Knives at Dawn (23 page)

As an accompaniment for steak and salad, he decided to make
pommes dauphinoise
, a classic French dish of scalloped potatoes and cream. Though he hadn't had it in a long time, it was a technique that was seared into his memory, taught to him by former French Laundry chef de cuisine Eric Ziebold: thinly slice potatoes on a mandoline, then bring some heavy cream to a boil and season it with salt, pepper, thyme, and garlic. Add potato slices one at a time, shaking the pan to ensure that each is well coated in
cream. As you work, the natural starch in the potatoes thickens the cream even further. Hollingsworth poured the creamy potatoes into a vessel, and baked it until it was nicely golden brown on top, with the cream bubbling up around the sides.

“I hadn't had it in so long,” Hollingsworth remembers. “You take a bite of it, and it's
so
good.”

Hollingsworth got to thinking: you don't see this dish very often in restaurants, and if you do, it's not usually made all that well. Before long, he'd thought up a Bocuse d'Or–appropriate version: turn the potato on a vegetable slicer, cut uniform rectangles from the ribbons, cook them in cream, and then layer them into some kind of baking vessel. Once baked, the preparation could be unmolded and cut into shapes, even served atop a
pommes Maxim
(thin potato rounds, tossed in clarified butter, and baked together to a crisp in overlapping decorative shapes) to make it easy to lift off a platter. Complementary ingredients could be added; at the moment, he was thinking of punching out cylinders of pommes dauphinoise, wrapping them in carrot for color, and topping them with a poached quail egg and chopped chives. Gee, maybe he was getting the hang of this competition thing after all.

In addition to the pommes dauphinoise, Hollingsworth soon devised a working collection of garnishes for the beef platter. The centerpiece was still a blank, but if all the other components were in place as they turned the corner into the New Year, he wasn't worried about being able to weave the preparation of the final element into his and Guest's game plan.

One of the garnishes he was most excited about made use of that smoke glass Kaysen was so taken with. Convinced that the smoke would be a crowd-and judge-pleasing flourish, he wanted badly to include something like it on his platter. Moreover, he
had
to use the glass or a similar vessel because he was committed to those circular light panels Tihany had incorporated into the platter's design. His first thought was to smoke braised beef cheeks, and accompany them with a brunoise of cabbage, apple, and onion. Another idea he had was to transform one cut of beef, curing the
calotte
(beef cap) from the côte de boeuf into bresaola, or air-dried seasoned beef.

Hollingsworth didn't have much experience with curing, but Devin Knell had been experimenting quite a bit with it during the fall of 2008, and was set up for curing at Ad Hoc. (Hollingsworth had also done some curing himself in the wine room at The French Laundry to good but not great effect.) For the moment, he was planning to cure the calotte with salt, pepper, and sugar, starting at three different times to give him three levels of intensity to choose from, then use the cured meat in a riff on eggs benedict: on a base of fried brioche, he would lay a piece of compressed spinach (made by repeatedly Cryovacing the green with salt and olive oil), wrap the bresaola around that, and top it with a circulator-cooked quail egg that was filling in for the Benedict's poached chicken egg. (Cooking the egg in a circulator would result in a perfectly round orb and make both the yolk and the white seductively runny.) For a finishing touch, he planned to make a truffle hollandaise and pipe it out of an ISI gun, the introduction of air alleviating the vinegary richness, then top the whole thing with sliced truffles.

Centerpiece concepts eluded him, but he had options: if he didn't come up with a better idea, he could always bring the bacon-lined tenderloin from Orlando back for an encore. That left the rest of the côte de boeuf, which demanded a high-impact presentation. It hadn't come to him yet, but if everything else worked, he had little doubt he'd be in good shape.

G
RAY SKIES AND A
persistent drizzle greeted Yountville on the morning of Tuesday, December 16, but Hollingsworth and Guest didn't mind; they were too excited about the next four days, which they would devote entirely to recipe work.

By eleven o'clock, the two of them were in the Bocuse House kitchen, grinning at each other.

“I'm excited,” said Guest.

“Long time coming,” said Hollingsworth.

