The Mind of a Chef (2012) s04e17 Episode Script

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In this episode of The Mind of the Chef Gabrielle Hamilton shares some of her favorite recipes.
This looks perfect.
It's a good texture, it's pretty loose.
But still creamy emulsified.
The Monte Cristo sandwich.
Just like French toast.
Except with a whole sandwich.
This is the most delicious thing you can have at brunch.
A Calvados Omelet.
I'm gonna pour this powerful Brandy in here.
Tip it towards flame.
And a technique for making fresh butter from heavy cream.
There it is, completely separated.
In the morning we have home-made butter, for our toast.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
It's so good to be classic and not trendy Oh, man, we're making some food here now.
Ajo Bianco.
It's a cold pureed soup, which in summer when you're desperate for something besides Gazpacho, you know, you drum 'em up.
This is from Spain.
So I'm sure this was not originally made with panko and just leftover bread.
But I have loved the ease and consistency of the crumb and it soaks in the water.
Just enough to get a sort of flabby.
It sounds kinda disgusting but I mean it in the nicest possible way.
And then in the blender I'm gonna make a wild ruckus and grind these almonds with water.
I'm gonna put a little salt in here as well.
All right, let's hope for the best.
This is sherry vinegar.
Yeah.
And a little green grape juice.
Now I'm gonna add the panko that has been soaking in the water.
And you can see it's very wet and fluffy and saturated and it is in fact flabby.
Garlic cloves, I want this olive oil.
This Ajo Bianco which has a kind of grass butter balance.
So now we have the perfect mixture into our frosty cold glasses just out of the freezer.
And then a little of the oil.
Oh, man.
Gosh.
With some of the very ingredient should get the tweezers out.
Voilà.
That is the Ajo Bianco.
And I love it.
This is a classic vinaigrette that actually my mother would have made just by making it in the bottom of the salad bowl itself.
But because I'm a restaurant cook I'm gonna make things in giant quantities.
So, quiet simply I'm going to put some salt in here to kind of help the blades grab the garlic.
I don't think this machine's gonna have any trouble pulverizing the crap out of these cloves of garlic but The salt macerates a little bit.
I'm gonna put some Dijon mustard in there.
Mustard gives it what I often call bottom.
I'm not even sure if anyone knows what I mean when I'm saying bottom.
But it has a kind of like bass vinegar to splatter all over the place in a beautiful Jackson Pollock way.
Oh, ohh! And remember to try and emulsify.
I don't want this to be, uh, broken or separated vinaigrette.
Every French housewife is rolling over in her grave right now.
It looks like something you would get at McDonald's.
Creamy balsamic.
Pepper.
You know, this looks, um, frankly perfect.
It's a good texture, it's pretty loose.
But still creamy emulsified.
Okay, we'll toss the salad and assemble.
It's kinda funny.
But this looks like a nice red leaf.
Lettuce and, um, I love the soft butter lettuces.
Little chumps of such a ruffly leaf.
And they catch the vinaigrette easily.
And they're so beautiful the way they are.
It's a pity to put the dressing on them in a way.
But, if you don't mind I'm gonna use my hands.
Why be fancy here, when I'm never fancy.
This way I can actually feel what I'm doing, see what I'm doing.
I like every leaf glistening.
And that it still has a life and it's not just dead and, um, collapsing from the weight of the dressing.
Or maybe, I should have the waiter do this.
Mademoiselle, do you like some pepper? Okay, here is very simple.
Bibb lettuces, soft lettuces vinaigrette.
It's a salad.
Classic.
My idea of a great dessert.
Sgroppino.
It is a boozy milkshake that has lemon ice cream, lemon Vodka and it's finished with Prosecco.
The first thing is to make some lemon Vodka.
Just by taking the whole peel off one whole lemon.
Feed this yellow snake into the magic water.
It's funny, you can see already, even, that it's starting to take on the color.
You wanna let this sit for two weeks.
For today because I am now thirsty, I think an hour is gonna be great.
I'm gonna just immersion blend the sort of milkshake base part of this lemon ice cream.
Not sorbeto or sorbet.
It's something about the dairy that makes it extra, extra good, this drink.
It's like the wood-chipper scene in Fargo.
Just gonna open the Prosecco.
Do you like my technique, my I guess the idea about this Sgroppino apparently it's the word for when the horses, uh, clear their nostrils of the and that sort of like feeling.
Because of the potency of these two alcohols you're cleaning your own nostrils.
I'm a little afraid of it now, but I'm gonna calm down for a second.
Sgroppino.
This'll clean your clock.
Deep- fried Shrimp toasts with sesame seed.
It's my favorite bar snack at the restaurant.
These are rock shrimp which have a really meaty texture.
Pepperidge farm white bread and I try this with so many soft white sandwich breads and they don't hold up.
The white bread matters.
The rock shrimp go in.
I'm gonna put a little bit of this Tom Yum paste in.
It has a lot of lemon-grass and chilli.
Sort of sweet and sour.
And then grind.
And I want the shrimp to completely break down into a paste and it become a kind of mortar.
So I have fully, pasty shrimp.
The Tom yum color and flavor is distributed evenly.
So I'm just gonna take a little bit of the white part of the scallion and stir it into the paste.
So I'm stirring the scallion in by hand I don't want to grind up in the food processor.
