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Cooking Class - NYC Series - Marcus Samuelsson

The next chef we're reviewing is Marcus Samuelsson. At the beginning of class, we go over a chefs timeline (where and when they moved from one area to another) or we read the intro from one of their cookbooks to get an idea of what geographical or cultural influences has had over their cooking. And we can see those influences in the recipes we cook that day.

Our first day, we made the Yes Chef cocktail, which everyone thought was quite good. It was made with honey syrup, ginger beer, pineapple and lime juices and vodka.

We made deviled eggs with chicken skin mayo. This was interesting. We made our own mayonnaise and took two fried chicken legs, took all the meat and skin off the bones and blended the chicken and mayo in a food processor until smooth. We put a bit of the puree on a plate and put a deviled egg on top and a gougere on the side. How can fried chicken anything be bad? Yeah, it can't.

 

The gougere was flavored with bacon, cheddar and lingonberry jam. It was sweet and salty and slightly smokey. I can see using the fried chicken puree as a filling for the gougere and using those as appetizers. That would be a really good combination.

Our main lunch was catfish with blackening rub with beets and peanuts, collard greens and andouille bread pudding.

The beets was sauteed with daikon radish, soy sauce, honey, capers and lemon and finished with peanuts. The collard greens were really good and everyone was a bit surprised that they liked them so well. The were made with onions, chilies, cider vinegar and brown sugar. The andouille bread pudding was okay. It had andouille sausage, bacon, cheddar, peanuts and raisins in it and of course bread. I thought it was good but something need a bit more spices or something. It's a good recipe that you just have to make it your own.


For dessert we devils food cake with buttercream frosting. This was awesome and I completely forgot to get a picture of it. The cake was super light. There was 3C of liquid to 2C cake flour and the batter was really thin which was kinda unusual but it worked.

Our second week cooking Marcus Samuelsson's recipes was a big success, I'm happy to say. We all loved everything and I think that was pretty surprising to some of us in the class.

We started out making meatballs for an appetizer and the main fair consisted of fried chicken with 2 kinds of sauce, spicy sweet potatoes with green beans and succotash with yogurt sauce and corn bread. Unfortunately, our dessert didn't get served. It was still cooking and with a 4 hour cool down time it wasn't going to get served during our 3 hour class.

  


Every cornbread recipe I've tried always turned out pretty dry and crumbly. Well, those days are over my friends. This cornbread recipe was made with cake flour, cornmeal, butter, sour cream which kept the loaf very moist. Even the succotash was really good. It was different then your typical succotash of carrot, lima beans and whatever else is in the mix. This was made with corn, tomatoes, fava beans, and bacon and it tasted a bit vinegary and the yogurt was a nice balance. The spicy sweet potatoes and green beans was an odd combination but mostly was spicy with crunch. I might substitute the beans for walnuts or something but it was still really good.

The cocktail of the day was called Harrogate Nights which was peachy and really good. The dessert was called a blackbottom peanut pie which we unfortunately didn't get to try. The crust was made with nilla wafers, sugar, vanilla and browned butter. The first layer for the filling was melted chocolate and the second layer was made from sugar, eggs, cane syrup, molasses and roasted peanuts. Kinda reminded me of a pecan pie filling but we didn't get to try it.

The big drawback to some of these recipes is that there are a lot of ingredients that most people simply don't have on hand and some of them I've never heard of before but I have to admit everything tasted really good so maybe all those spices are worth it.










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