Our Parm bill is about a thousand dollars a month, which is why I get so cranky when I see you using it carelessly in family meal. Please. Ours is the real, expensive deal. Ease up on the Parm.
Please don’t throw away the many hard-as-wood rinds we generate. When we have a good clutter of rinds accumulating in the walk-in, pull them out and cover them with water in a soup pot and simmer for an hour or so until you have a rich and distinctly Parm-y broth. Big beads of milky fat will rise to the surface and signal the richness. You can then chew on the soft rinds, if you like, or just toss them.
Strain the broth and freeze it. It’s excellent for cooking the Rice Beans with Green Herbs when we run them, or for poaching the Gnocchi with Prune Butter on Valentine’s day.
For the average weekday/workaday use, make stracciatella and run it as an addition at lunch. Even in warm months this use is fine—I love hot soup in summer.
This item that can be made entirely from the waste bins, and run at lunch. We always have Parm rinds, loose yolks, extra whites, and leek tops idling in the walk-in to make use of. The single ingredient that doesn’t come from the garbage is the pinch of toasted and ground fennel seed.
This makes a rich and silky soup that has the same body and depth as a chicken stock–based one. If you are asked about its appropriateness for vegetarians, explain that there is surely animal rennet in the production of Parmesan cheese, and let them decide if that’s sufficiently vegetarian or not.
Collect from the day’s waste bins the following:
1 cup Parm broth
2 or 3 heavy, tough dark green outer leaves of the leeks from the garbage bin, well washed and sliced into thin slivers (about an overflowing ¼ cup of leek shavings)
extra yolks
extra whites
And from the spice shelves:
toasted ground fennel seeds
kosher salt
Bring the Parm broth to a rolling boil in a small saucepot.
Add the leek top shavings and allow to cook until tender, about 1 minute.
Meanwhile, beat whatever yolk and white combination you were able to gather, but make sure to include at least one white, otherwise the “straccia” of “stracciatella” won’t form as nicely.
Reduce heat to a solid, active simmer and in a steady thin stream pour the beaten egg into the soup slowly.
Do not stir. Allow the ragged raft to form, and when the egg is cooked through, turn off the heat.
Gently tip into a wide soup plate, keeping the egg raft intact and centered.
Season with toasted fennel seeds and kosher salt.
Spanish Garlic Soup with Smoked Paprika Butter
Serves 6
1 quart Chicken Stock
1 quart cold water
4 Tablespoons sweet butter
a hunk or bone end of serrano ham
3 heads of garlic, mostly peeled but intact, sliced horizontally
6 garlic cloves, peeled and whole
6 small yellow waxy potatoes, diced
6 slices stale bread
6 Tablespoons sweet butter, at room temperature
2 Tablespoons Spanish smoked paprika
6 eggs
For the broth:
In a large, deep soup pot, melt 4 Tablespoons sweet butter. Sweat horizontally cut garlic heads, cut side down, until soft and aromatic. Add diced potatoes and sauté briefly until coated and softening. Add serrano ham hocks, chicken stock, and water and bring to boil.
Immediately reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 2 hours. Remove serrano bone and pick any viable meat from bone. Discard spent bone.
Mash 6 Tablespoons butter with 2 Tablespoons of sweet Spanish pimenton, until the butter is the color of bricks. Toast the stale bread. While toast is warm, rub both sides with a clove of garlic until the garlic is ground into nothing, the bread is glossy, and garlic covers the entire surface, about 1 clove per slice of bread.
Place 1 slice garlic toast into bottom of each bowl.
Crack an egg into a small ramekin, put the lip of the ramekin close to the soup, tilt the egg into the simmering liquid, and let poach 1–2 minutes. (Repeat for each serving). Place the poached egg, garlic, and some potatoes over the toast in the bowl, and spoonfuls of soup until brothy but not awash. Swirl in 1 Tablespoon of paprika butter to each bowl, and correct seasoning, adding kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste.
If there was soft meat from the ham bone, add to the bowls before serving.
*At some point I had to write this recipe for civilians with domestic use/portions in mind, so the quantities won’t work for us, but follow the protocol and scale up appropriately for our purposes.
