by Frank Deis » Fri Sep 11, 2009 10:43 pm
Hi Daniel
I really did have you in mind as I was making choices, especially today. I have been steaming chicken, following Japanese recipes, and had kind of planned to do that to the poussins but I decided I had better poach them in a rich broth instead, at least giving a nod to the original.
OK, so after boning the poussins I put truffle salt and truffle butter inside and rolled them up and left them in the fridge overnight.
When I got home from work today (early), I went to work on finishing the birds. I put a fairly large amount of pâté de foie gras down the center of each bird, almost the size of a stick of butter, and then tied them with string (salami tie) to get them roughly circular/cylindrical. Then I made up some of that concentrated veal glaze into a rich stock, an mixed it with some chicken stock I had. I have a sort of loaf pan -- Dansk ceramic coated metal -- and I used that to poach the birds which fit nicely, head to toe. The narrow pan allowed me to keep the amount of broth down. Cooked about 15 minutes and put the birds in the fridge. They had to be cold for slicing.
Then I experimented with the puff pastry. Actually I had twice as much of the commercial stuff as I had thought, not one 8x10 sheet but really two. This let me play around, fortunately, because I discovered that during baking circles work MUCH better than squares. The walls tend to come loose on a square, but the circular ring (as in the movie) stays firmly attached. Who would have guessed?? I had worried that there would be too much waste with circles, and in fact I mostly made squares. Copying the pre-made circular pastry shells I had bought (pre-formed but not prebaked) I also cut a little around the inner part of each one, so that the puffed pastry could be easily removed later.
My real butter pastry didn't puff as dramatically as the store bought non-butter stuff, but everything worked well enough and it all looked good.
For final assembly I put a dab of foie gras pâté in each pastry shell, then about half of a circular slice of stuffed bird, then half of a large black seedless grape. That was pretty much it. I had added some gelatin to some of the poaching broth and I had a comical experience trying to get it to a syrupy consistency so that I could paint everything with it. Put it in the fridge, hard as a rock. 15 seconds in the microwave, totally liquid. Back in the fridge, solid, back out, liquid. I seem to have a serious technique issue here. I finally put a cube of the jellied broth into each pastry. FWIW it tasted wonderful.
In fact the entire thing tasted wonderful. But like many dishes from classic French cuisine, it was TOO rich, and right now, after the party, I have a feeling I remember from my days when we were cooking regularly from Julia Child's MTAOFC. It feels like my blood is sludgy from cholesterol. Not a happy or healthy feeling. But it is a price to pay from eating food that is delicious and food that, even in the way I made it, means something and has a history.
I did take a batch of pictures and I will choose a couple to post.
FWIW what I did was pretty easy, if you can bone a bird. Sure as heck a lot easier than the original. And I am convinced that my dish has a flavor spectrum that hits the notes you would taste in the original. Well, I missed having real truffles in there. I tried, there were truffly bits here and there but I think in the original the truffles would be very bold. And of course quail is different from poussin (slightly). But I've tasted real foie gras many times and I know that the d'Artagnan product I used is very much in the same ballpark. And a grape is a grape, and butter-based puff pastry is also itself.
FWIW our next movie is "Eat Drink Man Woman" and yes, Daniel, I noticed those recipes on your site, thank you!
Frank
