Noisy Balloonist there will be blood

There is a whole other post stewing on Noisy Balloonist somewhere lampooning the art of food porn and publications that use terminology like foodways, so it is with some hesitation that I relate the following, which so nakedly embraces that which I pretend to criticize. Just open any issue of Saveur magazine, where meals are never neat. They are pictured oozing, spilling over, split and smeared, buffed with crumbs like spunk on décolletage—a sensational eros of food that make you want to eat and eat and eat with Roman abandon. This will be a departure from NB’s usual Pod Chocolates fare, but to be frank, any post around here is a departure from the usual. Great things are happening in chocolate and there’s more news to come. [Special to food publicist Nancy: I know the Pod website is shite. I had no intention of going live until all the commerce bits were in place, but an angry mob descended on me last Christmas demanding blood and also HTML, so there you go. However, I’m thrilled you enjoy this blog!]

I fixated on steak. Specifically dry-aged prime ribeye steak, buried deep within the rib primal of the steer, shielded from exertion and thus yielding the supple ellipsoid of flesh called the eye that makes it the most desirable of traditional steak preparations. A proper ribeye steak weighs about a pound and is uniformly two inches thick. Any thinner and it becomes difficult to adequately char the exterior while keeping the interior rare. This poor runt steak, this consolation steak reserved for punters like me who step up to the meat counter and demand “the smallest steak you got” was eight ounces and maybe an inch-and-a-quarter thick. It still cost 15 bucks.

Ribeye, modestly appointed. With marjoram and chives (chives excluded from the final dish).

Marbled like an Italian quarry.

Nevertheless it was a magnificent cut, mellow and sweet, deeply marbled and fringed with concentrated, mahogany protein that is the stamp of good dry-aging. I deliberated on how to cook it. Putting meat of this quality under a home broiler is more an insult than a cooking method. Grilling would vaporize all the juices, a foolish sacrifice. I opted for a version of the pan fry, using a furiously hot cast iron pan to sear the flesh steakhouse-style and develop a rich brown char to insulate the flesh within. Cooking this way in my poorly ventilated kitchen is tantamount to lighting a bonfire in my living room. I turned on all the fans, opened all the windows, disabled the smoke detector and dropped the steak into the pan.

Four minutes on the presentation side to achieve a Hemingway-class mantle. A scant 60 seconds on the reverse to finish.

Shitake mushrooms and farmers’ market fingerling potatoes were glazed in the pan sauce that resulted and the dish was paired with a modest South African red. Hybrid, medium-bodied, experimental. The sunny, mineral clip of the Shiraz in the blend parried good-naturedly with the richness of the steak. I have bigger guns in the wine closet, but this was, after all, a meal for one.

Plated. Dry-aged prime ribeye steak with shitake mushrooms and rainbow fingerlings in a pan glaze.

Complete mise en place. Clockwise from the pepper mill: pepper, sea salt with marjoram sprig, marjoram, Italian parsley, shallot, grapeseed oil, shitake soaking liquid for the deglaze, homemade brown stock, ribeye, roasted fingerling potatoes, torn shitake.

Delheim 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz (60%/40%), Stellenbosch, South Africa.

Sated.

Forensics of the home abattoir.

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Prog Rock
The Wizard of Zo
The Jettisons
Heavy Water
The Collapse (real band)
Exeunt
Cubic Musiconia (taken: a super-band of sorts, assembled from my solo tour characters)

70s Punk
The Gendarmes
Felt Bikini
The Gimps
The Plants
The Drags (also a real band; damn you, German)
The Speci-Men

Gutter Punk
Messy Handjob
Feces Police
Toothless Old Man
Piss Whistle
Pussy Inspection
Fetus Party
Z is for Bitch

80s Thought Pop
Politics as Usual
Ready Not Ready
Binding Arbitration
Mur is Furder

Jazz
The Trio Quartet

Nu-Metal
Coat of Arms
Ventricle
Lagbolt
Numismatogram
Velociraptor
Sleepdriver
Inchwyrm

Math Rock
The Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Band
Atomic Waits
Grinding in China
The Frags
The Ridley Scotts

Neve Campbell tribute bands
The Craft

Goth
Crying Jäg
Etheria Mare Lactalis
Deck of ‘Tards
Oxycontin Twins

Emo
Chartreuse
Rainy Day Supper Club
Old Navy Turtleneck
The Four-Eyes

Indie
Pretty Weathergirl
Every Seventh Sunday
Away Message
Restless Leg Syndrome (taken: our headlining act, featuring Jeff, Daisy and myself)

Arena Rock
Outer Heaven
Katana
Slyder
Big League Chew
Scent of a Roadie
Gila Monster
Iroc
Mouthful
Freshener

Last week I found myself at Safari Sam’s, a club in the malt liquor-enhanced urban transitional zone between Hollywood and Silverlake, watching Daisy play keyboards for Phantom West—click the image above for a photoset. You could call them electro-gaze, but the night belonged to the goths, as nights often do, and the line-up culminated with a performance by Teutonic Depeche Mode simulators De/Vision. One gent played his Powerbook while the other sang and barked orders in German. I assume he was telling the crowd to liven the fuck up.