Run this as an addition whenever you start a new Serrano ham and have a spent leg retiring in the walk-in taking up precious real-estate in there.
Please save all of your zucchini stems whenever we have various zucchini dishes on the menu and run this as a wax.
2 cups cold water
1 teaspoon salt
14 zucchini tops
Trim the dry and grubby tip of the stem with a quick snip of your sharp paring knife.
The idea is to not lose any more of an already scarce piece of stem.
Place tops in a small saucepot and just cover with cold water.
Season well with salt.
Bring to a boil, turn down to simmer, and cook for about 10 minutes, or until tender and easily pierced with a wooden skewer or the tip of your blade.
Drain gently and neatly arrange in a small, shallow bowl in a single layer.
They can be crowded but not stacked on top of each other, please.
Drench with the good olive oil until it just begins to pool in the bottom of the bowl as soon as you take them out of the water, so that they can sort of drink the oil into their warm bodies.
Give them a final few grains of salt and make sure you get them to the table while they are still warm.
Save all the cores you cut out of the cauli during prep and give to whoever is leading the line for waxing.
Place hearts in a small saucepot and just cover with cold water.
Season well with salt.
Bring to a boil, turn down to simmer, and cook for about 10 minutes, or until tender and easily pierced with a wooden skewer or the tip of your blade.
Drain gently and neatly arrange in a small, shallow bowl, looking like icebergs.
They can be crowded but leave a sliver of negative space between them, please.
Drench with the good olive oil until it just begins to pool in the bottom of the bowl as soon as you take them out of the water, so that they can sort of drink the oil into their warm bodies.
Give them a final few grains of salt and make sure you get them to the table while they are still warm.
If you are the one assigned to clean out and reorganize the walk-in on Fridays, please don’t toss that huge container of the week’s accumulated outer stalks of celery. It is still useful. Use some for all of the weekend stocks, obviously, but that will only put a minor dent in what is usually left piled up in that bin.
I know it’s tempting to just dump that debris, given the huge deliveries clunking down the stairs all day and your rush to check in their products. And I know you are desperate to carve out real estate in that absurd walk-in as we bury you under all that additional weekend brunch mise on top of the regular dinner madness, but just don’t do it.
Get that bin onto the prep table and make everybody take a fistful of stalks to help you out. If you get everybody to do the prep work on the stalks, you can put the rest together rather quickly. And once it’s on the stove, it’s more or less a set-and-forget project.
Since we always have unpredictable amounts of pancetta scrap and leftover bits and scraps of meat, don’t worry about hitting the meat quantities in the recipe below exactly—just use what we have but keep the meat-to-celery ratio intact.
Cook it long and slow and until the meat and celery look almost sticky.
2 pounds pancetta
2 pounds sweet Italian sausage—no casing
2 pounds cubed beef
2 pounds pork butt or shoulder, cubed
10 cups white wine
1 cup onion, finely dice
10 garlic cloves, finely chop
1 cup parsley, chopped
10 canned tomatoes, crushed
40 stalks celery, de-ribbed and cut into 3" pieces
Grind all meat separately and combine.
Sweat out meat, onions, and garlic. Add wine and parsley and reduce by ⅔. Add tomatoes and celery, cover, and cook gently (stirring occasionally) until celery is tender. Season with salt and pepper.
Remove cover and allow to continue simmering gently until reduced to moist, almost sticky, and just beginning to tighten up.
When we are running salmon, use all of those heads and skeletons leftover from the butchering of the fillets for family meal, please. I don’t like seeing those end up in the trash.
The skins should be deep-fried separately to make excellent, crunchy, super delicious topping for scallion/rice/cucumber salad. Include the skin in the marinade step and let it dry as long as you can before dropping in the deep fryer. I realize in those few minutes just before family meal things get rushed, but try to fry as last-minute as possible.
Also, don’t crowd the bodies on the sheet pan or they will steam. Separate out some of the soy-sauce mixture to use for brushing the raw fish bodies before and during roasting so it won’t commingle with the rest of the sauce—(raw fish on your brush)—which you’ll use for dipping and dressing during the meal.