The two of them stood over the rolling prep tables in the center of the kitchen, dressed in their blue aprons, an important symbol of life at The French Laundry. The blue apron, worn by commis and apprentices in French kitchens, is worn by
everybody
during prep time at The French Laundry, a symbol of their willingness to help each other and to always be learning. Hollingsworth and Guest wore the blue aprons in the competition kitchen in Orlando and planned to wear them in Lyon, at least until the time came to plate up. “It means French Laundry,” said Guest of the apron. It's a “comfort,” said Hollingsworth, “Not as much, but like the American flag is the symbol of our country, the blue apron is the symbol of values.”

Hollingsworth showed his commis illustrations of the garnishes he'd been imagining and reimagining, then they broke from their huddle and started gathering ingredients and equipment, getting ready to cook for the rest of the day. What they did
not
do was discuss who would do what. Because they worked together at The French Laundry, they already knew what their division of labor would be: Guest would do all vegetable prep and Silpat work, and Hollingsworth would do all the butchering and the cooking of the proteins, as well as any finishing work that required particular finesse.

One way in which things differed from The French Laundry in this satellite kitchen was the constant presence of music. Hollingsworth doesn't function well in quietude, and so even on this formative day, he put music on the sound system, opting for something relatively low-key: CDs featuring music mixes from Keller's casual restaurant Ad Hoc: “One Step Up” by Bruce Springsteen, “Bye Bye, Blackbird” by Ray Charles, “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones, “Could You Be Loved” by Bob Marley. By Hollingsworth's standards, this was easy listening—a mellow way to slide into the long week ahead.

The first order of business was to try that pommes dauphinoise. Guest peeled the potatoes, turned them on the vegetable slicer, par-cooked them in boiling water, drained them, and cut them into squares, arranging them in stacks like wonton wrappers on a sheet pan, which she brought over to Hollingsworth at the stove.

Now the teaching commenced. Hollingsworth poured milk and cream into a large, stainless-steel pan, added salt, pepper, thyme sprigs, and a clove of garlic, and brought it to a simmer. Then he had her taste it, so that she'd know what to look for when she made it—how salty the cream should be, how much the thyme flavor should have infused the liquid before the sprigs were removed and discarded, and so on.

One at a time, Hollingsworth added squares of potato to the mixture. Doing it that way ensured that it never lost its simmer and would continue to thicken. As the potatoes piled up to the top, Hollingsworth added more cream, then agitated them gently with a spatula to help the liquid find its way between the layers of potato.

Hollingsworth then transferred the potatoes to a wide, deep stainless-steel bowl. At the ready, he had a small rectangular pan with deep sides and upward-facing handles. Both of them snapped on latex gloves and as Guest looked on, Hollingsworth put layers of potato into the pan, spooning liquid between the layers. After a few layers, he turned to Guest:

“Got it?”

She nodded and he stepped aside as she stepped in, or “cut in,” if you refer back to Keller's original description of The Dance. As usual, Guest worked faster than Hollingsworth, with quick, urgent, compact movements. Although the dishes were still works in progress, Guest treated them as though they were being prepared for competition, working as fast as she could without sacrificing neatness. It was a nod to their accelerated timeline. “I shouldn't start going faster when I am practicing [fully developed dishes] for Lyon,” she said. “I need to do it
now
.” Just as Hollingsworth was incorporating preparations she knew from The French Laundry into the platters, Guest was treating each visit to the kitchen as a chance to improve her efficiency. She was also under instructions from Hollingsworth to make sure to take on preparations at The French Laundry that resembled her Bocuse d'Or tasks so she could have more opportunities to increase her speed.

Hollingsworth snipped open a sous-vide bag filled with veal stock, and poured the viscous brown liquid into a tall stainless-steel pot. He seasoned
three pieces of beef cheek and three pieces of oxtail with salt and pepper then opened up a tin of extra virgin olive oil and heated a few tablespoons in a wide, deep sauté pan. He added the three pieces of beef cheek, searing them well, then transferred them to a paper towel–lined hotel pan. He added diced carrots, leeks, and onion (collectively referred to as a
mirepoix
) to the pan and sautéed them. He transferred the meat and vegetables to the pot with the veal stock, snapped on a pressure-cooker lid, depressed the button in its center to vacuum-seal it, and left it to stew.

