What’s the best way to recover from running a massively successful beer dinner? Why, volunteer to help cook another one, of course!  Next year I’ll have to work on scheduling myself a little better so that it’s not back to back nights for my biggest events – but this year, it was full steam ahead.  After sleeping in a bit after my dinner, I was up and on Muni across town to the Toronado, so I could assist the Homebrew Chef in cooking and executing his menu for the Firestone Walker “Night of Ales.”

Being asked to help cook this menu presented a unique opportunity: I spend a lot of time criticizing professionally cooked food, and one of my main complaints is always “I could have done this at home.”  When I’m laying my hard earned cash down for a dinner, especially and event dinner like this, I want to be impressed.  So this gave me the chance to step onto the other side and into the kitchen, and put my money where my mouth is, grab a knife and head into the kitchen. The SF Beer Week audience also gave Sean the chance to show off his stuff, and start really stretching his “beer as an ingredient” approach in combination with ultra-modern molecular gastronomy techniques. It was learning opportunity, which I strove to take full advantage of.  

 

 

 

Since I wasn’t in the dining room, I can’t provide much perspective on how the dinner was as a customer – instead I’ll be looking at the cooking and plating process, taking stock of culinary leadership in the kitchen, looking back on how to manage a crisis, and examining all of the  details that go into a “Night of Ales.”  So pour yourself a glass of Double Barrel Ale, get comfy – this is going to be epic – and take a peek behind the curtain in the kitchen of The Homebrew Chef.

I arrived at the Toronado at noon, and found other members of my homebrew club  and a fellow beer blogger prepping the fresh ingredients for dinner.  Rob, Jeff, Tim and I set to work.  Some of these preparations were pretty interesting taken in this back room of a bar context.  Tim was cleaning already cooked duck tongues, and helpfully explained where they come from. (Like I said, this day would be educational.)

 

 

Meanwhile, supremes were cut from oranges and grapefruits, and placed into a homebrewer’s best friend, a cornie keg.  Cornelius kegs are great for homebrewers, since you easily get beer – or citrus – in and out of the keg easily through a large valve, and have separate ins and outs for beer and CO2. The supremes were then covered with Union Jack and put under pressure.  I’ve fallen madly in love with this preparation, and want to engage in pomelo-based experiments of my own.

 

 

 

 

Conveniently, this very first prep actions perfectly demonstrates the vision for the meal: creative and modern dishes that showcase beer as an ingredient.  To that end, Sean brought a few other new toys out to play for this dinner: a vacuum packer and immersion circulator for sous vide preparations, and a whole lot of liquid nitrogen. 

 

 

 

So with all of these great toys to play with, what did I do first?  I broke down a crate of celery root into sous vide-able slices (pictured above) and then cleaned and broke down leeks.  While I was hard at work dicing leeks, the power went out on Haight Street. 

See the blinking lights above?  They weren’t blinking anymore. We also couldn’t get into the Peacock’s minuscule kitchen yet (located across the street from the bar we were prepping in,) for logistical and organizational reasons that are still a complete mystery to me.  Even if we could get in, the kitchen has no natural light.  Thinking this would be a good time to take a lunch break, we headed outside to eat something while Sean started working on plan B. Many, many components of this dinner required electricity to cook, and given the restraints of the kitchen we would be serving out of, we had to have them coked ahead of time.  With only a few burners and even less counter space, this kitchen couldn’t even cook on course at a time from start to finish, much less cook and plate ahead of time.  That’s one of the keys to this sort cooking is that everything has to be as pre-cooked as possible. Without electricity - that is impossible.

To give you an idea of how big a problem this is, when we headed out to get lunch, nearly everywhere we went had posted hand written signs that they were closed until the power came back.  Reports were coming in that power was out all the way up until Upper Haight.  The Toronado ran down the street and got candles, and for a little while, was a romantically lit wine bar. 

 

 

 

How long would the power be out?  If it would just be a few minutes, we could pick up where we left off.  If it was an hour, a few alternative plans had to be made.  If it was out all night?  We could be really, really fucked. 

We kept prepping where we could, and started putting plan B into effect.  The Toronado helpfully pulled out a double propane burner, which we started to use.  After about an hour and a half – the power came back on.  The major crisis was over, but we were already behind, and weren’t even ready to start plating the first course.

 

 

 

As we finished up the prep, we starting moving into the main kitchen.  Jeff worked on cooking crackers for the cheese course in the ovens, and Sean gathered everyone around to assign point people for each course.  I was assigned the scallop course.  The point person was assigned as the sous chef for that particular course, to make sure all of the parts were getting cooked in time, and allow Sean to step into the dining room to present each course. This sort of delegation is essential in the kitchen.  One person can’t possibly do everything, and explaining everything on the fly as it was impossible. By assigning a person to each course, it helped prevent group decision paralysis if Sean not available cook it himself.  In regular kitchens, this process is broken up into stations where different chefs build dishes – but here it was essentially one large station to serve each course, one at a time.

