Ad Hoc at Home Part 2

As much fun as it was to cook out of Ad Hoc at Home last night, now I'm a little more "practised" and ready to cook even better food tonight!
Its not that easy to cook Thomas Keller Recipes. Try to find a regular home cook who has cooked more than 2 or 3 recipes from any of his other books. Tonight, we are on recipes 5,6,7 and 8.



Here's the menu:

Chicken and Dumpling Soup
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Green Bean Salad, Mission Figs, Fingerling Potatoes, Radish, Walnuts
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Pan-Roasted Breast of Duck
Butter-Braised Brussels Sprouts, Kohlrabi and Radishes
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Pineapple Upside Down Cake

I figured why change a really great dessert.

There are a couple of pictures of this soup throughout the book. The creamyness and freshness of it was what drew me to choosing this recipe. But I have to admit that this is not an easy soup to put together. But with all the pots (about 5) and steps it took to make this soup, the results were amazing.
A good soup starts with a good stock. I, of course, made my own stock. Lots of raw chicken bones, cold water, carrots, celery, onion, leek, thyme, garlic and bay simmered for 4 hours. One of the steps in the recipes says to take carrots, celery, onion and leek and sweat it off in a large pot, covered for 30 minutes, add the stock and simmer again for another 30 minutes. Then the vegetables were strained out and you have a more flavourful stock. I skipped this step due to time constraints, Also, I made a pretty intensely flavoured stock, so I wasn't worried about the lack of flavour. The reason Keller does this is because the vegetables that are served with the soup are not cooked with the soup! Strange right? But it makes total sense to me. In order to get a beautifully clean soup, everything is cooked seperatly and brought together at the very end.
So we cooked the vegetables seperatly. I blanched the celery in water. I also decided to add some sliced leeks and blanched those as well. In a seperate pot I blanched the carrots with a sachet of thyme, garlic, peppercorns, bay and some honey. This was amazing because the carrots really took on those flavours.
Next were the dumplings. The dough is a "pate a choux". Meaning we heat up water and butter in a pot, add the flour and stir together. Over low heat cook the dough for about 5 minutes and then remove and incorporate dijon, eggs, and chives. Then we made quenelles and dropped them into simmering water for 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, while the stock was simmering, we prepared a "roux". It's strange to see a soup thickened this way, but it goes along with the whole clean look of the soup. We prepared equal parts flour and butter, mashed it together and created a "beurre manie". It was whisked into the soup until it had a creamy look. That was left to simmer for about 20 minutes to allow the flour to cook out and the soup became thicker.
Once the soup was thick, we added in the vegetables and dumplings, seasoned with a little salt, pepper, and a touch of vinegar, and after all that work, the soup was done.
A few people said it was the best soup they ever had. I have to agree. When it comes to recipes like this, the more care you take in the preparation, the better the dish turns out. The soup was smooth, clean, and full of flavour. The dumplings were light as clouds and had a light sharpness from the dijon. The vegetables were perfectly tender-crisp and the carrots really stood out with the tastes of garlic and honey. It also looked pretty close to the picture. I love it when that happens.

That soup was pretty complicate. It gets easier from now on.

The salad was pretty straight forward and simple to put together. First we needed to blanch the beans in salted water and shock them in an ice bath. Then blanch the fingerlings in simmering water with thyme, garlic, bay and some salt. Then we carefully roast the walnuts in the oven.
To put it all together, i tossed everything in a large bowl along with some halved figs and sliced radishes and Sherry Vinaigrette from the book. On a platter, a bit og lemon juice and olive oil, toasted walnuts and done. It looked better than the book because we could actually eat it.

Duck, specifically duck breast, is one of my favorite things to cook. Not everyone knows how easy it is to roast a single breast. After trimming off excess fat and silver skin from the breast, we marinated it with salt, pepper, orange zest, thyme and a bay leaf. We allowed that to sit for a while in the fridge. After an hour or two, I prepared a saute pan over medium heat and preheat the oven to 400*. The breast went in skin down and allowed to cook slowly for about 10 minutes. The recipe said medium low for about 20 minutes, but I did it my way :)
Once the skin became dark brown and crispy, it was added into the oven for 6 minutes to finish off the cooking. Duck breast is a fairly dry piece of meat and when over cooked, is really tough. So cooking it to medium rare is recommended. Once out of the oven we allowed it to rest for 5 minutes as we prepared the Butter Braised Radishes, Kohlrabi, and Brussels Sprouts.

We melted some butter in a large pan and gently sauteed some shallots, added quartered radishes, sugar, salt, pepper, vinegar and some chicken stock. It was allowed to simmer, covered for a few minutes. Meanwhile we blanched the Brussels and kohlrabi in some salted water. They were added to the radish mixture and tossed with a bit more stock and butter and done.
The duck was sliced thin and put on a bed of the vegetables.
The duck had a faint taste of the orange and was very tender. The vegetables were crisp and light but rich with butter.
This was the most impressive dish of the evening I think. If you factor in the ease of preparation which results in something like this, it's definitely the most impressive.
And it looked like the picture...not too bad.

I decided to re-do the Pineapple Upside-Down Cake tonight. For notes on that, take a look at the previous post.
I did change it a bit though. Instead of using 3/4 or the smear on the bottom, I decided to use all of it. I figured a bit more sugar and butter is not a bad thing. I was right. The cake turned out more moist on top which made it a bit more sweet and gooey, but not too sweet and gooey.



Ad Hoc at Home is one of the best books that came out last year. I've not had this much fun cooking out of a cookbook before. The anticipation while cooking each recipe to see the end result was like going to a Tarantino movie. It seems complicated, but once it's done, it totally makes sense.
If you don't have this book, get it, cook out of it, and enjoy the subtleties, the discipline, and the uncomplicated complication of it all.