Asian Glazed Pan Fried Quail with Sweet Soy Reduction

The last couple of days I've worked have been crazy!  Ideally, we, the day team or prep team, come in the morning to prep 2 days worth of mise-en-place.  Due to higher sales in both the day and evening business, our mise-en-place have been depleted within a day or maybe even just hours.

My prep team have been working exhausted, not because we've been drinking the night before but because of what I've mentioned above.  Ironically, we aren't your typical restaurant employees.  You know, the kind of people who work at a restaurant and drink a lot after their shift(as Anthony Bourdain would describe it in his book).  We are the complete opposite of that.  We're actually responsible adults.  We work hard during the week and party harder during our weekends.

Here's an overview of my prep team:

Line Coach: Used to be an actor and Sous Chef at another restaurant.  Well aged and knows his responsibilities(married).

Garde Manger:  Has a degree in Geography.  Very educated.  He wants to be an Urban Planner so I'm trying to hook him up with my references.

Saucier(me):  Has a diploma in Architectural and Building Engineering and a background in Civil Engineering.  Gets paid way less than the dishwasher....seriously.

Prep Tournant:  Finished his diploma in Culinary Arts.  The hardest working and the official Prep Speed Demon of our restaurant.  This guy can finish his day in a blink of an eye.  Same as me, gets paid way less than the dishwasher...and I'm still not joking about this.

These are the guys preparing the products at the restaurant.  There's usually only 3 preppers working in a day but on fridays we have 4, just in case it's a big day.  We all love the place we work at and if we see anyone not treating it well, they'll be facing the fall in corner.

Asian Glazed Pan Fried Quail with Sweet Soy Reduction:

4 Quails

1/4 cup Soy Sauce

1 Clove of Garlic

1 tsp. Sesame Oil

2 tbsp. Sugar (4 tbsp. more for the Sweet Soy Reduction)

3 tbsp. Vegetable Oil

4 tbsp. Water

With a pair of shears, cut through the quail's breast.  Also, cut the quail's backbone and neck.  In this way, you'll end up with two pieces from a single quail.

In a small saucepan, add your soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic and 2 tbsp of sugar.  If you want it a little bit more sweeter, feel free to add some more sugar.  Bring this mixture to a boil.  Once it boils, reduce your heat so that it just simmers.  Let it simmer for 5 minutes.  Take it off the heat and let it cool.  

After your soy mixture has cooled down, place it in a container big enough to place all your quails.  Let your quails marinate for at least 2 hours(24 hours would be preferable) in the fridge. 

Add oil to your pan and heat it to medium high.  Take out your quails and save the marinade for the sauce.  Gently place your quails, skin side down first.  Be careful with the oil splatters when you're putting it on.  Cook your quails for 2 minutes on each side.  Quails can be eaten medium-rare.

While cooking your quails,  pour your marinade and water in a saucepan and add the rest of the sugar.  Reduce this to 1/2 the original volume or reduce it to your desired consistency.  Take it off the heat and let it cool to room temperature.

To serve,  arrange your quails on a platter and drizzle it with some of the Sweet Soy Reduction.

Serve and enjoy!

Chorizo and Thyme Sofrito Sauce

I've always been wondering what kind of cooking style I want to do.  There are a lot of styles out there.  There's the classic french, american, asian and so on and so forth.

Filipino cuisine?  I was wondering about that too.  Is there even such a thing?  Maybe not, cause I haven't seen one done at a professional level.  I think it's because the things that we cook are too ethnic and too homey.  If you think about it, Filipino cuisine is the modern equivalent of east meets west cuisine.  It was a fusion of malaysian, chinese and spanish cooking.

Still, here I am trying to figure out my style.  I guess I want to go the asian route because I'm already very familiar with it.  I grew up with asian fruits, vegetables and cooking.  I remember when I was a kid growing up in the Philippines, that we had a lot of produce in our backyard and frontyard.  We had mangoes, avocadoes, guavas, jackfruits, soursops, java rose apples, manzanitas, calamondin, kalamungay and a few more.

I never realized how lucky I was back then, to have all those produce for free at my old home.

Enough of my mindless rant. 

Chorizo and Thyme Sofrito Sauce

Sofrito Base:
10 ripe Tomatoes
3 cups of diced Oions
1 cup of Olive Oil
2-3 Bay Leaves
Sugar, Salt and Pepper to taste

Add your onions and olive oil to the pan and cook it on low heat for 30-40 minutes or until your onions start to caramelize.  Your onions should be sweet to the taste.

