Anatomy of an appetizer

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Published on Sunday, 23 October 2011 16:47
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Tonight, Insight on Appetizers

Appetizer special: Fruit, Cheese, Nuts
(red anjou pear poached in red wine,peppercorns and vanilla, with a danish blue cheese souffle, served with a carmelized red wine sauce and almond bisquits)
 
It was pretty good.

After last weeks dismal performance of my appetizer special I thought it would be fun to take you on a little trip and show you how I go about creating whatever the appetizer special will be for the week. We have been doing this now for 10 months and the special has been different every week. Hopefully by the end of this explanation you will have some insight as to how I do it. My ultimate goal is that you may look at food a little differently yourself.

You can not sit at a desk or lay in bed and think of what will be good to cook and be sure it will be good. Cooking is a sensory experience and that means engaging yourself from the selection of ingredients to the final presentation. This entails going to market and looking at, smelling, and touching the food. For me this begins Thursday when I get in the car and head off to Shoperite. To be more concise about the process I will divide it into steps so we develop some type of formula you can repeat for yourself.

  • Step 1. When you enter the market go to the produce area and just walk around. Don’t try to think about anything in particular, just acclimate yourself to being around food. Sort of like jumping into a pool. Let your mind and body adjust. Avoid eye contact with woman over 60 that like to embroider things on their sweaters. They will end up showing you pictures of their grandchildren on their phones that they don’t quite know how to use yet. This will cost you valuable time and concentration.
  • Step 2. Now you are ready to begin. Of all the food you will now examine, what you are looking for is the best example of what an item should be. Sort of like a dog show only with produce and not dogs. Last week the yellow pepper took the prize. Their confirmation was perfect, they had uniformity in size, the color was stunning, and the walls of the pepper were over ¼ of an inch thick. When I picked one up it had substantial weight to it. This week it was the red Anjou pears. Of the four varieties of pears the red ones were the only ones that were dead ripe. I knew from experience in a few days these pears would start the rapid decline to the compost pile. They were in the parlance of cooks, “peaking”. The process of determining a winner usually takes me about 30 minutes. It was close this week, the fennel was looking mighty nice, but it came down to the swimsuit part of the competition, the pears won hands down.
  • Step 3. At this point you go from beauty contest judge  and morph into a dating service. What will be the best escort for the pears? I normally think of an appetizer as having two basic components. It could be a protein and a starch, but basically it will be two things that compliment or play off of each other. It could even be two of the same thing as long as the method of preparation is different and you can show some contrast. This week as you have seen it was Danish Blue cheese. The cheese section in ShopRite is directly across from where the pears were. They had been staring at each other all day. The magnetism was disgusting. They should have gotten a room.
  • Step 4.This is the fun part. You have chosen what you believe to be the best possible ingredients you can procure, their compatibility based on some fundamental rules of gastronomy but their future entirely in your hands. What parameters determine how they arrive on the menu? There are a few to choose from. The easiest way of thinking, or “modo di sentire”, which just sounds nicer, is the ethnic route. This does not require much thought, only a healthy amount of respect for whatever cuisine you decide to model the preparation after. The next option for me is to think of someone I have worked with and how they would handle these ingredients. That was the case for me this week. There was a time in culinary history when soufflés were the in thing. What is foams and gas fueled frenzy today was once soufflés. Sweet or savory, hot or cold, if you wanted to strut and shine, soufflés were the ticket. That story I will save for next week as to not distract from the conversation at hand. The last approach, and for me the most interesting, is to try and assume the techniques of a person you find interesting and be them if they were a cook. There is a contradiction in the idea of originality and creativity in that sometimes creating something worthwhile involves escaping one’s self. If I am attempting to assume another’s perspective, how can I claim the end result to be original? Why not be Bach, Matisse, I.M. Pei, Gene Simmons? I will give a small example. Lets say I’m Bach and I need to write a menu. I take five very basic ingredients and for the first course prepare them as simply and straight forward as I can. Simply put, I lay down a melody. With each course I use the same ingredients only I change the preparation and make it progressively more complex. Sort of a fugue only with food. I don’t know if that gets my point across but its after one and I don’t plan on trying much harder.

When you get to the time of the knife and fork none of this is relevant as long as you have something delicious and fun in front of you. I didn’t sell many appetizers last week. Didn’t sell many this week either. The sale is only as small aspect of why I do these things, the most gratifying part being that someone will enjoy and share in the journey. For me, when the plate comes together and I take my picture, the journeys over. As is my ramble for this week. Have a good week everyone.

Best,

Mike