Lessons in ink.

The Voltaggio Brothers were favorites of the wife and mine during their run on Top Chef season six, which saw Michael best his elder sibling Bryan in the finale. Michael Voltaggio was, at the time, the chef de cuisine of The Dining Room at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena. Before I had the chance to check the food out, he'd left to start what is now ink. in LA.

The first thing to like about ink. is the online reservation system. I didn't have to call, pray, and do a rain dance just to get a call back from someone (I'm still waiting, Animal). You pull up their website and it shows you which days within the next 30 are available.

As for the food? When Voltaggio won Top Chef, he did it with a solid dose of modernist flair. This is a guy who makes yeast-less brioche in the microwave by aerating batter in a whipped cream canister. And while that type of thing is fun to watch on TV, to be honest I wasn't sure if I'd enjoy it as an actual meal.

I did. And as a culinary student currently going through the greatest hits of traditional French cuisine (Butter! Bacon! Stock reductions!), I thought the food at ink. was inventive, but also a terrific example of balance. Voltaggio and his crew get pretty playful with their food, grabbing inspiration from all over the world and putting it in different contexts. Despite the tinkering, dish after dish featured great complimentary flavors and textures.

Also, everything tasted really good. Let me just get that out of the way before I get all food nerd describing flavor profiles and textures.

(The menu descriptions below are lifted from the website menu.)

kale, burrata, pumpkin seeds, pumpkin preserves, yuzu

There are also chunks of asian pear. The burrata was super soft, almost like popping a creamy mozzarella balloon. The preserves (spread at the bottom of the dish) were almost like peanut butter, and the seeds provided a nice crunch.

bigeye tuna, parsnip-sesame cream, grapefruit, soy gel

The only thing we had that could be accused of being conventional, though it was still good. The black cake/crouton things provided the crunch. What stood out for me was actually the soy gel. It helped season the tuna and the saltiness also mellowed the tartness of the grapefruit. I think if soy sauce was simply drizzled over, it would've muddled the dish. Up with gel!

spaghetti, giant squid, squash, hazelnut-ink pesto, piment d’espelette

I'll be honest, I didn't even know I was eating squid until after the second or third bite. Even with the server explaining the dish. For a minute, I kept thinking, "Why does it say spaghetti when it's fettucine?"

This was one of the more playful dishes and I loved it. Just a wonderful plate of pasta-less pasta. Also, another admission: I had to look up "piment d'espelette" when I got home. It's the pepper powder dusted over top.

brussels sprouts, pig ears, house-cured lardo, apple

I've made pig ears once, poorly. They came out like what they are: chewy pieces of cartilage and skin. So, this was a deliciously humbling experience. Crispy strands of pig ear, tartness from the cured lardo and the brussels sprouts, and sweetness from the apple.

Seriously, they make pig ears good. And brussels sprouts. Together. That by itself is worth noting again.

lamb neck, chickpea poutine, yogurt curds, chive purée

High class, modernist greasy spoon food! It's kinda like using ingredients for doner kebab and falafel in a dish that screams drunken American excess but is actually French-Canadian (that's what I think of poutine, anyway).

I've been reading a lot about chefs doing the high brow-low brow thing and this is another shining example of applying technique to a dish that you'd shovel in your face at 2am to help your body soak up copious amounts of alcohol. The lamb by itself was delicious. The chickpea croquette fries were light and crunchy and lovely. The yogurt curds, like The Dude's rug, really tie the room together.

berkshire pork, charcoal crust, macaroni and cheese, leeks

The charcoal crust was actually leek ash, so this dish contains leeks in three different forms: the ash crust of the pork, braised leeks, and crispy leek strands.

I'm pretty certain the pork was sous vide. It was extremely tender all the way through, with the leek ash supplying the smokiness you'd usually get from a seared crust.

