A few weeks back, my wife and I booked our stay at the inn, cashing in a Rue La La deal we had purchased a month prior.  The deal included a night’s stay at the Inn at Langley as well as dinner and wine pairing for two at the attached restaurant.  Even from my first call to make our reservations, I could tell that this place exuded the type of warm hospitality that is often absent in the typical passive-aggressive Seattleite interactions.  When we arrived and were shown to our room, we were stunned in disbelief – the “cottage suite” included in our package was a 1400 square foot apartment overlooking the sound, beautifully appointed and peacefully serene.  And, if this were a travel blog, I’d go on and on about the room, the amenities of the inn and the charming little town scattered around it.  But, you’re here for the food, so I’ll get right to it.

Dinner started quite leisurely, just as the sun was falling low in the sky.  We were the first to arrive for the night’s seating, and we were greeted warmly by Stephen McClure, the restaurant’s sommelier.  He handed us each a glass of champagne dotted with basil seeds and we took a seat in the garden as the other guests trickled in.  Sitting in that manicured garden, watching the sunset and sipping champagne, I felt a million miles from home: relaxed, refreshed, civilized, and centered.  It’s a great way to begin any meal.

We were shown to our table which was one of just a handful in the restaurant’s petite dining room.  The room is divided by an oversized stone fireplace, and flanked by tables of two and four laid out around the perimeter.  However, the main focus of the room is

the kitchen, which opens into the space through a countertop-turned-pass where Chef Costello and an assistant finish most of the dishes for service.  Before the meal began, the chef walked us through the evening’s ten+ course menu.  He rattled off the dishes we’d be tasting, but spent most of his time discussing their origins – specifically, the sources of his ingredients.  As he explained, Whidbey Island is a hugely agricultural community.  The island is home to more than ten farmers markets which support not only full-time farmers, but are also popular among pop-up producers.  Say Mr. and Mrs. Jones have a bounty of plums on their back yard tree?  You might just catch them at the market, selling directly to the restaurant. 

Chef Costello described the suppliers for almost every element on the menu – not only meat and seafood (which, by the way, is harvested just out the back door), but also for coffee, raspberries, radishes, milk, onions, and nearly every other once-living thing stashed away in the kitchen.  This was impressive, not because of the level of detail in his list, but because the way he spoke of each supplier conveyed that he had a meaningful relationship with them and viewed their work as being just as important a contribution to the meal as his own. Even with the proliferation of Portlandia-esque connections between Seattle chefs and farmers, this level of reverence and respect is a rarity.  Just as rare, each seat was pre-set with a hand made place card, drawn in a charming lowercase design that underscored the level of personal attention that was given to each quest.

Dinner started with an eye-opening bang: gelled, Manhattan-filled cherries and savory mini-meringues.  This was my first indication that the meal was going to incorporate modernist technique, and it was a bit of a shock considering the small, old-school-looking kitchen from which the chef was working.  There were no (visible) sous vide baths humming, there were no centrifuges spinning, there were no brigades of sous chefs and stages running the line… hell, there wasn’t even a line!  It was just Chef Costello and one assistant pulling course after course out from behind the counter and quickly plating 30 dishes before they were swept away by the servers. 

The next course, another amuse, was billed as “really cold salmon mousse”, but was actually a cryo-shattered salmon mousse served with salmon roe on delicate wooden spoons.  The frozen mousse started out cold and crunchy, but quickly melted to a decadent and creamy consistency, balanced by the salty tenderness of the roe.  The bite was so pleasing that I smiled one of those mid-chew smiles that violates dining room etiquette but just cannot be helped.

The next course was a freshly-baked pretzel roll served with locally produced goat butter and kohlrabi.  The course was paired with a beer – it was the first time I had seen a beer course on the wine pairing menu, but it worked perfectly.  The roll was soft and sour and studded intensely with giant crystals of salt.  It made me wish the restaurant was one of those “endless breadsticks” places.

Next up was a baked potato consommé with a potato foam, chives and a healthy chunk of sous vide pork.  The broth tasted vibrantly of potato skins, and the classic flavors of the chive and bacon took me back to my childhood, unwrapping the foil from a scalding russet and piling on enough toppings to completely obscure the notion that it was ever a vegetable. 

The next course was one of my favorite dishes of the evening, and perhaps of the year.  It was a piece of roasted butterfish topped with carrot foam with peas and mint.  Spread across the plate was a streak of anise-flavored marshmallow fluff which the chef lightly torched just before service.  The combination of the burnt anise, peas, carrot, mint and butterfish was as divine as the presentation.