While your onions are cooking, slice your tomatoes in half.  After your tomatoes have been sliced, grate it.  Save the juice and throw away the skin

Once your onions have started caramelizing, add your grated tomatoes, bay leaves, sugar, salt and pepper.  Let it keep cooking on low heat for another 20 minutes so it can develop some more flavour.

With this base, you can add anything to it.  This is a basic Spanish sauce used in tapas.

Chorizo and Thym Sofrito Sauce
Sofrito Base
4 sprigs of Thyme
5 Spanish Chorizos, diced
4 cloves minced garlic
2 tbsp Vegetable oil

On a medium heat pan, saute your garlic and chorizo.  Add your Sofrito base and plucked thyme leaves once your chorizo is cooked.  Reduce your heat to low and let it develop some more flavour for another 30 minutes.

This sauce takes a lot of patience but once it's done, it'll be packed with lots of flavour.  This is perfect for a pasta dish.

Serve and enjoy!

Miso and Maple-Crusted Scallops with Edamame Coulis

 

 

For the last few months I’ve checking out a place called The Dirty Apron.  This is one of those neat culinary stores here in Vancouver.  The store is comprised of three components: the kitchen supply store, the butcher shop and the classroom.  Yes, the classroom.

The Dirty Apron offers classes at night to anyone.  You could be a professional trying to learn a new style/cuisine or you could be an avid home cook who wants to serve something new.

While checking out their website, I saw a recipe for a Maple-Glazed Scallop with Pea Coulis.  At this point, I’m still thinking about that Miso Caramel-Glazed Cod with Smoked Tuna Broth and Soba Noodles.  So I decided to tweak their recipe a bit and went the asian route.  Thus, Miso and Maple-Glazed Scallops with Edamame Coulis was what I ended up with.

Miso and Maple-Glazed Scallops with Edamame Coulis

Scallops(fresh if possible)

2 tbsp Sake

½ cup Miso

¼ cup Maple Syrup

½ tbsp Unsalted Butter

1 Shallot(finely diced)

1 Garlic Clove(minced)

¾ cup Edamame Beans

70ml Vegetable Stock(or chicken stock)

20ml Heavy Cream

2 tbsp Olive oil

Salt and Pepper to taste

In a saucepan, add your miso, maple and sake and mix well on medium heat.  Stir well and let it incorporate together for 2-3 minutes.  Do not reduce.  Take it off the heat and let it cool down to room temperature.

Add your scallops to the marinade and make sure that your scallops are fully slathered with the marinade.  Place in the fridge and let it marinate for at least 30 minutes.

While your scallops are marinating, you can prepare your Edamame Coulis.

Drizzle your saucepan with olive oil and saute your shallots and garlic together.  Saute for a couple of minutes.  Add your stock and bring it to a boil.  Once it's boiling, add your cream and edamame and bring it back to a boil.

Puree your mixture with a hand blender.  If you don't have one, place your mixture into a regular blender.  Puree it.  You can serve your edamame in chunky form or if you want a smooth texture, put it through a fine mesh sieve.  Season to taste.

Take out your scallops and wipe off the excess marinade.  Sear on both sides.  Add your butter once both sides have caramelized.  Don't overcook your scallops or it'll feel like your chewing rubber.

Serve and enjoy!

Chocolate and Toffee Crackers with Maldon Salt

I love Mondays.  Everyone might be suffering the Monday blues, but I'm enjoying it.  It's my day off, usually, and it's also the only time  I can find to do something productive, let's say cooking.

I'm not saying that the rest of the other days weren't that productive.  It's just that usually after getting off of work that I'm so exhausted that I can't get myself to do anything else.

A few days ago, I made a Chocolate and Toffee Crackers with Maldon Salt, with the recipe I found on *Simply Scratch*. It's super easy to make and it only requires 5 ingredients.  The Maldon Salt in this recipe really balances out this little treat.  You'd think that it's going to be really sweet, but once you get that small piece of salt in your mouth, it mellows out the sweetness.

