The other night we had lamb loin chops from Safeway. I prefer to get the whole lamb loin, but chops aren't bad for a ten-minute weeknight dinner. How ridiculous is it that I'm at a point now where lamb chops (albeit Safeway lamb chops) are a quick and easy weeknight meal?

I also happened to have on hand some fingerling potatoes that I'd already cooked once in the manner recommended by Ideas In Food, "in their jackets."

I pretty much always cook my potatoes that way now--twice-cooked, skin-on. The first round, you just throw the potatoes in some water at around 150-170 F, and cook them until the insides of the potatoes have reached that temperature. For fingerling potatoes that only takes fifteen minutes or so. For big russets it can take over an hour. But then you cool them completely, and save them in the refrigerator for up to a week. After that you just take them out and cook them however you normally would.

There are two advantages: First of all, it makes the potato flavor come through so much better at the end. Potatoes taste like potatoes, instead of like butter or nothing. Something about cooking them in their skins imparts such a potato-ey flavor. Second, when you cook them to above 150 for a few minutes, the starch molecules in the potatoes swell as they do when potatoes get cooked. Normally, when you cook them once, those molecules swell but don't set before you, say, puree or mash the potatoes. The starch in the potatoes then gets released, and your mashed potatoes or whatever you're making can get all gluey and starchy. But when you cook them until the starch swells, then cool them, the starch molecules set. And they stay that way even when you cook them again. So you can stir and mash your potatoes as much as you want, and they'll never get gluey. You can make the mashed potatoes then cool them and reheat them and they're still not starchy. Anyway, the pectins in the potatoes apparently break down around 83C (180F), so as long as you keep it under that, your potatoes won't get fully "cooked" the first time around. I should note that if you "puree" the potatoes in a blender or even food processor, the blades can break up the starch molecules and cause glueyness, so you're better off doing your pureeing or mashing by hand, with a food mill or tamis.

Anyway, I had them on hand, so while we were eating our dinner, I saved a cube of the seared lamb and got the fingerling potatoes cooking (for the second time) in some boiling water. After dinner, I peeled the fully-cooked potatoes. I sweated just a bit of onion, and pureed the onion in a blender with the potatoes and a bit of milk. Since I was making basically a soup I wasn't worried about releasing the starch. Once I had my vichyssoise, I added a bit of xanthan gum and lecithin. Then I whisked the stuff over a bowl of ice to chill it. I re-seared the lamb to heat it up and foamed up the cold potato stuff into a foam. I put the foam into a tiny stone bowl and set the cube of lamb into it.

Finally, I sprinkled a bit of beet powder over it. I had made that a week or two ago and just keep it on hand. Thinly slice very dark red beets and dehydrate them in a 170F oven on a silpat overnight. Then grind them in a spice grinder.

This was awesome, with the cold potato and the hot lamb. The beet added a sweet earthiness that was nice. I wasn't entirely happy with the way it looked after sprinkling on the beet powder, so in the future (I'm going to make this for a dinner party that's coming up) I'm just going to use crispy little slivers of dehydrated beet, instead of the powder.

It's meant to be eaten in one bite (and then hopefully it's delicious enough that they sop up all the extra potato stuff).

Posted by Barzelay on 2008/12/13 @ 12:38 | Comments (0) | Food Additives, Meat, Veggies, Fruit, Grain, Cheese