Brandade, You're a Fine Girl

Tonight's big success was my Thomas Keller inspired presentation of a classic provencal dish, brandade de morue (I think thats how it is spelled). I've been talking about it for three days, I need to backtrack to explain how it came about.

First, who is Thomas Keller, why do I keep talking about him? He is the chef-owner of a restaurant called The French Laundry, its somewhere in the San Francisco area, all I know about it is, its supposed to be the best restaurant, or at least the best French cuisine, in the US, and you cannot get a reservation. Foodie people (I hate this, when my passion of 30-some years is suddenly everyone's latest fad, I used to be ahead of the curve, now I am one of millions) just worship Keller. Julie and Julia was a cultural phenomenon, this year, cooking your way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking has become a mainstream fad. Well, real fanatics, they are working there way through Keller's French Laundry cookbook, they call it "doing the Laundry" ha ha, how drole.

So, for my birthday, just a month ago, I got Keller's first two books, The French Laundry, and Ad Hoc at Home, I have to say, I was a bit unimpressed. The French Laundry dishes are all of them, every one, of that oh so precious, tiny little layer cake variety, various ingredients all cut into a small round shape with a cookie cutter and layered up, "vertical food," pretty, not so much my cup of tea. Yet its what I did tonight.

For Christmas, I got Keller's Bouchon, his bistro-style restaurant cookbook, and this is more my style. And it was a recipe for salt-cod and potato fritters that caught my eye immediately when I opened the book on Christmas morning. I happened to have a bag of frozen, vac-packed cod filets from Costco in the freezer, and I was unhappy with the quality. But some time ago, I had done a recipe where you salt your fresh cod, to make fresh, home-made salt cod, and I thought, this was a fitting purpose for this mediocre cod, so yesterday, I defrosted two cod filets and salted them, you just put them in a bowl filled with kosher salt, cover them with kosher salt (I used Camargue sea salt, no difference, its what I had) and let it sit, after a day or two, you have salt cod, then you can soak it in water and milk to turn it back into something like fresh cod, what a journey, out and back.

So today, totally snowed-in from the blizzard, I had time to make this salt-cod dish.


Its not really complicated, this is peasant food, basically salt cod mashed in with mashed potatoes, its peasant food from the south of France. Its salt cod, mashed potatoes, garlic, olive oil, thats it.

How does this become haute cuisine? Well, in Bouchon, Keller took little balls of this brandade, coated them in batter, and deep-fried them, to make fritters. Lovely, I would have liked that, but deep-frying, at home, is yucky, all that oil, it gets in the air, coats everything in the kitchen, lots of work and mess for a few fried cod balls? No sir.

But I figured I could pan-fry it, like a crab cake, and I have panko on hand, so thats what I decided to do.


And in the end, I wound up inspired by the French Laundry style of vertical, layered presentation, driven mostly by what I had on hand.

For a sauce, well, I had cucumbers and tomatoes, garlic and lemon juice and some hot peppers, so I made a spicy gazpacho in the food processer, I didn't take a picture, and I had a red pepper, so I roasted it on the range, and cut a disk of roasted red pepper, using the same cookie cutter I used to shape the little discs of brandade.




And I had a little bit of jumbo lump crabmeat left over from Christmas eve's special seafood dinner, so I figured I could put a couple of lumps of crabmeat on top of the roasted red pepper, put a little more gazpacho on top, and drizzle some unfiltered extra virgin olive oil over all, and this was the result, suprised myself, I did.