Original Dish: Royal Red Shrimp, Brioche, Leeks Vinaigrette, Sauce Vin Blanc (Also, TFL/PSCB Review Tease #2!)

 Ok, so I'm still working my way through the brilliant The French Laundry/Per Se Cookbook.  It's got so much stuff in it, my head is going to explode.  Like his other books, it's primarily built on recipes that they use at the restaurant (or, at least, recipes that look like they could be used at the restaurant.  However, intermixed with this are articles on purveyors, biographical entries on key players, simpler, snapshot-style recipes, as well as articles about the chefs that inspired them.

One thing I saw and had to try was their recipe for Sauce Vin Blanc, which Keller learned at the Polo Lounge.  It involves sauteeing lobster shells with mirepoix, then covering them with 50/50 heavy cream and Noilly Prat vermouth.  Then, you throw the whole thing in the oven and let it go for about an hour at 300 degrees.

After that hour, you strain it, reduce it to taste, and thicken it.  He doesn't make any suggestion about how much to reduce it, but what I found was that eventually, the sweetness of the vermouth feels like it's about to take over.  At this point, you correct the seasoning with salt, and it brings it back into balance.  Interestingly, he also makes no mention of how to thicken it, but the reason is that he has an entire section on liaisons.  Which is remarkable, if you think about it.  Why?

Well, the French Laundry Cookbook was almost entirely devoid of thickeners.  I think they used flour in Eric's Staff Lasagna, but that's about it.  Everything else was late-Nouvelle, with the method being either juice, reduce, butter out, or brown jus reinforced with bones and trim, reduced till sticky. Now, we all went through that, and it's awesome, but didn't we all figure out that sauces that were 85% butter usually just ended up tasting like butter, and that sauces that were 85% gelatine ended up coating everything and being really sticky, and expensive, besides?  I mean, there's certainly still room for that, and those techniques are represented in the book, but Keller also seems to have been willing to move out of his routine, and continue to expand and evolve, which is really what this book is about.

He's been looking forward, embracing techniques popularized by the Modernists, Grant Achatz and his ilk, like Ultratex, xanthan gum, agar-agar, and carrageenan.  But he's also looking back, and gave a passionate defense of bechamel and buerre manie.  It's about time a Michelin-starred chef did something like that.  You could make a strong argument that the flour/starch-eschewing of the Nouvelle movement was a direct reaction to the flour-power overload of haute cuisine, 1950's continental, and traditional American cuisine, where it was all-flour, all the time.  Now, the pendulum is swinging the other way again, and I applaud him for not listing a method to thicken the Sauce Vin Blanc.  He doesn't directly tell the reader to go back to page 108 and pick a method, but I like to think it's what he was thinking.

For the record, I went with a slurry made from sweet potato starch that I get in the Chinese grocery.  I think it has a little better flavor-release than cornstarch, and it doesn't clump up when you reheat it (at least, not as bad).  

So How's the Sauce?  Delicious.  In a way, it's similar to a good sauce Americaine.  Like, you ever notice how lobster stock is just kinda dank and saline, without a whole lot of appeal?  But then, when you add brandy, tomato, garlic, fennel, and cream, the whole thing just blossoms into this amazing flavor chord, that's so much more than the sum of its parts, and would be nothing without the saline backbone of lobster heads?  Sauce Vin Blanc does the same thing.  The lobster provides the backbone, the vermouth does the heavy lifting and brings the acidity, the aromatics fill out the corners, and the cream smooths everything out.  A great sauce for fish or shellfish.

The Dish

So I had this great shellfish sauce kicking around, and I was trying to decide what to do with it.  Then, at Tarvin Seafood, our local shrimp shack (like, literally), they had Royal Red shrimp, head on, for like $8 a pound.  If you haven't had Royal Reds before, they are a shrimp caught off Florida, and their skin is red when it's raw (so are the heads), and turn even redder when cooked.  The picture doesn't do them justice, they almost look like mini lobsters.  They are worth the extra money.  The flavor is somewhere between a Hawaiian blue prawn and a langoustine (but not as good as a langoustine, no way).  They are some of the best semi-local shellfish available in my market.  I wanted to do a dish that would put them front and center.  This is what I came up with.

Royal Red Shrimp, Brioche, Leeks Vinaigrette, Sauce Vin Blanc

The Shrimp- Royal Reds, just shucked, and pre-salted for about 10 minutes (I like to give shrimp a little dry-brine)

The Leeks- Classic leeks vinaigrette, just like you see in every bistro in France, and never see in the US.  I I had some huge leeks, like, tee-ball-bat sized.  I cut fat rounds from them, removed the outer layers (they were really clean), and put them into a sautoir.  Added water and a pinch of salt, covered them in a parchment lid, and braised them on the stove top till they were really tender.  Meanwhile, I made a simple dijon vinaigrette (dijon mustard, red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt).  I made sure it was just a little more acidic than a vinaigrette that would be going on a salad.  When the leeks were done, I poured the vinaigrette over them to cover, and let them sit about 4 hours.  If you've never had leeks done this way, give them a try.  At service, I just blotted off the extra dressing, and it was good to go.

The Toast- Just regular Whole Foods brioche, nothing special.

How Was It?  It came together really nice!  Would have made a good appetizer at a bistro.  It was definitely true to my personally favored culinary ethos, that is to say, 'bistro cuisine that is just a little to elaborate and frou-frou to still qualify as bistro cuisine.'  

It would crush it as a lunch dish at a ladies-who-lunch kinda place too, I think.  But I'd keep getting orders in 'no bread, SOS,' and then I'd have to go start slapping people.  You know, in my imagination.

-JS