Cool Plates features dishes from across the country to help inspire chefs' creativity.
Chef-owner Scott Anderson recreates the flavors of a classic French Béarnaise sauce — egg yolk with a reduction of white wine, shallots and tarragon, emulsified with clarified butter — in this amuse-bouche.
He makes tarragon ice cream by adding fresh tarragon and a little salt to a less sweet ice cream base, and then freezing it. He sandwiches it between two brown butter shortbread cookies. Keeping the sandwiches upright are 64.5-degree egg yolks, made by cooking eggs in their shells for an hour in an immersion circulator set at 64.5 degrees Celsius.
“That makes the yolk pliable,” Anderson says. “It thickens it to the point where we can manipulate it, and it gives it that nice gold translucent color.”
He also puts some of the yolk on the sandwiches, which he garnishes with tarragon.
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