Eli was assigned to the first course.  Since the power had been out, we had to ditch sous-viding the shrimp, and instead the shrimp were sautéed on the stove top in a giant paella pan. Sean’s cousin, Tommy, who cooks professionally at John Bentley’s Woodside, took care of that, and was a saving grace as the only other professional hand in the kitchen,  Once those were out, the beer-soaked beans went in. The salad was paired with Pale 31, an American style pale ale.  It’s bright, citrusy aroma made made for a great first course, and logistically, the salad was pretty easy to put together. Eli spearheaded it, and did a bang-up job of finishing the last bits of prep in a timely fashion, and getting it all together.  As we started plating it, major logistical challenged became clear: even with two extra tables, there wasn’t enough space to plate everything at the same time.  There was no where near enough space to do a assembly line like we wanted to – instead plates were assembled in waves. It was a bit rough at first, but steadily, we found our rhythm. The first course made it out, and work began on the cheese course. 

 

 

Warm Prawn Salad
Pale 31 marinated prawns mixed with baby arugula, slow-roasted roma tomatoes, hopped quail eggs, beer-soaked white beans and tossed in a citrus Pale 31 vinaigrette made with Stonehouse Olio Nuovo olive oil
Served with Pale 31 – American Style Pale Ale

One limitation of this story is that I can only comment with authority on the parts of the dishes I helped out on – there were many dishes I had little or nothing to do with, and other kitchen hands helped assemble.  Even more parts though, came in the door as put together as possible.  For example, the quail eggs on the dish above – to create these “hopped quail eggs,” Sean soaked the eggs for a week in a hop bath made up of amarillo, simcoe, cascade, and centennial hops – the same hop bill for Pale 31.  The porous nature of the egg shell allows the hop aroma to seep through to the raw eggs, which he then boiled and peeled before bringing them in. All we had to do when they arrived was cut them in half with a sharp knife, and plate.  These eggs are just one example, of one component, from one dish that had to be prepped this way.  This is business as usual in a regular restraunt, but an enormous workload for just one night.  I can’t provide a complete picture of the work that went into this dinner – only the parts I worked on.  To calculate the effort involved multiply, my workload by the dozen other hands in the kitchen, and then tag on more than a week of prep Sean did before any of us ever showed up.  And that doesn’t even begin to cover recipe formulation.  But anyways, back to the task as hand: cooking scallops.

While the crew had been getting salad together, I started to go after the different components of my dish.  One of the things I quickly realized was that I had a LOT of cooking to do.  There were three main components to my dish: the sauce, the celery root puree, and the scallops. The beer for the sauce had to be reduced and combined with the demi-glaze that Sean had already made – which required tapping the firkin of Double Barrel Ale. The celery root was raw from the power loss fiasco earlier, and was being finished in sous vide bags in boiling water… and in a pan with cream… and boiling in cream on the stove. Different stages of prep resulted in different parts, all of which had to get cooked one way or another.  We had celery root being cooked in every conceivable fashion. Once each method was done, I started to puree the celery root using a food mill. 

 

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This food mill was my nemesis.  After the celery root was finished cooking in a multitude of ways, I was to push it through this to create a smooth puree. Things did not go as planned.  After thirty minutes to frustration leading only to a quarter cup of cream and a sore arm, Tommy finally stepped in and upgraded me to an immersion blender – muuuuch better.  I blended in additional cream and braised fennel (Sean had brought that already completed) and turned my attention to helping plate the “Local Bits to Nosh On.”

 

 

 

Rob was the point person for this course and did a great job of helping make sure we had everything we needed on the plate, and ready to go. The real job of the point person it turns out, was to work with Sean on that dish to make sure the rest of the kitchen crew had everything they needed to execute the dish while Sean coordinated and charmed the front room full of diners.  His responsibilities demanded that he be in both places at once.  Since we couldn’t really send a substitute out front, he flowed information though his point person for each plating.  Rob plated his demo, Sean signed off on it, and we went to work.  Here’s some extra Point Reyes Reserve Blue Cheese porn:

 

 

 

 

Each plate a lot of components – three cheeses, three crackers, malt honey, cashews, two slices of orange, and a slice of grapefruit.  That’s a lot of parts to keep track of, and the cheeses and sauce were slow and clumsy to plate.  With everyone plating at once (since we had to do waves, and couldn’t do a Ford factory assembly line,) I think we only had a single plate go out without the complete set – not bad for a bunch of bloggers and homebrewers.  

