New on the Menu: Two puff pastries and two caramels, one savory and one sweet
Caramel mixed with umami-heavy fish sauce is not an uncommon condiment in Southeast Asia, and at Pecking House in New York City, it’s combined with buttermilk fried chicken. Caramel is used in a more traditional sweet preparation at Zanti Cucina Italiana in Houston, where it’s used to coat pumpkin seeds that garnish a puff pastry stuffed with cinnamon-rich pumpkin. Puff pastry is used in a savory application in Tampa at Boulon, where the Everything bagels of New York City are the inspiration for a cream cheese-stuffed pastry pinwheel.
In Jersey City, N.J., freshwater eel is stir-fried twice — once to concentrate its flavor and once to crisp it up, at the new restaurant Yuan.
In Sheridan, Wyo., chamomile is made into a tincture and a syrup at Le Rêve Restaurant & Raw Bar, where both are used, along with two types of amaro, to make a balanced yet boozy bourbon cocktail.
Eric Huang, chef and founder of Pecking House, with locations two locations in New York City — one in Manhattan’s Chinatown and the other in Brooklyn’s Park Slope — recently added this dish to his menu, inspired in part by Vietnamese-style garlic-and-peppercorn fried crab. He starts by making a dark caramel with white sugar and then stopping the caramelization “with an abundance of fish sauce,” along with chopped garlic and cracked black pepper, finishing it with a little rice vinegar and butter. He uses that glossy, sticky sauce to glaze the restaurant’s classic buttermilk fried chicken and then “showers it with lots of chopped cilantro and fried garlic,” he said. “It is sweet, funky, garlicky, and herbaceous.”
He added that there’s nothing new about fish sauce caramel, “but I don’t think it has been applied to buttermilk fried chicken in many places. Just as with the rest of the Pecking House menu, our garlic & herb fried chicken is reflective of the Asian-American experience as we blend elements of Asian cuisines and African-American cuisines.”
Price: $9 for a quarter and $17 for a half.
At Yuan, which opened in Jersey City in October, owner Shiyang Li, who also operates Peppercorn Station with locations in New York City and Jersey City, starts by cleaning freshwater eel as soon as it arrives in the restaurant and slicing it into fine shreds. Then he quickly sautés it with just a little oil until its water evaporates. That step, called bian chao in Mandarin, concentrates the flavors and gives the eel a more intense, savory taste, Li said. At service, it’s stir-fried with Chinese celery and la jiao, spicy oil made with chiles and Sichuan peppercorns that is a cousin of chili crisp until the fish is crispy and slightly charred.
Price: $36
Amanda Merchant, who developed this cocktail for Le Rêve Restaurant & Raw Bar, which opened in Sheridan, Wyo., in September, said it has a smooth balance between bourbon, two types of amaro, and a floral finish of chamomile and orange. She makes a chamomile syrup by steeping the flowers in simple syrup, and also a tincture by soaking the flowers in vodka for 12-24 hours “until the flower is really prominent. “I do both syrup and tincture because I really want the chamomile to be noticeable, but without being too sweet from the syrup,” she said.
To make the drink she pours two ounces of Buffalo Trace bourbon over ice in a mixing glass along with ¼ inch of Amaro Nonino Quintessentia, Amaro Braulio, and her chamomile syrup along with five dashes of tincture. She stirs those ingredients and then pours them over a large ice cube in a rocks glass, expresses an orange twist over it, and also uses it as a garnish.
“I think this cocktail is unique because it offers a variety of flavors that most wouldn't expect from a bourbon cocktail, while also being approachable to those who are new to bourbon,” Merchant said.
Price: $15
Boulon in Tampa, Fla., recently added a new bakery menu developed by executive pastry chef Summer Bailey, including this item, for which she makes puff pastry using 32% butter, making it extra rich. Separately, she soaks capers in water to remove most of their salt, strains and dries them, and then fries them for a few seconds to get them crispy. Frying them also brings out their brininess, Bailey said. Then she folds them into tempered whipped cream cheese and finishes it with a little lemon zest. She adds two small scoops of the caper cream cheese to a five-by-five-inch square of puff pastry. She makes a slit in each corner of the pastry and folds them over to resemble a pinwheel. Then she brushes it with egg wash and sprinkles it with her own Everything bagel mix made with fried garlic, black and white sesame seeds, poppyseeds, and one other secret ingredient, and then bakes it.
Bailey is originally from Louisiana, but she attended culinary school in New York City and ate an Everything bagel almost every day. When she moved to Tampa, nothing there met her expectations, so one day, she played around with extra puff pastry at Boulon.
“Colleagues are your best critics,” she said, “and their reaction confirmed that this pastry had to be put on the menu.”
Price: $6, though the optional addition of smoked salmon for an upcharge is a “huge seller,” Bailey said.
For this seasonal dish at Zanti Cucina Italiana in the Houston community of River Oaks, chef Hilario Zamora prepares traditional puff pastry a day in advance. The next day, he cuts a pumpkin in half, removing the seeds for later, and roasts it with sugar and cinnamon until the sugar caramelizes. He cools it, peels it, blends it with a little cream cheese, and chills it.
He pours white sugar in a hot pan, adds a few drops of lemon juice, and then adds the pumpkin seeds until they’re caramelized.
He cuts his puff pastry into circles, adds a scoop of the pumpkin mixture, seals it, and bakes it. He serves it with vanilla ice cream and garnishes it with the caramelized seeds.
Price: $15