Attack of the Substitutions
Pretty good meal, but the substitutions were many and of varying impact. Good news: I followed the Bread and Garlic soup recipe to the letter — after parsing out another recipe error; bad news: I scrapped the Puerco Pibil recipe in favor of Robert Rodriguez’s version, found in the DVD extras for Once Upon a Time in Mexico. It can be found here. Also, there were no fresh figs to be had, so I used kiwi — no rhyme or reason for that, except they were on an end display.
   
First, there is a little screwiness in the soup recipe for six. The bread called for scales down from the 75 servings to the 20 servings cleanly, but when going from 20 to six servings (roughly dividing by three) it calls not for 10 ounces of bread (which would be roughly a third for 20), but 24 ounces. If two pounds (32 ounces) feeds 20, then why the hell is 75% of that amount going to feed six? I used 10 ounces. Everything else was dirt simple, and tasted great.
   
For the pibil, I couldn’t source achiote paste, so I scrapped the recipe and went with the version from Robert Rodriguez’s “Ten Minute Cooking School” from the DVD material I just mentioned. He makes his own achiote paste from scratch, and I’d done this several times, not with pork, but with caribou. Essentially, grind the spices in a coffee grinder (used for spices only) and then throw everything else (including the spices you just ground into a fine powder) into a blender. Pork Butt and Pork Shoulder are the same cut of meat, so get about five pounds, cube it up into two inch pieces, then marinade the pork in the mixture from the blender for 12 hours. Roast all this for four hours at 325º. Get the extra wide/tough “grilling” aluminum foil for this, and seal the marinade and pork inside a pouch set inside a lasagna-sized pan. When it’s finished, shred the meat and serve either over rice, in tortillas, or both. Because I had my parents over, I left out the habaneros, with can be added into the individual tortillas later, depending on your heat tolerance.
   
I did follow the recipe in marinating the pork for 12 hours, and did also throw the onion into the foil packet when I roasted the pork, serving it up in the way directed (although I made fresh corn tortillas and added a little pecorino romano to really set off the meat.) As best I could tell, the recipe in the book is proportionally fine, but something tells me this would be a hard one to screw up: Pork, acid, cumin…..
   
Just plain awesomeness.
   
For dessert, there were no figs available, but I figured a sweet fruit with the liquor and whipped cream would be hard to screw up. The Kirsch called for wasn’t available either, but I did find a roasted cherry rum that is probably similar. Not bad, but nothing to write home about, either.
   
Here is the recipe from the video for the pibil:

5 lbs. pork butt (shoulder), cut into 2 inch cubes
5 tablespoons annato seeds
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
1 tablespoon whole black pepper
½ teaspoon whole cloves
8 whole allspice berries
2 habanero Peppers, fresh or dried, cleaned and minced (optional)
½ cup orange juice
½ cup white vinegar
8 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons salt
5 lemons
1 shot of tequila

Another interesting meal, dishes ranging from dirt simple to watch-your-ass careful.

The first course, goes without saying, just get organic tomatoes if you can, and use a little better olive oil, blah, blah, blah….

For the second course, I substituted Better-than-Bullion’s fish stock and used King Crab legs (*Hey* This is Alaska!) instead of the small crabs. The recipe uses some building blocks you’re encouraged to make ahead. In particular, soffrito and picada. The soffrito is straightforward. The picada is a green sauce made from Italian parsley, garlic, oil, hazelnuts, and SAFFRON — which is giving me trouble. I’m not certain how saffron is supposed to taste, but if the recipe for the picada is too heavy on the saffron, it may explain the “medicinal,” “idodine,” or “bactine” taste it has given the last two dishes I used it in (including this crab stew). I Googled the taste issue, but can’t quite make heads or tails of whether I’ve got crap saffron, or just used too much. The stew was good, but the hint if medicinalness from the saffron was annoying.

At any rate, the stew is fairly straightforward, and most importantly the serving for six proportions — of rice to stock — are dead on. Don’t let that 15 1/2 cups of stock throw you. The only caveat is that you will be eating the rice for a while — it makes quite a bit.

The flan was a bit more troublesome, again maybe the magic ovens at El Bulli can cook a flan in 30 minutes, but mine can’t. After about 40 minutes it was at ~160º in the middle, thought the eggs would set, cooled it off. Not so — it was a runny mess. I put it back in the oven for an hour, got it past 180º, and cooled it off. The carmel on top was a little clumpy, but it held together and separated cleanly from the bread pan that I had cooked it in. The proportions were right and it tasted great.

Cooking Ferran Adriá’s The Family Meal — The Errata

Another good meal. The first and last parts were a no-brainers, except that I cheated and used store-bought pesto, and orange Curaçao instead of Cointreau.

The fish was almost a disaster. I couldn’t find sea bass, hake, or any of the other substitutes called for in the recipe, so I opted for two fillets: one of Rockfish and another of Cod. Later in the day I stumbled across whole Tilapia, already gutted and scaled. The fish looked identical to the Japanese Bream in the recipe photos, so I ended up steaming all three types of fish. The rockfish was a tasteless mass of crap, and the Cod wasn’t much better, although it had a better texture. The Tilapia however, ROCKED for some reason. Very, very good.


The only recipe weirdness was how long to cook the ginger slices in the oil. I found that you really need to fry the little devils until they are like potato chips. Make certain that the oil [BE CAREFUL] is boiling as you spoon it over the fish, to make certain the onions and cilantro sizzle; also the ginger chips need to get spooned over the fish, along with the oil. 














Cooking Ferran Adriá’s The Family Meal — The Errata

Another good meal, with just a couple of recipe flutters.

The potato salad was great, just watch (when cooking for six) that the ratio for the capers aren’t a third of the amount called out for cooking for 20, so I doubled/tripled what was called for. Pretty interesting flavors, it generally rocked.

The Thai beef curry had another error, where the amount of curry paste called for was 1/3 of a cup for 20 people, it calls for only 1 teaspoon of paste when cooking for 6 — I used a heaping tablespoon. Also, the water called for seemed really excessive, it took quite some time to reduce the cooking stock to something resembling a sauce. I removed the meat, as it was falling apart already, and cooked the stock off for more than an hour. Be sure to reduce it though, the meat has little flavor on its own right out of the pressure cooker. Again, it was pretty good.

The strawberries were great, I used balsamic vinegar instead of red wine vinegar — very interesting flavors. Be sure to mind the recipe when putting the water into the caramel, it creates quite a lot of steam. I served it with some sweetened whipped cream which helped balance out the strawberries, which were just on the verge of getting ripe.

All in all, another sold set of dishes.

Cooking Ferran Adriá’s The Family Meal — The Errata