The Prep Ahead Dinner Party: Sides: Braised Lettuce and Pommes Puree

Getting on with the dinner party. I called this one Prep Ahead, because unlike pretty much every other Heston dinner, I didn't spend the entire day cooking up a frenzy. 

Seriously. I even took my daughter to her sport game in the morning. It certainly was a change of pace!

We had: (Heston dishes marked with a *)

• Prawn cocktails*, with from scratch Mayonnaise* and Soy-marinated roe*
• Braised pork belly with cracking*, pommes puree* (mk2), braised lettuce* and steamed carrots.
• Coffee creme brulee*

I'll talk about the sides today, and then we can get into the... ahem... meat of the dinner in the next blog post.

Braised Lettuce 

Heston Blumenthal at Home

As discussion on the netball sidelines that morning indicated, not everyone has heard of buttered lettuce. It's a French dish, but I've had a few times in nice restaurants, including at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London. They added peas.

I think it's delicious. I consider it like the best kind of buttered cabbage, but without weird cabbage smell and a much more delicate flavour. Since trying it in London, I've been keen to try Heston's recipe from Heston Blumenthal at Home.

Process:

1. Prepare your lettuce
2. Blanch your lettuce
3. Make some brown butter
4. Make the buttery emulsion
5. Heat the lettuce in the emulsion when ready to serve.

Pretty straightforward huh? Even better, you can do steps one and two ahead of time (before your guests arrive) and then just need to heat it up to serve.

Prepare the lettuce:

The recipe calls for Romanie lettuces, which I'd never heard of. Thankfully, so google-fu tells me that they are what we call cos lettuce - which is terribly easy to get. I got two small but bushy numbers. These get quartered.

 And washed and drained.

Put aside an iced water basin put to one side to stop them losing their colour.

Blanch them

In slightly salty water.

 Then into the iced water to keep their color.

 You can then trim the stems off and put the aside to heat up later.

Make the brown butter

We've done this before... old hat now, right?

Melt some unsalted butter.

 Whisk it...

 Until the butter solids turn brown and it smells kind of like toasted nuts.

 Then filter it through a coffee filter to get out the dark solids, leaving nice clear butter.

 Make the emulsion

I was kind of... sceptical about this. you are basically putting some of the butter into some water and blitzing it with a stab/hand blender until it emulsifies (becomes a single liquid, not two separate ones).

Then, you keep adding butter... until.. ta da! frothy buttery-flavoured water! That was surprisingly easy. Also, made ahead of time, and then just re-blitzed just in case before serving.

Warm up to serve

Okay, so I was kind of busy, but you just heat up the butter emulsion in a fry pan, and then warm through the lettuces. This take about 1 minute, or the amount of time it takes you to serve up the pork. (Actual cooking times may vary.) 

I recommend serving into a covered dish as this keeps it from going cold and you can keep it on the table, letting people serve themselves.

Pommes Puree (Mark 2)

I blogged about this dish once before, when doing the mammoth Fish Pie with Sand and Sea Foam Topping. These were better the second time around, learning from past mistakes.

Unfortunately, this time I forgot to take pictures when doing the spuds, so you'll have to sue your imagination, or the pictures from last time. 

Peel and dice your spuds. Cook them at 72 degrees for half an hour. Then rinse them, like so.

 

Then boil them in a fresh pan of salted water until they are falling apart. (Very, very soft but not disintegrated.) Carefully drain the falling apart potatoes, the put them back in the hot pan to dry out.

Side-note from last time: I had previously misread the recipe, thinking you stopped here if you wanted them later. This is incorrect. On a more careful reading, I realised that you do everything up to the adding of the milk.

So next, you put the soft, but drier, potatoes through a ricer (one of those potato masher/press things) onto a large hunk of butter, and mix it through.

You are them supposed to put it through a sieve to make it extra creamy. I am lazy and did not do this.

Now if you want you can can put it aside to use later.  

When ready to serve, you mix through the warm milk (which heats the whole thing up again, and makes it ready to serve!)

Lessons learned & verdict: 

Pommes puree

• I'm glad I figured out what went wrong with the lumpy pommes puree last time. This time they worked very well, and reheated easily with the hot milk. They would be even better if you bothered to put them through a sieve, like you were supposed to. I'll do that next time.

