Lamb Shanks Roasted "al la Matignon" with Chef Thomas Keller

hello everybody and welcome to William Sonoma here in San Francisco for our first ever I think webcast out of this beautiful kitchen first of all I want to introduce you to Devin Nell our chef de cuisine at the Thomas Keller restaurant group who's been with me for quite a while and who's helped me with many recipes and has put together this one for us and I think you can be very excited I also want to acknowledge amanda haas our chef de cuisine here at williams-sonoma for all of her help and support through this process and again welcome so thank you for coming and thank you for joining us before we get started I want to talk about the way I view cooking and it's it's very simple it's a very simple equation it has two parts first part is about ingredients now certainly you see some ingredients here and the ingredients are really really really important and they're part of the responsibility that we have in sourcing and chefs really spend a lot of time sourcing high quality ingredients is what what makes us special it what makes us have the ability to to give our guests and give you an extraordinary experience at our restaurants so we're always sourcing ingredients and with that we have a great relationship with our our farmers our fishermen our gardeners and our foragers those those individuals who commit their lives to bring us these ingredients in fact we have one here right now because we're going to do a wonderful recipe for you it's a lamb shank from Elysian Fields far more pure sorry from pure bread which is part of a lesion fields farm in Wayne Waynesburg Pennsylvania and we're gonna cook it a lomatin yon and we're going to serve it with ratatouille yellow corn Anson Mills polenta and a beautiful sauce so I would introduce you all to a great friend of mine and a wonderful man mr. Keith Martin Oh chef Thomas thank you very much chef Devon really appreciate the opportunity to be with you today thank you very much it's good to have leisure fields we we think more holistically in our approach we really like to focus on the animal and really uh the focus needs to shift away from consumerism to the we agree you know it's as I said it's all about our ingredients making sure that we have those extraordinary ingredients being able to support individuals like you so again really I commend you for your efforts and for your commitment to bringing us these extraordinary animals that we use every day and we don't ever take them for granted the other part of an equation is equation we talk about ingredients and we need to really talk about our execution now execution has a lots of you know several I shouldn't say a lot of thing but several things involved in execution one of them is skills Devon has has great skills I have skills that sometimes border on on his but he's an extraordinary chef Amanda has a certain level of skills all of you have certain levels of skills so I would encourage you certainly today hopefully you'll learn a couple things and if you can take a couple things away from anything then you're way ahead of the game but we want to encourage you to continue to work on your skills whether that's your knife skills you're roasting skills just your your ability to to organize and do me sound plows or you know get everything ready so that when you do start a recipe you can finish it without being distracted by having to go to the refrigerator or go to the store to get something that you forgot execution also has to do with our tools you know a great cutting board a wonderful sharp knife or a wonderful set of sharp knives some spoons things like this which we need it to be able to cook and then of course our equipment and and many of those things are our ovens making sure that our ovens are calibrated successfully we we talked about that earlier today making sure that these others were calibrated successfully to talk to us a little bit about calibration Devon I mean really the concept of calibration is very simple just because the dial says that your oven is 350 degrees does not necessarily mean that it's 350 degrees so you know if your ovens too hot you're going to cook too fast it might go too far if it's too slow you might not achieve the same results so really the best thing you can do is purchase a small inexpensive rack-mounted my thermometer mama that hangs with your other yes I mean really in terms of calibrating your oven you can either have that professionally done or we just learn where your oven is at certain times and and cook from kind of what your temperature is actually reading not what the dial says because that will affect ultimately the cooking time in this recipe yeah I believe we specified three and a half hours but that may be longer or less depending on the calibration of it and also depending on the size of the lamb or in this case the size of lamb or whatever you're cooking we're using what about a pound and a quarter lamb Chang these are pounder and quarter lamb shank right right so if it's a heavier if it's a pound and a half you know it may take a little longer if they're a pound they may take a little less time but always making sure that you have your your equipment then of course we're going to talk about you know are all clad cookware here and and I am so proud to be associated with this company number one I believe they makes the best cookware in America and