Foie Gras, Truffle, and Seared Scallop

ChefLive

Chef Jenifer Chandler

Foie Gras, Truffle, and Seared Scallops

Hi my name is Jenifer Chandler and with ChefLive and tonight we’re going to be making some seared foie gras. I'm going to sear some scallops with a little truffles. I got some tomato comfiture for the foie gras, a little juice that we’re going to use for our sauce and some garnish.

First thing I want to start out by heating up my pans. I’ll do the scallops first. I want a nice hot pan to do my scallops and I'm going to go ahead and season them up with some salt and pepper, but before I do that you notice there’s like a little guy hanging on the side of this, so we call the foot. This is how they close their shell. It comes really tough because it’s a mussel that they continue to use. So we want to remove these. Sometimes they have them on and sometimes they’ll fall off but always look for them.

Here we go, just get rid of those. I'm going to go ahead and season them up with little salt, white pepper, put them over. I'm going to grab some olive oil, our pan is getting warm. You want a nice hot pan just to sear to caramelize the bottom and make it nice to form a nice crust. Thing to remember about scallops is that it’s okay to cook in medium rare. A lot of people kind of get hesitant about fish when it comes to cooking it but most of the time like sushi products if you can eat raw that means you can eat it medium rare.

So get that with hot pan. We just sit it down. Okay, don’t move or I just take the scallops from there in the pan, we want them to form that crust so just kind of let it sit there. And you can kind of see it cooking up on the side. I move my pan off the way and you could just tell. So you want kind of let it cook all the way up until about fourth the way up and then we’ll flip them over and cook it fourth of the way up again, and then it would be a nice done. And also once you pull them off the heat, we’ll kind of cook them a little bit longer so they’re like nice.

We also have some foie gras here. Now, this is a goose liver. It comes in about liver size like this with two lobes. This is just the piece of it. This is very fatty so it will melt quickly and basically it doesn’t taste like normal chicken or beef liver anything like that, it has really mild flavor to it. And when you cut it you want to have a nice warm knife and slide through. And you want to cut it to a nice thickness because a lot of it is going to melt off. You can use the heat from the stove or you can get a nice hot pitcher of water. I love foie gras, it’s amazing. The first time I saw I was like “eww liver” and then I tasted it and fell in love. At first I can only eat seared foie, it’s nice hot buttery and now – then I started making the whole foie trains and I smooth on some breads and it’s just amazing.

I'm going to go ahead and put over my scallops. This works some time but – we have a nice little crust but I probably could have cooked them a little bit longer. There we go. And you can usually tell it like with meat whenever you press it you can tell that the tighter it gets the more cooked it is. So if you like your steak rare, the softer it is the more rare it is. So we’ll get that finish.

Now, with the foie you want to season it up real nice because they can handle a lot of salt. We add some pepper. What I'm going to do is – this is just about done. I'm going to start my pan back here to start heating it hot and I put for a moment. I got my own juice as well and I'm just going to go ahead and this is just juice from steaks that you cook off and that’s been solidified in the refrigerator so I'm going to warm that up.

And with the foie you don’t need to use any oil because it is a fatty substance and it will melt you’ll see. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to wash out my hand. This will continue to cook for a little while and I put those right there. I get this pan like really extremely hot because basically what I want to do is I want to get real hot, put it in there, form a nice crust, flip it over and do the same with the other side. Here we go.

So wait for a minute until that pan is nice and smoking hot, I’ll go ahead and I'm going to just pull these scallops out. This one might take a little bit longer. That one is a little smaller so I take him out the same with that. And I'm going to go ahead and what I want to do is I'm just going to slice these one more time maybe we could make a nice little layer.

All right. I think our pan is hot enough so I'm just going to go ahead and sit it in there and just put the season side down and then season this side as well. See how the fat is starting to render off rather quickly. I will just let that cook for a little bit and while that’s still cooking I'm going to grab a little knife and this is truffle puree with a little truffle oil in it. Truffle is a very, very expensive mushroom usually harvested underground, they find them around certain trees and they usually – the way they find them is they use a dog that sniff out the truffles.

You check this. I'm going to flip that over, a nice little caramelization on it. Now, you can tell when it’s finish. Before it was little hard – and then the pan when you feel it, you can still feel that it’s a little hard. Once it starts to soften up it’s when it’s just about done because it melt away if we leave it there too long. While that is finishing up, I’ll turn my heat down just a little bit. You can finish this in the oven if you have your oven on, you can just take it and finish it up. It does produce a lot of smoke so make sure you have your fan on.

So I'm going to take this truffles and I'm just going to spread them like a little sandwich right between my shallots. Okay I'm going to grab a plate to put my foie gras on and I like to put down a little tab because of the fattiness and—oh yeah. It's just nice and soft, looks like our sauce is done as well. There we go, oh yeah, this is our all cheese has melted down. I’ll just put that aside over here, get this stuff out of our way. All right, my plate. What I have here is the tomato comfiture and this is just tomatoes that have been reduced with a little sugar, a little rice wine vinegar and a little red wine vinegar and I'm going to make what you call canella.

You take two spoons and you just scrub a little amount and then you just kind of push it to the edge like this and that’s making like a football shape. That’s what we call a canella and it makes it look really nice. Were just going to set that right there on our plate and I have our scallops that I'm going to bring over here. Okay and then last but not least, a foie gras right up there. Foie gras goes really well with things that are sweet and sour because of the texture that’s fatty and they will kind of cleanse the palate.

A good saturation is usually served with it because their really sweet and I have a nice—let's just a little foie gras. Spread that around, not much just a little for flavor then I have some chives here. You can spot on my chopping board, I'm just going to chop those up really quick. It's nice little garnish, let's sprinkle that around and a little bit of our garnish on then stay. Then we last but not least, we have a little rock salt from Hawaii. It's called the Hawaiian salt and it's made—the reason why it's red is because of the clay and I’ll just sprinkle that on the foie gras. Maybe a little bit over here and there we have it.

There is scallop with foie gras in tomato comfiture.



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