Knives at Dawn (24 page)

But he found himself unmoved. Worse, he was confused. And then it hit him: the food in those books might have been beautiful, but it was only beautiful because it was
different
. “It is not American and not what you would typically do,” he thought to himself.

In retrospect he felt he understood what Keller had meant by his comment earlier in the day—“That is really French.” He thought that The Chef was trying to tell him: “Tim, you know deep down inside [that this is not you], so why do you go and do something that is not you? Why aren't you being yourself?”

Hollingsworth slammed the books closed, pushed them aside, and broke out his copy of
The Flavor Bible
, the new book by Dornenburg and Page, whose earlier
Culinary Artistry
had gotten him through those menu meetings during his formative years at The French Laundry. He thumbed
it to death that night, looking up possible accompaniments for caviar, for cod, for scallops, and for any number of ingredients, both assigned and elective, that he had been grappling with.

He stayed up until three in the morning like that, filling his head with new ideas, sketching them in his notebook, getting ready for the next day, a day in which—if nothing else—he would cook from the heart.

W
EDNESDAY
, D
ECEMBER 17 WAS
a sunny day in Yountville, with temperatures in the mid-fifties. On his morning e-mail review, Hollingsworth received a note from Kaysen, responding to the update and photographs with a characteristically friendly and supportive missive. But it also contained a question that all but screamed out at him: “Can you explain the garnishes in the pictures for me please … what am I looking at?”

What am I looking at?

WHAT AM I LOOKING AT?

For Hollingsworth, the query reinforced the epiphany of the night before: he was drifting too far from the food he wanted to make, veering into the land of nonsensical flourishes. “It's really important that I believe in the food and that I'm comfortable with it,” he said, sounding as sure of himself as he had since winning in Orlando. “I can't even tell you how impossible it would be for me to serve the pommes dauphinoise with carrot wrapped around it.”

By 11:00 a.m., a sense of déjà vu permeated the Bocuse House as Hollingsworth and Guest were back at it. Once again, he braised beef cheeks, which he sliced and put into a sous-vide bag with maple syrup, then steamed in the oven. The utility of developing and practicing on the Bocuse d'Or equipment was fast becoming apparent: it was taking Hollingsworth some time to get used to the oven. Each time he opened the door to check on the meat, he had to jerk his head back to avoid a face full of hot steam, not the kind of thing you want to have happen when you're being observed on the world stage.

And, as was the case the day before, there was a steady stream of music DJ'd by Hollingsworth, only now it was being piped out of a Bose iPod dock he had brought in and stationed in the kitchen.

As Eminem sang about his daughter, Haley, Hollingsworth butchered a whole cod. Although Guest moved quickly in these sessions, Hollings-worth butchered the cod more slowly than he normally would, using the opportunity to take the fish apart as a chance to imagine the possibilities of what he might do with it. He still didn't have that fish centerpiece finalized, and he hoped—to no avail on this day—that the intimacy of butchering might deliver inspiration.

Guest meanwhile was preparing the potato garnish Hollingsworth was considering for the fish platter, a potato mille-feuille—similar in construct to the dauphinoise, but made by brushing each potato layer with butter, seasoning them with salt, and inserting overlapping strips of bacon every five layers. She moved even faster on this day than she had the day before. Maybe it was because Robert Plant was screeching “Whole Lotta Love” in her ears.

As Mickey Avalon's hardcore rap anthem, “Waiting to Die,” shook the kitchen, Guest also retried the pommes dauphinoise; yesterday's were too creamy, the layers slid apart and were hard to punch out. Though this was how Hollingsworth had first made it at home, it wasn't the desired effect for competition. This time, she weighed all the ingredients, even the salt, to track and adjust and be precise. “Otherwise you're just guessing,” she said. She also used only cream, with no milk, and omitted the black pepper, which Hollingsworth realized marred the truffle's flavor. (In time, he would also omit the garlic.)

