Sous vide with Cervena venison at the StarChefs.com ICC

 

 

Tables set for service, Aki Kamozawa and Alex Talbot prepared a five-course sous vide tasting menu with the Polyscience immersion circulator (and other high-tech gadgets), while explaining the techniques for each element and giving advice for modern cooking methods. (On overcooking meat with sous vide, Kamozawa said, “The greatest downfall of sous vide is dry meat.” And on the passé sautéing vs. deep-frying: “It makes a hell of a lot of sense to apply heat to all sides,” said Talbot.)

The Ideas in Food meal was built around three primary elements: Cervena venison, squid, and butternut squash. They composed the first dish with sous vide calamari rings, a thin sheet of sous vide butternut squash, and venison flank steak bonded with tranglutimase and cooked sous vide with bromelain to render rare venison jus—a technique also demonstrated by Chris Young on yesterday’s Main Stage. Kamozawa and Talbot took the jus one step further by barrel-aging the sauce in a sonic prep with whisky barrel chips and adding a salty umami shot of fish sauce. The second course was a venison shank, cooked sous vide to maintain its heft and chew, a few squid tentacles, and butternut squash buttercream. Kamozawa and Talbot prefer the texture of roasted (rather than braised and melting) shank and used the immersion circulator to achieve a roasted texture. For the pasta course, the chef couple made a venison heart ragoût seasoned with coconut milk rather than cow’s milk and cocoa-rye-semolina pasta (made with an Arcobaleno pasta extruder). A classic example of layering flavors, they added flavor at every possible stage to produce a more interesting, exciting dish. Next, attendees dug into venison hearts (cured for 14 days, air dried, and cooked sous vide) that were brushed with aromatic butter and coated with candied pecans left over from Philip Speer’s pastry demo. The last bite of venison had a sweetness and kick of heat from an unconventional coconut milk brine that was spiked with hot sauce.

Attendees not only consumed month’s worth of creative work that Kamozawa and Talbot put into researching venison, squid, and other ingredients, they walked away empowered to try sous vide their way with a new baseline of knowledge and creative inspiration.

 

Taken from Starchefs.com