First Dinner (Theme: French Bistro)

The first dinner went great. Here are the photos...

Mussels and Pate with a French Baguette

Course 1 (Light/was Course 2 but since it was hot, we started with this first):

Louis Roederer Champagne paired with the Mussels.

Mussels with slices of bread to soak up the sauce.

Pate with bread awaits.

Mussels.

A toast to friends and food...and wine (and champagne)...and...

Pate. Some of us love pate too much.

Seared Scallops in a Lemon Butter Sauce over Belgian Endives

Course 2 (Light/was Course 1):

Scallops.

Wine Pairing: Side Yard Rielsing

Excellent colors.

Herbed Steak Frites in a Mustard-Wine Sauce

Course 3 (Main):

Fries served on top.

Wine Pairing: James Cole Malbec.

Fries on the side.

Lemon Tart (Sabayon method) with a Blood Orange Sorbet and Candied Orange Peels

Course 4 (Dessert):

The whole tart! Looks very French!

Fabulicious tart with sorbet.

Inniskillin Sparkling Ice Wine paired with dessert.

An excellent way to end the dinner!

Steak au Poivre: Saucy!

Eating Steak with Herbed Frites.

We picked up a few New York steaks from Costco in preparation for this dish. While the steaks were being made, I was focused on making the fries, which I have already made a post about.

This post... is about steak! Anyway, prior to our trial, we had seen Andrew and Yurah's posting and I noticed in their photos, their sauce was yellowish. We had very different results.

As per the recipe, we tried tor crush whole peppercorns. We didn't get the green ones, but instead used mixed black and white peppercorns. I think here, we didn't really know how fine to crush them. Since crushing was fairly difficult without a mortar and pestal (or without a vice!), we left them fairly rough.

Then the mustard was added to one side of the steaks while the cast iron was heating up. We weren't sure which side went down, the mustard side or the bottom side. But we figured, it must be the mustard side to get it into the pan. As the mustard touched down on the fiery black metal, the mustard seems to burn up. We let it cook for 3 minutes, then flipped it. We questioned whether we should have added mustard to both sides, and after some discussion, we added mustard on the bare side, now facing the top. Then, into the oven the cast iron went with its temporary inhabitants.

Once done, the steaks were put out on plates to rest, and the cut shallots were tossed into the pan with the remnants of seared meat crust, crispened mustard, and near whole, but somewhat softened peppercorns. Then the wine was poured in. Anything's better with wine. Especially red wine.

The wine reduced a bit and an interesting sauce was born. We scooped the red-gray concoction onto the steak, and we were done. But our sauce didn't look too appetizing. The mixture of mustard yellow with maroon-red wine resulted in a muddy looking sauce that sat between us and our medium-rare protein.

Frites dropped by, on a plate asking to accompany our steaks. We obliged and dug in. However unappealing the sauce looked, it actually tasted pretty good. I would eat this again, but maybe figure out how to make it look better. In fact, I thought, it'll look better with some fries on top... and voila... Steak Frites!! Anyway, Kirk and Ei-lun's photos of the steaks looked awesome, and inspired us to step up our presentation. So check out our Scallop and Endives photo! =P

New York steaks from Costco.

Crushing peppercorns and prepping the herbs for the fries.

Putting Dijon on the steaks.

Steaks are ready to go into the cast iron.

Let the searing begins.

Shallots with wine. Where'd the mustard go?

Adding the red wine/mustard sauce on top of the steaks.

Steak with sauce.

Frites + Steak = Steak Frites!

Steak au Poivre with Herbed Frites: Lessons Learned

Kirk had a semi-early roller hockey game this evening, so I started the prep. for our last assignment, Steak au Poivre with Herbed Frites.

Unfortunately, I forgot to consult with him before he left about whether he had wanted to sous vide the NY strips vs. searing/baking them like the recipe mentioned. Of course, the decision was "yes", so in hindsight, we should have popped those into the water bath while he was gone to save ourselves the 90-minute wait. Nevertheless, everything turned out great, and we enjoyed a late, post-game dinner, paired with the Chilean wine we had used for the sauce - Montes Alpha's Series Cabernet Sauvignon 2007.



Herbed Frites
Like others, we opted for the oven fries, as we don't have a deep fryer and are ever-wary of our finicky, fire alarm. I was able to prep. the majority of this while Kirk was away, so by the time he was back, we just popped them in the oven while waiting for the steaks to sous vide.