2–6 (what’ve we got?) salmon carcasses
soy sauce
ginger, peeled, then grated on a microplane
sugar
rice wine vinegar
*Mix together and taste for balance.
Arrange the salmon bodies and heads on a full sheet pan, either on parchment or a Silpat mat. Don’t forgo the nonstick surface because there is sugar in the dressing, which, once roasted, makes everything stick to the sheet pan.
Brush and mop the hasty, improvised teriyaki sauce all over the skeleton and the head and cheeks and collar of the fish—include the tail and the long “evening gloves” of skin, too, please. Turn the carcass over and brush the other side as well.
Remove the skin from the sheet pan and set aside to dry, unfurled, on a baker’s rack while the salmon carcasses roast in a high oven. If you are trying to muscle in on the ovens during the end of lunch service, use the 400° one on the left, but keep an eye—it will be done in about 20 minutes, and do not, obviously, think of double-tasking with any baking in there at the same time. I understand the egregious lack of oven space here, but let’s do things right anyway.
Drop the skins into the deep fryer for 2–3 minutes.
Serve the roasted carcasses with hot steamed rice and raw scallions, scattered with toasted sesame seeds.
And if we have plenty—check with the bartenders first—shave cucumbers and dress with the usual—sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, etc.—and crumble the fried hot salmon skins over top.
If there is smoked fish leftover from brunch on Monday morning, make this chowder and run it at lunch, please. The quality of the fish (Russ & Daughters!)—and the expense (this is not product to be used in family meal, people) is such that I’ll kill you if you waste it.
We charge a lot for this at lunch, considering it is made of our leftovers—please show that you know how to neatly and uniformly dice a potato, and that you have a sense of balance between the brine of the clam juice and the unctuousness of the cream.
smoked sturgeon and sable, as is, and some of the chubs, removed of skin and bones and bloodlines—equaling 1 pound of useable meat
1 yellow onion, small dice
1 russet potato, peeled, perfectly diced the size of your thumbnail, held in water
2 Tablespoons sweet butter
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup clam juice, strained through dampened and wrung-tight cheesecloth (check brunch bar bin in walk-in for open clam juice from Bloody Mary menu and use first before opening new)
1 cup dry white wine—stay away from the Rieslings and other fruities
thyme leaves, stripped from one full branch
cayenne pepper, 1 pinch
salt and freshly ground black pepper
Sweat onions in butter.
Add white wine and simmer to cook off bright alcohol taste.
Add clam juice, thyme, and potatoes and bring to a boil and then simmer until potatoes are just cooked, 4–5 minutes. Gently add in fish, keeping it in nice flakes, without becoming shredded, and finish with cream and a pinch of cayenne.
Add water if it seems salty.
Season with salt and pepper if necessary at pickup.
*TASTE YOUR FINAL PRODUCT*
Ask the guys to let you know when they have accumulated too many of the hard, smoked, full belly sheets of rind that they pull off of the sides of bacon when they do the brunch bacon slicing, and run this as an addition on the bar snacks menu to use up some of our garbage. Make sure you take it to sticky, tender, and on the verge of gelatinous.
Put bacon skins in a pot of cold water and bring to a boil over high heat.
Reduce heat to medium and simmer until rinds soften, about 45 minutes.
Drain.
Put some tomato sauce in the bottom of a hotel pan. Layer rinds into hotel pan, covering each layer with tomato sauce, keeping sheets flat.
Finish with tomato sauce.
Cover rinds with parchment and set a baker’s drying rack on top to pin them down and to prevent them from curling up while cooking.
Cover with foil and a lid and braise in a 350° oven.
Check after 30 minutes, but let them go an hour if needed—the rinds should be tender, but not falling apart.
Cool in their sauce.
To assemble:
Working one at a time, lift a sheet of braised bacon rind from tomato sauce, as neatly as you can, scrape off the sauce that clings back into the hotel pan, and lay the sheet on your cutting board fatty side up.