Chocolate and Toffee Crackers with Maldon Salt
Box of Crackers
1 cup of Butter
3/4 cup of Brown Sugar
1 cup of Dark/Bitter Chocolate
Maldon Salt

Before anything else, preheat your oven to 350F.  Chop up your butter into small chunks so that it melts faster.  Place your chopped butter in a sauce pan together with your brown sugar.  Whisk your it until the brown sugar has been fully dissolved. 

While still whisking your mixture, to avoid the bottom from burning, let it reach to a boil.  Once the bubbles start appearing, take it off the heat so that it doesn't further reduce.  I've reduced it so much before that once it cooled, it felt like I was eating a piece of rock.

Place an aluminum foil on your baking sheet.  Spray it with a bake spray or just brush it with some melted butter for more flavour.  After brushing or spraying your foil, line up your crackers close to each other on the sheet.

Pour your toffee on the crackers and spread it all over.  An offset spatula would be the tool of choice for this task but a regular spatula will fare well.

After spreading your toffee, sprinkle your chocolate chunks on the crackers.  Place it in the oven for around 5-10 minutes, just enough to let the chocolate melt.

After 5-10 minutes, take it out of the oven.  Just like the toffee, spread your melted chocolate all over and let it cool for a bit at room temperature.

Once it's cooled down, sprinkle your Maldon salt(Coarse salt, fleur del sel or kosher should work here as a substitute.) on top.  Don't go crazy or it'll taste like eating very salty chocolate crackers.  Place it in the fridge for 30 minutes so it solidifies.

You can keep these small treats in a tightly sealed container at room temperature or in the fridge.  Serve and enjoy this with a cup of coffee or tea.

Miso Caramel-Crusted Black Cod with Smoked Tuna Broth and Soba Noodles

For a long time, I've been wanting to make this dish.  This dish is the equivalent of candy.  People sometimes call this "fish candy", which when you consider it is true. 

I have read a lot of cookbooks with different variations/interpretations for this.  Nobu Matsuhisa of Nobu, uses 5 ingredients for the marinade: sake, mirin, miso, sugar and water.  James Walt of the famous Araxi restaurant in Whistler only uses 3 ingredients: sake, miso and sugar.  There's also Frank Pabst of Blue Water Cafe, a sister restaraunt of Araxi, who uses 4 ingredients(sake, mirin, soy sauce and sugar) but substitutes miso with soy sauce.

I can keep going with the different variations but there's always something that's prevalent in all recipes.  All the recipes mentioned above listed sake and sugar in the ingredient list.  They also call for the fish to be marinated in this asian concoction.

This dish is quite easy to make.  The only problem you might have with is the price of sake and cod and also some of the asian ingredients like dried kombu and bonito flakes.  Buying a bottle of sake should be fine especially if you do a lot of Japanese stock(I just used the one I had from last summer so that saved me some money).

Let's talk about cod.  This piece of fish is quite expensive!  The local fish mongers at my place sells this for around $16/lb!  If you can find a cheaper substitute for this fish, by all means substitute it.  The recipe will work for any kind of firm white fish.  While I was at the shop, I was so tempted to just buy the halibut belly for this.  In the end, I spent $32 for the fish alone.  Hmmm...

Trust me with this dish.  It's so good that you'll even want to eat the fish by itself.

Miso Caramel Marinade:

2 tbsp Sake

1/2 cup Miso

1 1/2 cup Fruit Sugar(Any kind of sugar should work.)

Smoked Tuna Broth with Soba Noodles:

4 cups Water

1 stalk Lemongrass, chopped

1 inch Ginger, chopped

1 small piece of Kombu

3/4 cup of Bonito Flakes, packed

3 tbsp Soy Sauce

1 1/2 tbsp Rice Vinegar

Soba Noodles

Shiitake Mushrooms(Didn't specify an amount for this cause I must've used a lot of it.  I love mushrooms)

2 fillets of Black Cod(You can use Halibut for this or even Halibut belly if you're just eating the fish by itself)

 

1.  Place your miso and sake in a double boiler(stainless steel bowl on top of a pot of boiling water) and mix well to incorporate the sake into the miso.

2.  Add the sugar and mix well.  

3.  After 1 minute, turn off the heat and keep mixing every now and then.  Leave your bowl on top of the pot for 10 more minutes so that the sugar dissolves.

