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!