Sprinkle entire sheet, evenly, with a generous amount of grated Parmesan, chopped basil, salt, and pepper. Roll tightly and tie with kitchen twine. Cut the rolls into 4" to 5" logs, as possible, so we can reheat as close to a portion at a time in the pickup. Pack the tied rolls back in the tomato sauce.
To plate:
On the pickup, warm through in some of the tomato sauce, check seasoning, remove string, and slice in ½" spirals. Let some of the sauce pool up on the plate. Go easy on the portion—no one can eat more than a few bites of this.
Sliced parsley to finish.
Am worried that this is taking things too far on the frugality front, but the deliciousness is undeniable. Save the broth leftover from braising Alda’s octopus, and use it to braise the pork butts for the Maiale Tonnato. Then, incredibly, save it again and use it one more time to make the chorizo broth when we are running periwinkles.
OMFG. so delish.
You really have to take care with these. They are totally the wrong oyster for this type of treatment, but you can pull it off with care. Barbecued oysters in the South are a common thing but they use those giant oysters that grow in clusters and it really works. To repurpose our delicate brunch Malpeques in this way is not that swift from a culinary standpoint, but they are certainly tasty and I am always happy whenever I eat here and you send me a couple of these as a wax.
Lay them curved side down directly on hot dry grill and as soon as they hiss, pull them.
Pop them open and retain all of the just-warm liquid inside.
*You still need to sever the adductor muscle with your knife so customer can slurp easily.
Spoon a dribble of warm melted butter spiked with Tabasco into each one.
Set in mounded salt so they don’t tip over on the way to the table.
Puree the leftover brunch stewed chickpeas in the Vita-Prep with water and olive oil until you have an emulsified, tasty puree as thin as crème anglaise.
Spoon into shallow bowl and let pool up.
Boil fresh green chickpeas in salted water and drain, then nestle in neat fashion on top of puree, leaving a wide ring of puree at the perimeter.
Season with cumin-salt very lightly and a few drops of lemon juice and a drizzle of Arbequina extra virgin olive oil.
Plate with care to achieve three rings in the bowl—fresh chickpeas in the center, reddish puree, then golden olive oil.
Fried, salted chickpeas to garnish.
*use this for vegetarian wax.
*Don’t use this butter for anything but cooking or family meal - it is not special enough to be featured in any way. It’s just a way of not throwing money and perfectly good product into the trash can.*
At medium-high speed whisk cream. After 2–3 minutes you have perfect whipped cream. A few minutes later, it starts to look like whipped butter. Be sure to scrape sides of bowl down as the cream thickens and sticks to the sides of the bowl. When the cream is very thick, you can turn the mixer up to high without worrying about getting cream everywhere, after about 10 minutes. After 14 minutes the liquid and fat begin to separate. Butter looks like little pebbles in liquid. Turn off mixer.
Rinse and wring out several layers of clean cheesecloth, drape inside a china cap set in a cylindrical bain, and transfer the whole butter mixture into the cheesecloth. The whey will collect in the bain. Gather the cheesecloth into a bundle and twist a wooden spoon around and around and around until you have a tight orb like a hobo’s sack tied to a walking stick. Remove the china cap and set the wooden spoon across the mouth of the bain, letting the butter dangle—its whey dripping slowly into the bain. Set in the refrigerator for a full day and come back and twist occasionally to retighten the ball of butter/cheesecloth.
1 quart of cream yields 14 ounces butter.
If you are cleaning out the walk-in, it is your responsibility to constantly monitor the dates on the dairy. Health Department will not appreciate past-date dairy. It hardly happens here as we go through it so quickly and replenish so often, but when you find past-date cream that is still perfectly tasty, whip it up and make this butter. If you are on pastry prep and have left cream to whip in the Kitchen Aid and gotten distracted and left your cream too long, you can also recuperate the loss in this way. Anything past stiff peaks should be turned into butter by just continuing to whip it until it separates and becomes pebbly. Don’t throw your mistake away.
Set aside all of those gorgeous hairy leek bottoms from leek prep and soak well in cold water repeatedly.