number two they're made in America so I'm extremely proud of that today you know and when we talk about all clad cookware we talked about three I think three specific things for me is recovery how fast the pan we heats after you add something a conductivity and distribution of heat how how the pan distributes the heat and how it conducts the heat to bring it up to a very even distribution and then of course of course shape and size and this is a very interesting pan this is the all clad essential bat correct and and you have articulated so well the the quality of the shape as relates to this recipe I think this pan is great for many reasons I think it's really versatile but in this application what it really does is it helps distribute the moisture because we're not adding a tremendous amount of moisture in comparisons like a traditional breeze so what we want to do is create steam and break down the vegetables break down the lamb and have that steam circulate so if you can see the shape of the pan the steam is going to come out the side and condense on the top and then actually based right on top of meat as it's cooking and maintain that moisture so it's a great pan for a lot of things but especially this location okay so we're going to go ahead and and saute or roast or pan roast this this lamb shank Devin's going to going to season it with some salt so we're using kosher salt really because it's it's easy to distribute evenly it's it's kind of a coarse grind that allows you to pick it up and rain rain so now hey we love it I love winter when the salt rains down yeah we don't we don't ever want to season like this right because you're not it's not just really evenly the higher you go the more the the natural gravity and and distributes the salt as it falls through the air so we want to make sure that we understand that distribution is very very important even distribution is very very important typically you would see in any recipes or as well as it's my older cookbooks where we talk about seasoning it's salt and pepper well I just want to I just want to lighten you will give you a little bit of information on that because I've kind of changed my philosophy on seasoning so that's not it's not necessarily about salt and pepper salt enhances flavor we all know that salt will will bring out the quality of the ingredient the flavor so we know when something when we say something things bland why does it tasting bland well it's tasting bland because it doesn't have enough season doesn't have salt in it of course if it's over salted and it tastes like salt we don't want to do that we want to add enough salt to bring out the flavor pepper on the other hand adds flavor so pepper has its own flavor and it's adding flavor and if we put pepper on there now of course we're getting it to this hot oil the pepper also may scorch and burn adding a different flavor to it which we don't really like so we're not going to use pepper anymore in the beginning of the seasoning process we're going to use it at the end more as a condiment to add the flavor of pepper afterwards so we set that pepper side you can see here we've heated up our oil and we've got it quite hot you can see a little smoke it starts to shimmer on top that's about what we want it to be the tempering of the lamb yes so the lamb is tempered and really what that entails is just pulling the lamb out of or any meat any meat fish any type of protein out of the refrigerator at least a half an hour or longer before you cook it that eliminates like a cold core so you're not you're going to get a very even heating distribution when you cook it when you add it to your pan you're not going to cool the oil off and you're just going to have a much better cooking process I think it's important to note too we added quite a bit of oil here and that's not going to be retained in the food so a lot of people are worried about using a large quantity of oil when they when they sear because they're they're conscientious about the fat content of food this will serving this purpose only really to brown the lamb and after the process is over we're going to discard it so you know I think it's going to help create an even browning just by filling in all the voids and imperfections of the surface all right so you knew air if you're gonna if you're gonna if you don't know how much oil to add error on the side of too much oil as opposed to not enough wood okay okay so we're going ahead and do that that's talking about let's talk about the process of methanol in it and and what Matt's in your means and and how we get to that point really what the purpose of these beautiful these beautiful vegetables that we have cut up here sure so Matt methionine is a basically a bed of vegetables that that meat fish or or any other product is cooked in and what we've chosen today to use our leeks carrots and onions we selected these because they contribute a sweetness to the overall dish they're aromatic and they release a lot of moisture so oftentimes like a traditional pot roast we would have like large chunks of vegetables that are designed to cook slowly with this what we want here is we want these vegetables we cut these about 3/8 of an inch roughly it doesn't have to look beautiful but the small size and what we want that to do is to expose more surface area of the vegetables release more aroma more flavor and more liquid so that's going to