The next dish out was a palette cleanser – a melon sorbet with fennel on a bed of sheep’s milk feta.  The combination of the tangy feta and the sweet sorbet was unusual but extremely refreshing.  Although fruit and cheese is combination as timeless as peanut butter and jelly, this presentation turned the pairing into an elegant midpoint for the meal.

Next was another winner – duck liver risotto with risotto, currants, wild onion and finger lime.  Since risotto is typically reserved as the de-facto vegetarian menu option at so many restaurants, I was happy to see that the chef took the liberty of including duck liver in his rendition. 

The meat course came out next.  It was a medallion of lamb loin with an artichoke puree and a spherified béarnaise sauce, served with hemispheres of summer squash.  This course was the only one I found underwhelming.  By this point in the meal, I expected the lamb to be cooked to the oh-so-perfect rare that you can only achieve with sous vide, and accompanied by bright, complimentary flavors.  Unfortunately, I found the lamb to be slightly overcooked, leaving it drier than it should have been.  Although the menu listed artichoke and béarnaise, the flavors of the dish were dominated by the same anise notes that I had already enjoyed a few courses earlier.  I thought the spherified béarnaise sauce was a great concept, but I found it lacking in richness.

Luckily, the next course got everything back on track.  It was a triple-cream cheese served with toasted grass ice cream, a burnt grass sauce and sorrel.  The toasted grass ice cream was a revelation.  It was creamy and sweet, but with familiar traces of grass and hay.  It was a taste I had never experienced before, but it completely worked for me.  Extremely well done.

The meal ended with two more desserts – a goat milk mousse served with strawberry sorbet and buttermilk meringues, and a final taste of chocolate to end the evening.  By this point, we were both pleasantly stuffed and quite inebriated from the generous wine pairing.  Luckily our room was just a few short steps away.  When we awoke the next morning, happy and hungry, a gorgeous, complimentary, more-than-continental breakfast awaited all the guests in the restaurant. 

I had a chance to chat with the Chef Matt Costello post-dinner and ask him about his approach at Inn at Langley.  He’s very humble about his work at the restaurant, and views himself as “out here in the woods just doing my thing.”  Echoing the sentiments of other local chefs, he wishes the Seattle dining scene had more diversity.  When I asked about the modernist technique incorporated in his dishes, he explained that he was self-taught, but had made a visit out to the Modernist Cuisine lab.  He’s also dined several times at Alinea, though he says that it is nothing like what he does.  “Some folks just think I’m Blaine [Wetzel] from Noma and are confused a little.” 

Well, let me set all confusion aside by saying that Chef Costello combination of thoughtfully sourced ingredients and masterful avant garde technique add up to an incredible meal which I will not soon forget.  And, as the menu changes with the seasons and with his whims, I look forward to my next trip back to the Inn at Langley.

All images courtesy of Matt Costello.

I got the books, brought them home, and posted an “unboxing coming soon” teaser article.  That was two weeks ago.  Since then – not a single mention.  The books that I’ve been salivating over for nearly a year finally arrive and I don’t post a word.  What happened?

I had an existential crisis.

I’ve known for a while that I want to write something profound about what this book means, not just as an artifact in its own right, but as a reflection of the modernist cooking movement that is progressing through the world as we speak.  I’ve got strong feelings about many of the themes that this book addresses, and I’m dying to contribute to the conversation.  For example, I’m particularly sensitive to the “conflict” that the media has generated between modernist and oldschool cooking.  As a corollary, I’d also love to write about the use of nontraditional ingredients – tapioca maltodextrin, sodium alginate, agar agar, etc. – which are called for in many modernist recipes, and which inexplicably prompt so many people to take up picket signs in protest.  Even more, I’d love to write about how modernist chefs are expanding the boundaries of the chef-diner relationship and creating a dialogue with dinners that challenge the palettes and minds of restaurant goers.  And, I’d love to write with great insight about a dozen more topics that deserve the attention of anyone who claims to care about food.  But I haven’t written a single word until today.