Around 2:00 p.m., Hollingsworth sliced a few wedges from the previous day's dauphinoise and set them aside. He then heated some olive oil in a sauté pan and added some spinach, working it with a silver spoon as it wilted. He sliced some meat from the leftover oxtail from the day before, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and topped it with some grain mustard. This he put between slices of bread, set on a plate, and spooned spinach and
potato cake alongside. It wasn't a garnish: it was
lunch
for him and Guest. Even this kitchen had its version of a family meal.

Guest was ready to move on to her Silpat work for the day. Among the garnishes they would be trying was another new one: Hollingsworth had moved on from the custard “stacks” that were part of his first dish conception, but still wanted to include some kind of custard: it was a luxurious and versatile component and one that Guest could make. By now, he envisioned a custard, made unconventionally with eggs but no dairy, and flavored with Champagne vinegar, that would be presented in individual glasses. The custard would be topped with a small amount of intensely flavored shrimp consommé. (He planned to use shrimp consommé in competition but because there was always lobster glace on hand at The French Laundry, that's what he used in this and subsequent practices.) Until he could think of a shrimp-focused garnish, he would add chopped shrimp to the consommé for the sake of using them. A melba topped with sliced scallops and sized to hover high in the glass would complete the composition. In addition to the flavor, Hollingsworth was attracted to the idea of having an inch or so of space between the melba and the custard—his understated way of playing the competition game.

Hollingsworth used French Laundry shorthand to describe the melba toast he had in mind: “Just like the garlic melba, but light.” Guest knew that this meant to adapt a melba they used at the restaurant, leaving off the garlic and parmesan. So she set to work, slicing thin mushroom-shaped slices from a loaf of brioche, punching out circles, layering them between Silpats, weighting them, and baking them to the exact desired degree of color and crunch; just thirty seconds too long and they would be over-cooked and have a burnt flavor. If they were cooked too little, they might lack the fortitude to support the sliced scallops they had to carry, or to survive the hang time over the steaming hot liquid, which threatened to wilt them.

Over the course of the afternoon, they made several garnishes:

For the fish platter there were:

The custard: Hollingsworth sliced a raw scallop into thin rounds and overlapped them in a circular pattern over a brioche melba, then set that in the glass high above the custard, finishing it with a quenelle of Petrossian caviar; and

The mille-feuille: Once Guest had baked and cooled it, Hollingsworth unmolded it and cut out a rectangle with angled ends, topping the piece with crème fraîche and a quenelle of caviar.

For the meat platter, there were:

The revised pommes dauphinoise: A rectangle of the potato preparation was set on a rectangular pommes Maxim, the browned top layer trimmed and decorated with chestnut and a salad of shaved celery, green celery leaves, and cutting celery (a microgreen);

The smoke glass: into the orb that everybody loved went apple puree topped with a tornado-like twirl of bresaola, a brunoise of cabbage, and a chiffonade (long, thin strips) of quick-pickled pearl onion.

The deconstructed beef stew: a punched-out turnip round (made by pushing a cookie-cutter-like tool through a slice of the vegetable) topped with a cube of stewed beef cheek, then small buttons of punched-out carrots threaded on a thyme sprig and perched horizontally, and pickled pearl onion … before tasting that, Hollingsworth put another cube on a paper towel to its left, topped it with broccolini florets and
stem segments and pickled pearl-onion layers. He professed a preference for the look of the second one.

Hollingsworth felt better about this day's work product. In comparison to the carrot-wrapped potato concoction, the one he had just made—with the celery salad and chestnut on top—pleased him both as a chef and as a potential eater. “That looks like something I want to eat,” he said. “The other one does not.”

Guest agreed with her chef's assessment of the prior day's experiment. “There's just no purpose to it,” she said. “Especially the carrot.”

Nothing was completely nailed down, and there remained a number of issues unique to the competition: for example, the brioche melba had become soggy after just twelve minutes of resting over the steam of the hot consommé, which wouldn't be a concern in a restaurant, but at the Bocuse d'Or, with that lag time, could prove fatal.