The goth scene has appropriated trance from a decade ago. The color’s been desaturated but the cut is the same and the beats are identical. I drew a few skeptical glances when I pointed this out at the show, but DJ Jonas reported that members of the Stormriders crew (responsible for the phenomenal Dune and Caladan desert parties of my misguided youth) described exactly the same thing.

Pod Chocolates, Rock Band, redesigned photo galleries and actual deserts are in the pipeline. More soon.

I hope this fortnight-long crash diet of coffee, wine and carpet chocolate paid off. Here’s a few more temporary snaps of the finished product, as I’m sweet-talking (or sweet trading, more likely) my way into a professional photography session next week. Please enjoy.

The land of chocolate. That bin at the end is filled three layers deep.

Nut trio. Almond paste base, Nux Alpina walnut liqueur ganache, toasted pine nut.

Mint Julep—made with Black Maple Hill 16 year-old bourbon—and Espresso con Panna.

Buckwheat honey, cumin and clove. Tastes like vindication.

In high school English class I was introduced to a parochial definition of the sublime, described as the ideal mix of elation and terror. This is etymologically suspect, but a vivid idea: When pushed to the feral outer limits of sensation, pleasure and pain might feel alike, and exquisite. I’d write more about this if Clive Barker hadn’t been flogging the notion since the 1980s, but I’m not yielding to melodrama when I suggest that there is some of the sublime in making chocolate. Terror and elation arrive in alternating waves. Nearly every task generates abject despair, followed by a rain of joy when the results are marginally acceptable. When I work molded chocolates, for example, I agonize over the ragged edges, the uneven backs, the pits and the air bubbles. I pine for the wasted mass of $18-per-pound chocolate curdling on the marble, identical in all aspects to a Jackson Pollack canvas except for its value at auction. I’m sullen and angry. I’m convinced the chocolates will never release from the mold. When they inevitably do and some of them are even pristine, I’m giddy with relief and my confidence is renewed.

Chocolate making is about science, and something like grace, and painstakingly sweating the details. Supremely tolerant in liquid form, once it sets the stuff is unforgiving as concrete and any blemish, however minute, appears on the finished product in grotesque relief. The image below is a good lesson. Look at the piece I split open. The shell is in perfect temper. The upper portion is suitably thin and delicate and there is good definition between the layers of ganache. It looks good, but I assure you Jacques Torres would declare amateur hour. Well, he’s French; he probably wouldn’t declare anything. He’d retire somewhere to smoke and beam searing waves of disapproval into my heart. Now see what he sees. The bottom of the shell is extremely thick and meets the ganache along an inelegant, irregular joint. It accounts for far too much of the finished weight, overwhelms the flavors within and destroys textural balance on the palate. Of course, somewhere in the ranks are pieces worthy of Wybauw himself, containing a payload of joy that could only result from a technique mastered and a job well done. Just gamble and bite.

Espresso con Panna. A dualie. Espresso ganache made with fresh-ground dark roast coffee beneath a float of panna (whipped cream), a white chocolate ganache infused with vanilla and anise.

Maybe I’m romanticizing just a little, but I’ve never encountered this tidal oscillation between dread and triumph anywhere else (except possibly romance). Permit me to boost my spirits and self-name-check for a change. I created a tinted flower to decorate a Pod Chocolate as yet undisclosed. Suddenly I understand the genius of transfer sheets—chocolate flowercraft is absurdly labor intensive—but I did well for a first try.

The palette: pure cocoa butter chips, luster dust and powder color.

The cocoa butter is melted and blended with color. Each bowl contains multiple colors.

A glittering slurry of canary luster and yellow color.

The cocoa butter is painted on acetate and a pattern is applied with a brush. After it sets, the entire sheet is coated with a thin layer of tempered white chocolate.

The flower is clipped out with a pastry cutter, to be affixed to finished candy with a dot of molten chocolate. Chunk of El Rey for demonstration purposes only.

Now cough.