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If you’re in a pinch for dinner it’s the perfect place to go.
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Tag Archives: Food
Yannick Alleno Magazine (YAM: le magazine des chefs)
About a year and a half ago I was introduced to this amazing magazine by a fellow student at Le Cordon Bleu who had just returned from a quick trip to Paris. As I began to flip through the pages my breath was taken away by the amazing plating and the beautiful photography of said plating. It appealed to my photographer side just as much as the chef side.
When I began to read it in my sort of half fluent french I realized that the recipes behind the beautiful photographs were clearly of higher quality than the recipes you find in a typical North American food magazine. Upon further research I found that ‘YAM’ stood for ‘Yannick Alleno Magazine’. Yannick Alleno is a 3 star Michelin French chef based in Paris. This is his magazine. Boom. That’s why the recipes sounded like the recipes I was learning at school!
Unfortunately the magazine is quite costly and is only available in French. An annual subscription outside of France is 110 euros per year. The good news is that you can order single issues from their website for 15 euros. On the French only side of things, it really doesn’t matter. Just looking through the photos is enough to make a chef get excited. And if you really want to know what they’re talking about, grab a French-English dictionary. Heck. Google it.
Website: http://www.y-a-m.com
Recipe: Truffled Poached Egg Salad on Rye
This is one of my favourite lunches because it’s filling, easy to do, and healthy. It’s great for breakfast or dinner as well. All you have to do is poach an egg, make a simple vinaigrette (a guideline of 3 parts oil to 2 parts acid always works), toss the greens in it, and layer it up. In this particular recipe I add apple slices, goat cheese, and a truffled honey vinaigrette. If you want to know how to poach an egg you can find the directions in another post by clicking HERE.
Truffled Poached Egg Salad on Rye with Apple and Goat Cheese
serves 4
4 eggs
100 ml olive oil
50 ml white or black truffle oil
25 ml honey
100 ml white wine vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste
mixed greens
1 apple
soft goat cheese
4 slices of dark rye bread, thick
Whisk the vinaigrette ingredients together and season with salt and pepper to taste. Toss the greens with the vinaigrette to lightly coat. Poach the eggs and toast the bread. Thinly slice apples with the peel still on. Place salad on top of the toast, apples and crumbled goat cheese on top of the salad, and top everything with a poached egg. Sprinkle a bit of salt and pepper on top of the egg. Enjoy.
Book: The Flavour Thesaurus
It’s a book without pictures. It’s a book with no recipes. Yet I still consider it one of the most helpful cook books I have.
The book is The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit. Like it’s title suggest, it’s a guide to ingredients and their flavours. The book puts ingredients into different flavour categories such as Earthy, Floral Fruity, Marine, Green + Grassy, and many more. It then will take an ingredient and give pairing suggestions. An example would be Globe Artichoke. Some of the pairings suggested are: Globe Artichoke and Bacon, Globe Artichoke and mint, Globe Artichoke and Pea, and Globe Artichoke and Pork. For each pairing, the book gives details on the flavour and texture profiles of each and reasons to why the two work together.
If you enjoy being creative in the kitchen, if you’re a chef responsible for developing menu items, or if you just want to know why the heck the chef at the last restaurant you went to would put Goat’s Cheese and Coffee together, then you need to get this book.
Buy it online at Amazon.ca or Amazon.com for about $20.
Recipe: Roasted Garlic Risotto with Guanciale and Soft Egg
Hey there food lovers!
So the last post was an Ingredient Focus on Guanciale, a type of bacon taken from the cheek of a pig. I promised a recipe to use it in, so here it is. I decided that a great way to showcase the texture and flavour of Guanciale would be in a nice risotto. Check it out.
Roasted Garlic Risotto with Guanciale and Soft Egg
serves 4
1 cup arborio rice
1 litre chicken stock approx. (can be substituted for any other type of stock)
50g shallots, fine dice
1 head of garlic
100ml white wine
100g Guanciale, skin removed and cut into matchsticks
50g unsalted butter
50g parmesan cheese or aged gouda (In the picture I used a 3 year aged Gouda. Money.)
Roast your garlic head (wrap in foil with some oil and salt and cook for about 30 minutes in a 350°F oven) and remove the garlic from it’s skin. Smash it into a paste. Fry Guanciale in a pan until crisp. In a large sauté pan, sweat the shallots gently for a few minutes in the fat rendered from the Guanciale. Add the rice to the pan and toast it for a few minutes over medium heat. Add your roasted garlic paste and fried Guanciale to the rice. Pour the white wine into the pan and stir until it is absorbed. Add your hot stock a ladle at a time and stir constantly to work the starches out of the rice. You’ll know it’s time to add more stock once about 80% of the liquid in the pan has been absorbed. Patience is the key to a beautiful risotto. Cook the rice until it is cooked but still has a slight bite to it. Once the rice is done, mix in the butter and grated cheese to add a richness to the dish. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
To poach the egg, bring a pot of water with a couple tablespoons of white vinegar to a simmer. Create a whirlpool in the pot with a whisk and drop your egg into the middle from as low a height as possible. Cook for 3 minutes and refresh it in an ice bath to stop the cooking immediately if you aren’t going to eat it right away, otherwise just serve it straight out of the pot.
I hope you enjoy the recipe! Leave a comment and let me know how it works out!
Josiah
Ingredient Focus: Guanciale
Do you like bacon? If you don’t, please stop reading this blog, never come back, you’re not welcome.
Seriously.
Well maybe not seriously.
But seriously…WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH YOU!?!?!?!
Anyway, back to bacon.
Recently I was watching an episode of Chopped, which is a TV show where 4 chefs compete in a series of 3 rounds of black box competitions. In one of the rounds, an ingredient the chefs got was Guanciale. I had never heard of it before.
Quickly the contestants realized that it was basically bacon but made with the cheek of a pig rather than the belly. It’s cured, smoked, hung, and from all reports is basically bacon. Obviously I had to try it.
The next time I was at the market I saw a piece of it at one of my favourite shops, Oyama Sausage Company. I bought it.
In the next post there will be a recipe featuring Guanciale, but for now I’ll explain it to you.
Guanciale is distinctly porky, tastes very much like bacon and for all intents and purposes, looks like bacon when you fry it up. I find that the fat is not as soft and takes a bit longer to render. In terms of flavour, it is a bit sweeter and not quite as salty. Now of course all of this depends on how each (guanciale vs bacon) are prepared, but I am using a basic Pancetta as my reference point.
Stay tuned for the next post where I’ll show you how I used it for lunch today!
Thanks for reading!
Book: Ginger Pig Meat Book
image courtesy of http://www.thegingerpig.co.uk
This book is simply one of my favourites. While it may be an emotional connection that warms my heart to it, that doesn’t change how great the book is.
The Ginger Pig Meat Book is the fantastic new-ish book from The Ginger Pig butcher shop in London, England. I discovered this butcher’s shop while studying in London at Le Cordon Bleu this past year. The shop is amazing. The quality of meat that they carry and the knowledge of the butchers is outstanding.
The really cool thing about this book is that aside from great recipes, it also provides a ton of information on different cuts of meat, different varieties of breeds of each animal and information on which breed is best for which cuts of meat, and stories of how the shop grew from the humble beginnings to what it is today.
The one downside to the book (if you can call it a downside) is that all of the measurements and some terminology is very British. For example, instead of a recipe calling for 1 cup of milk it would call for 250 ml of milk. Also all of the weights are metric which might take a bit of getting used to for those used to using cookbooks with imperial measurements.
In short, get the book. You can pick it up on Amazon by clicking HERE.
