Return to Sent Soví

Some of you may remember that Bill & I also belong to a small wine tasting group that meets once a month. Our annual dinner was at Sent Soví Restaurant again. This dinner was a bit different than the dinner our Cookbook Club had a few weeks ago in that Josiah was given the wines the members chose to bring and created a 6 course menu specifically for each wine. He came out of his kitchen with each course to describe what he prepared and why he chose the ingredients for that wine. This group of people have been friends and tasting wines for over 20 years so you can imagine that the conversations were spirited and enjoyable. However, for a several minutes after each course was served, there was total silence as everyone savored the flavor combinations, tender meats and total gastronomic experience.

We started with a NV Tattinger Champagne la Francaise brut. We were treated to several “small bites” of Gougéres, stuffed purple endives and basterma (air cured beef) on croutons. It was hard not to fill up on these small bites and champagne…what’s not to like?

But we finally sat down to dinner and began with an unusual German dry Riesling that Einar discovered while visiting his family and friends in Norway, a 2009 Gerhard Al Alba Vinceró Riesling Kabinett Trocken, Germany. It was perfectly matched with a entré that Josiah created for this wine, Butter Poached Prawns with Saffron Gelée with English Peas. The prawns were delicately poached and accented with a puree of peas, fried diced tofu and potato sticks, topped with a few chives.

The next dish was my favorite, again, created to accompany a 2007 Rhys Family Farm Vineyard Pinot Noir. Josiah cured a goose that he started last December and finished in April. It was a prociutto type cured goose with wonderful flavors! It is the thinly sliced meats you see on the sides of the dish in the photo. Underneath the crouton topped with a duck paté was thin strips of cured duck breasts, nestled in a bed of barley and Hen of Woods mushrooms and topped with Bull's Blood beet greens. Wonderful textures, tastes and aromas!

Josiah served an intermezzo of Chocolate Sorbet with olive oil and infused with 25-year old balsamic vinegar. Very chocolatey. Our chocolate lovers really enjoyed this tiny scoop!

We were then treated to a magnum of 1995 Antinori Tignanello, paired with Roasted Deboned Quail laid over a puree of parsnips and accompanied by large morel mushrooms and stewed strawberries. Having deboned several quails a couple of weeks ago, I really appreciated the work that goes into a dish like this. The morels were the largest I've ever seen and very tender. We learned that Black Garlic is garlic that is fermented and then turns black in the process.

Our last wine, and our oldest wine, 1989 Chateau Longuville au Baron de Pichon-Longueville, France, went with a Lamb Ribeye served over caramelized mixture of late spring alums and sprinkled with summer truffles. The lamb was cooked medium rare and so very tender! The mixture of different onions were sautéed to a mahogany deep caramel.

We completed this feast with a 2001 Chateau Doisey Védrines Sauternes. This could have been our dessert all by itself! However, Josiah created a Green Tea pot du crème that was delicately accented with green peppercorns and served with diced fresh cherries and peaches. And, you can see from the photo that the colors were bright with cherry reds, peachy oranges and pale green from the matcha in the pot du créme.

The perfect ending to an evening filled with good friends, great wines and gourmet food. Who could ask for more? Certainly not me!

These images are a compilations of photos taken with cameras and iphones by different people and by no means is a complete collection of photos but are ones that came out best (i.e. no blurry ones, no crossed or shut eyes or strange expressions), if you want to see more, just let me know and I'll send all of them to you.

In the meantime, I continue to prepare dishes from Jacques Pepín’s book Fast Food My Way. And am getting ready for our great Africa adventure! We hope to taste some wild game in Zimbabwe and take some fantastic photographs in Botswana and South Africa! More later. . .

Beyond the Cookbook with Josiah Slone

Our October dinner will be an unusual one because we won’t be cooking from a cookbook but creating our own recipes. Josiah Slone, the executive chef/owner of Sent Soví restaurant in Saratoga regaled us with his culinary and engineering expertise for over an hour. What amazed me was that he draws his plates in a notebook and thinks about what will be placed on it, how it will be arranged, what flavors her wants on it, and what different textures and colors he wants. To briefly summarize what he shared:
• Food uses all of our senses: taste, smell, sight, sound and tactile.
• What constitutes “Flavor.”
• FLAVOR= Taste + Aroma + “Mouthfeel”
• There are 5 components of Taste: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami.

