When chefs create those daily specials they often go through the same motions a home cook might, except we may have ready access to ingredients on a daily basis the home cook simply does not. Plus there are small considerations to be made, such as the location of the restaurant. In central NY it’s nearly impossible to sell a feature dish without the tried and true starch, vedge, sauce combination. I’ve personally only made one dish without a starch at the restaurant, and about 2 hours into service found myself whipping up a quick batch of soft polenta just to get that delicious ratatouille to sell.
If you’ve ever wondered what a chef is thinking as he comes up with a new dish, wonder no more! I am going to take you through a particular day (which just so happens to be yesterday) as I started with one simple idea: we have butternut squash in the cooler. In the end what ended up on the plate was a sauté of finely diced butternut squash, parsnips, sweet potato gnocchi and spinach with a white onion puree and tarragon lemon vinaigrette.
Every single special that shows up at your table starts with a simple idea. Often times on a Friday or Saturday night that idea is “scoop and serve.” This simply means a dish that takes little to no work in order to get a plate set. That’s also why it’s so great to go out and eat during the weekdays, because often the chef’s take a little more time with a dish because they know that a slower service means they could do a complex risotto or make a delicious pan sauce.
On my way to work today I knew we had butternut squash because I had made a butternut squash orzo Sunday night to accompany crab cakes. I hadn’t even begun setting up the grill station when the “thing” came to me: sweet. That “thing” is the idea or element of a dish that makes it a cohesive unit. Anyone who’s had roasted butternut squash drizzled with honey and balsamic vinegar knows how delicious that combination is. And so I set out to make a sweet dish.
If you now worry about how to keep things from getting too sweet (or whatever your idea might be), just remember that if you stay convinced and have a basic understanding of flavor combinations you’ll come out on top. The first item to tackle was the squash, and that was easy. I had done puree just the other night. This time I wanted the plate to have a bite of the squash, so I finely diced up a few and roasted the diced squash in the oven until just barely tender.
Clearly this dish was going to be a sauté of some sort, now I just needed something to go along. Something that would pair nicely with the squash. Our Executive Chef had put together some crab pot pies for a special not long ago, and within them was parsnip. Perfect! So peeling began with no real idea what I’d do when the parsnips were cleaned and trimmed up. Not to worry though, because I had “sweet” to drive me forward. I sliced the parsnip into half moons, placed them in a pot and covered them with water. I then added some salt and honey, threw the pot on a burner, and simmered until just barely cooked.
Stop? The honey is too much? Hmmm…you could be right. But remember that when using honey with parsnips (or carrots) in such a manner you’ll get pretty much zero honey flavor or sweetness. Instead what you’re doing is bringing out the natural sweetness of the vegetable just a little bit more than simply boiling.
I was briefly stuck there on the vedge portion of the sauté so I turned to what I could for a starch. Ironically we had sweet potatoes, which is the first time since I started I’ve seen them in our restaurant. I wondered if I could execute sweet potato gnocchi, and decided the only way to find out was to try. Gnocchi are little light potato dumplings, distinct for their fluffy texture. With sweet potatoes having little starch, and being quite dense I knew I had a challenge.
So I cheated and added in one russet potato. See? Occam ’s razor works in cooking too, the most obvious and simplest answer is usually the correct one. From there the gnocchi became just another task. Sage is a common friend of sweet potato, so in went the sage. Our handmade tortellini contain a filling of ricotta and goat cheese, and with a spare batch on hand that went in as well.
With the gnocchi made and accounted for I stepped into the realm of sauces. “Sweet” was once again at the forefront of my mind, but I had what might be a disastrously crazy idea. Puree of white onion. While thinking on that concept I briefly considered doing a savory style zabaglione. Rather than prepare it as a dessert (the traditional method) could do something with maybe herbs. I’d done a basil zabaglione a few months ago and knew it’d be tasty. But here’s where my own brain said to stop and reconsider the “sweet” concept. That puree now sounded perfect.
What I didn’t want was a caramelized onion puree, but that pungeant onion flavor had to be mellowed. So I chopped up a few onions and threw them in a pot with melted butter. I stared, I think for at least a minute at the pile of onions, before turning and tossing in a bunch of chopped garlic. Again I stopped, unsure of what was going to happen with this puree. For some reason I got the idea in my head that the puree would need much more texture, so I also chopped up a russet potato and tossed it in along with a bit of thyme. Satisfied I turned the heat to very low and walked away, strolling right by the Chablis. I grabbed the wine and splashed just a little in. And so began the sweet onion puree.
I ended up cooking the onions for over two hours, being careful to keep them from burning or turning too dark a brown. Naturally as they cook that long, even over a low flame, onions begin taking on a brown tone. I was OK with that, and for some odd reason before removing the onions from the burner I splashed in just a little bit of sherry. Into a blender went the onions and then they were pushed through a sieve. Final seasoning adjustments and the puree was done.
The dish was done. Yay! Except that it really wasn’t. Now here’s where maybe a home cook would just call things good and serve up a very tasty sauté. I knew that some absurdly simplistic things were missing. One was color. That was easily solved with fresh spinach thrown in the sauté. The spinach would provide a vibrant green color to the dish, and even better would help bring back a bit of the earthy qualities of the other ingredients that may have been lost in the “sweet” concept.
The other problem was a lack of acid. Serving halibut with this dish I had to have something acidic to help balance it all out. A lemon vinaigrette is about the most common and simple thing to do, aside from just squeezing lemon juice over a cooked fish. So that’s what I made, and just for the fun it I threw in some tarragon.
Now you know how a restaurant special is created. Most often a chef will answer that they sautéed up some compatible items and made a sauce that paired well. No real details are given on why they did what they did, but at least this once I wanted to open up the world of the restaurant chef and reveal the dirty little secret you already knew. Chefs go through the same process as the home cook, just a lot more refined.
