3 years old going on 42

We have a very interesting group in house. They bring a lot of business to the hotel. They take courses throughout the week on meditation, palates etc.. When a problem happens I am the first to make it right with the guest. Sometimes there is nothing you can do. A bare foot lady entered the restaurant and ordered a flat bread. It usually has around a 12 minute ticket time. After 8 minutes she came to the kitchen and demanded her food. My manager asked the lady to wait in the bar and told her she could not be in a public area with out shoes. She walked into our bar and dropped to the ground and through a tantrum. All I could do was laugh, ask if she needed a time out and move on.

Marinara stuffed meatballs

Certainly one of the best savory applications for liquid nitrogen is being able to freeze a liquid and put it into the middle of something. Here we will freeze a sauce and place it in the middle so when the guest pierces it with a fork, a rich red marinara will run out.

Steaming will set the activa so when the meatball is warmed, the marinara will stay inside.

Recipe

700g pork butt, 700g ground beef, 70g roasted garlic puree

160g small dice onion and celery sauteed, 80g mayploy, 25g salt

30g parsley chopped, 17g activa, 8g pepper, 100g eggs

Mix all ingredients and chill overnight. Freeze small balls of marinara in liquid nitrogen.

Roll the meat around the marinara and place in plastic wrap and steam for 4 minutes

Roll in bread crumbs and sear in oil. Bring the temperature up slowly in a 250 degree oven

Milk and cookies

I Had a few hours to mess around tonight. I wanted to do a dish with familiar flavors that everyone can relate to. The milk is placed in a balloon and spun in liquid nitrogen. The middle is filled with a chocolate chip cookie mousse. There are also nitro cookie crumbs on the base.

Tasting menu 51

First day of DNC. So far it has been smooth at the hotel. I have always wanted to do a creative meatball and pasta dish. We have some amazing produce right now on the western slope of Colorado. Peaches, Rocky ford melons and Olathe corn to name a few. The cool nights and hot summers in the valley create this very rich sweet flavor in these vegetables.

Alaskan king crab
Passion fruit film, poached fruits, fennel mousse

Quail egg quiche
Black truffle, onion confit, apple syrup

Mojito space foam

Tomato sauce stuffed meatball
Mozzarella sheets, pasta puree, Goats milk parmesan

Colorado western slope peaches
Sangria syrup, mascarpone ice cream made tableside
With liquid nitrogen

DNC 08

We are prepping like donkeys on the eve of the convention. I have never gone into a week having no idea of how busy we will be. Will people here in the suburbs stay away from downtown and come to the hotel for dinner. Will our hotel guest slam us for breakfast or have a hamburger when they get back from the convention at night. (I hope we guess right) We have some very interesting people staying here, I will elaborate when they are gone. I hope the city comes out of this with a new national respect of how great this place is.

Creme brulee short cut

This recipe allows you to make a creme brulee without baking it for 40 minutes in the oven.After it sets you can level it off in a brulee dish and fire it with a torch. For the tasting menu this week we added 60 grams less sugar and added 2 oz of sesame oil. We seasoned with salt and folded in chop scallions

Recipe

1000 G Cream
240 G Egg yolks
160 G Sugar
4 Ea Sheets gelatin bloomed in water


Scald the cream. Add the eggs to the sugar and whisk for 2 minutes. Temper the egg yolk mixture with the hot cream. Add the bloomed gelatin and return to medium heat for 2 minutes. Stir constantly.Remove, strain and let set

Yuzu soda and green tea ice cream float

Tatsing menu 50

I was wondering on my days off if other chefs have the same problem going out to eat as I do. I can never sit down and enjoy the meal. I think about operational shit like what was the food cost of that dish or wonder what the line looks like and how many cooks do they have? It is very annoying never being able to turn my brain off. This week we will be doing a lot of experimenting with our new carbonating machine. We have also been looking at doing a dish using superconductivity. I never thought I would here myself say that

