Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where the course of true grub never did run smooth. I’m your Lysander of Lasagna, Jon O’Guin, and today’s recipes are…unusual. Not fully of one thing or the other. But if you have no time for taxing taxonomies, you can check the recipes with this link, while the rest of us push onward to see how things go wrong while pushing boundaries.

Jean, Georges, Ringeau, and…I Guess Paul’s the same.

So, couple weeks back we were talking about Jean Georges briefly while memorializing my father weirdly. And the weird thing about Jean Georges is that I’ve never been to any of his restaurants…but of all the great chefs of our era, he’s been one that’s crept around the edges of my conscious. Like I mentioned back then, in the distant time of “earlier this month”, Jean Georges has a lot of recipes that I’ve considered making, and just never gotten around to doing. Much like watching the rest of Arrow, or The Flash: I’d like to, but I just haven’t done it yet.

I still don’t know much about Savitar!
And that was YEARS ago.
(in my defense: I’m not the one who decided to cross-over 4 shows, driving people like me to want to be fully caught up on ALL the storylines, so I have to watch 2 seasons of Supergirl and 2 seasons of Legends of Tomorrow to continue the Flash)

And his cookbook has proven…strangely alluring to me. There’s something about the way it relates advanced culinary techniques with relatively simple presentations and ingredient lists. It feels…endlessly relevant, but never like, quite what I’m looking for.

• A couple years ago, I made a Fruit Terrine. While working on that dish, I considered also making a savory terrine, because this cookbook has a recipe for Leek Terrine that only has like, 3 ingredients. (Leeks apparently have a lot of natural gelatin, so you can boil them, and press them overnight, and they’ll form their own terrine.) I didn’t do it, because the set up was just a TOUCH too complicated (you have to fill a loaf pan with the leeks, then flip it over, on top of ramekins on top of a baking sheet, because you need the excess liquid to drain out as the terrine presses itself.) but I considered it.

• Last Friday, we made Garlic confit, a simple combination of garlic and oil. This cookbook has a recipe for Apple Confit, which is just Apples, Sugar (FRUIT confits, unlike meat and vegetable ones, use a sugar syrup as their preserving agent: while a little sugar feeds bacteria, a LOT of it kills it) and Orange Zest.  

So on and so forth: his cooking is unusual enough to be interesting, simple enough to feel doable, but…it just doesn’t ‘click’ most of the time. When I review cookbooks, I talk about what I call the “catapult” effect: the desire that cookbook instills in me to go MAKE that recipe. Jean-Georges has something else. It’s like a…kudzu effect: everywhere I go, It’s got a tendril there.

If you don’t know of it, Kudzu is a VERY fast growing vine that can strangle out other plants.

And that’s very interesting to me, as someone who, at this point, has read SEVERAL cookbooks from very famous and technically competent chefs. I talk a lot about David Chang and his Momofuku cookbook, but there’s a level of mastery and ingredient unfamiliarity that even I struggle with when considering making stuff from that book. I also have the cookbook from Alinea, one of the America’s top restaurants (like, a year or two ago), in Chicago, and THAT cookbook is basically just coffee-table art:

Look at my crystal pillow of edible…something.

Since it’s unlikely you can guess what that is just by look, (and I couldn’t fit the text explaining it legibly in the shot) that is a square of “bacon powder” contained in “pineapple glass”. And sure, the cookbook makes a very clear and relatively easy sounding explanation how to make both of those things: You make bacon powder by rendering 6 ounces of bacon, and mixing the fat with maltodextrin…a powder that will, for chemical reasons I do NOT have the training to really unpack, basically turn any fat you mix it with into a powder that will dissolve back into liquid in your mouth. It’s not hard to get, though it is pricey: a pound is $17 on Amazon. And the pineapple glass is made by boiling together pineapple juice, sugar, saffron (which I’m pretty sure is mostly for color, and could be skipped to save money), adding some food starch, and blending thoroughly before allowing to cool in a thin layer on acetate/silicone, producing a kind of thin, translucent, and pliable sheet. Like I said: it’s explained very calmly and precisely…but it also needs 2 products I am unfamiliar with, that both cost like, $1 per ounce. It’s really cool, and I’d like to do it at some point, but it’s definitely not something you can just ask the average home cook to make.