“Don't let me forget to take pictures,” he said to Guest, remembering Pelka's e-mail from the previous day. “We have to send them to,” he paused here for comedic effect, “The Corporation.”

Then Hollingsworth left to check on something two doors down Washington Street, at The French Laundry. As soon as he was gone, Guest, who was slicing carrot ribbons on a mandoline, stopped working, walked into the living room, squatted down next to the sound system, and lowered the volume considerably, a benign violation of the chain of command.

B
Y MID-A FTERNOON, A NUMBER
of preparations were ready to be finished and tasted. Hollingsworth removed the pressure-cooker lid from the beef. After the accumulated steam was released, and the meat had been allowed to rest and absorb some of the flavorful cooking liquid, he fished out a piece of beef cheek with a pair of tongs, set it on his cutting board, seasoned it with salt and pepper, cut a piece, tasted it, and grinned like a little kid.

“That's my mom's beef stew,” he said.

Apart from this comment, there was virtually no personal chit-chat; what little talk there was was related to the task list.

Moving right along, Hollingsworth heated a sauté pan, added some oil, and seared the three seasoned oxtail pieces to the tawny color of well-done bacon, periodically draining the fat from the pan. He then returned the beef cheeks' cooking liquid to the pressure cooker, added the oxtail, and snapped the lid back into place. The oxtail would fortify the liquid, which
would become the basis for the meat platter's sauce. For the moment he did not plan to incorporate the oxtail itself on the platter, for the simple reason that he didn't have an idea for how to use it. It was a risky decision because judges who noticed the absence of the cut might be inclined to penalize him for this end run.

Guest, meanwhile, had baked the potato dauphinoise to a deep golden brown, the cream bubbling up around the edges between the potato and the pan, and had chilled it in the freezer to make it easier to manipulate. She had moved on to making pommes Maxim: punching out one-and-a-quarter-inch circles out of sliced potatoes, tossing them with clarified butter, seasoning them with salt, arranging them in an overlapping circle, and baking them in the oven between two weighted Silpats, which browned and fused them together.

Hollingsworth pulled the potato dauphinoise from the freezer and composed the garnish he had in mind: punching out a cylinder of potato and setting it atop a pommes Maxim, wrapping that in carrot ribbons, top-ping it with a daisywheel of black truffles, and topping the composition with a hard-boiled quail egg.

Late in the day, Keller himself dropped in to say hello and check in. Seeing the pommes dauphinoise wrapped in carrot, he smiled and said, “That is really French.”

Hollingsworth took note of the comment. He knew it meant something, but wasn't sure what, and the chef took off before he could probe him for more feedback.

The team tried a few other preparations that afternoon. Hollingsworth fashioned a light truffle hollandaise, transferred it to an ISI gun, and attempted a version of the smoke garnish with leek puree, a stewed beef cheek cube, and pickled pearl onion. They added smoke with The Smoking Gun, an electric pipe manufactured by PolyScience featuring a carburetor that one lit, and a button that forced the smoke through a long tube.

They covered the bowl for a few minutes, then removed the lid and
tasted: the smoke wasn't especially prevalent, so nothing really pulled together the flavors of the beef cheeks and the sweet vegetables, and the puree was too loose.

But Hollingsworth wasn't really focused on the smoke glass. He couldn't get his mind off the pommes dauphinoise. He unwrapped the carrot and topped the potato cylinder with a turned carrot and a pickled pearl-onion layer.

Hollingsworth rested his hands on the table, a pose he lapses into when he's frustrated, when his thinking isn't clear. He couldn't quite put his finger on what was wrong, but he felt adrift, unsure of himself and his decisions.

Guest left him alone and started scrubbing the pans in the sink.

After they cleaned up for the night, Hollingsworth went for a drive to clear his head, then home to Napa. He fulfilled his reporting duties, sending a lengthy e-mail (typed by Laughlin) and several digital photographs of the day's haul to the committee, then he plopped down on the couch and cracked open his sketchpad. He also leafed through those books he'd picked up over Thanksgiving, skimming for inspiration.