become our cooking liquid right and so we're doing we're doing a lamb chang method on here what is not what else is a good party yeah you know we talked about that again you know being able to roast a lamb at the old as well in other words not cover something up I'm a raw chicken for example maybe a good way to the rotor and roast the methanol I mean any really anything you can cook it's a different way of approaching cooking obviously other breeze cuts like short ribs lamb shoulder would be great you could do you could do spareribs like this you know it all works but even something that's really delicate and you know that needs a lot of moisture so if there's like a piece of halibut right halibuts a very lean white-fleshed fish if we put a piece of halibut in oven it's just got dry air circulating around it it's going to dry the fish up itself if we needed halibut we're surrounding with the moisture of the vegetables and we're maintaining that moisture of the fish itself I mean obviously the cooking time is gonna be different but we you know it certainly can apply to almost anything and then one of the things that we also again suggest is after you cook with the Matteson y'all you know we're gonna discard the vegetables in this case so you know I can recommend that you could use it you can use it as actually part of the dish they're really gonna be beautiful vegetables they've absorbed they've not only given a lot of table the table absorbs a lot of flavor as well so they can become part of the dish you can have almost a one-pot dish if you watch some other things we've done with that is we pureed it to make a soup we've made a bolognese sauce with it much pasta parts with and there's so many different elements that you can do so you know think about that as we're starting to learn how to cook is being able to extend the quality of your recipe beyond that that specific recipe there so you can see here we've had some really wonderful color on lamb shank here okay so it's almost done we're gonna take it out of the shot here right now to be very careful of course I think we have time we have time for a question so let's look at some questions from from our Twitter feed ah what is the difference between a stew and a LeMat signal a stew is going to have much more liquid is you're going to add enough liquid into into the into the ingredients that they're actually they're actually going to do they're going to be totally encased in liquid almost like a braise but the stews going to be something that's done on top of the oven when a braise is something that's done in the other so hopefully that helps you understand the difference between a typical stool and a lime at the norm okay so now we're going to begin the process of building our sauce or building our flavor profiles here so we're going to drain off some of our oil here alright some of that salt that was excess salt that was on there as well will go away with it so we're limiting some of the salt that was excess on there as well a little bit more of that you can see how much salt we have left over all that so it's that all that all the salt is going into recipes I'm gonna deduct sorry we're deglaze it here without with some water okay with some of that nice the meat juices that were trapped on the bottom of the pan we want to be able to get those off start that building of the flavor I always I always think of myself as a homeless as a carpenter you know we carpenters build walls and you see when you're looking at a wall we always see the beautiful wall as it looks from the exterior but behind there are many different elements that help support that wall so when you're building your sauce we're doing the same thing we're adding different ingredients whether they're liquids or vegetables or Aero mats or spices to to the sauce to build the flavor profile without even recognizing necessarily any one of those ingredients and it's a very important thing to think about but I think that's a great point because if you just read a recipe and add all the ingredients to the pot you're going to get a very different quality of finished product than if you take the time to to really add the detail techniques I think the better the thing about this recipe is really not the recipe itself it's a technique of building flavor with really humble ingredients you have a piece of meat and some really you know nice vegetables and that's really about it and you can make a lot of a lot of flavor with without a million different spices or or you know ingredients right we talk about spices if you do if you like spices I mean you can make this check it out curry to this you get a tough break into this you could add chili powder time you can almost anything you want to increase our or to extend a flavor profile so don't always just think about it as the recipe that we're giving you today think about how you can make it your own recipe using some of these techniques which i think is the most important thing so not only do we have our methanol we're going to add a bouquet garni which is traditional it's got parsley stems some thyme and bay leaf and then a few pieces of crushed garlic again if you don't like garlic don't use garlic if you don't like thyme maybe you want to substitute it with with rosemary or something yeah I mean any lemongrass you can make it anything you want exactly that was after the lemongrass sounds really good that