REAL MEN (MAKE) QUICHE

Quiche Lorraine. Mangalitsa bacon, onion, and Pennsylvania Noble

Like a lot of chefs my age, I've spent many hours with Thomas Keller's books. There are techniques from The French Laundry Cookbook and Bouchon that are still in use in my kitchen today. A few years ago at Journeyman, we decided to check out Keller's quiche recipe and we liked it so much, that after a few minor tweaks to "make it our own" it went on the menu where it was universally beloved.

Keller describes quiche as "the essence of luxury", a statement that sparked our interest in trying his out. The quiche we knew was typically a soggy, frozen pie crust filled with spongy, curdled eggs and a few poorly cooked garnishes throughout. This is not French quiche, he explained. French quiche is deep, two inches, and is a quivering, light, luminous custard spiked with flavorful, seasonal, and carefully prepared ingredients. This is typical of Keller's recipes. Simple and familiar things are granted enlightenment through an understanding of a dish at its essence, through its history, or possibly a reexamining of its role in modern cooking. Eating this quiche for the first time was like finding a long lost brother.

Brandon, my current sous and butcher, spent a few years as the "day guy" at Journeyman, and is intimately familiar with this quiche. He has made dozens. He has lived through the frustrations of finicky pate brisee, the horror of opening the oven door to find your batter leaking, or leaked and baked solid to the sheet tray, and the not so momentary hatred of a not so competent line cook turning his back on it for a minute too long, only to find the buttery, crisp crust burned to charcoal. This quiche is a labor of love, time consuming and demanding. Give any phase of its production less than your full attention and it can fail. But when it's right...

Brandon, Green and  myself have talked fondly now and then about quiche. Brandon began wondering if there could be a place on our menu at Reserve for it. As he is prone to do, he prowled the internet late at night, learning what he could about its history and found that in the days of the guilds in France, where the art of charcuterie was, if not born, formalized, it was actually the right of the charcutier to produce and sell quiche. That's right, quiche is charcuterie. Not pastry, not brunch. Charcuterie. I suppose it makes sense. Pate means "paste" in French, and back in the day referred to anything (though usually meat) baked in a pastry crust and eaten cold. Quiche is of course most commonly eaten hot these days, but this one is a knockout cold. It has therefore joined our terrine and sausage on our charcuterie menu as a nod to its history.

After some time spent damming his leaking quiche with corn flour, Brandon has mastered it. Like Keller, we have a taste for the classics: Florentine (spinach, cheese, and shallot) and Lorraine (pictured above and on the menu now). Our quiche Lorraine contains our house made mangalitsa bacon, caramelized Visser Farm onions, and a blockbuster American artisanal cheese (in lieu of Gruyere) called Pennsylvania Noble. It is a cheddar in style, inoculated with a white mold -- the same mold responsible for brie and camembert -- during the last two months of aging. The custard is made with Hilhof organic cream and milk and eggs from S & S Farm. Thanks to these great producers, Keller's mentoring, and Brandon's obsessive-compulsive nature, it is outstanding. I won't describe it further. Come in and taste for yourself.

Keller ends his introduction to quiche by saying "I'm sorry America has lost the quiche - or never really had it. I'd like to see it return to its proper form, and for more people to know about it and appreciate it." We're in, chef. We will do our best to spread the good word.

How to cook

When I talk to people who don't cook I often find myself saying something ridiculous like, "Cooking is easy, it's mostly just paying attention to what you're doing."  Which I really think is true but is just about the most unhelpful statement you can make.  It got me wondering if I could come up with a formula for cooking, breaking it down into its parts, 10% this and 33% that.  So here is my list and percentages:

shopping 35%
     you can't make good food with bad ingredients
technique 15%
     it's easy to destroy good ingredients if you don't treat them right
history/knowledge/context/experience 5%
     mostly avoiding past mistakes or building on past successes
creativity 5%
     I think often over-rated in American culinary culture, the quest for the next new thing leads to more bad food...
patience 15%
     knowing when not to mess with it, waiting until summer for strawberries
paying attention 25 %
     cooking is an interactive and dynamic process

What do you think, would you assign different percentages or different elements?

Salt cured egg yolks

 

Allie caught me with the camera salting egg yolks.  Chef calls it "chicken bottarga."At the moment I completely could not remember what fish is used to make bottarga.  For the record, it's tuna, grey mullet, and sometimes swordfish.

Spinach & poached egg risotto

hooligan, midnight moon, sweet peppers

 

Our menu has changed a lot since we opened back in September.  We lose a dish most often because the season has changed and we can't get a key ingredient any longer of the quality that we need.  Sometimes, we just want to move on to something new, sometimes we just get bored.  My favorite dish these days is our risotto, one of our classics, on the menu since day one, with very few changes.  It's also one of our top sellers.  One night Scott had 17 orders come in all at once.  The risotto part of that is easy, but 17 perfectly poached eggs at the same time is no small feat.  

