Sunday, February 15, 2009

Valentines Day Shots


Here we have the start of our chocolate dipped hazelnuts with fleur de sel. This was our amuse bouche for valentines day. On this tray alone there were roughly 400 hazelnuts. We poured hard ganache over the four different times and then topped them with fleur de sel.


This is our almond brittle thuile being molded on our back line. We used it for the Banana Split for Two shown below. My sous John and I write a lot menus over many beers and we play the what if. Example, what if we did a banana split for valentines day. Yeah, maybe we could make a huge sweeping thuile to come off the plate. Sounds great. Well the next part is actually making the thuile. I am no pastry chef, but with a little trial and error and one quick run to Ace hardware we actually pulled this one off. These are the types of experiments for me that really get me excited. Especially when they work. It is actally pretty scary how many of our ideas come through versus how many fail.

Thanks to all who came for Valntines day. I am pretty sure the banana split is going on to our regular menu.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Great ending to a fabulous meal. My hat goes off to chef's who are not afraid to "experiment" with flavors and textures during these hard economic times. And extra praise should go to the owners who give their chefs creative freedom to make decisions about menus that will ulimately keep people coming back for years, even if they don't come right away. Restaurants like Azure Grill are a dying breed that I will forever cherish, again and again.