4.  Let the caramel cool down before adding your fish in to marinate.  Marinate for at least 30 minutes.  If you're patient enough, you can marinate it for up to 2 days.
5.  Take out your fish and take off the excess caramel while making sure that there's still some left on the fish.
6.  Place your fish in a 400F oven for 20-25 minutes or until it starts to darken.
7.  While your fish is cooking, heat up 4 cups of water in a pot.  Also heat up a pot for your soba noodles to cook in.
8.  Add your ginger, lemongrass and kombu in the pot.  Let it simmer for 10 minutes. 
9.  Add your bonito flakes, soy sauce and rice vinegar to the pot.  let it reconstitute for about 10 minutes.
10.  Strain your broth into a bowl and discard all the strained ingredients.
11.  Place your broth back into the pot and let it boil.  Once boiling, add your shiitake mushrooms and cook it for around 2 minutes.
12.  In the other pot of water, cook your noodles until it's al dente. 
13.  Take out the noodle once it's ready and run it through cold water.
14.  Serve your noodles, cold, in a bowl with your hot broth and place your fish on top.

I also tried to just make the fish minus everything else, and it works great with rice or vegetable and potatoes but I thought that it might be missing something.  Maybe a sauce?  Nobu uses an orange tamarind sauce with his fish.  

Nah!  I'll just stick with the fish for now.

Crab with Mixed Herbs, Creme Fraiche and Phyllo Napoleon with Tomato Vinaigrette

Earlier tonight, I made dinner for my folks.  I made them Pork chops with apples and onions sauce.  Bleh!  I didn't like it at all but my parents said that it was really good.  That made me scratch my head.  Were they just being nice?  Maybe.  Eventhough I confessed to them and said, "I don't like it and I'm going to throw it away unless you guys want it", they gave it a try and they loved it. 

They must be just being nice to me.  I love my parents.

Here's a dish I did on Tuesday.  Saw it in one of my cookbooks that I've purchased.

Crabmeat
Basil
Cilantro
1 very ripe Tomato
olive oil
Frisee
1 sheet Phyllo Pastry
2 Avocados
1/3 cup of Whipping Cream
1 spoonful Sourcream
Lemon juice
Salt and Pepper

1.  Preheat oven to 300F
2.  Cut out 2.5" diametre circles from your phyllo sheet.  Place it on a bake tray lined with a baking sheet.  Bake for 3-5 minutes.
3.  Chop up your crab meat and mix it with a chiffonade of basil and some chopped cilantro and toss it in olive oil.  Season to taste.
4.  Dice your tomato and squeeze out the juice through a fine sieve.  Mix this with a few drops of lemon juice, a 1/4 cup of olive oil, salt and pepper.  Mix well.

5.  This will become your pseudo avocado creme fraiche.  Whip your cream until soft peaks have formed.  Fold in your sour cream.  Add your avocados and puree.  You should end up with a mascarpone like consistency.
6.  Serve and enjoy.

Pan Fried Prawns with Almonds, Thyme and Browned Butter and Garlic Puree

So on monday, I woke up quite early after sleeping for almost 12 hours.  I decided to go to SuperStore(this is the equivalent of a smaller Costco) at 8am and do some grocery shopping for my next "projects". 

I've been reading a couple of cookbooks and saw 3 recipes that caught my eye.  Each dish had a similar ingredient in them, namely phyllo and prawns.  I thought to myself that this might be a great idea to kill 3 birds with 2 stones and save a lot of money on ingredients.

Here's what you need for this recipe:

Jumbo Prawns
Thyme
Sliced Almonds
4 Cloves of Garlic
1/2 a cup of Whipping Cream
Olive Oil
Butter
Lemon Juice
Salt and Pepper

Note:  Everything else doesn't have a measurement and is done to taste.

1.  Place your crushed garlic in sauce pan of cold water and boil.  Once it boils, discard your water and cover your garlic with cold water again and repeat.  Do this 3 times.  This will help mellow down that strong garlicky taste(boiling it in milk once also works too).
2.  After discarding your water, add your 1/2 cup of cream to the pan and let it reduce on medium-low heat.  Season to taste.
3.  Once reduced, take it off the heat and let it cool.
4.  Onto the prawns.  Season it with salt and pepper.
5.  Heat your pan and add olive oil.
6.  When your pan is hot, add your prawns.  Cook it for about 30-45 seconds.
7.  Add your almonds and thyme leaves and cook it for an additional 1-2 minutes the most.  Be careful not to overcook your prawns or burn the butter.
8.  Serve and enjoy.