The ingredients are simple. Rice, butter, vegetable stock, fresh spinach (currently from the greenhouses of our friends at Visser Farms), two excellent cheeses, midnight moon and hooligan, a poached egg, and a sweet pepper relish. 

I have to tell you a little bit about those cheeses because they are a big part of why I love this so much.  Midnight moon is made by Cypress Grove from Humboldt County in California.  It's a slightly aged goat cheese that is the hands-down favorite among our servers.  Which is probably why it is also our best seller from the charcuterie and cheese menu.  It's mild, smooth, and nutty, reminiscent of parmigiano but not as powerful. 

The aggressive cheese in this mix is Cato Corners' Hooligan.  Hooligan is a stinky and flavorful washed rind cheese produced by a mother-son team on a 40-cow dairy in Connecticut.  It's intense and has scared away more than a few timid tasters, but it  is mellowed out in the risotto.  It's the tuba in this orchestra, unmistakable on its own but it blends in so well that you don't know it's there unless you look for it.

 

I don't know where Matt got the idea to put a poached egg on top of risotto,  but now that I've had it I don't ever want to make any kind of risotto without an egg on top.  I love breaking open the yolk and mixing it in to the rice, it adds that extra bit of richness that makes this so satisfying to my mouth, and stomach, and soul. 

The egg is topped with sweet pepper relish.  We buy fresh red, yellow, orange, and even, sometimes, ivory peppers.  Roast them, peel them, chop them, cook them with herbs, make them even more delicious. 

This is the dish I always want at the end of the night when I'm tired and hungry.  It's comforting and restorative.  It's a culinary Snuggie.

So many tortured metaphors in support of one simple $11 dish. 

MONTELLO MEATS

Standing rib roast from Montello Meats

Many meat lovers bemoan the loss of the family butcher shop these days, and with good reason. Really great beef requires excellence at several stages of production and this level is infrequently achieved. On the farm it is  essential to raise animals in a healthy environment which suits their natural habits: access to clean air and water, room to move about, and fresh green grass. At the slaughterhouse, care must be taken to keep stress levels as low as possible. And with beef in particular, the butcher plays a vital role.

All meats benefit greatly from a skilled butcher's expertise, but beef requires it most. Beef must be aged to become tender and pleasant to the modern palate. This takes place over the course of a minimum of two weeks and there are two ways to do it: wet aged and dry aged. In modern, industrial meat packing, wet aging is the preferred method. The carcass is cut to to large primals and vacuum sealed in plastic bags, boxed, and left to age for several days to weeks. During this time, lactic acid builds in the muscle tissue and tenderizes it. With dry aging, the carcass is split in two, sometimes four, pieces and left to hang in the open air.

Modern meat packers prefer wet aging because it is cheaper. It requires less cooler space, less labor, and produces higher yields. Dry aged beef requires room for air to circulate around it and the outside dries and gets trimmed off. Also, there is moisture loss, which means less money per pound per carcass (open a plastic bag of wet aged meat and the liquid pooling in the bottom of it would have evaporated during dry aging -- good for the packer, but not your plate).

The building of lactic acid takes place whether beef is dry or wet aged, so tenderizing takes place in both methods. Dry aging concentrates flavor, improves texture, and creates complexity and depth. Wet aging degrades texture and can sometimes contribute unpleasant metallic and sulfurous aromas and flavors. If you want a really great steak, you want it dry aged, but the expense involved has all but driven it out of the marketplace. Those who know, however, will happily pay the premium.

Enter Montello Meat Market. Tony and Tina Larson own this small butcher shop on the south side of Holland, Michigan and are of a dying breed. The family butcher shop has all but vanished from our culinary landscape and we are truly blessed to still have one in our neck of the woods. The Larson's buy grass fed, hormone and antibiotic free beef and age it in house for a minimum of 21 days. Then Tony and his oldest son Sam set to work on it, producing various cuts with artistry and obvious patience, practice, and skill.

Visit often enough, and you will eventually meet all of the Larson clan. They all pitch in to make a go of this truly family run small business. Tony obviously taught Sam, and like many butchers, guards that knowledge carefully. Brandon and I once asked if we could come follow him around for a few days to learn from the master, and with his trademark ear to ear smile and genuine good will, he politely declined. I don't think he actually said no, but it was clear that mentoring was for his heirs only. I will have to content myself with the fruits of his labors.

The Larson's are a perfect example of why buying from the little guy is so much more rewarding than giving your money to a big box store. The big guys can never give you the sense of confidence and community that comes effortlessly from Tony and Tina, not to mention the artisanship, the preservation of economically challenging techniques, and the simple damn deliciousness of a food treated thoughtfully, carefully, and with the health and happiness of the client being priority one.

Long live the corner butcher shop.