• Minus Mandolin. Like John mentioned, a mandolin would have been super helpful for the prep. here - although it was just two potatoes, it seems like it would have been a lot faster and more uniform if we had one - registry item?
  

• Over-Oiled. I was super liberal with the olive oil, as I didn't want anything to stick to the pan or be burnt. We ended up taking a hybrid of everyone's suggestions and pre-heated the oven to 400°F, tossed the potatoes on a heavily oiled baking rack for 20 minutes, then broiled them on high for five. They were definitely cooked, but still didn't look completely crisp, so we flipped them over, then broiled them for another five to finish. Next time, I'd definitely use less oil, as they still had a glossy sheen when they came out of the oven.
  

• Herb Abundance. I decided to just throw it all in there. We had chervil, thyme, parsley, rosemary, and chives from previous recipe preparations, so I figured we could just pick out what we didn't like. Kirk wasn't too fond of the chives, and in hindsight that was probably a bad choice. I think the rosemary was a decent addition, and I liked the parsley in there for the contrast and leafy look. If we hadn't already bought all of the herbs over the weekend, I probably would have enjoyed the sage leaf variation that John & Lee went with the most.

Steak au Poivre
As you know, we went sous vide for the steak preparation. There's been some discussion on here about portion size, so I thought I'd share what we ended up buying. We found our NY strips at Costco, and bought them in a pack of three steaks weighing 2.22 lbs. total. We cooked two of these, lightly coated in pepper and salt, in a vacuum-sealed bag at 128°F for 90 minutes.

At some point, we had been contemplating whether or not we should have added the Dijon mustard to the steaks in the bag, but after a brief discussion with John & Lee, we decided to play it safe and coat them afterwards in case the entire steak ended up inundated with the flavor of mustard.

The other thing to note is that we cheaped out on green peppercorns, as we would have only needed 1/2 a tbsp., so we substituted with black instead, which we have plenty of. Additionally, I used our coffee grinder to grind up the peppercorn coating, which is apparently a faux paus in Alton Brown's book, as k explained to me later.



Kirk can elaborate on the searing part in a separate post - one note here is that instead of using olive oil as recommended in the recipe, we used refined sunflower oil, with has a higher smoke point than EVOO, so as not to set off our alarm.

While he was tending to the meat, I prepared the cabernet sauvignon/cream/shallot sauce. Like everyone else, in the interest of time, we purchased some pre-packaged demi-glace at Whole Foods. I didn't read the ingredients all that carefully prior to going to the store, so we didn't actually get a veal demi-glace. Instead, we bought a packet of Savory Choice beef demi-glace, which I think worked equally well (at $3.99 for 1/2 a cup). Another note is that I had read Andrew/Yurah's post beforehand and made sure to halve the pepper and salt portions, as I'm overly sensitive to salty foods. Even at half portions, I still found it just a bit salty for my taste, though that could have been due to the use of beef vs. veal?



All in all, a delicious recipe and a quick/easy preparation (save for the 90-minute wait time due to our sous vide variation). We couldn't resist using the sous vide machine again for this, as we have gotten consistently good results every time, but we'll try the recipe to the tee at some point for comparison's sake.

...and onto Dessert, Round II!

Frites: Mandolin makes it easy.

Steak Frites w/o the Steak

I couldn’t find Idaho Potatoes while we were shopping for supplies at Whole Foods, so I sub’d in Yukon ones. Since our dinner was for two, we only used two potatoes instead of four as the recipe had called for. I used a mandolin to get a consistent matchstick sized cut on each fry. Then when we were about 5 minutes out from the finishing of the steak, I dumped about half of the fries into the deep fryer at 350 degrees. After 5 minutes , I took the fries out, but they were a little limp. Lee suggested to go at a higher temp, and I had just noticed on the roto-fryer that it recommended fries at 370 degrees, so I up’d the temperature. Also, Lee had noticed there was a “steam” coming out from the vents, and that might be causing the sogginess of the fries. So we kept the lid open to get all the steam out.

The second round yielded much more crispy fries. But since we changed two elements, I’m not sure what fixed the problem (the higher temp or the opening of the lid to keep steam out). We added in the herbs and salted the fries. We also tried a few deep fried sage leaves like we've seen at Cesar in North Berkeley. The result of the second batch were much better and had a better crunchy texture. I put some on top of the steaks like they do at Bistro Jeanty. It made the steaks looks more dramatic, in my opinion, and hide the sauce which didn't look so appealing.

Using the mandolin to make fry cuts in a matter of minutes.

Cut potatoes.

Submerged!

Coming out of the deep fryer.