|
Four-star feasts: Roland Passot &
Top Bay Area chefs share their home holiday menus
Janet Fletcher, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
They set the bar for Bay Area fine dining, but The Chronicle's four-star chefs have less in common when it comes to feasting at home. Asked to compose a Christmas meal they might serve family or friends, these six top toques came up with a wide variety of menus that define pleasure for them. If you think their holiday must-haves are foie gras and truffles, the results may surprise you.
Although at least one of these chefs cooks as lavishly at home as he does for his well-heeled customers, others show a taste for rusticity.
Grilled duck, Cajun shrimp, pork and beans - recipes home cooks can execute - are among the dishes that satisfy these high-profile chefs when they can dine at their own table. Accustomed to working at full tilt through the end-of-year holidays, most of them are just grateful to have Christmas Day off.
"We try to make it pretty festive," says La Folie's Roland Passot, the only one among the six chefs whose Christmas dinner qualifies as deluxe. "The next day we go back to work, so we have to make it worth it."
 Passot and his wife, Jamie, typically convene at home with some of their French compatriots, including Fleur de Lys chef Hubert Keller, Ritz-Carlton executive chef Jean-Pierre Dubray and former White House chef René Verdon. With so much culinary talent at the table, "it's not like we're making stew," says Passot.
The festivities generally get under way with Champagne and an appetizer, such as caviar, foie gras or scrambled eggs with truffles. The next course might be Passot's lobster "cappuccino" - a lobster bisque served in a coffee cup and topped with orange zest-scented whipped cream - with a miniature lobster croque monsieur. The main course runs to game, perhaps squab, quail or venison. For The Chronicle, Passot suggested a pancetta-wrapped venison loin. A cheese course follows, with a purchased bûche de Noël, possibly from the Ritz pastry kitchen, for dessert.
Contrast that menu with the elbows-on-the-table shrimp feed that spells Christmas for Douglas Keane and his family. The Cyrus chef isn't sure where his mother got the recipe for spicy Cajun-style shrimp - she is from Detroit - but the dish has been the centerpiece of a family ritual for years.
The dining table is blanketed with newspaper, and the messy, buttery shrimp are served family style, preferably with beer. "We all liked it so much it evolved into a Christmas dish," says Keane.
An arugula salad with persimmons, Asian pears, blue cheese and cider vinaigrette joined the menu after the family moved to California, and the meal typically ends with bananas Foster - sauteed and flambeed bananas with vanilla ice cream - because Keane's mother adores it. Her homemade Christmas cookies appear as a finale, with coffee.
David Kinch of Manresa also credits family history for his menu's main course: a braised pork shoulder with cabbage, chestnuts and white beans. His Pennsylvania Dutch parents prepared roast pork with sauerkraut at holiday time, but after moving from Lancaster County, Pa., to New Orleans, embraced the custom of eating black-eyed peas at New Year's. Combining all these elements - pork, cabbage and beans - Kinch produced a lusty French-style garbure, a stewy soup, that reminds him of childhood holidays.
"I love these kinds of homey dishes," says the chef, whose family was so far-flung that when it did gather, food wasn't the point. "The big deal was everybody getting together."
Jean-Pierre Moullé, the longtime Chez Panisse chef, grew up in France in a family that celebrated Christmas with seasonal game. "Both my parents were hunters," says Moullé, "so all winter, it was game, from partridge to deer to rabbit."
A typical Christmas dinner in his childhood home would begin with truffled foie gras mousse, followed by a leg of venison with red currant sauce and chestnut puree. Moullé's wife, Denise Lurton, comes from a Bordeaux winemaking family that launches its Christmas Eve dinner with fresh oysters. Moullé adopted that custom for his Chronicle menu and settled on grilled duck as a main course, a more accessible choice for home cooks than leg of venison or the traditional French roast goose.
For French Laundry chef Thomas Keller, cooking outside of his restaurant is a rarity. "I hardly ever cook at home," he says. Although Keller does get Christmas Day off (both French Laundry and his New York restaurant, Per Se, are closed), he isn't likely to spend it in his home kitchen. So his Chronicle menu has little to do with tradition, he says, and everything to do with "what I would enjoy having at this time of year."
That means a simple romaine salad with a poached egg and herbs, and a roast sirloin of Mishima Ranch beef with Yorkshire pudding. Mishima, from Redding, raises a breed that is 75 percent Japanese Wagyu and 25 percent Black Angus, yielding well-marbled beef sometimes referred to as American-style Kobe. For home cooks, the closest equivalent would be USDA Prime, although American-style kobe is available at some markets.
Keller sauces this super-rich beef with beurre Colbert, an herb butter, and partners it with bacon-wrapped King Richard leeks, a long-shanked variety available at some farmers' markets.
Holiday food is much simpler at Ron Siegel's home. For the Ritz-Carlton chef, Christmas Day is no time to spend laboring over the stove. "It's more about being with the kids," says Siegel, whose four children are aged 7 to 17.
On Christmas Eve, Siegel generally makes a Caesar salad and some cocktail sauce, boils a heap of Dungeness crab, and sends all the kids into the backyard to find rocks to crack the crab shells.
"We put newspaper all over the table and tell them to go at it," says the chef. "Our table's not going to the museum."
For The Chronicle, Siegel devised a more elaborate menu aimed at the grown-ups. It opens with crab and persimmon salad and moves on to grilled lamb chops with accompaniments - sunchoke puree and shallot marmalade - that can be made ahead.
Although the main dish is moderately time intensive, it is not overwhelming unless you have four children underfoot. In that case, the interactive boiled crab on the newspaper sounds pretty good.
Pancetta-Wrapped Venison Loin (recipe)
|
Zagat Review for 2007