 

 

 

I particularly liked the beer-carbonated citrus, which we helped make at the start of the day.  It both brightened the plate with the hit of citric acid, and the plate with it’s bright colors – it literally popped thanks to carbonation.

 

Local Bits to Nosh On
Point Reyes Reserve Blue | Rouge et Noir Yellow Buck Camembert | Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk
Carbonated grapefruit and Cara Cara orange segments marinated in Union Jack, malt and hop spiced cashew seeds, Union Jack wort honey, homemade malt crackers
Served with Union Jack IPA – India Pale Ale

Then it was off the races with my course, the scallops.  I thinned the puree with the remaining cream, but Sean rejected it as still too thick.  We were out of cream – he loosed it further with Double Barrel Ale, and it was done.  Beer wasn’t only an ingredient, it was a tool to fix the consistency of a wide variety of sauces, and since it was already in everything, it’s flavor profile was a guaranteed match. As each course went out, inevitably a pitcher of the beer came back to the kitchen for any last minute additions.  If it wasn’t used for that, there were thirty cooks. Eli, who really was the other experienced toque in the kitchen, reminded me of the importance of staying hydrated.

 

 

 

Tommy had smoked the scallops at the beginning of day using wood from Firestone’s own Union Barrel brewing system, and now seared them off in the all-purpose, can cook anything paella pan.  It was large enough to use two burners, and could cook half the scallops at a time. Meanwhile, I bottled the demi-glaze (Sean tasted, and approved –  yay validation!) and we got started. Only there was a problem. 

 

 

 

We had to plate 84 palates, and had about about 130 scallops, but not enough to give two per plate.  Scallops are bought in bulk according to the average weight, so you really don’t know how many are in there till you open them up and count – the key is to have more than you need, as you’ll loose a few during cooking and plating to breakage. If we only did one scallop per plate, we’d have forty leftover scallops.  Serving a scallop and a half would look shoddy on the plate, and who really wants half a scallop anyway?  We needed to use what we had, but still make it work visually – after all you eat with your eyes before your mouth.

The solution was cut in scallop in half lengthwise, then plate one and half scallops, all sear side up.  Luckily for us these were gargantuan scallops, and showing off Tommy’s great sear worked out visually.  The three pieces of scallop fanned out created a great sense of opulence, which is what an indulgent ingredient like a scallop should evoke.  When we finished, there was a scallop and half left unplated. It was really, really close. We added a small pinch of microgreens, and sent it out. 

Amazingly, looking back, I had everything go wrong on this course - electoral failures, medieval food mill machinations, and an uneven number of scallops.  But none of these crisis were reflected on the plate, and large part thanks the Sean’s leadership.  Throughout the night, he really did a great job of keep us updated on the dining room, which largely consisted of “Great Job!” and “They’re loving it out there.”  The demeanor of the kitchen was a pleasant blend of positive reinforcement and gallows humor.  Not a bad place to be for 12 hours. Also, this is about where the beer started to make it’s way back into the kitchen, which really helped. 

 

 
Union Barrel Smoked Sea Scallops
Cold smoked jumbo sea scallops, seared and served on a roasted fennel-celery root purée with a DBA demi-glaze
Double Barrel Ale – English Style Pale Ale 100% Unfiltered, barrel-fermented & served from the cask

 

Next we plated my favorite dish of the evening.  Sean had treated duck breasts with pastrami spices, including some nitrates which gave it that classic corned beef color.  The whole plate was topped with a sauce made with the duck tongues. The small, repeated piles created a modern “deconstructed” look that serviced the dish well thematically – and made it work for the large slices of duck breast, which didn’t need to be thin sliced like real pastrami – they were unbelievably tender. 

 

    

 

As the last few plates were assembled, it looked like we were going to run out of bread.  Rob ran across the street, but we had exactly enough bread on-hand.  He got back just as the last plate went out the door. The result, predictably, was bread based violence. 

 

Duck “Pastrami”
Beer and spice brined Petaluma duck breast cooked sous vide with Double DBA spiked cole slaw, 2000 Island gastrique and artisanal rye crostini
Served with Double DBA – English Style Barley Wine (First Public Release)

This was the hands down, no contest, knock out winner of the evening for me, especially with the barleywine.

 

 

I consider myself something of a corned beef expert, based largely on my experience working as a busboy in an old Jewish deli called Benji’s in Milwaukee when I was fifteen. This dish not only evoked pastrami flavor-wise, but also visually.  Sean really nailed the playfulness of the best molecular gastronomy, by creating something that at least for me, evokes a chuckle  before I even take a bite. Compare it against a real corned beef sandwich (pastrami is corned beef, plus spices): 

 

    

 

Time for a break in the kitchen.  Sean headed out to make table side Russian River sorbet (there had been some sort of issue at the last minute supply with the ‘Lil Opal) and the kitchen got a five minute breather before the next course. 

