Veronica: As a lifelong California resident, friends are always asking me for great restaurant recommendations. And one of my favorites is Studio Laguna Beach.
Hi, I’m Veronica Hill, your California expert. Today we’re in for a treat, executive chef, Craig Strong, is going to prepare one of its signature dishes for us. Come on inside, I can't wait.
If you have a chance to visit Montage resort, you must try Studio. Strong’s French cuisine with California influences is impeccable. Made with seasonal produce from around the world, just one bite and you’ll be hooked.
Craig: Hi, I’m Craig Strong. I’m the executive chef here at Studio at Montage Laguna Beach. You know I grew up here in southern California but my training is mostly classical French. So I just want to modernize those classics that everybody loves using the fresh ingredients from the farmer’s markets that we get right here in southern California. And an example of that would be my dungenous crabs salad with melon and a honey sherry vinaigrette. And I love to show you how I do it.
First you need a vanilla bean, and I have three egg yolks. If you haven’t used a vanilla bean before, it’s really simple. You get these, they have a great aroma, but all the flavor for vanilla bean is inside, it’s the seeds actually. This come from in an orchid so what you do is you just make an incision down the middle. Then you want to scrape out the seeds and those seeds right there, that’s we’re going to put inside. And those little seeds give a lot of flavor, so you really don’t need a whole heck of a lot. Just one vanilla bean is more than enough. So I’ve got three egg yolks, I’m going to put about half the juice of a lemon. We’re going to mix that up.
And the secret to a mayonnaise is just add the oil slowly, you can't add it too slow, but you can go too fast. If you go to fast, what will happen is it’ll separate. So just the secret is go little by little and then you’re set. So I’m going to just drizzle a little bit of this grape seed oil in here. And again, start real slowly, just maybe a few drops at a time. You can flavor this with anything you wanted. If you like vanilla bean, great. If you want to do a little bit of garlic, okay fine, you do a different dish. You can add whatever you want. This is a homemade mayonnaise. Again, grape seed oil is really neutral. If you want to give it a little Mediterranean flare, like I live in Barcelona for a couple of years. It would be garlic and olive oil. And then you could do that with maybe some other kind of fish that’s a little bit hardier like calamari or something like that would be classic.
So I have my mayonnaise, there it is. You can see it’s thickened up, you know that it’s going to bind everything. It’s going to make the crab seem a little bit more sumptuous, put just a little pinch of salt in this. I whisk that in then I have my crab meat here. That’s already cleaned and ready to go. So a couple of spoons of this mayonnaise, and I’m going to stir it up.
The next thing is we need to prepare the melon for the crab salad to go into. We’re going to peel it. These are great right now, so this is a honey dew. Hence why there’s a little bit of honey in the vinaigrette that we’re going to put on the lettuces later. Honey and melon goes really well together. Cut the melon into quarters, okay. So now we have it in quarters. Then I’m going to just cut out the seeds.
Now I have this piece. So what do I do with this? I'm going to square it up and then the off cuts, I’m going to puree and make a sauce out of and this I’m just going to make is so that it’ll fit my little slicer here. This is a Japanese mandolin, cost about 20 bucks. Its’ really sharp. It makes very thin slices. It’s a great tool to have at home. Makes things have a nice form. So that’s what we’re looking for. We just want a nice shape. So take this and slice very thinly, watch your fingers. And you see, you get a little thin slice like this. It’s in season, it’s perfect.
So I have my four little slices of melon, let’s lien this up like soldiers. I take a little bit of my crab salad mixture here. Mr. spatula just going to help me roll it up into a little cantalouni shape. Then you take a beautiful plate like this, going to take my little crab cantalounis. Set them in the middle. I have this sauce that I made which is just the puree of these scraps that I had left over. I put a few dots of this sauce around the edge. Then I have my honey sherry vinaigrette, which is just a little bit of honey, grape seed oil, and sherry vinegar. Mix this up a like this. Put a little bit on my lettuces. You can set these babies on top like that.
And then, like I said, vanilla bean and orchid is where the vanilla bean comes from, so what better to garnish it than this little tiny baby orchids, which adds a little color and are edible. So we’re going to add these. That will make it pretty. And there it is. We have a crab and melon salad with baby lettuces in honey sherry vinaigrette. I hope you will come join me at Studio Laguna Beach Montage and enjoy this salad
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