sounds really good so we're going to continue this we're going to add now we're going to add our our vegetables okay and you can see how high that is right now we're going to cook this down and of course it's going to reduce or diminish in in volume because a lot of the water that's in the vegetables is actually now going to release and part of the way to get the water to release from the vegetables is again adding salt so we get a little bit of salt to that now when you put salt on a tomato for example you know you see how all the moisture comes to the top or or eggplant you know the technique to remove some of that bitterness from the eggplant is by taking the water out of the eggplant which is actually what causes the be better I think we can take another question from our from our Twitter feed if we have one it's a good time as we're cooking down our vegetables here any tips or shortcuts you can make at home if you're crunched for time I think I think this is actually a perfect question exactly yeah I mean obviously we're ready for this one right exactly but I mean if you really think about we're cooking pretty much in real time here for the most part it with the exception of the cooking time so getting this ready up to this point really took us I think 15 minutes now at the most what you what this is great about this recipe is it can be stopped halfway and so it's something when you do have the time maybe at the end of night you know you come home from work you can go to this point put this in the oven and let it cook for you know the required amount of time to make it tender and just put in a refrigerator and then the next day all you really need to do is heat it up and continue it spray another half an hour you know or so from there so it's like I mean I think that you you obviously can't cook this more quickly you know in a conventional means but but I think if you organize your time it's very very doable right you know again it's called me some bots and planning one of the things I love about dishes like this is that the transformation you know you're transforming a kind of meat that you can't cook quickly in other words I mean a steak a fillet a fish anything like that you can take you can take a steak home and cook it in seven minutes basically going to be done but you know what you're going to have and the quality the quality of the ingredient is certainly paramount there I mean if you're going to have want to have a great experience with a steak then you've got you know spend the money to get a really great steak lamb shanks on the other hand you know again quality of ingredients are paramount but it's the transformation through the process that that's so important because if you don't use the right technique take the right amount of time you're not going to have what we want what we want to be able to we would watch to be able to have which is a really wonderful experience not only in the cooking process because for me that that's one of the meaningful things is to be able to transform something like this it is something that is so good through the the different sounds that you have when you're cooking food like this the different aromas it already we're smelling all these different aromas in the kitchen from the different items we're cooking the vegetables now you know we're taking on you know that beautiful sauteed vegetable called but it can also start to smell the thyme in here as its cooks it starts to envelop the kitchen in that in a beautiful aroma so transformation of ingredients like this is so satisfying gratifying and really goes from being bitter and pungent to being sweet right you know so if again like if you just kind of threw all the ingredients in there and went front when the oven you didn't take the time to create that sweetness something something's been compromised in your recipe so that that wouldn't be an area where I would take the time but you know maybe just organizing you know organizing your time around this recipe really is beneficial yeah that's the transformation these ingredients which i think is so important so you know do this a day ahead do this two days ahead this is a dish that you know you could do on a Saturday or Sunday you can certainly eat it that night but you can also eat it on Monday Tuesday or Wednesday you could you could you could cook six shanks for example if you wanted to any two or three that night and then turn the rest into you know into a beautiful Raghu I'm starting to tacos you could turn it into absolutely a lasagna I mean you could turn into so many different things you can make sandwiches out of it I mean it's just the opportunities for you are endless and a dish like this so don't be afraid to spend the time because what's going to happen once you spend the time is the versatility of the and the quality of the food that you cooked is going to be so gratifying okay so anything else on that Navin you can add on I think you hit okay so we're gonna do now here we're gonna add some red wine okay go ahead you want pour that in there um and again you know if you don't like wine in your food then of course don't use wine you can use chicken stock juice fruit juice almost anything you want we we like the wine for a couple different reasons it helps enrich the the color and helps enrich the flavor we like that but again you know this is your recipe this can be your recipe if you just modify