The Chef: Jeremy Brutzkus (Longman & Eagle)The Challenger:Courtney Joseph (Takashi)The Ingredient: Mastic
To incorporate the mastic into the dish, Brutzkus first pulverized it and cooked it into a syrup with sugar and water. “If you heat it, it’ll turn it into almost like a piece of tar. Translucent tar,” Brutzkus said of the mastic. “It won’t dissolve into the syrup; it’ll basically extract some of the flavor out of it, and then you end up with a chunk of mastic that binds up on its own.”
Andrew Brochu of the Aviary, challenged by Brutzkus to make a dish with milk jam. “Essentially it’s a form of dulce de leche,” Brutzkus said, but instead of starting with condensed milk, you cook down fresh milk and sugar until they caramelize. It “leaves room for interpretation,” Brutzkus said—among other possibilities, there’s the option of infusing the milk with another ingredient.
Honey “pork rind”
60 g potato starch 5 g maltodextrin 1 g vanilla paste 21 g honey
Toast pine nuts. Scrape pulp from vanilla bean. Add all to Robocoupe (or food processor), blend until homogeneous.