For the last year (with increasing focus as time has progressed) I’ve been trying to really understand modernist cooking.  I’ve read biographies of preeminent and quite eminent chefs; I’ve watched documentaries on elBulli and seen Heston Blumenthal do things that make Alton Brown look like Sandra Lee; I’ve spent time talking with the chefs at Spur and MistralKitchen in Seattle; I’ve built up quite an exotic spice cabinet with a shelf dedicated to hydrocolloids, and with the help of Jethro and Eric from Jet City Gastrophysics, I’ve tried to teach myself the fundamental techniques of modernist cuisine.  Together, we’ve spherified, powdered, centrifuged, dried, homogenized, cavitated, cryopoached, vacuum sealed, evaporated and transglutanimized just about any food we could.  And for a moment, I felt knowledgeable, connected, and accomplished.

But when I opened the Modernist Cuisine books and started reading, my whole perspective was shattered.

Imagine that you were with Lewis and Clark, mapping your way across the uncharted expanse of North America, struggling to find passage to the West Coast.  One day you meet a passing traveller who pulls out a laptop and shows you Google Maps.  It might fuck with your head a little, huh?

Although my expectations for the content of the books were high, I was overwhelmed by their simultaneous breadth and depth.  I flipped through the pages as if I had discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls – noticing many familiar pictures, recipes and techniques, but reveling in the pieces I had never before seen, the intense level of detail and shocking clarity with which everything was presented.  On several occasions, I slapped my forehead, as if to exclaim, “So that’s how you do that!” noting the important differences between my failed attempts at a recipe and the surgically-precise guidance given in the book.

Like being handed Harry Potter’s Book of Spells, I suddenly realized that I was capable of executing a rare breed of magic.  Dishes that would arouse the jealousy of chefs the world over were now at my disposal, even if they did require thirty hours of preparation.  However, I also realized that my past work at developing a modernist skillset were somewhat trivialized.  My empirical attempts at reverse engineering dishes I had seen before were reduced from an admirable scientific endeavor to a laughable waste of calcium chloride.  The answers to my unknowns existed, and they had been neatly collated into this set of books.

For a while, I felt lost.  I had been so excited to witness and perhaps even participate in the greatest movement in food since Escoffier pulled a Martin Luther on French Cuisine in 1903.  But, looking through the endless compendium captured in Modernist Cuisine, I couldn’t help but think that I had  missed my opportunity.  The revolution was over – all of the secrets of modernism were now available to anyone with $625 and a fortified bookshelf.  The maps were drawn, the gospels were recorded and casting a Patronus would soon be blasé. I became a little depressed.

And so I wallowed in my untimeliness, still gawking with the turn of every page at the unparalleled photography and exhaustive parametric permutations of each new recipe.  “What could I possibly write now?” I questioned.  And then I had a realization….

…But I’ll save that for the next post.

Updated: Continue reading Part 2

Unfortunately, you may know Ferran best by his most extreme techniques, which are often implemented poorly by far lesser chefs (yep, I’ve been guilty of that).  His most recognizable methods include making foams and turning liquids into encapsulated spheres, both of which quickly denigrate from masterful haute techniques into party gags rather quickly.  However, in the hands of (by all accounts) a master/genius/sorcerer/+5000 Mana Food Priest, these methods contribute to a transformative and even transcendent dining experience.

Through Colman Andrews’ unprecedented access to Ferran, we learn about his fascinating and serendipitous career progression from military dishwasher to short-order beach bum, eventually becoming the most renowned chef in the world.  We also learn much of the history of El Bulli and how the location, landscape and struggling seasonality of the restaurant ultimately contributed to its unlikely success. 

What we don’t learn, though, is much about Ferran, personally.  Although he dispenses a bevy of prolific statements throughout the chapters, nearly nothing is written about his life outside the kitchen, his wife or his relationships with friends.  In fact, reading about his many simultaneous projects and ventures, I began to wonder if there was any off-duty time to discuss at all!

Skeptics of “molecular gastronomy”, a term which Ferran and others abhor, may find this book less than satisfying – the brief chapter on the opposition to Ferran’s food only lightly grazes the surface of the common knee-jerk responses to modernist cooking, and regrettably does very little to dispel the pervasive untruths that are frequently held against Ferran and his disciples.  However, for a geek like me wishing to emulate the patterns and unbounded thinking that made Ferran Adria such a powerful force in the modernist food movement, this book was a fantastic glimpse into the mind of a genius. 