in specific ways now the thing about about any alcohol and certainly wine falls into that category is we want to be able to cook off the alcohol before we continue with the recipe so cooking out the alcohol is nothing more than just letting it simmer letting it study a cook and the way you can tell number one you know you you want to be able to experience what alcohol feels like on your in your nasal passage so what you want to do to experience that is you just stick your head in there and you take a you inhale it and and the alcohol is going to burn the raw alcohol that's in there is going to burn my nostrils right up in here so I know there's still alcohol in there so I need to continue to cook it until when I do I don't feel the the burn of the raw alcohol anymore but I smell the sweetness of the wine so we let that cook probably for about three or four minutes in order for that alcohol to evaporate that alcohol be the first thing that evaporates alcohols are very volatile liquid so it's going to be the first thing that evaporates off this wine and we don't we want to make sure that it's all gone before we continue with the process because once we cover this and we trap it you know and as Devin was explaining earlier the process of the cooking and and and the steam and the steam basting the the lamb shanks again if that alcohol is in there it's not going to go away alcohol try me too I mean this right now is a problem here but it does dry right need out okay so we have another question from our from our Twitter friends when do you use the flour to help sear the protein hmm yeah I mean you can you can always use flour you can elect not to it's more of a it's more of a older style of cooking but really I've already teased flour I would have applied the flour at the very last minute and prior to searing I just want to really light coating so what I would do if I were to use flour on that that shame because I would have seasoned it and then immediately dredged it in flour and shake the off the excess so it's just a very very thin coating if you do it too far in advance that salts going to pull moisture from the meat and you're going to get more almost like a fried chicken better for a for a lack of a better description like a very thick coating that's going to flake off and the sheets and it's instead of thickening your sauce somewhat and taking on just give it a nice nutty roasted flour flavor you're gonna you're gonna wind up having like little bits and sheets of flour that's been braised and in your your sauce and remember the flour is a hydrocolloid up the hydrolyzed what the hell is that hydrochloride is an ingredient that binds water together so it makes water thick right so you know it's a new term that we've used a lot lately in in our modern kitchens they have all different kinds of hydrocolloids things like the anthem xantham gum karajia jello gel and things like this but flour is also hydrocolloid in other words it makes water thick and so in the old days when they would do a lamb ragu Danya or lamb stew we would always coat the pieces of lamb and flour as we sauteed them then we would add the liquid so what would happen is the flour that was on the lamb would begin to bind the water begin to make the stew if you will so so flour in that process was a thickening agent not necessary a process of being able to brown the meat because we can right right we can we didn't color the meat without adding flour but if we added flour it would help with thickening this okay another thing that we thought that we talked about earlier too is is if you wanted to serve the vegetables with this dish but you wanted to have a starch so you have to starch you know add vegetables and starch you could put pieces of potato in here and and the fact that adding potatoes would do would do what it would think I mean you'd liberate the starch from the potato right taking it right so we have more modern and light approach exactly because it's potato starch you know much like corn starch or rice flour things like that modified starches okay are we ready to add the lamb back we are we are okay so we're gonna get on now we're gonna Nesler lamb shanks in there okay you can see how how beautiful I smelled it is there any is there any stick your head in there it's gone it's gone it's gone you can't really eat you have to trust us on this please there's we're nestled our lay on there okay we're gonna go ahead and cover it I think when you when you cover it is important it's important little it yeah it's important to get that steam generating so I mean obviously your lamb is cooler so it's going to just kind of slow the cooking down a little bit so we want to reinvigorate the heat and get it going before we go into the oven right now as this continues to cook the vegetables are going to give up more of their liquid they're become more compressed and the lamb will really be then enveloped in the liquid so we go in the oven all right oh okay we got through that part I think we did okay doing tank made it okay so now um we're gonna go in in TV time or in web webcast time we're gonna we're gonna fast-forward to the lamb shanks that we've been cooking here for about three and a half hours yeah right you should do it three hours yeah person and we're gonna get out we're gonna get ready here with to do I'm sorry stuff we get ready here to do our sauce okay so again that one of the things