But there’s something much more approachable about Jean-Georges’ recipes. You want some fancy “Orange Dust”? Cool, it’s just slightly sweetened orange peel, baked dry in an oven and pulverized. You want to try his “Tomato tower?” It’s just a thinly sliced tomato with basil leaves between the slices, and a drizzle of basil oil, which you make by “pureeing some blanched basil in oil”. It’s presented in a much more approachable method.

Anyway, because of that, I finally made two recipes that I’d been considering making for a long time from the cookbook. Let’s talk about the first one, which will take the most time, first.

Bring the Beet Back

So, I’ve actually been thinking about making this one for years: Beet Tartare.In fact, it was backing out of Beet Tartare that drove me to make my first Jean Georges recipe, Beet and Ginger Salad. If you’re unaware “Tartare” is a preparation normally used for Beef, and is…well, it has an amazing history: You might have noticed that Tartare looks like Tartar, the sauce commonly used (in America at least) with fried fish products. Congratulations, that’s ACTUALLY where the name comes from! Because Beef tartare has a 3 part confusion over who came up with it, AND it’s connected to Tartar sauce, and, wait for it…the Mongols.

Bit of a weird cross-over joke, but the Green brothers are always welcome guests.

So, what happened? Real basic breakdown because I spent so much time on the first bit: The Mongols invaded Europe. Some dishes associated got called “Tartar” dishes. Why? Because the Mongols were allied with the Tatars (note the ONE R), which in turn got confused/linguistically connected with “Tartarus”. (Which makes sense, if you were calling the foreign invaders “devils”, you’d make their name closer to a Hell equivalent. Like how crazy right-wing posts call Democrats “Demon-Rats”, and similarly crazy left-wing ones call Republicans “Repub-lie-cans”: real basic propaganda stuff: put mean word in name to make person bad”)

So, apparently, these guys ate a lot of stuff with like, raw minced meat, as well as capers, pickles, dill, etc. Which makes sense: a lot of outstanding Tatars are in the southwestern Russian region (the Crimea, the Volga, etc.) and I know those flavors are popular there. That’s where Tartar sauce comes from: it’s basically capers, dill relish, and mayonnaise.

The mysteries of tartar sauce have long interested my family. ESPECIALLY the Hama Hama Tartar Sauce they sever at Finnriver, which we’re told is made by them.

The minced meat thing actually catches on in what’s now Germany, creating what’s called the Hamburg steak: a patty of minced meat, sometimes bound with an egg, often served with bread-crumb or onion, and often, but not ALWAYS, cooked. Sometimes, it’s served raw, sometimes it’s smoked, sometimes they just sear the outside and leave the middle raw, whatever. You might recognize the dish as the reason Hamburgers exist: Hamburgers are just “Hamburg Steak Sandwiches”. The steak was brought from Germany to America, and then back to france, where a raw minced beef patty was called “steack à l'Americaine “. OR, you could serve that with a side of Tartar sauce, and it became “Steack à la tartare”. Over time, people forgot that the name was referencing the sauce/chefs started mixing the minced meat with the tartar sauce, and the dish became just “Steack tartare”. So that’s what Beef/Steak Tartare is: minced raw beef tossed with, basically, tartar sauce.

The name has since spread so you can get various “red meat tartars”. But this recipe was created to A: make a vegetarian version of the same idea, playing with the similar raw red color of (and similar name of) Beets in comparison to Beef.

And as complicated as that explanation was, let me assure you: This recipe is MUCH simpler. Like the Parmesan Coin recipe, this is a heavily front-loaded recipe in terms of time, and, kind of, complexity. Your first step is to roast 1.25 pounds of beets for 90 minutes. This step will take up…basically 85-90% of the total cooking time. Just wash the outside of the beets, leave them wet, wrap them in tinfoil, and pop in a 350 degree oven for an hour and a half.

They come out very dark and soft.

Once the beets are roasted, peel the skins off of them, and chunk them down. I cut mine into quarters. I also stopped making the dish at this point, since I had started the roasting in the evening, and we’d already eaten dinner by the time the beets were cooked, so I just popped them in the fridge overnight. Doing the roasting step before hand makes this a super quick recipe to put together later, as the next step is to roughly chop a shallot, and some cornichons. Cornichons are fancy small pickles: if you can’t find them, just use like, dill gherkins. Cornichons are more vinegary/sour than that, but it’s a close enough match.

