No Substitutions
Remember the $50 ducks from “Duck with Chimichurri”? Well, their legs and thighs reprised their performance in the list of ingredients. Not certain that was intentional, but it worked out perfectly. Pretty neat set of dishes; I thought dessert would pound me, but it all turned out great.
Raw Omnivore
First course is a no-brainer of sorts, just cut up a melon (cantaloupe) and serve it with some Prosciutto (cured ham sliced REALLY thin). Try to go to the deli counter and bump up the quality if you can; it doesn’t take much. Great.
Saffron Alert
Second course: (Again, you need the soffrito and picada “building blocks” from the front of the book.) I took the legs/thighs that I had broken down from the earlier recipe that used just the breasts — and boned those out, and then cut them into 1 inch chunks. The rest is just following the pictures. There was a marginal recipe flutter with the soffrito callout — it doesn’t scale down anywhere near the measurements called for — I’d use 1/2 cup for the serving for six. But it probably doesn’t matter. Again, because of the Saffron Oddity in the picada, I used half of what was called for. Also, the rice-to-broth ratio was SPOT ON once again. Really good.
Last course: when I first looked at the recipe, I thought they had Fracked it up by not including flour. Not so. The measurements are correct, and the instructions are too. The only thing that bothered me was the “folding” issue and the “soft peaks” callout for the meringue. For the folding, the best I can surmise is that you take a spatula, run it towards you along the bottom of the bowl of “stuff”, and about three-quarters of the way to you, lift what you have straight up and over, moving away from you — rinse and repeat, GENTLY. For the soft peak thing, it’s was a tough call, I just ran the mixer full-out until the egg whites looked like a flacid octopus sitting in the bowl. Nowhere near the shiny styrofoam stuff you’d get if you let the egg white go a lot further — even just a minute or two — so WATCH IT CAREFULLY. I used a large zip-loc bag (just snip off one corner) for piping the mix into basically a range of cupcake molds, some nonstick, some with leftover St. Patrick’s paper cupcake liners in them. The sizes of the molds ranged from about a Tablespoon to “really big cupcake” — you’ve just got to wing it on the cooking times. The 17 minutes called out is way too long for the bite-size ones, and not enough for the bigger molds; also, there’s a translation error in the size callout. It mentions 4 inches in diameter or so, where the cakes shown are nowhere near that size.
Also, I only had 72% chocolate instead of the 60% called out — so the cakes where a little more Dostoevsky than Paula Deen.
Still Great.
Cooking Ferran Adriá’s The Family Meal — The Erratas