Buttered lettuce

• The buttered lettuce was very easy, could be done well before it was needed and a delicious alternative green veg. (Not every one like peas or broccoli). It went very well with the braised pork belly too.
• The one I had at Dinner was even more buttery. I'm undecided if this was because they finish theirs with more butter, or if they had a more buttery ratio to the water used. I'd consider upping the butter to water ratio next time.
• I would  absolutely make this again.

Guest opinions:

Guest enjoyed the lettuce and the mash, with what I took to be pleasant surprise at the flavour and texture of the buttered lettuce. To be fair.. opinions on this were pretty much swamped by the satisfaction of the pork belly.

Next time: Onto the meat! Braised pork belly with crackling

The day I went to a late lunch at Dinner

subtitle: Isn't that the most confusing sentence to get your head around.

Warning: Gratuitous self-serving write up of "what I did on my holidays" coming in. With a reasonable degree of child-like squealing with glee, on the inside. Mostly. There is no recipe being cooked by me here. Feel free to click one of my other posts in the sidebar where I do normally do the cooking myself.

This post was going to have a different title, one that I had wittily already labelled as.."I want to Cook" eats with "In Search Of" at Dinner. But, sadly due to forces beyond our control, it was not to be.

I, travelling to the other-side of the world (no hyperbole there, either) was going to meet, in person, my fellow Heston-blogger in crime - Phil, from In Search Of Heston. (Go read his blog, he's funny and awesome and posts more than me. Truly, I wish I was able to be as prolific. Serious props to him. But then come back, ok?) And we were going to eat at the best of London options - Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, at the Mandarin Oriental. Menus can be viewed here.

After some finagling and trip-extending, we had a booking, and a day we could both make it. But the fickle gods of machines intervened, thus preventing Phil from making it. (Damn them to fiery hells!)

Regardless of my deep and bitter disappointment at making it to the other side of the globe and missing meeting him ... I went to lunch. With another dear friend who is also London-based. Hurrah, no solo lunch at least!

It was a nice Sunday - sunny and pleasant. (In London, who knew?)

I may have been a little excited. *cough* Or you, know beside myself with joy and excitement and what-have-you.

Unbeknownst to me, my favourite blogger Phil, had put in a good word for me at Dinner. (He was my favourite before, now I think he's a solid legend.). Thus began the most fun meal I've ever had.

It started with a personal, pleasant and warm welcome by the maitre d'. Who then sat myself and dining companion... let's call him.. Um... Giorgio (Forgive me, I went to Italy too) ... at the best table in the restaurant - right in front of the windows overlooking the kitchen and next to the roasting pineapple. Very exciting.

 

First, pre-dinner drinks. Since I can't drink wine any more (skip tedious story), I have discovered I can drink cocktails. So... rose martini for me! It was ridiculously tall. I've never seen such a long stemmed glass. And tasty. Like Turkish delight, but not sweet. Yum.

Then, our first course, to share. Meat fruit. (Let's face it, it was a required thing, right?)

 

Mandarin, chicken liver & foie gras parfait, grilled bread. It was almost mousse-like with a beautiful flavour, and a nice hit of citrus for contrast from the outer gel layer. (So delicious!) They even gave us more bread.

Next, entrée: I had the Frumenty (c.1390) Grilled octopus, smoked sea broth, pickled dulse & lovage. This was, hands down, the most tender, delicious octopus I have ever eaten. It was so tender I could have pushed it apart with a butter knife. The smoked broth and barley was so good, I didn't want to drink anything afterwards because I didn't want to spoil the lovely smoky flavour it left behind in your mouth.

Giorgio had the Earl Grey Tea cured Salmon (c.1730) Lemon salad, gentleman’s relish, wood sorrel & smoked roe.  I had a little taste of this, Giorgio was kind enough to share. This was a very delicate contrast to my smoky one - light, soft and delicate flavours vying for attention.

Mains. Both of us picked the same mains. Spiced Pigeon (c.1780) Ale & artichokes. This was a no-brainer, since pigeon is my favourite meat. It was SO good. Really, really good. Probably the best meat I've ever had, and definitely the best I've had that I can recall. Um. I should say a bunch of more erudite sounding things here, but pretty much my thought process during this was "Oh. Yum. This. is. so. good." (Repeat).

We got some sides with it, caraway carrots and lettuce and peas (cooked in butter, just in case you forgot you were in a Heston restaurant). These went with the pigeon beautifully. 