Amazon: Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food

I love sous vide cooking.  Those of you who have discovered it know what I’m talking about – nothing short of a new frontier of culinary technique, and one of the first pure intersections of science and cuisine.  However, if you aren’t willing to drop $1000+ (or you don’t have a soldering iron and some patience) it used to be the case that you were excluded from the inner circle of sous vide wizardry.  Professional thermal immersion circulators are extremely expensive and, due to their scientific design aesthetic, aren’t very likely to show up on the shelves of Sur La Table anytime soon.  But, for the first time, a home cook willing to spend $450 (the price of a top-of-the-line stand mixer + accessories, for example) can experience for themselves the eye-opening, mouth-watering, religious revelation of their first sous vide steak.

I’ve blathered on for the last handful of posts about how great sous vide is, and to a certain extent, I’ve become obsessed with the method.  So, you can imagine my delight when the nice people at SousVide Supreme offered to let me test drive a unit for two weeks (there’s my disclosure).  When the unit arrived, I anxiously brought the box inside and began unpacking.  The first thing that struck me?  “Damn, this thing is big!”  So big, in fact, that there was no hope of ever storing a unit like this anywhere in my kitchen.  For the entire two week trial run, it sat on top of my stove, next to my stockpot that’s also too big to find a home.  If you can’t tell from the picture above, the unit is about the size of a large bread machine.  And although it’s handsome enough for what it does, I’m not sure I would acquiesce to the idea of making this behemoth stainless brick an objec d’art atop my precious counter space.  That said, I’ve found myself cooking nearly everything sous vide recently, so perhaps it wouldn’t be such an inconvenience to have the machine on display all the time.

Once I got over the size issue (like a blind date with a girl who has “a great personality”), it was time to put this unit through its paces.  By now, I had already been cooking with my DIY sous vide machine for a few weeks, so I had some reasonable expectations of heating time, temperature evenness (temperature measured at different spots in the basin) and temperature fluctuation (how well the target temperature holds over time).  I filled the unit’s basin with hot water from my kitchen faucet to speed up the pre-heating time.  If you haven’t been to the gym in a while, you might notice that the water-filled unit is quite heavy.  The unit features well-placed inset handles to help with carrying, but even so, it’s a precarious beast when full – especially when full of hot water!  It would be great to see a drain valve in version 2, since it’s very difficult to negotiate 30 lbs of 120° water up and into the kitchen sink without spilling everywhere.

The SousVide Supreme comes with a wire food rack (shown in the picture above) which actually does a great job of keeping your food in place and allowing ample circulation.  Unfortunately, since the unit doesn’t have circulator of any kind, you’ve gotta rely on convection currents to distribute heat evenly through the basin.  I was initially quite concerned that this would result in hot and cold spots (which it does) but the temperature differences were reasonably small – within .5°F as measured with a laser thermometer.

Heating from faucet temperature (about 110°F) to cooking temperature (about 144°F) took about half an hour – a time scale consistent with my DIY machine, and certainly reasonable for anyone who’s ever waited for an oven to preheat.  However, I was quite surprised to see the temperature fluctuations of the machine over time.  The video below shows 1 hour of cooking time condensed into 2.5 minutes.  The target temperature remained fixed at 144°F, and there were no external factors influencing the temperature (eg. I never removed the lid, opened a window, turned on the stove – in fact, I wasn’t even home!).  The temperature varies between 142.1°F and 144.5°F, and if you watch closely, you’ll notice that this variation happens in a very cyclical manner.  In other words, the machine is programmed to allow a zone of acceptable temperature that is at least 2.4°F wide.

These temperature fluctuations weren’t noticeable on beef short ribs or potatoes, where there is a wider zone of doneness.  However, if you’re finicky about your steak, and especially if you’re aiming for the Goldilocks zone on eggs, those temperature swings may make a difference.  As you can see in this invaluable guide to sous vide cooking there’s a substantive difference between eggs cooked at 146°F and 148°F.

All in all, however, the SousVide Supreme did a fine job cooking.  Plus, I felt completely comfortable leaving the unit unattended to run overnight or while I was away at work.  The all-in-one design certainly is convenient, but the machine’s bulk means you’ll have to annex the dining room to find storage.  I’m delighted to see the SousVide Supreme bring sous vide cooking into home kitchens for the first time, and very excited at what the future may bring!

I had the recent pleasure of a visit to the newly-opened Sip at the Wine Bar & Restaurant in downtown Seattle.  I’m typically cynical of places that 1) are chain restaurants, and 2) have both “wine bar” and “restaurant” in the title.  However, I’m happy to report that the folks at Sip exceeded my expectations, in general.