They LOOK exactly like other pickles, so I don’t know what I hoped to convey with this shot.

I THEN couldn’t find our capers for a while, only locating our green peppercorns, which have a VERY different flavor, but I ALMOST used them mixed with some chopped green olives, before my mother suggested a pantry shelf I could check for the real thing. And the capers WERE there, so I tossed out the minced olives, and moved on.

The next step is to put the beets, capers, shallot, cornichons, a bit of vinegar, a spoon of Worcestershire,  and a bit of hot sauce, all into a food processor, and pulse it a couple times. The instructions are “until minced, but not pureed”, which…turns out is an easy step to go past. I wanted just SLIGHTLY smaller chunks of cornichon, so I pulsed 4 more times, and I got THIS.

Functionally a bloody paste.

It’s not a huge problem, it just means there’s less textural variety in the bites, which makes this more of a dip than like, a true tartare. (I kind of wonder if like, a fast- and furious rough chop of everything on the same cutting board wouldn’t guarantee the mixture’s texture better…but I guess then it’d be less approachable. And also, there’d be a LOT of potential beet juice flying around, which is a stain nightmare.

Mix the result with some mayonnaise and parsley, season to taste with salt, pepper, hot sauce or vinegar, and serve at room temp.

Weirdly, this looks a lot like the cranberry salsa my family makes for Christmas.

And it’s…fine? I’ve never actually had steak tartare, as there’s just never been an overlap of “being in a place I trust to serve good Tartare”, and “Wanting to try it”, so I don’t actually know what I’m aiming for in flavor profile This tastes…mostly like beets, with some vinegar/salty notes. Maybe it could use some more salt to really make everything pop (undersalting food is a common mistake in most home kitchens) but  It’s perfectly fine, as long as you’re okay with the flavor of roasted beets, which I am. OH, I almost forgot: while this version of the recipe isn’t vegan, that’s only because of the Worcestershire sauce and the mayonnaise, so if you wanted this dish to be vegan, it is very easy to pull that off. They make vegan Worcestershire, as well as like, Coconut Aminos, and vegan mayos. Real simple change to a simple recipe.

But, because the recipe was so simple, I wanted to try ANOTHER simple recipe at the same time: Cumin Crisps!

Cumin and Jam, and Welcome to the Slam

When we made the Parmesan coins last week, I noted that I understood it as a cracker essentially by process of elimination: it didn’t have the thin crackliness I expected of a ‘cracker’. As such, I was motivated to get something much more cracker-like, figuring it would be a good transmission method for the beet tartare.

This recipe is, as I’ve alluded to, also pretty easy to make, consisting of very accessible ingredients. The Crisps are made with flour, sugar, white vinegar, cumin seed, melted butter, and water. You whisk together flour and sugar, and add 6 tablespoons (3/8th of a cup) to the bowl. Now, the instructions here note that the mixture will be “quite thick”, which I felt was an understatement.

The verticality isn’t as clear as I thought it would be, so to clarify: that whisk is like, 8” above the bowl. It’s all just wedged into the whisk.

After you untangle all the batter from inside your whisk, you add 2 tablespoons of melted butter, and 1 tablespoon of cumin seeds. Mixing that in will get a pretty wet dough. Then, add, according to the recipe, at LEAST ½ cup of water, to make a thin batter. Mine didn’t even stick to the whisk anymore, by the time I was done.

Before you get pedantic, and point out there is CLEARLY still batter on that whisk…Look, it was late, and “it ran too fast to get a good picture of” is an unwieldy descriptor.

Let that sit for 10 minutes, for the gluten and everything to work itself out, and then you’re going to…”brush the batter directly onto a non-stick pan”? That…doesn’t feel like it will work. Bake at 450 degrees for 5 minutes…yeah, just straight on the pan. Ok, let’s give it a shot!

This was…roughly what I thought was going to happen.

Yeah, that didn’t work. Maybe our pans are too battered…or maybe this specific pan isn’t actually non-stick, but that’s pretty easy to fix. You could do some parchment paper, or maybe grease the pan, but what we did was use a silpat!

A word I really screwed up in the filename.
Also, if you’re wondering where this nice wood grain came from, the answer is “these are cabinets”. I didn’t take a picture BEFORE cooking, so I had to hammer out a quick one by just holding the silpat up.