The lone, elongated macaroni stuffed with cheese was good, but frankly I would've been satisfied with the pork and leeks.

grapefruit curd, avocado, cilantro sorbet, charred maple-lime

Again, balance. Tart and sweet. Maple can be really cloying, but charred maple with lime flavor cutting through? Quite lovely. Cilantro sorbet was nice and refreshing, too.

Food in Fiction: The Muppet Show

The Swedish Chef (operated by Jim Henson and Frank Oz)
The Muppet Show season 4 (1979-80)

Kitchen Lingo: Mise

Mise (meez)
Shortened form of mise en place (meez ahn plas)

In French, it means everything in its place. Google Translate says it means implementation. But in kitchen terms in gets tossed around in slightly varied ways...

1. noun: Preparation done prior to cooking. Specifically, ingredients used for cooking. More specifically, ingredients that are ready to be cooked (washed, chopped, minced, etc.).

e.g. Are there tomatoes in our mise today? 

2. verb: To retrieve and/or prepare ingredients for cooking.

e.g. I'm gonna mise before I even think about touching the stove.

3. adjective: Used to describe any piece of equipment used for mise en place.

e.g. mise cup, mise tray, etc.

Butter in a mise cup, cut into small chunks to be used to mount a sauce.

Culinary Foundations II in Review

My station prior to our final cooking practical.

I'm currently two weeks into my third term at Le Cordon Bleu, which is called (wait for it) Culinary Foundations III. I'm just now getting around to writing about Foundations II. Suffice to say, it's been busy and the learning curve keeps going up. But that's another post for another time (hopefully soon).

The end of Foundations II marked my 57th day of culinary school. The first 29 days, which were divided between basic knife technique and sanitation, featured almost no cooking aside from a poached egg and two emulsified sauces.

The next 28 days?

37 different items if you count basic elements that don't stand alone as food. Stock and clarified butter and the like. Those 37 items did include some crazy deliciousness like French onion soup, risotto, and glazed vegetables. Almost one-fourth of the items featured potatoes as a primary ingredient. (By the way, in a French cooking school they aren't French fries, they're pommes frites.) I was happily surprised by some things I'd never eaten before, much less cooked, such as a warm lentil salad and white beans Bretonne. And some things, well… if I ever see celery root remoulade on a restaurant menu, I will not be ordering it.

While in the midst of Foundations II, it was pretty easy to get lost among the dishes thrown at us. The basic routine – instructor demo one day, student cooking the next – didn't leave a lot of time for reflection. Looking back at my recipe cards, I can see how those 37 or so dishes contained a wide variety of cooking techniques that I can use more or less confidently as I move forward as a cook.

It's a little like learning grammar. Not the most exciting process in the world, but it's basically the root of everything one can do in a kitchen. Not that I'm a master of any one thing after a 28-day culinary relay race, but I think my point of view has definitely shifted from reading recipes to knowing techniques. And after that it's really just a matter of choosing ingredients. Once you've made one vinaigrette, you can pretty much take any variety of oil and any variety of vinegar and whatever other flavors you like and know what to do.

Take risotto. We specifically did a recipe for risotto milanese, but we also learned the basic risotto method, and I feel pretty confident contemplating flavors I can throw into that particular equation. I've done mashed potatoes a few times before enrolling, and now having done pommes puree in class several times, I can knock them out without measuring a single thing.

What stands out even more than dishes are the little techniques – making a reduction, sweating but not coloring onions, simmering till tender, seasoning to taste – that always used to trip me up when going off of a recipe in a book. I'm actually starting to rethink basic things I've been making for years, wondering if the order of steps can be improved.

Or at least thinking up pseudo-French names for things. That's another benefit from being in a French technique-based school.

Food in Fiction: American Beauty

Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening), Jane Burnham (Thora Birch)
American Beauty (1999)
Written by Alan Ball
Directed by Sam Mendes

Am I reading too much into this, or does the choice of vegetable reflect Lester's quest to reclaim his, ahem, manhood from the "mason jar under the sink"?