Moulard duck leg with lavender, honey, and asian spices along with bourbon maple sweet potato puree. Last week I posted about the duck recipe from Eleven Madison Park’s new cookbook. This weekend, as promised, I cooked more duck. This time, I used a 6lb Moulard duck (from Hudson Valley Duck Farm) and the results were fantastic. The skin crisped nearly to perfection and took on a much deeper color while the meat was more uniformly cooked to the desired temperature.

The sweet potato puree is a modification on the EMP recipe I talked about last week. For this version, I made the obvious addition of BLiS Bourbon Barrel Matured Maple Syrup and they were every bit as good you would expect.

Mangalitsa pork sirloin chop from Mosefund Farm with chanterelle mushroom risotto and bourbon-maple pan sauce. The 18 ounce mangalitsa chop was cooked sous vide with salt, pepper, and BLiS maple syrup, then quickly seared. The pan was deglazed with bourbon, then the liquid from the sous vide bags was added to the pan and reduced.

I tried something new with the risotto—a new minimal stirring recipe from Serious Eats. I’ve always been in the stir-the-risotto-constantly camp because I like the control. This batch didn’t do anything to pull me away from stirring. I don’t doubt that these recipes work well when followed to the letter and have been customized for your home’s range. But, when you want to start playing around with different liquids like mushroom steeping water, etc., there’s no substitute for the control that comes with adding one cup of liquid at a time and stirring constantly. Oh well.

Babbo’s maple mascarpone cheesecake, made at home. Unfortunately, this cheesecake has stopped showing up on the menu at Babbo in the last year or so. I appreciate that menus need to change, but this is one of my favorite desserts anywhere and I would’ve ordered it on every visit.

The recipe appears in the Babbo cookbook and online here, but it takes extremely careful baking to approach what you used to be able to get in the restaurant. If you whip the ingredients too little or too much, the texture suffers. If you don’t reduce the maple cream right, it’s soup or a brick. Unless you’re a cheesecake master, it’s challenging to tell when the small cakes are just set and not curdling, but cooking by internal temperature rather than time or look can help. Anyway, this attempt, drizzled with BLiS Bourbon Barrel Maple Syrup was as good as it gets. If this is repeatable, I’ll forgive Mario for shaking up the menu.

Mangalitsa pork chop with BLiS Bourbon Barrel Aged Maple Syrup glazed sweet potatoes. These Mangalitsa chops from Mosefund Farm might just be the best pork there is.

Homemade brioche french toast. I took this photo to send in a thank you email to someone who gave gifted me a couple of bottles of my favorite BLiS maple syrup. Great gift! Anyway, for my tastes, a couple of decent slices of fresh brioche make the best french toast—especially when served with delicious vanilla infused maple syrup.

Maple and chipotle duck breast. Not all food experiments work out, but this one sure did. I seared the Hudson Valley Duck Farms magret skin-side down as per usual to crisp and render out fat, then coated with a mixture of BLiS bourbon barrel maple syrup and chipotle and baked to medium rare. The liquid you see in the pan (concentrated syrup and drippings) was drizzled for serving.

Fat-wrapped prime filet topped with stilton and maple-glazed carrots. The filet from Florence Meat Market comes wrapped in fat which does a great job adding some flavor to this cut. Cheese is Colston Basset Stilton from Neals Yard, probably my favorite blue. Carrots were simply roasted and glazed with BLiS Bourbon Barrel Matured Maple Syrup.

Seared U6 Maine diver scallop with BLiS Bourbon Barrel Matured Maple Syrup cream and smoked bacon bits. This is a real treat and is relatively easy if you start with the right ingredients. This would still be good with normal high quality maple syrup, but the smoky bourbon flavor in the BLiS Maple Syrup really makes this special. Here’s what I did:

Cook 4-5 slices of bacon until crisp and plenty of fat is rendered. Dust the scallops lightly with flour, kosher salt, and black pepper, then sear quickly in the rendered bacon fat.

For the cream, simmer 2:1 ratio of heavy cream to maple syrup until reduced to a thick cream. Remove from heat and whisk a bit of Dijon mustard to taste and a bit of heavy cream to smooth it out.

BLiS maple syrups… Bourbon Barrel Matured and Tahitian Vanilla Infused. When something is regularly on the menus of the French Laundry, Alinea, Eleven Madison Park, etc., you know it’s good. The Tahitian Vanilla Infused maple syrup is exactly what you would hope—fragrance and flavor of vanilla with the sweet and rich backbone of maple syrup. Sticky sweet, this would be great in desserts or on crepes. The Bourbon Barrel Matured version, on the other hand, is balanced and complex, finishing with toasty bourbon flavor that lingers for quite some time. This is the product BLiS is known for, and I can’t wait to try it with everything from seared scallops to fancy breakfast to various desserts. This maple syrup encapsulated in ice cream prep is maybe the most interesting use I’ve seen—is liquid nitrogen too dangerous to use at home? :)