that we want we want to really emphasize here is the resting we talked about that a little bit earlier I'm going to re-emphasize that you want to let the lamb rest for as long as possible you know is a half hour enough about half hours all you have then it's enough but you know the longer that it has an opportunity that meat has an opportunity to reabsorb the liquid the more moist and succulent that lamb is going to be or any any protein if you did a braids I'm sorry if you did click brains as well you know you'd want to let that do the same thing exactly and I think like a lot of times people I made some he asked me to say other day he's not he's not a cook but he's a home chef and was wondering why his braised dishes would come out dry and any news stating that he'd follow a recipe and this and that and I think that could really most likely be attributed to just as soon as it's come you didn't come out of the oven we're going to eat it it's like it's like eating a steak immediately off the grill if you don't let it rest it's going to be dry so I mean it applies to brazing - right it's more important than brazing I mean resting all your your proteins is important but in a braise or in a mat - Nolan a situation like this where we have that moisture you really want to you really want to let it rest and if in going back to the original claw earlier question was if you wanted to stop you know and continue on the next day this is the perfect point to just stop let it cool down a little bit and put it in your refrigerator you can even leave it in the pan if you have the space since it's good beginning I think it looks great are we doing now no I don't wanna be X Factor yeah I think we're taking the lamb out of here we did make our sauce right yes oh you can see right you know it's very poor you can see all that fat on the top right and I we don't worried about that No number one it comes from the fact that was excess fat that we had in our pan which wasn't much but most of this fat is coming from the lamp yeah yeah so again a lot of a lot of flavor there so the longer you let this sit and rest in the liquid the better off recuit happens it's not only absorb so liquid some of the fats materials or be lost that's very important okay so beautiful beautiful lamb shanks so I mean if you look at the pan you can see the level of the liquid is the same level of what the vegetables were except the vegetables I mean I'm greatly diminished and so really now it's it's almost all I mean I would say it's reduced by at least half in terms of its original volume ha yeah we didn't let it rest here and let it rest no rest for the wicked come on come on okay cute it's just so versatile there you go thank you chef see even I struggle sometimes it's so tender so it's melt in your mouth you can you can tell and I think that's actually something we should hit on is we were talking earlier about just because the timer went off and the recipe says it's done doesn't mean it's done so we really need to be able to do is check to make sure that's tender so this should actually be done before you let it rest we've come out of the oven we want to take something like a simple paring knife or you know a cake tester it's good really good and hot we want it we want to pierce it gently with a knife and the knife should just offer where the meat should offer very little resistance to the knife so should just be able to go in without you having to push it without feeling any resilience and and if it does resist we all you just put the oven the lid on cook some more right back in the oven and it's a great way to practice this so you know what it feels like is buy a baked potato take your take your your your your paring knife or your cake test or whatever you're using and put it through the raw potato you're going to feel resistance because it's raw start making the potato bake it for a half an hour and then feel the resistance you'll still have some resistance as you go through because it's not cooked all the way through and then finally after the hour or whatever it takes to come to baked potato when it's totally done stick your knife through it no resistance that that gives you a good indication and a good way to practice what that resistance feels like okay this is wonderful and and I you know and and I have some of the liquid on my fingers and they're sticking together because of the gelatin that's come out of the bones and the mean so so beautifully so that's gonna take yeah so we're gonna go ahead and strain this now okay so we can start our sauce process now we got to be careful so we're first going through a coarse strainer because we have a coarser you know volume of vegetables here and that's just going to be much more efficient than trying to go through something really fine right immediately the larger the ingredient that's in the liquid that you're straining the larger the hole the strainer okay and then want to go through a really fine hole strainer now I want I want to point out some something that it's really some of you may not realize it but you saw me pour all this liquid from this pot through the strainer now one of the qualities of the all-clad or this copper core is the rolled edge which allows me to pour evenly and have it have it stream out without spilling over the edge a straight edge pot is going to be impossible to pour out rubble down pour off the bottom right yeah