Arrange attractively on small coffee saucers with a tea light in the center and use on the tables for decorating large parties.
*Crowd them a bit so it doesn’t look too precious or martha stewart-y!
Or fill all three of the large plates on the cake stand at the pass but don’t use candles. The pinspots overhead will shine down on them in dramatic fashion.
If you are going to use these as your display, do all three tiers of the cake rack so that it makes an intentional statement. If you put it between a platter of red onions and a plate of pears, it looks weak and somehow sloppy. Not impressive.
Lastly, chuck them after a couple of days when they dry out, or remember to pack them away each night in soaking wet towels. They look best when fresh.
Keep the stone kegs on the shelf under the spices and above the cooking wines where it is relatively dark, cool, and out of the way.
Be sure to transfer the filmy slippery mothers from the big commercial jugs of vinegar into the stone kegs every time you drain and finish a commercial jug, please.
Add red wine dregs to the red wine vinegar keg and white wine vinegar to the white keg, obviously, but I really don’t mind if you get white in the red sometimes.
Keep the cheesecloth clean—replace with new when you do the weekly deep clean in the prep kitchen.
Don’t shake, stir, or jostle the kegs excessively when adding more wine.
Taste it periodically—I do not mind new wine on top of older fermentation—I actually like the taste of the blend and the way it can lighten up the intensity, so just keep adding new wine whenever there are bottle dregs—stay in touch with bartenders and servers about this.
If the vinegar you draw out from the bottom is just too terribly viscious, add a few splashes of the filtered sparkling water from the waiters’ water station to your bottle but leave the large mother batch undiluted.
Do a good job with the butchering and filleting of the sardines in the first place and do not leave sloppy amount of flesh on the bones. The fun part of butchering fresh sardines is in how clean and easy it is to lift the skeletons out without tearing the flesh. This also gives you a very good bearing on the freshness of the sardines.
Soak all the spines with their intact heads and tails in milk for an hour. Any you don’t sell during service, keep stored in milk, refrigerated. Date well and clearly from service to service.
Drain and dredge through AP flour. Tap off excess.
Deep-fry until golden and crispy/crunchy, a full 5 minutes. 335° is good for the fryer temperature.
Drain, season with smoked paprika salt, and plate in a little tower on torn brown butcher paper.
Send these out as a wax to very special good customers—if you see industry folks, line cooks, chefs—they will appreciate it fully.
*Do not sell these.* These are just a cook’s treat and to be used as a special wax for good friends and the right people. Don’t waste it on anyone who won’t get it.
Also, make sure they have fried through. Like a potato chip.
After blanching and peeling all of those tomatoes, whether for Alda’s Zucchini Tian, or Sliced Jersey Beefsteak Tomatoes with Warm French Salted Butter), save the skins and dry them out in the oven, very slowly.
Heat the oven to 200°.
Lay out the skins on a Silpat mat on a ½ sheet pan.
They only dry thoroughly and evenly if you lay them out fastidiously without clumping or overlapping.
Set them in the oven and let them dry for at least 4 hours.
Pull them when they are papery and dehydrated but still retaining their color. If you take them too long or turn the heat up to rush them, you lose the beautiful burnt red color and get something more yellow-tinged, which is not what we’re after.
The little convection toaster downstairs is also good for the job.
When they are as dry as winter leaves, grind them in the spice mill, and save the powder.
Swiss chard stems, in all colors, trimmed more or less into 8" ribs—don’t be anal, but tidy them up a bit
kosher salt
raw fresh garlic, peeled and finely minced
extra virgin olive oil
Bring large pot of water to boil.
Season water with salt.
Stir garlic and oil together with salt.
Add the chard stems to the boiling water and blanch for a couple of minutes, until tender and al dente and the color has just started to turn from bright to drab.
Drain stems and spread out to cool and drain well.
Lay stems down on hot grill—don’t season or dress or slick them with oil. Just lay them down dry right onto the hot grill.
When nicely blistered and with some black char in spots, remove from the grill and drizzle amply with the garlic oil.
Hard to believe we need a recipe for this, but I have seen the bread crumbs made poorly here.