A silpat is a silicone insert that creates a non-stick surface on baking sheets. They’re often used in making frico, or other high-heat oven projects. And while the first batch we made were pretty wobbly, the rest of the batches turned out pretty okay. There was a definite learning curve on how much batter to leave in a spot: too little, and it’ll fully brown  and even char a little before things are done. Too much, and it won’t get crisp in time, and stay a little rubbery.

Technically, the instructions imply that you don’t need to leave space between the brushes, as I did, and invite you to brush “any shape you like”. So of course, after I had several successful batches:

As successful as I could get them, at least.

I had to finish up with a choice befitting a 31 year-old, college-educated man of letters such as myself.

“Some of you may burn, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make”
”what a dick”

And the consensus of the crisps was that they were…fine. The book says they will taste like ‘nothing you’ve ever had before’, which Nate disagreed with, because the only thing he could taste was the cumin. But…yeah, I can’t say I’ve had a sweet-vinegar-and-cumin flavored cracker before. I don’t know that I’m entirely FOR the experience, but it’s definitely new.

The two recipes actually DO work well together, which, if you know flavors, is kind of a ‘no duh’ situation.  “Oh, really, Jon? You roasted Earthy beets, which makes them sweeter, and mixed it with a bunch of salt and vinegar, and that pairs well with the chips made out of sweetened vinegar with an earthy spice? WHO COULD HAVE GUESSED?”

I can’t unequivocably say I support either recipe. While they’re both fairly easy, the results are kind of weird. Certainly unique, and something that, if you presented them at a fancy dinner party, would probably get a fair bit of a boost from the social weight of “this Is fancy food”, but they didn’t really work on their own as an afternoon snack during social isolation. I’d definitely say you don’t lose much by trying them, and I’m more ready to endorse the beet tartare over the crisps, but I can also say “if the recipes don’t SOUND interesting to you, you probably won’t like them” with a fair degree of certainty.

FRIDAY: MAYBE I’LL FULLY REVIEW THIS COOKBOOK, OR TALK ABOUT FANCY DINING MORE. MAYBE I’LL WATCH A SHOW OVER THE NEXT TWO DAYS, I DON’T KNOW.

MONDAY: DEFINITELY SOMETHING WITH MEAT. MAYBE CHICKEN CROQUETTES, MAYBE SOME ASIAN PORK DISHES. I JUST BOUGHT THE MEAT ON LIKE, FRIDAY, SO I GOTTA USE IT SOON.

Recipes

Beet Tartare

Makes 4 servings (which is a LOT of beet)

Ingredients

1.25 pounds beets (about 6 medium, or 2 large)

1 shallot, roughly chopped

6 cornichons (or gherkins), roughly chopped

1/3 cup capers, drained

1 tsp Worcestershire sauce (or vegan alternative)

1 tsp sherry vinegar

A few drops of vinegar based hot-sauce, such as Tabasco, Cristal, Cholula, etc.

1 tbsp mayonnaise

2 tbsp chopped parsley

Salt and pepper

Preparation

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees, and bake your beets: wash them, and wrap the still wet beets in aluminum foil (if working with larger beets, cut into smaller portions.) Place on a baking sheet, and cook for 90 minutes, or until a paring knife stabbed through the foil meets no resistance in the beet.

2. Let cool, peel, and place in a food processor with shallot, cornichon, capers, Worcestershire, vinegar, and hot sauce. Pulse several times until minced, but not pureed.

3. Mix with mayonnaise and chopped parsley, season with salt, pepper, and additional hot sauce/vinegar. Serve at room temp, topped with additional parsley if desired.

Cumin crisps

Makes “about 30” crisps (which actually suggests mine were maybe too thin)

Ingredients

1 cup flour

2 tbsps granulated white sugar

3/8th cup (6 tbsps) white vinegar

2 tbsp melted butter

1 tbsp cumin seed

Water

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Whisk together flour and sugar, and then whisk in white vinegar until fully incorporated. (it will be very thick) Then whisk in melted butter and cumin seeds, then add additional water to thin batter.

2. Brush batter onto prepared non-stick surface in a baking sheet, and bake for around 5 minutes, until fully dry and edges are browned. Remove from the oven, let cool, and move to another plate or surface. Serve immediately.