Good stuff, again — with only one error to report. The timeline has you make the gazpacho 45 minutes ahead of time, while the recipe tells you to do it at least two hours ahead.
So watch out.
The first course threw me, I ended up with much too much sharpness/bitterness from the garlic. He has you bring the cloves up to a boil, and then has you shock them; he tells you to repeat that two more times. I only did it once again, and in neither case did I let the water come to an absolute complete boil. So watch that part (and do take out any green sprouts in the center of the garlic). I ended up diluting my original batch with another batch of gazpacho, and it was passable. Otherwise I’d imagine I’ll stick with the recipe from The French Laundry Cookbook.
Second course — the squid. I bought a 3lb box of whole frozen calamari, and went from there — substituted Better Than Bullion fish stock for the homemade, and got my picada and sofftio from the freezer (again using the basic building blocks from the front of the book.) I only used half of the picada called for, thinking that might tame the weird saffron overload that I’m having with the original picada recipe. Cutting back seemed to work. Otherwise the recipe is fine, the stock-to-rice ratio is once again, dead on. There was an issue with the squid ink: I found the ink sacs in the squid and reserved them, and basically pressed them through a sieve into the rice when called for. If you immerse the bottom of the sieve with the ink sacs you can pretty much “wash” the ink from the sieve into the rice. There wasn’t really enough to give it the black effect, so if you really want the dish to look like the picture you’ll have to source some jarred ink. Cleaning the squid themselves was pretty tedious, and while the tentacles clusters looked neat on the plate, it took about an hour and a half to process the little devils. So unless you have the time for a couple hour lab on squid anatomy (The Joy of Cooking tells you exactly how to process the squid) it’s probably way easier to just get some frozen squid tubes from the butcher at the local grocery.
The dish tasted pretty good — seafoodie tasting, but without the grit of clams.
Dessert was a no brainer, just use a spoon to sprinkle the chocolate, or the shavings will pretty much instantly melt on your fingers. Also, I didn’t use nearly as much chocolate as was called out. Pretty neat dessert.
Good stuff.
Cooking Ferran Adriá’s The Family Meal — The Errata