it's a great oh yeah just something to think about here we have a little we're gonna show you this clever this clever little contraption here what's it called a degreaser gravy separator a gravy stuff was it called a mega a gravy separator okay so it's a gravy separator we love gravy separators although we don't use them but in this case we are going to try it and they work really rather well I think I remember my mother had one of these and what happens to it is when you add your liquid or your stock all of the fat in a few minutes all the fat will rise to the top and then of course the spigot that's on the bottom or the spot on the bottom we'd be able to pour it off and we'll be able to have all of your stock and or your your base for your grave you or your sauce be separated from the fat so it's really a wonderful way in a restaurant we wouldn't actually do it this way because our volumes are much larger we'd have a little different approach to it but nonetheless it works really really well so in the meantime we can do with this we can cover it right just to keep it warm in the oven I think it should also be noted to like another level of detail that you can add to your repertoire that that wolves I'll make it improve your I just keep it covered yeah that can improve your cooking you know in terms of refinement and people and people really notice is is by investing you know with ten fifteen dollars in a small fine mesh strainer so we're removing all the particles from that sauce so instead of having kind of a like a sauce that has a lot of fibers and particles and you're gonna have a very crystal clear smooth silky sauce beautiful - that beautiful sauce and I think I'll add at home at home you may want to put this in the oven so that you can finish your sauce but since we've already done a sauce ahead of time and reduced it for just for time considerations we'll just leave it here so you can see how it's already begun to separate clever we love it it even has all different kinds of measurements on the side of it but anyway enough about that so we've got we've got to write that chewy up sorry that's our polenta we've got a ratatouille here okay we've got our polenta here we've got our beautiful lamb there we've got our beautiful sauce okay so there are three components that we want to do now again you know you can serve this with anything you want we've just made some recommendations here because I love this time of year with the the ratatouille that we have balance is always something that I find very very very very fulfilling and and elegant here we go in our sauce of course which we've already reduced and you can get a sense of the color of it I know and I don't know if you can see the dark the darkness of it but this sauce comes from that there okay and I wish you were here to smell these aromas but you're not so you can say um I know is Keith still with us to meet this Keith still with us no okay sorry do we have time for another question I think we have another question just to clarify what is the desired of the temperature okay Devon you are like oh that one we selected 275 degrees because it's probably really the lowest effective temperature I think for something like this that that would produce these results in a reasonable amount of time I think the crucial part with that temperature is really making sure that you bring this up to a boil or simmer before you place in the oven or else you're gonna have that much more lag time alone in the oven you know so so I mean I really you know you don't want to go to art yes they don't wanna boil I don't want to boil it so you know it at a low simmer 275 is really where we're going to be simmering in the oven so I think that's a really good temperature to have it at okay remember cooking is all about time and temperature so the lower the temperature the longer you can cook it at 250 it's just gonna take you you know X number of hours longer right so in our sauce here again bring up something that I think will be will be interesting for you to learn today is about again about seasoning because seasoning is so important we talked about the quality of the flavors of our food okay we talked about the exquisite ingredients but being able to season is critical so use the use of salt is critical but there's another element another ingredient that also does the same thing salt does which is enhance the flavor and that is acid acid so acid in the form of of fruit to our citrus you know lemon lime grapefruit orange I'll have acid and all great enhancers you see those in vinaigrettes now you see those in different ways use different ways in different cultures to to add acid acid acid to the to the green ceviche is is probably one of the most famous ways of using acid from a citrus to to really season and cure their fish this time we're going to a little bit of vinegar vinegar will also you know it has the a sense of flavor and we like to use vinegar in areas where there's a lot of liquids so we don't we can reduce the amount of salt by a certain amount but salt and vinegar in the end the in the sauce here to enhance the flavor so just a couple drops if you taste the vinegar and it's not a vinegar sauce but obviously you've added too much vinegar we just want that we want to make the sauce taste more more of lamb I think I think one thing too that we should we should try to stress be sweet that's it's a really sweet