Hacked Sous Vide: The Best Black Cod Ever
I don’t always post recipes to this site, but when I do, I post recipes like this. A good friend of mine, Anna Larsen from Eat Retreat, asked if I could write one for her recently founded Sustainable Seafood CSA, Siren SeaSA, and I happily obliged. The recipe below is for Black Cod, one of the wonderful offerings Siren SeaSA provides, and I describe a way to hack a sous vide setup without all the expensive equipment. It’s a great technique for this kind of fish and I hope you’ll give it a whirl. We’ll get to the recipe in a minute, but first a few words about the great stuff Anna is doing out in California.
Siren SeaSA connects young fishermen directly to customers, which encourages the fishermen to continue practicing sustainable fishing methods. Anna supplied all the seafood for Eat Retreat, and I can personally vouch for the gastro-orgasmic inducing powers of this stuff. You’ll never be able to stomach supermarket seafood ever again. On top of all her fishmongeress duties, Anna is also a prolific opera singer, which makes me feel bad because I got to hear her sing at Eat Retreat but she, being one of my roommates, only got to hear me snore. I hope my cooking made up for that awful injustice, and I hope you enjoy this recipe.
If you’re in the Bay Area or love someone who is, please check out Anna’s Siren SeaSA operation and buy a seafood share. Then you’ll be eating tasty seafood like a boss. And now, the recipe…
#IreneRecipes
Here in NYC life is pretty much back to normal post-Irene. Walking the streets of Manhattan, it’s hard to tell that the entire city was on lockdown for the better part of last weekend. To quell the boredom, I prompted people on Twitter to tweet me their Hurricane Irene disaster prep food items, to which I responded with totally killer recipes that will win Studiofeast a James Beard Award.
A recap of our Twitter antics is below. Take a look, have a laugh, and if you enjoyed them, please consider for a moment to donate to the Red Cross to help with the recovery effort in places that were way less lucky than NYC.
Again, Irene sure wasn’t the haymaker we all thought it would be to us NYC-ers, but don’t forget about those in places like Vermont, North Carolina, and Upstate New York where they experienced catastrophic flooding and even fatalities. Let’s all be grateful that we could sit back with a drink and some food while watching the rain out the window, but throw a little love out to those who couldn’t.
Here’s that link to the Red Cross again.
The Future of Food: A Video Interview on PSFK
I sat down with the fine folks at PSFK to talk a bit about this thing of ours and to give my take on the future of dining experiences. Check out the video here:
We have new dinner events in the works that will be a bit more intimate than what you’ve seen in the past, those announcements should be coming soon for the Fall.
Get on the mailing list and follow/like us on Twitter & Facebook to stay in the loop.
Video Excerpt: Google+ Hangout Cooking Class
Last Sunday was our first cooking class on Google+ Hangout–it was great. We had a handful of friends, old and new, in the hangout while Soo and I demoed the Marrows dish from our recent Doppelganger Dinner. Here’s a short clip of the plating where her meat version met my mirror image vegetarian version. More of these to come, Circle me up on G+ to stay in the loop.
Studiofeast Cooking Class on Google+ Hangout
We’ll be hosting a Studiofeast Google+ Hangout cooking lesson on Sunday, July 31st at 6pm EST. The URL to the hangout will be posted to G+/Twitter/Facebook around 5:30p that day. You can also add me, Mike Lee, to your Google+ Circles in advance so you’ll see the link when I post it to my G+ Stream or leave a comment below if you’d like to be kept in the loop on the Hangout details.
For this lesson, Soo and I will be breaking down the process behind the Beef vs Potato Marrow from our recent Doppelganger Dinner. We received a lot of great comments the night of the event from this dish so it makes sense to teach you how to make it. Soo will be doing the beef version from one Hangout square and I’ll be doing the potato version from another square.
6pm EST is approaching dinnertime on the East Coast (or Dunch on the West Coast), so if you’d like to cook along with us, you should purchase the following ingredients:
Grandpa’s War Shu Duck
My Grandpa Tong used to own Stanley’s Place, one of the first Chinese restaurants in downtown Detroit in the 50s. At one point, he had 100 employees which included 16 line cooks, 6 people solely dedicated to taking phone take-out orders, and 1 person who did nothing but make rice in a jacuzzi sized rice maker. The whole family worked there and it’s been a big inspiration to why/how I cook for people.
After a visit home to Michigan, where I had the pleasure of cooking for him, he laid down some knowledge and explains his recipe for one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes: War Shu Duck.
War Shu Duck is a whole duck that’s skinned and deboned, then the meat is minced and combined with ground pork (“you can use Cantonese roast pork too” he says). The skin is then used as a wrapper to surround the ground meat and covered in an egg wash with corn starch and sugar. You deep fry the whole thing and cover it with duck jus. Grandpa recalls that Detroit Mayor Coleman Young would call in advance to order 4 of them at a time for take out. From what I gather, it was the Momofuku Pork Bun of its time.
I’m dying to try this thing out and will report back with results. Hopefully it lives up to Grandpa’s standards, or at least Mayor Bloomberg’s.
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Here’s a Yelp listing for the spin-off sister restaurant to my Stanley’s Place, cleverly named “Stanley’s Other Place.” My grandpa’s original restaurant was sold in the 70s and converted into a church, but the Other Place lives on.
Time Lapse: Doppelganger
A time lapse of our Doppelganger Dinner on July 17th, 2011
Photos & Recap: The Doppelganger Dinner
I had a thought once about couples where one person was a vegetarian and the other was a meat eater. It seemed like they could really never share a meal and have the same experience without one person–usually the omnivore–compromising to suit the mutually agreeable meal. To a normal, well adjusted human being, this is a totally banal observation that wouldn’t warrant losing sleep over.
But to us at Studiofeast, we thought it’d be cool to do a meal where an omnivore and a vegetarian could both share the same meal without the former forgoing meat or the latter having to try flesh. That was the seed of an idea that grew into our most recent dinner: a 7 course meal with an omnivore and vegetarian option where each corresponding course looked identical across the meat/vegetable line. And on July 17th, we seated 40 guests–20 omnivores on one side of the table, 20 vegetarians sitting opposite them–and served them our Doppelganger Dinner. [Full menu & photo gallery after the jump!]
Hacking the Dinner Party @ ITP
I recently had the pleasure of teaching a session at NYU’s ITP Camp entitled, “Hacking the Dinner Party,” which was an introduction to Sous Vide and Activa.
Anatomy of a Subway Meal
Mike Lee from Studiofeast wore a Contour HD camera on his head to capture his team’s main course execution for the L Train Lunch. This video captures the entire experience from the staging apartment, to platform plating, to train service in a first person point of view.
It’s been over a month since Studiofeast collaborated with A Razor, A Shiny Knife, The Cheeky Chef, Winetology‘s Jonny Cigar and many others to plan and execute the L Train Lunch. Since then, we’ve received a lot of attention and the reactions from people have been overwhelmingly positive with coverage in countless publications. Our main video, edited by Ronen V, has collected over 250,000 views and Melena Ryzik’s piece in the New York Times has spawned new countless conversations from friends old and new.
