Recent Stories with tag iron chef

This weekend's episode of Iron Chef America featured only the second husband-wife cooking team in all of Iron Chef history: Rachel Yang and Seif Chirchi, the masterminds behind Wallingford Korean-French-American-whatever else eatery Joule. Along with being an award-winner in its own right, Joule just happens to be (friend of The SunBreak) Gastrolust Jay's favorite restaurant in town--and that's saying something. So we were more than a little intrigued to hear the local duo would be competing in venerable Kitchen Stadium.  Yang and Chirchi chose to take on the newest Iron Chef, Jose Garces. Secret ingredient: Hawaiian moi, the fish of kings.  Let's get ready to cook some fish!

So first everybody got busy scraping off fish scales. Scrape scrape scrape. Fish bones and heads were thrown into pots to make stock. There were different butchering techniques on display, with Yang doing more filets and Garces doing more fish fingers and strips, though Yang also made use of her fish skin, first stretched and then fried. So many ingredients at play:  daikon, carrots, and fennel in the rapid pressure cooker; onions, pear, apple, and jujubes, salted shrimp, and anchovy sauce made into puree; not to mention the soft-boiled quail eggs, banana leaves, salted corn nuts, nori, panko-fried sweet potatoes, and bechamel sauce. Moi was smoked, salt-cooked, stuffed, ceviched, tempura-ed, seared, and tartared.  Something for everyone!...

(more)