Snacks
Yuzu soda with rasberry sorbet

Crispy chocolate wrapped curried peanuts

Pomegranate marshmallow

Oil poached snapper
Smoked corn pipette, crispy potato, potato foam

Scallion crème brulee
Unagi, Asian pear, king mushroom

Bing cherry flambé
Mexican vanilla ice cream made
Table side with liquid nitrogen

Carbonation

The best part about working in this hotel is having a engineering department. When my coolers down or I have a leak in the steamer they are just a phone call away. I asked them if they could help build a carbonation machine. This is what they came up with:

We used a propel bottle and screwed a tire pressure valve onto the top. We then fit a valve onto a hose that conected to a c02 bottle. You hook up the bottle and turn on the gauge to 20psi. You then turn the bottle over and shake until the slight bubbling noise has stoped. This means that the C02 has mixed into the liquid. You let the bottle rest for 5 minutes and then crack it open. Apple juice and orange juice were amazing. We are now going to make our own soda and carbonated liquor.

Metromix

9 news new webservice metromix came and took some pictures a few weeks ago. The pictures came out really well. Makes me wish I paid a little more attention in photo shop.
http://denver.metromix.com/restaurants/photogallery/chemistry-in-the-kitchen/553467/content?photo=9

Tasting menu 49

It is really crazy for me right now, even posting menus has become a struggle. We are getting ready for the Democratic National Convention. The day before the confrence starts we have the Green Bay Packers. Our roll is still up in the air as far as who and when we are going to be feeding people. We know it will be crazy for breakfast and late night at the very least.

White soba noodles
Jelly fish, roasted peppers, toasted nori cream


Heirloom tomatoes 10 ways
Marshmallow, granita, sushi, glass, confit,
Inverted Bruschetta, fata paper, clarified, sou-vide, candied


Roasted lemon
Peppered chicken, brown butter powder, crispy garden squash


Black pearl tapioca
Coffee jelly, condensed milk ice cream
Made table side with liquid nitrogen

Curried peanuts in crispy chocolate

El Bulli recipe #641. Pretty straight forward recipe. The key is cooking the chocolate long enough to get the crispy texture. My camera sucks so I am back to taking pictures on my phone

Isomalt light bulb

We were doing this as a garnish for out crispy coconut ice cream with rum marshmallow. We stopped doing it in the summer because it is too humid here. You can extend the shelf like by putting it in a air tight container with limestone. The limestone draws out the moisture giving you a few more hours of life.

Heat the isomalt and water to 310 degrees and pour into a metal ring on a silt pad

Let it sit for 2 minutes.

Slowly pull the ring up to get the candle form

The finished product is placed over the dessert. The guest shatters the bulb and it will rain some crispy sugar on the dessert

Tasting menu 48

I am going to revisit cooking food in the earth this week. We will dig a pit at the hotel and roast the salmon in the ground. The white cherry tomatoes came from my garden this week. We had a micro burst at the house yesterday that took out a huge chunk of a tree in our back yard. It was about 6 feet from taking out the garden. I will be working on a new way to document my experiments this week. Writing recipes like a math formula allows you to come up with new combinations of cooking techniques that you normally would not think of.

Tasting menu


Yogurt paper
White cherry tomatoes, olive soil, red pepper jel

Pit roasted salmon
Orzo, whipped lemon, cucumber

Porcini amber
Manchero, bison, smoked grapes

Girl Scout samoas ice cream
Thin mint dippin dots made table side
With liquid nitrogen

Be a faster cook- Learn to play the drums

I have always talked about how food and music go together. The fact that music and food give so much pleasure and how artistic these two mediums are. Thinking back, my playing the drum set through high school really helped me to become a better line cook. It made my hands a lot faster and made me think steps out to set my self up for the next hit. Cooking is the same way, when you work the line you are always thinking 10-12 steps ahead of what you are doing. Trying to remember when the fish went in the oven or when I dropped the pan and is it hot enough. I think I naturally plan for the next step because of music. No doubt the repetitiveness of playing drums has helped me think in a different way. I even keep this drum in my office to hit on. Better the drum then the waitstaff