So it doesn't make that odd, spongy quality.
I'm gonna seal the edges of the shrimp paste to the crust of the bread.
And it's so sticky it just adheres and won't go anywhere.
The paste and the bread are now forever one.
Coat it in sesame seeds.
And then we deep fry it.
Even if I just drop them in meat side up they roll over.
I want the toast to be submerged as well so that their getting crispy and golden and not just the shrimp is cooking.
Exactly what I'm looking for.
Bring it up and let it drain over here.
So I still have a little of my scallion leftover and I don't like to throw much away.
So we can use this to garnish.
That's nice.
There you go, deep-fried shrimp toast with sesame seeds.
I'm gonna make some mistake butter.
You're whipping cream for service and, you know, the phone rings or you go and talk to an employee and your cream just went way too far.
I don't wanna just dump that down the drain.
I want to use it in some way and you can just make butter from that.
It's as simple as over whipping the cream.
I'm gonna start slow and as it becomes more viscous and filled with body I'm gonna increase the speed on the whisk.
We've just passed perfect, luscious shaving cream texture of whipped cream.
It's got a little granular.
So we're gonna make butter.
We're gonna come to this moment where the milk is gonna separate out and you're gonna have this milky, watery whey liquid and all the butter solids separated and it's gonna start to splash.
There it is.
Completely separated now.
So now I'm gonna drain this through cheese cloths.
I'm gonna let this hang and drain.
The butter starts to compress and becomes more solid.
In the morning we open it up and have beautiful home-made butter for our toast for our breakfast.
This is our beautiful mistake.
So I'm gonna make the potato rostie.
We make hundreds of these on the weekend.
It is the potato dish that goes with every brunch item on the menu.
It's just grated potato cooked in clarified butter.
All the milk solids have been removed.
This gives you a longer cooking time and a higher cooking temperature.
We're just using a rosti potato, a starchy potato not a waxy potato.
And we want all of the starch so after you peel and shred the potato you do not want it to be washed away in water.
And water is of course what keeps the potato from turning black.
So it doesn't oxidize, so, your impulse is to put it into water but you should not.
Two potatoes per one rosti works out just right.
That's nice and smoking hot.
The starch wants to start turning brown and I'm like no, no, no, no.
You see, this is like a little race.
Please, cook fast.
Don't turn brown.
We use a slated fish spatula.
So I can turn this beast.
You see how the strands are threading in there.
You want the fat to be able to come up.
You don't want to pack it in so tight that the fat can't come up.
Yeah.
I would like to salt this and cut it up and eat it.
So here's a potato rosti that goes with every plate of food at brunch on the weekend.
I'm gonna make the Monte Cristo sandwich which is a triple decker sandwich that is both griddled and then deep fried.
So the first thing is to make the custard that the sandwich will soak in a little bit before being griddled.
That's our little custard bath.
Just like French toast except with a whole sandwich instead of just a piece of stale bread.
So triple decker I'm gonna make the slices of bread a little thin.
The butter is gonna keep the meat adhered to the bread so your whole triple decker doesn't topple over when you're griddling it.
So we have swiss, turkey, and beautiful ham.
Okay, so onto the buttered bottom I wanna keep it in the center of the sandwich as much as possible.
Layer two.
Okay.
Trim the edges up a little bit, cut it in half and put it into the custard.
And I want the custard to get all the way in to the center and let's see, oh, I can tell by touching it how soft and custard-y it's gotten.
I'm gonna flip it.
You can see I've kind of sealed the cut.
It's now gonna help hold it together till when we deep fry.
I think I'm ready to fry.
Right down into the deep fryer.
This makes the exterior crispy the interior completely cooked, melty, gooey.
Okay.
I'm gonna plate my sandwich here.
Hot.
A couple of over easy eggs with the sandwich.
Mm.
Sugar.
A little powdered sugar.
And then we give the customer the red currant jelly to dip in if they like.
This is the most delicious thing you can have at brunch.
This is the Monte Cristo sandwich with over easy eggs and red currant jelly.
I want that.
Okay, so I'm gonna make a Calvados omelet is what we call it.
It's a dessert that we run in the fall.
It has Calvados in it which is a strong apple Brandy.
What this really is, is leftover French toast batter that I didn't wanna throw away when I was making breakfast for the kids one morning.
And I ended up just putting it in the pan to see what would happen.
And it kind of makes like a pan custard.
So it's very simple.
I'm just gonna, uh, blend these eggs, cream, just a little bit of sugar and, mm, that is some good vanilla.
And because this had been French toast mixture and I had soaked stale bread in it I'm just adding a little bit of flour.
Okay, that is as simple as it is.
A good hit of butter in there.
Pour it a little bit around so it's setting.
And then drag from noon, and three, six and nine o'clock on a clock phase just until all the little runny bits have made their way into the crevices.
I can small it browning so now I'm gonna flip this thing.
I'm gonna pour some Calvados, this powerful Brandy in here and I want to tip it toward the flame.
Uh, tell me that not a thing of beauty.
It's carmalizing the sugar.
And while it's nice and warm put some butter on it.
Almost as if this were salt I'm sprinkling sugar on it.
It's not so much about the sweetness as it is about the little, crunchy, granular texture in your teeth.
'Cause otherwise it's a very soft, custard-y experience.
Viola.
Colorless omelet.