave it as a comment, I'd be happy to clarify anything on a one-to-one basis, if any of you want to attempt this thing.

Overview: This dish is a riff on an established formula.  I'd call it neoclassical French, in the sense that foie gras, toast, and jelly is as old as the hills, but the twists of using truffle butter in the brioche and a liquor for the jelly were novel twists.  Novel for 20 years ago, that is.  But just like with neoclassical architecture, the term gets dated.  This is an early-aughts riff on an haute cuisine classic, and when we were doing it back in 2003, it still felt astoundingly retro.  Now, you just don't see dishes like this anymore, which is why I wanted so badly to take a crack at it.  

The dish is only 3 components.  Let's take a look:

Foie Gras au Torchon: we all learned this from the French Laundry cookbook, and it was a throwback, even then.  Torchon just means 'towel,' and that's what this dish is: foie gras, rolled into a cloth.  I've made a few tweaks to the recipe.  At Avenues, they did a salt-cured torchon, but recent medical experiences have made me a little squeamish about raw anything (might write a post about it one day, but let's just say I'm doing less raw stuff than I use to).  As a result, I went with the poaching method.  The other adaptation I made is SURE to piss off the fine dining purists, but I did what I did.  Rather than make this dish with whole, fresh foie gras, I used frozen nuggets.  I did this for 2 reasons.  First, the economics of it: this is already an expensive recipe, and the whole reason I'm doing this blog is that I have no job at the moment.  Economies had to be made.  But compounding that, because of interruptions in the restaurant supply chain, my local wholesaler no longer even offers fresh foie gras.  I was a little relieved, because that meant I didn't have to agonize over what to use.  Also, since making the transition to casual fine dining, I've been making pates, torchons, and mousses with the nuggets since forever, and they are a pretty good product.  But know that this is a slightly ghetto-fied recipe, ideal for the home cook, and perhaps not the Michelin-level badass.

What I ended up doing for the torchon: I started with the foie gras au torchon recipe from the French Laundry Cookbook.  If you don't have that book, it's really not my problem.  We've been through this before.  Smarten up!  Anyway, I made the following tweaks.  I used 2# of Labella nuggets, rather than a 1.25# lobe.  Broke the nuggets into pieces to find veins/bruises/membrane, which is so much easier than the Laundry method.  Went with a 2 hour ice water soak, rather than 24 hours in milk.  [Never been satisfied that the milk actually helps, and Modernist Cuisine backs me up, so there's that.]  Scaled up the marinade, for 2# of foie gras, rather than just 1.25#.  

 Actually, hold up, let's not breeze over that step.  I know I'm not giving recipes, but I can teach some of y'all a little something.  How does one use quick and dirty algebra to recalculate how much marinade you need for a different size batch of foie gras?  I hope a lot of you know this, but culinary math is something that's not well-known enough, so I'm gonna lay it out.  To adjust ANY recipe to ANY size, here's the trick.  

Pick an ingredient that defines your batch.  In this case, it's obviously the foie gras.  If you were doing a pate, it would be how much pork butt you were starting with.  Or let's say you were doing a pate with pork butt AND liver.  Pick whichever one of those you have the most limited amount of.  Like, say your pate took a pound of pork and a half pound of liver.  If you had 10 pounds of pork, and 8 pounds of liver, that's 10 batches worth of pork, but 16 batches worth of liver.  That means the pork is the ingredient that's going to define your batch size, which will be a 10X batch.  Conversely, if you had 3 pounds of liver (6 batches worth), and still had 10 pounds of pork (10 batches worth), the liver becomes the ingredient that defines your batch size (called your limiting factor, and you said you'd never use 9th grade algebra), so you're doing a 6X batch.  So anyway, in this recipe, the limiting factor was obviously the foie gras.  I had plenty of ingredients for the marinade, but wanted to use exactly my 2# of foie gras, in a recipe that calls for 1.25#.  (Note: for those of you who want to get into baker's percentages [which should really be all of you, if you're serious cooks], understanding this process is the first step, so give it a go, will ya?)

The way to do this is to find the multiplier.  To do this, divide your batch by the original batch size you're trying to convert.  Units don't matter, as long as they line up.  Grams and pounds will get you the same result.  In this case, it would be 2/1.25=X.  Now, I can't do that math in my head, but the supercomputer I carry in my pocket says that X, my multiplier, is 1.6.  So now, go through and multiply every amount in the recipe by 1.6 to get your new, converted recipe.

Also note, if you're scaling a recipe up, making it larger, X will always be greater than one.  If you're scaling it down, making it smaller, X will less than 1.  Since X=1.6, we know we are making the recipe bigger, which makes sense, considering we have more foie gras than the book recipe, so we are making a larger torchon.

Anyway, back to the tweaks I did to the French Laundry foie gras torchon method:  So, as I said, scale up all the amounts for the marinade.  Also, to reinforce the cognac flavor, I scattered about a shot's worth into the foie gras during marination.  I rolled it and cooked it very much in accordance with the method in the book, although forming it was different, because I broke it into chunks, so I just pressed it into a log.  To cook it, I just used water, rather than stock, and since I don't have a good place to hang torchons, after shocking and re-wrapping it, I put it in a sheet pan covered with an inch of salt and some plastic wrap, just to stop it from getting a flat spot as it chilled.  (With TFL method, the foie is still somewhat pliable when it's put in the fridge to rest.

