DORIE GREENSPAN

A Taste of Vegas Uncork'd

I'm in Las Vegas for Bon Appetit's Vegas Uncork'd, billed as an Epicurean Experience, it could modestly be called a culinary lollapalloza.  It's three days of lunches, dinners, workshops, tastings and general jolly-making with tens of Las Vegas chefs, which means tens of the country's best.  The amount of talent in this town is mind-boggling.

I've been here only 36 hours and already I've got too much to tell you and not enough time to sit down and do the telling.  So, I'll mention just a few things and then try to tell you more when I'm not in the midst of it all.   In no particular order, here are some tidbits ...

I'm staying at Wynn and being spoiled silly.  When I toddled into my room last night I found this amazing box of chocolates by Frederic Robert waiting for me.  It was very late and I was very tired, but as soon as I spotted the huge box I started giggling like a little kid.  From left to right by rows, there's:

• Candy bars -- coffee and coconut
• Caramel bouchee and milk gianduja bouchee
• Lollipops
• Chocolate-covered hazelnuts
• Tablets of milk chocolate, dark chocolate and white chocolate with fruit and nuts
• Chocolate-covered almonds
• Spiced mixed nuts
• Popcorn, and these

• Soft pretzels with mustard, which made a great snack this afternoon

These chocolates -- I called them, the package and the thoughtfulness amazing already, didn't I? -- joined another little goody, which also came with a story. I was picked up at the airport by someone from Wynn (told you I was being spoiled) and, in the course of our chatting, I mentioned that I love M&Ms and was hoping to find time to visit the M&M museum.  Thirty minutes later, when the bellman arrived with my bags, he said, "I understand you like M&M's, so maybe you'll like these," and he handed me this:

a bowl with enough M&Ms to keep me for the weekend.

In between chocolate treats, I hosted a dinner at Payard, Francois Payard's gem of a patisserie and dessert restaurant in Caesars Palace.  Here I am with Francois and Mario Rinaldi from Champagne Paul Goerg, who makes Francois' excellent rose Champagne (if you know my blog, you know that I almost never appear in pictures, but last night, whenever I said I wanted a picture of someone, I seemed to get pulled into the shot)

I was so busy eating and chatting with guests that I didn't get to take food shots, but if ever you're in Las Vegas, you've got to go to Payard, have the four-course dessert menu -- all of which will be prepared in the kitchen-in-the-round in the center of his beautiful and very intimate (only 40 seats) restaurant -- and hope that the Milk Chocolate Payard Candy Bar with Gianduja and Caramel Glaze is on it.

At the dinner was someone I think many of you know

the adorable (funny and smart) Adam Roberts, The Amateur Gourmet and the star of The FN Dish on the Food Network's website.

Then this afternoon, I played sidekick to Anthony Amorosa, executive chef of Michael Mina. 

Anthony did a workshop that had us all mesmerized -- he prepared a lobster cannoloni and a boneless rack of lamb sous-vide and got everyone in the overflow audience (me included) so excited about the possibilities of cooking this way at home that we were all teasing that soon we'd be competing against one another on e-bay to buy immersion circulators, the tool chefs use to keep water at a constant 68 degrees C, the ideal sous-vide temp.  Because it was so fascinating, I'll tell you more about Anthony's workshop and what I learned in a separate post.

The workshop was in the Bellagio, which means I had the chance to ogle Jean-Philippe Maury's pastisserie.  In the pastry case, I found Maury's contribution to rose fever

and on display, this whimsical assemblage of sculpted cakes

There's more, but I've got to get dolled up and get over to Caesar's for the Grand Tasting.

The Most Extraordinary Lemon Tart Re-thunk

A few weeks ago, I posted the recipe for this lemon tart, a favorite of mine from Pierre Herme, on Serious Eats and, coincidentally, it was chosen as the recipe of the week by the wonderful bakers at Tuesdays with Dorie.  I heard from some of you that you were having difficulties getting the lemon cream up to 180 degrees F -- 165 degrees F seemed to be the stopping point -- and that whether you called it quits at 165 or kept going to 180, it was taking a long time and a lot of elbow grease to thicken the cream.

Well, I made the recipe over the weekend and I've got a new thought on how to speed up the process and still get the thick, smooth, almost velvety cream that makes this tart so remarkable.

To recap, the recipe calls for the sugar, lemon zest, lemon juice and eggs to be mixed together in a bowl.  The bowl is put over a saucepan with a few inches of boiling water and you whisk, whisk, whisk until the mixture thickens enough for the whisk to leave tracks, then you keep whisking until the cream measures 180 degrees F on a candy or instant-read thermometer.  To finish the cream, you pour it into a blender and cool it slightly before you whir in room-temperature butter -- but that's not the problemmatic part.

So here's what I did over the weekend -- I got bold!  To make my double boiler, I used a soup pot and I filled it about 2/3 full of water, which I brought to a boil.  I then put the bowl (a metal bowl) with all the ingredients over the steaming soup pot (making sure that the bottom of the bowl wasn't touching the boiling water) and whisked like mad.  With so much heat under the bowl, the cream came up to 180 degrees F in under 10 minutes (in fact, the first time I did it, it took 4 minutes and 39 seconds; the second time, it took almost 7 minutes -- different bowl, different pot, different stove).

Of course, if you're going to supercharge the power under the bowl, you've got to be vigilant -- you can't take your eyes off the cream; energetic -- you can't stop whisking, even for a few seconds; and  nimble -- as soon as the cream shows the slightest signs of thickening, measure the temperature and make sure to remove the bowl from the heat immediately the instant you hit 180 degrees F.

A couple of other re-thinks:  If your lemon zest was very finely grated (I use a Microplane grater/zester), then you don't need to strain the cream -- just quickly scrape the hot cream from the bowl into the blender.  And, while you shouldn't add the butter to the cream while it's still very hot (if you do, then the butter will melt, as it does in a lemon curd, and you won't get the great texture that sets this cream apart), you don't really need to measure the cream's temperature before you butterize it -- if you leave the cream in the blender for 8 to 10 minutes, it will be just the right temperature for blending in the butter.

Finally, I made this tart on Sunday as part of my workshop at Pastry Scoop's Spring Conference at The French Culinary Institute, and, because it was at hand, I used lime juice in place of the lemon juice and it worked perfectly.

I hope those of you who haven't already made the tart, will -- it's really one of my all-time favorite recipes -- and that those of you who've already made it, will find these tweaks helpful the next time you decide to whisk up this treat.