Also, because we use them for different things, we make them in different ways.
For pebbles:
Run the day-old, not powerfully dry leftover bread through the Robot Coupe with the blade attachment. Work in manageable batches—that container can only hold about 6 cups.
For actual crumbs:
Let all the leftover bread, sliced, dry out in even layer on sheet pans for at least 2 days.
Do not wrap drying bread or else we will just be throwing it away in a couple of days, covered in green mold.
When completely dry, feed through grater attachment in the Robot Coupe.
Make sure your receiving container is tall and wide to catch all of the wildly flying debris of bread crumb production.
This is a lot like a backyard wood chipper and makes as much dust.
Squint, hang a dish towel around the project, and make sure your receiving container is adequate. Otherwise you will be blowing bread crumbs all over the prep kitchen.
Store the crumbs in the freezer, labeled and dated properly.
For very fine crumbs:
Grind the already grated crumbs in the processor with the blade attachment after you have passed them through the grater attachment.
Label accordingly.
Do not toast the crumbs! All calls for bread crumbs in our recipes here ask for untoasted crumbs. And do not remove crusts. We want that color and texture and taste from crusts.
Keep a collection of all the cheese stubs in one place in the walk-in, please.
At any given service we always have Valdeón, Cambozola, aged and young Gouda, sharp Cheddar, Feta, Vacherin, Camembert, Garrotxa, Chihuahua, and Swiss between dinner, lunch, and brunch cheese use.
Remove hard rinds, paper, soft blooming rinds, any white or unintentional molds, cypress leaves, and give yourself clean, manageable chunks of cheese leftovers. If there is Vacherin, leave the skin behind and just get the interior.
Grind to smooth with raw burning garlic cloves, a small knob of sweet butter, and a few good splashes of dry vermouth; also, any leftover brunch Cava is good.
Season with white pepper, and taste for salinity before adding salt—it will depend on what cheeses you have used. We want smooth, delicious spreadable consistency.
Pack in the small jars with lids.
Make a condiment from all of the leafy watery herbs stems—parsley, cilantro, chervil—do not obviously use anything woody or branchy—no thyme, no rosemary—and cut the clean stems into small rings, add finely minced shallot, and a few drops of walnut or pistachio oil to keep the condiment from looking like lawn mower debris.
To plate:
Small jar fromage fort, small saltcellar herb stems condiment, 3 slices warm, toasted baguette.
leftover brunch Fruits Salads
Let the fruit salad sit a couple of days in the walk-in and get kind of “ripe,” and on the cusp of fermented. Not rotten—but “interesting,” or “mature.” Don’t know how else to say it.
Puree all the fruit salad in the Vita-Prep to ultrasmooth.
Per every 2 cups puree, add ¼ cup ginger syrup. Mix well. Chill well.
Churn in machine.
*Be sure to pre-chill machine before churning. Cold machine/cold product. Always.
To plate:
Several small, neatly formed scoops in glass tumbler
Pour over a little cold club soda to make a mini “float.”
Add exactly 1 drop of pure mint extract and exactly 1 drop of lime oil.
Set tumbler on coffee saucer.
Marrow bones, retrieved from dish pit during service.
Boil the empty bones until stark white and immaculate.
Set on sides at each place for knife rest or place card.
Set on end and fill with flowering thyme for place décor.
*ALTERNATE BOTH AT SAME TABLE SO IT DOESN’T LOOK SO RIGIDLY ANAL-RETENTIVE OR “CUTE-SY”.
Only for parties of 6 or more.
shrimp shells, tails, and heads from prep
onion skins, tops, trimmings from vegetable prep
celery tops, bottoms, and debris from vegetable prep
tomato paste
bottled clam broth
colatura
white wine
To make the stock:
Sweat the onion and celery scraps briefly in a pot with a short glug of olive oil.
Stir in the shrimp shells and tails and heads.
Add the tomato paste, stirring and mixing until warmed through.
Add clam juice, colatura, water, and white wine.
Allow to simmer as long as you’ve got time for.
Strain and reserve liquid; discard solids.