Now, this makes a lot of portions, but you can freeze the rest for later.  You can use a peeler to make curls of it on top of poultry dishes, stuff chunks of it in squab breasts like Fredy Girardet, or let it come to room temp and whip it for mousse.  It will lose color eventually, but even then, it'll make a nice addition to your cornbread stuffing this Thanksgiving.  Or you can do what I did the morning after my wife's 30th birthday.  She had me make a torchon, and we ate about half of it.  The next morning, I drove my friend home, and on the way back, grabbed a dozen Krispy Kremes.  I think y'all know what happened next.  Best breakfast sandwich ever.  I texted pictures of the unholy monstrosity to every chef in my phone.

Truffle Brioche: This is nothing more than regular brioche, made with truffle butter.  The good news is, any good brioche recipe will work, you just need to be willing to shell out $40 for truffle butter to sub in for the butter in the recipe.  I used my go-to brioche recipe, which is adapted from Thomas Keller's excellent Bouchon Cookbook (in which he credits it to Jean Louis Paladin, and so on, back to the beginning of time, no doubt).  If you don't have that book, I'm sure you can find a good one.  Look for one that has a 2:1 ratio of flour to butter, by weight.  There are only two real secrets: first, get the best truffle butter you can (the stuff they sell at Whole Foods is not bad, although back in the day, we used Urbani, which is the industry standard).  Second, don't pussyfoot.  Swap out EVERY scrap of butter in the recipe for truffle butter.  A thing like this is too important for half-measures.  The Bouchon recipe calls for 10oz., and makes two loaves.  Now, you could probably cut it in half, and get away with just one loaf to save money, but that's hardly the point on foie gras, truffle, and cognac day.  My recommendation is to make a full batch, and then have some fun figuring out what to do with the other loaf.  Nate, thoughts?  Grilled cheese?  PBJ?  French toast?  Let's get weird, brotha.

One important brioche note: If you've never made brioche dough before, you're going to think you screwed up.  The dough is so fatty and wet, it looks halfway between soft bread dough and cake batter. Don't worry.  Before you form it, you'll chill it, and all that butter will firm up, and it'll roll and form like a dream.

Cognac Jelly: This is the one where I really was on my own, trying to figure it out.  The dish wasn't on the menu that long, and I just never really got this one right.  I mean, you ever have the thing where the first time you make something, it comes out completely perfect, and then you just never, ever get it back?  This was like that for me.  I could never get to the bottom of the pectin ratio.  The trouble is that we didn't really have the tools to measure precisely (this is before everyone had drug dealer scales in their toolboxes).  Pectin ratios for jelly usually assume you're making gallons, but with a liquor jelly, you're starting with a bottle, tops.  So I took a crack at it this time, with a somewhat limited degree of success...  

The basic method for this is to burn the alcohol off of liquor, then sweeten it to taste, and set it with pectin.  The trouble I ran into was the pectin.  The pectin was the ingredient I never did figure out, but research tools (i.e., my library and the internet) are much better now.  My plan was to take my reduced cognac and pretend it was a fruit juice that had almost no pectin.  See, that's what makes all this complicated.  Different fruit juices have different levels of naturally occurring pectin.  Apples have a good bit, quince has a ton, strawberries have almost none.  So I was going to look at a grandma-ass jelly making chart from my old canning book, and get a good ratio for strawberry jelly, and use that.

At my local Whole Foods, this is what I had to work with:

See how the label says 'Universal Pectin?'  My ass.  When you open up the instruction book, it immediately informs you that Pomona's Pectin is different.  It sets in the presence of calcium, rather than sugar.  Okay, don't get me wrong, that's cool.  It allows you to make no-sugar-added jellies, which sounds just perfect for the work-out-clothes-and-no-makeup wieners that populate your average Whole Foods, but its hardly goddamn universal, now, is it, you hippies??  If they would have just said 'Pomona's Not-Universal, Different-Mechanism-of-Action, So If You're Trying to Bind $35 Worth of Cognac, You Might Want to Look Elsewhere brand pectin, I would have been like "Oh, okay," and done exactly that.

Instead, I foolishly assumed the 'Universal' in the name meant that it was the same as all the other pectin in the universe, and as a result, none of my grandma-ass ratios worked.  The instructions had ratios of their own, but they proved awfully thick.  I started with 2 C of cognac, cooked it down to 6 fluid ounces, added 6T of sugar.  I used their recipe for a light-medium set strawberry jelly, which was 3/4t of pectin (why do these products never use grams), and it set up like a gymnasium floor.  I had to cook out more and more brandy, and thin it down, and let it reset, until the cold-plate test (put a little hot jelly on a cold plate to check how it's gonna gel) came out right.  Which is fine, but I was gonna drink all that.  Oh well.  Whole Foods sucks, just not as much as all the other grocery stores were I live.

Also, the liquor really doesn't have to be Cognac, that was just where this started.  Armagnac, Bourbon, Calvados, hell, blackstrap rum, these all make a pretty great jelly, and they can go onto any kind of charcuterie board (or, again, a mutant PBJ). 

Anyway, how did it come out?

Absolutely fantastic.  The fatty liver, the sweet jelly, the pornographically aromatic brioche, it's just a perfect chord.  My buddy Mark opened up a bottle of 1999 Quarts du Chaume, which was the perfect accent, and almost made up for the extra cognac I didn't get to shoot.  Fun night.

Everybody buy Charlie McKenna's book when it comes out!  I'll hype the hell out of it when I can.  He's a nice guy, a hell of a fine dining mind, a barbecue badass, plus my wife says he's just as handsome as he thinks he is.  Also, he's a big Cubs fan, so clearly, he knows what time it is.  

Let's go Cubbies.

-JS