 

Really, the wait staff (who were all exceeedingly nice) must have been rather bemused at all the excitement and enthusiasm going on at our table.

Okay, now for my favourite! DESSERT. (Insert the joyful glee of the sweet tooth).

I went for the Tipsy Cake (c.1810) Spit roast pineapple (well, obviously...)
This dish, for the unfamiliar (hi family!) is sort of a signature of the restaurant.

Maybe because of these, which sit, roasting and looking gorgeous in the kitchen, on display from the restaurant.

Inside it is like this. Boozy custard meets light cake/brioche stuff. Best British pudding ever. The pineapple was sweet and sticky and tangy and my only complaint is I wanted more of it.

Giorgio had the Sambocade (c.1390) Goats milk cheesecake, elderflower & apple, perry poached pear and smoked candied walnuts. Which was a goats milk cheesecake masquerading as fresh goats cheese in vegetation. I was allowed one small taste. This was the point where Giorgio admitted freely that he didn't want to share. Even for a little taste. He did eventually relent, which I greatly appreciate, but it does suggest how highly it was regarded. This was light, delicate and delicious in way that made every other cheesecake you've ever had seem totally amateurish.  I would give more description, but I was too distracted by my raptures at my tipsy cake.

You thought we were done, right! Ha! No way...

Then we had this flavoured chocolate ganache (we were trying to decide what it was flavoured with - I think rose? We really weren't sure.) And a caraway biscuit. I can't tell you how happy I was - the ones I made at home were very close, though not quite as brown/crisp. This made me all kinds of happy. And they wrote me a message! (Yay me!)
But then ... we were told there was another course coming, courtesy of the chef!!

 

Here he is! Our lovely waiter, whose name I neglected to note down. (Sorry! I blame too much travel for a non-traveller). What's that he's doing? Oh, he's making us nitrogen ice cream.

If only you could see... oh wait.. here you are ! (I do apologise for the fan-girl excitement, and the talking-really-fast-thing I do when excited. If I wasn't holding a camera I would have clapped with glee. So not kidding.)

So we finished the amazing meal. Then I was presented with a menu, signed by the head chef, Ashley Palmer-Watts. (!!)

And then..I was asked if I'd like a tour of the kitchen, while they cleared and prepped for the evening service. Like any sensible foodie is going to say no to that.

The kitchen is placed in the center of the restaurant, to one side with glass walls all around so you can see them preparing the food. They each have their own station with everything they need, so there is a lot less rushing about and yelling than you get in most restaurant kitchens.

Here is a lollipop of foie gras, before it gets dunked in the mandarin gel. Behing the wall to the right is the temperature and humidity controlled area for making pastries.

This is the oven they do smoking in - the top part is where the chef was just putting my mussels to smoke for the Frumenty.

Here are the roasting pineapples.

This is me, standing next to the roasting pineapples. It looks like I am a long way away from them, I'm not. This is as close as I could get really - they were really hot. (I am in jeans because there is no dress standard. I did not follow Phil's suggestion of wearing a poncho.)

Then we were shown the Historic Heston cookbook owned by the restaurant - signed by both Ashley Palmer-Watts and Heston Blumenthal.

And then we made our sad goodbyes... (and let them finish getting ready for the evening service, because, frankly, it was getting very late in the afternoon!)

It's a difficult thing, trying to meet a dream. My whole trip was something I had always dreamed of doing. Eating a meal at a Heston restaurant was item number one once I knew I was going to Europe. I actually went to London for two reasons really - Heston Blumenthal and the British Museum. Both exceeded my expectations.

I also want to thank Phil again - who despite not being able to be there, made it a wonderful and memorable day through his help.  Phil, maybe we'll manage a table at the Fat Duck in Melbourne? Australia's great, you'll love it.

Thank you to my dining companion, Giorgio - so great to have someone who loves and gets the whole foodie thing to share it with.

All the staff at Dinner were kind, friendly and amazing to us. We had the best possible time. I can't thank them enough. I am just one person, of no particular importance in the scheme of things, but just with a huge and wonderful appreciation of the work they do. It was a truly great day. Thank you one and all. (And especial thank you to Ashley Palmer-Watts - you run a wonderful restaurant! And signed my menu. You made a little foodie very happy.)