When he creates a recipe he starts with a central theme and then begins to build on that theme to complement or contrast with it to heighten its essence. He likened it to a polygram where the 3,4 or 5 corners are the tastes that are balanced. It can tip to one corner or another but not too much so that the triangle, square or pentagram can still be balanced on a fulcrum and not tip over to one side. Using his engineering background, he also showed a graph with big flavors and big intensity but less dimensions (such as Indian food) or more dimensions but not big intensity (like a fine Bordeaux wine). He looks to his 5 components of taste to decide how many of them he wants to use and then builds his Flavor for the dish. It is how chefs in general create tastes that we normally don’t think would go together but when combined, are perfect. One combination that he used as an example was caviar and white chocolate which is, of course, salty and sweet with oceanic aromas and creamy white chocolate mouthfeel with the bursts of flavors from the caviar.

He also talked about wine pairings with food and how the alcohol creates more volatile flavors and adds a new dimension to the flavor. The premise for wines is the same premise used for food: sensory, tastes, and flavor. As we listened to Josiah, Bill poured glasses from a magnum of non-vintage Veuve Cliquot Champagne for everyone and people noshed on cheese, nuts, dried fruits and croutons. To be specific:
- Fiscalini Bandage-Wrapped Cheddar Californian Cow’s Milk, a Semi-firm, bandage-wrapped Cheddar
- Manchego Spanish Sheep’s milk, a semi—firm, with a hard rind
- Brie French Cow’s milk, a soft cheese with a Blooming rind
- Gruyere Swiss Cow’s Milk, Semi-firm with a Natural rind
- Humboldt Fog Californian Goat’s milk, a soft cheese with a blooming rind

The visual presentation of the dish was explained and choices we have to make: symmetrical or non-symmetrical, classic or modern. How much depth to the appearance as well as looking to see how much negative space is on the plate. It was a great lecture that taught us some rudimentary basics to constructing our own recipes. He later explained that instead of measurements (i.e. cups, teaspoons, etc.), he and other chefs use “ratios” of tastes (i.e. ratio of oil to acid or sweet to salty). As each plate was served for dinner, Josiah explained what was in the dish, and how it was constructed. We were in for a treat!

Jeffrey shared a magnum of 2005 Mount Eden Vineyard Chardonnay for our first courses. The first dish out of the kitchen was an amuse bouche served on a spoon: duck tongue with pickled radicchio and cabbage. It was a great test to find the tastes, flavor and sensory components of each dish.

Our first course was a salad with lamb’s tongue, maché, and Mitake mushrooms, accented with a brush of mustard and sprinkling of Vietnamese cilantro. Visually, it was a beautifully presented dish and everyone found it to be absolutely delicious!

The second course was a scallop dish presented 3 ways: seared, “scrambled” and caramelized. The combination of aromas, tastes, mouthfeel and visual design was a portrait of scallopness. This course was served with a magnum of 2005 Pinot Noir from Mount Eden Vineyards. The pinot really brought the ocean flavors forward for this entré and was the perfect wine choice. Jeffrey tried it with the chardonnay and it was not a match….the caramelized scallop flavors just ran all over the chardonnay. This dish needed a fuller wine and the pinot noir did the trick! We had an intermezzo bite of blood orange and rosemary sorbet that cleansed our palates.

The main course was a lamb chop that had been separated into 3 parts so there was the meat, the lamb bones and the rim of lamb fat that had been seared and caramelized to add depth to the lamb tastes. It was served with pickled apricots, sprinkled with green olive pieces, and sautéed savoy cabbage. The pickled apricots were a wonderful accompaniment to the lamb because they weren’t overly sweet but added, along with the saltiness of the olives and the savory-ness of the cabbage, a bright sweet-sour note to round out the flavors of the dish.

We then went to the last course of the dinner, pots a crème with hints of rosemary, topped with a thin gelée of black pepper and a compote of fresh strawberries, slow cooked rhubarb (to retain a crispy texture) and pistachios. This had all the mouthfeel of creamy, spicy, crunchy and crispy. It was paired with a glass of 2001 Chateau Doisy Vedrines Sauternes Bordeaux from Bill’s cellar.

As an extra treat, we had a second dessert! Hooray, Josiah! This one was a densely chocolately sorbet, served along side a white chocolate mousse topped with strawberry bits and then steeped in a strawberry, wine and simple syrup soup sprinkled with dark and white chocolate chips. This dessert had all the ingredients that makes it a “California” dessert: fresh ingredients prepared to bring out local freshness and who can resist chocolate and strawberries? The soup was fantastic! Obviously “cooked” but very little so that the colors were bright red as well as the flavors. The perfect end to a wonderful dinner.