The first defining feature of Sip is its location – directly across the street from the architecturally fascinating Seattle Public Library.  And although the restaurant’s design isn’t quite as extreme (no curvy iridescent escalators), the wrap-around picture windows and dimly-lit ambiance take full advantage of the location’s urban scenery. 

As you might imagine, the wine list is extensive, offering both local and international bottles.  Bottles start at $25, glasses start at $7, and if you’re a fan of variety, you’ll be happy to know that all wines by the glass are also available by the half-glass.  I chose to start off the meal with a gin cocktail in a burnt sugar-rimmed glass.  It was a slightly sweet-and-sour, and a nice accompaniment for Sip’s salty and seared appetizers.

I enjoyed the tender and well-seasoned Vietnamese Caramel Beef ($12), but the standout of the starters was the Bacon & Eggs ($13, pictured above).  The dish is served as a cube of braised pork belly with a soft-boiled and lightly fried duck egg.  I thought this was a great interpretation of the classic combination – salty, sweet, crunchy and… porky.  I also enjoyed the flavors of the pickled beet salad, particularly the crispy beet chips.  Unfortunately, the salad was impossible to consume without spilling half on the tablecloth; for reference, 2” wide olive dishes don’t make good salad plates.

I was excited, as always, to see braised short ribs on the menu.  The dish, $19, was described on the menu as “boneless ribs, parmesan ‘jo-jos,’ arugula salad, meyer lemon gremolata, parmigiano & red wine braising jus”.  What the menu neglected to mention was that the short rib was spiced so heavily with what I assume to be cayenne pepper, that all other flavors were undetectable.  That said, the parmesan fries weren’t bad, and the meat was tender.  The Flat Iron “Chivitio” ($22, described well by blogger and friend Jay at Gastrolust) was a much more pleasant dish, flavored intensely with smoke and char, and topped with the fatty softness of a duck egg.  If I kept duck eggs in my kitchen, I’d put them on everything, too.

I must say, though, that the best dish of the night was actually dessert – the Roasted Sugar Pie Pumpkin Cheesecake ($8).  It was light and velvety, with the vivid flavor of roasted pumpkin.  Well doe, chef  Allison Jester. 

All in all, the food at Sip exceeded my expectations, modest as they were.  However, the menu prices thus far haven’t followed the budget-conscious trend set by some other Seattle joints.  But, if you like to cap off your day of downtown shopping and public library book reading with a glass of wine and a steak, Sip at the Wine Bar & Restaurant is a fine choice.

Full Disclosure: I got free food, but that doesn’t pay for my opinion.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, I plan to eat my last meal on Earth in a French bistro.  To me, the rich decadence of traditional bistro fare is a reminder that you’re alive.  Though most cardiologists agree that joie de vivre and fois gras become mutually exclusive after a few consecutive evenings, the French still manage to outlive us by 5-10 years, n’est pas?

Given my vigor for all dishes French, my recent visit to Crémant hit the spot.  In a day and age when Americans are so insecure of their own culture that they’ll only eat “Freedom Fries”, my faith in humanity is restored when witnessing chef/owner Scott Emerick’s faithful execution of the most unabashedly French dishes that have existed since Louis XIV.  For example, the Foie Gras Salade Royal ($14, pictured above)is an increasing rarity among restaurants and gourmet food shops, but its inclusion on the menu signals a steadfast allegiance to everything good about French cuisine.  Furthermore, this particular foie gras had a noticeably fresh flavor and texture that paired well with the sweet crunch of the pistachios and green beans.

My personal favorite dish was the Os à Moelle Rôti ($12, pictured above), three roasted marrow bones served with a pile of salt and a small spoon.  Again, I commend the chef for his inclusion of this staple.  I would gladly return for lunch and order several more plates.

Unfortunately, there were a few negatives to the meal as well.  Besides the foie gras and marrow bones, which were plated with generous pinch of sel gris, there was a prevailing undersaltedness to many of the dishes, including the pork rillette, salt cod and potato puree, and braised pork shoulder.  And, although the wine list at Crémant is fine enough to make an Alsatian blush (little wine humor), my glass of red was served about 10° too cold, which is a shame when your wine list includes $140 Burgundies.  If these critiques seem picky, that’s because they are.  There is a clear attention to detail and an adherence to the French culinary attitude of perfection at Crémant, so these small, correctable mistakes stood out even more.

I will gladly return to Crémant, hopefully before the eve of my death.  I wonder if they’ll accept my prescription for bone marrow?