 

 

 

The sorbet was made by whipping liquid nitrogen into the beer and  - boom – sorbet. 

 

 

 

By time we were pushing out the last savory course, the kitchen had hit it’s stride and there were a lot more hands to help out, since most of the food had already been served.    This final component was much more rustic and comforting, especially after the wow factor of the sorbet.  This also meant a lot less components on the plate, and a simpler plating. All of these things meant extra time for me to take pictures, as an extra set of hands wasn’t really needed, and would even be in the way.

 

  

   

  

Reserve Braised Veal Cheeks
Robust Porter braised veal cheeks with baby fennel, organic maroon carrots, leeks, thyme and bay leaves, served over a wort polenta
Walker’s Reserve – Robust Porter

 

I then received the dubious honor of assembling the three vegetarian substitutes. Actually, they were really good : Sean swapped out the veal of sweet potato, sous-vide with butter and thyme.  No craft brew enthusiast left behind!

 

   

 

In the previous course he had replaced the duck with roasted beets, and the tongue sauce with extra high grade virgin olive oil, all of which Eli plated.  For those of you keeping track at home, this actually brings the total number of courses that were dishes to eleven if you count the beer soaked faux-caviar tapioca her served when people arrived alongside Barrel Wood Smoked Tomato Popcorn. 

Finally dessert was here, and along with it, the last issue rippling from the power outage earlier in the day: the ice cream wasn’t hard set, since it couldn’t be frozen after it was churned, because we couldn’t churn till the power came back.  No problem!  Just whip in some liquid nitrogen you happen to have lying around. 

 

 

 

 

Dessert Tasting
Velvet Merkin chocolate cake with Saucerful of Secrets infused ice cream & chocolate truffles filled with Firestone XII caramel
Served with Saucerful of Secrets – Belgian Strong Ale, Velvet Merkin – Oatmeal Stout, XII – American Strong Ale

 

Yes, that’s right a trio of pairings – how else do you imagine you can knock out the high alcohol end of Firestone Walker’s lineup? As one would expect, these were very small, responsible pours.   The truffles were especially great as well.  Those came in, ready to go, since Sean had made them earlier in the week with Pete Slosberg of Pete’s Wicked Ale. There were two different kinds, both of which were made with Firestone Walker XII, a big, dark, pours like motor oil blended beer: XII caramel in a dark chocolate shell with a XII rehydrate dried cherry and the XII beer brittle mixed with milk chocolate truffle.  From the description, I thought I’d like the cherry ones, but the texture of the brittle really won me over. 

Suddenly, we were done. The kitchen staff milled around, picked at the leftovers, and even found the missing bag of duck skin cracklings that were to be a last minute addition, and weren’t even listed as a garnish for the duck dish. It’s a real shame too, because these things are awesome. I especially like that duck can impersonate not only beef, but pork. 

 

 

 

What you do with leftover duck cracklings is really up you though. Me, I think they might be the greatest snack to go with a beer and being forced to watch enjoying a football game on TV.  Or I suppose you could eat them with dessert.

 

 

 

 

We set about cleaning up the kitchen – outside, everyone seemed to love it.  I went and said “hi” to a few friendly faces, and particularly liked it when someone said “Jesse! I didn’t know you were here! Where are you sitting?” Sitting? Ha!

The tables – which I really hadn’t seen until now – looked great, and you’d have no idea what a dingy bar the Peacock really is.  White table cloths, and giant candle holders, fashioned from Union Barrels completed the look of the evening, and visually reinforced the barrel motif of the brewery.  We got a lot of use out of those barrels – using them to brew the beer, set the tables, and provide smoke for the popcorn and scallops. 

 

 

 

Crisis after crisis came up in the kitchen, yet none of it translated onto the plate.  Instead, which arrived on the white table clothes was a great representation of Sean’s culinary vision, intellectually dissected in food form.  His central theme of beer as an ingredient really shone, and his platform for it – modern American (or Spanish, depending on how you look at it) execution delivered it winningly, with a subtle over-intellectualized wink.  His management style – delegation, positive reinforcement, and hands on teaching – kept our ragtag amateur crew inline and on task in a strange, cramped kitchen, even with a dozen beers flowing outside. It was barely-controlled chaos, but that chaos stopped at the pass when the waitresses took the food out to the tables, 84 plates at time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: Firestone Walker, homebrew chef, SF Beer Week, toronado

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 8:01 am and is filed under Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.