As an aside, during his lecture, Josiah discussed taste pairings and used the example of white chocolate and caviar (sweet and salty). I thought it was going to be our dessert and commented as much to Josiah. He brought out a plate of Guittard white chocolate chips and a small jar of caviar for us to try together. It was an amazing taste. It helped to melt the white chocolate on my tongue before biting into the caviar. It was hard for me to get my mind around the briny saltiness of the caviar and the creamy sweet taste of the white chocolate. Definitely fit the mouthfeel category giving me creamy with the slight crunch of caviar.

Thank you, Josiah, for inspiring us to experiment and try cooking without a cookbook!

I hope this makes all of you to want to try creating your own recipes and /or buying The Flavor Bible (it’s available in the Santa Clara County Library). This book will give you some ideas of tastes that go with certain foods, because the homework due in October is to create your own recipe and bring the dish to our dinner on October 29 (put this date on your calendar!)

Some members of the group are taking a trip to Penn Valley to visit Sharon, taste wines, cook some great meals and soak in the mountains. Please takes notes and let us know what you did, cooked, ate, etc.! We need some guest writers for our blog.

In the meantime, I hope you are enjoying Jacques Pepín’s books Fast Food My Way (there are two editions of this book) because we are moving on to our next dinner, Saturday, August 6th. I found that many of the recipes I chose out of his first book (that I checked out the public library) can be found online as well.

Cook on!

Eating In and Out

I haven’t written in a while but I have been in my kitchen…as well as other kitchens!

Have you tried any of Jacques’ recipes yet? I’ve tried his Sauteed Quail with Raita, Asian Eggplant Salad and his Cubed Potatoes with Garlic and Sage. Of the three, I loved the Eggplant and Potato dishes. The quail, in spite of having cayenne pepper, was rather bland and the Raita didn’t help. I love quail though and will try some other recipes from past cookbooks to satisfy that craving. Did you ever prepare or eat a dish that you thought was going to taste great but didn’t? And, what it does is create a craving for how that dish “ought” to taste? Well, that’s what’s going on for me right now.

The Asian Eggplant Salad recipe didn’t specify how thick to slice the eggplant and I sliced them too thin so I overcooked them in the oven. But, in spite of that boo boo, the dish was lovely and I actually like that bit of charred taste in eggplants. The salad dressing for this dish was de-lish! I used arugula & maché instead of the watercress he called for and liked the result.

The Cubed Potatoes were to die for! So simple but a perfect accompaniment to any main entré. I may bring them to our dinner, I liked them so much. . .of course that depends upon what everyone else brings. I mistakenly chopped the garlic instead of using whole cloves but it added a nice crunch to the potato dish that I liked so I make turn that mistake into a change in the recipe.

In addition to my kitchen, we’ve been eating out a bit lately. Our dining out seems to come in spurts. We eat a home for months and then in a few weeks, eat out 5 times!

We returned to Manresa to celebrate Bill’s B’day and, as you can guess, had a fabulous meal. If you have the time and money, go to Manresa again. They have remodeled the restaurant and it is so much nicer! They added a cocktail lounge where you can try some innovative cocktails and some small bites. I was thinking that it would be fun just to just go to the lounge. The cocktail mixes were quite alluring! While I won’t go into the entire menu (5 courses is $115 pp...there wasn't a choice for fewer dishes), my favorite dish of the evening was the Asparagus, both roasted and raw, crispy mussels with citrus saboyan, toasted seed. The combination of flavors (we’ll learn more about this at our Sent Soví event) was the perfect example of sweet, sour, salty, savory, mouthfeel and umami. David has this concept down to perfection. He also shared an amuse bouche that was an abalone custard served in a Japanese lacquered container. I could have made a whole meal out of this “bite.” It had that soft mouthfeel and was savory, sweet, salty and definitely umami!

We also ate lunch at Campton Place in San Francisco because I bought a groupon-type deal. Every dish was perfectly constructed, arranged on the plates and again, brought forward the five flavors and visual beauty. Because it’s spring, I order a lot of asparagus dishes and this one was wonderful! Delta Asparagus, Slow Poached Farm Egg, Green Herb Emulsion & Shallot Crisp was so French and I think I groaned, it was that good!

We recently ate at Daffodils, in the Orchard Hotel in near Union Square as part of SF’s Dine About Town. It is a beautiful restaurant but the food is sadly lacking. While sounding delicious on the menu, the actual dishes were poorly prepared, overcooked and several were rather dry. The server was doing everything including bartending and while missing a few notes, kept a smile and positive attitude and we enjoyed his attentiveness.

But, enough for now. Our next event is just around the corner and I, for one, am looking forward to learning how to create our own recipes from Josiah Slone, the executive chef/owner of Sent Soví restaurant in Saratoga…as well as tasting his innovative creations. It will be a prelude to our October dinner so stay tuned!