He Cooks, She Cooks

I am sure this salad sets the record for most ingredients — steak, mushrooms, goat cheese, hard boiled eggs, pecans, bacon, sage, cilantro, chives, basil, lavender, honey, croutons and many others. But Craig Cyr’s point was to show off the great local products from Saturday morning’s farmer’s market. It worked. The executive chef and owner of The Wine Cellar & Bistro in Columbia put on a cooking demonstration using almost entirely fresh and local goods. He made the most elaborate salad I’ve ever seen, but it was one of the best I’ve tasted, too.

“The market this morning seemed to scream salad,” Cyr said. But with a slight chill in the air he decided to make a warm vinaigrette for a hearty lunch or dinner salad. The idea gradually came together at the market and in the kitchen, then continued to evolve as he prepared the dish in front of the crowd.

He put an Asian style marinade on the flank steak from Show Me Farms. Then he sautéed mushrooms in butter and white wine, and made a red wine vinaigrette with bacon and chives — very French. Thus, he dubbed the salad “East meets West.”

I loved that every bite was different from the previous. Sometimes you got a lion’s mane mushroom and lavender-scented pecan. Then it would be a bite of cilantro, bacon and egg. You’d get steak with goat cheese. Or spinach and a crouton. There were different textures, and the sweet, sour and savory balance was perfect.

Craig and Sarah Cyr, owners of The Wine Cellar & Bistro

I don’t know how much of each ingredient Cyr used, but I’ll go through the ingredients and process he went through. You can try to create something like it, or at least try some of the elements in a salad of your own.

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In the Los Angeles Times food section today, editor Russ Parsons (also the author of How to Read a French Fry, which I started reading the other day) discussed the benefits of adding acids like vinegars to a dish.

How many times have you watched Top Chef, or something like it, and heard the judges say, “It needs more acid” and wondered what exactly that meant? “Needs more acid” used to be my go-to phrase for sounding like a food snob in jest. Then I started to read about more about cooking, and suddenly acid is no joke.

Acidity is sourness. As I mentioned the other day, The Flavor Bible talks a lot about balancing flavors, and sourness is one of those. The book says acid is only second to salt in enhancing flavors. There’s a quote from Sharon Hage, a chef at York Street in Dallas, “We have lemon juice right next to the salt when we cook. Acid is the most important aspect of how a dish tastes — whether it is there as subtle punctuation or an exclamation point!”

The LA Times article focuses on vinegars (balsamic, red wine, sherry, apple cider), but I use citrus fruits a lot. Anything Thai or Latin benefits from a squeeze of lime, as something Mediterranean or Middle Eastern will be enhanced with lemon. Oranges are a lot less harsh than their yellow and green cousins, and orange zest adds depth to desserts, like in an apple-cranberry pie.

Wine is great for awakening dishes too. White wine or sherry in a stir-fry marinade or a dry red in tomato sauce are almost critical to me now.

The point is, when something seems sorta blah, a squeeze of citrus or splash of wine or vinegar could be your redemption. The Flavor Bible tells me so.