sauce I'm sorry I don't know I know it's a really sweet sauce because of all the vegetables that we use we think about onions a lot a lot of natural sugar none you think about carrots or it's got a natural sugar character you think about leeks again it's an onion so there's lot of sugar so this is relatively a very a really sweet sauce that has that intense flavor of the vinegar it's not vinegar now by saving the land whoa sorry so but here we can add a couple drops of vinegar manage a little bit of salt and then I always like you know I always like to finish my sauce a little bit better but you were gonna say something I think I one thing to be to help clarify and will help people at home is you see that we start off with a very thin liquid and we've we've determined this is is ready to be finished sauce and the way that we've determined that is by by tasting rather than relying on viscosity alone because it often times if you go to what you perceived to be the best viscosity it's going to taste either salty or have an overly concentrated flavor so it's Bert yeah it's not it's not it becomes something great to something that's somewhat unpleasant so really when you think that that your sauce tastes the best is when you should stop producing it and if it's too thin you there's nothing wrong with serving a thin sauce but if you want to thicken it you could just take you know cornstarch or any other sort of you know thickening agents hydrocolloid good to to bring that texture back so you can have best of both worlds so something that's something to think about right and cornstarch you know or any modify starch is a quick way to make something thick you know the Chinese of the ages issues they not just change but the Asians have been using cornstarch to thicken things for for I don't know longest as long as I can remember long time it's and that's just that's just a purpose of taking a little bit of cornstarch mixed in with a little bit of water to make what we call a slurry and then mixing that a little bit in the into the sauce okay run to your liquid so beautiful ratatouille here I like this the polenta can be as creamy or as thick as you like it's one of those things that's really it's about a personal personal flavor texture we put a little bit marché component ours we like that but that's our richness and a lot of butter but you know what can I say about the butter basically yeah look at that okay no it's great hmm it smells better and we like to finish a lot of our proteins with some finishing salt in this case we have some great salt it comes from from from France we like it now because it enhances the flavors I spoke about already but also gives a little bit of texture a little bit of that a little bit that crunch and I kind of like that that crunch of salt between my teeth and you think we want pepper I think I think now is an appropriate time to have pepper now is the appropriate time to add pepper now would be the appropriate time to add olive oil as well if you want to use olive oil and be the appropriate time that add the olive oil as well if we want is to drizzle bit olive oil on top there we go our our lamb shank our leisure our purebred lamb shank a lomatin yom with ratatouille polenta and a beautiful sauce I think we have time for another question so well I stuffed my mouth here you maybe want to ask the questions I will go how they go yeah I mean yeah that's a great question because why bundle the herbs if we're going to remove them it really that's that's a really great question if you're if you're not planning on reusing the vegetables then there really isn't much much point in it I mean it says it's an extra step I would say possibly you could gain benefit if you bundle them tightly that they're going to release their flavor and aroma more more slowly but that's probably not anybody that big of a factor what are the one of the things that we talk about in our kitchens is is habits is creating really really good habits so even though we may not always have to bundle the herbs there are those occasions where you need to you know if we did a mat if we did a bouquet garni in the ratatouille which we did if we would let those herbs separate we'd be picking them out one by one which would be a really pain actually so we always we encourage our team certainly the younger chefs are coming into our restaurant to follow good practice and good practice is always creating a bouquet garni or bundling your you're elevating or elevating your repertoire of skills as well exactly okay how is it needs more salt I'd say that ingest because we have such a hard collar into salt that we always want a little more salt anyway I think there you have it we've had a great time shooting me we've had a great time sharing this technique with you we hope that you've gained as much out of this as as as we as we aspired for you and at least at least the one thing that you can grab from this would be would be a great success for so thanks for joining us have a good afternoon thank you

Channel: Williams Sonoma

Views: 362,687

Rating: 4.5282307 out of 5

Keywords: recipe, cooking, cooking demonstration, chef thomas keller, williams-sonoma, lamb shanks, pure bred lamb, #itsallabouttechnique, Sep 18, 2013, Thomas Keller (Author), Food, Roasting (Culinary Technique)

Id: KNn4DBo09lA

Length: 43min 53sec (2633 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 17 2013