Mangalitsa pork neck steak with Brussels sprouts and bacon. A mini-porkfest with great neck and bacon from Mosefund Farm. The steaks got more or less the EMP Cookbook treatment—the whole neck roll was cooked sous vide at 142 degrees for 24 hours, then sliced and seared. This time, I cut them much thicker (closer to an inch thick), only barely dusted with Wondra flour, salt, and pepper before searing. I liked the results much better; the original recipe produces thin medallions which have lots of fried pork flavor, but with pork this good, a thicker steak gives a meatier, fuller flavor. And of course, pan roasted Brussels sprouts cooked in Mangalitsa bacon fat is a perfect side.

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.

Pork neck medallions and sweet potato puree. Another adaptation from the Eleven Madison Park Cookbook, and this one is a winner. The Mangalitsa pork from Mosefund Farms was cooked sous vide for 24 hours, then transferred to an ice bath for four hours. Half-inch medallions were sliced, lightly dredged in flour, then quickly seared. The sweet potato puree is luxurious and rich; potatoes are sweat in butter, simmered in cream until soft, and pureed until smooth. As an aside, I love that the EMP cookbook has a complete, alphabetized section devoted to purees.

Roasted duck with lavender, honey, and asian spices, from the Eleven Madison Park Cookbook. The duck might not be the most creative or magnificent item on the EMP menu, but from a shear eating pleasure perspective, it’s probably my favorite. I’ve been cooking from this cookbook for a couple of weeks now (I’ll post some thoughts about that soon), and this happens to be one of the simplest recipes it contains. All you do is air dry the duck, rub it all over with honey, season it, stuff it with fresh lavender, and roast it. Easy. Well, sort of. A few things make it trickier than that:

First, the recipe as printed in the first run of the cookbook is misprinted—it says to cook the duck for a total of 18 minutes at 375. Oops. But that’s OK, I have a Thermapen for a reason.

Second, the size of the duck matters if you want crispy skin and properly cooked breasts. At EMP, they use Moscovy ducks that I’d estimate to be 6lbs. My little Lola duck from Hudson Valley Duck Farms was too small for this recipe, but I knew that so I compensated by using a bit of high heat at the end to crisp up the skin. My results were really good… the flavors in this recipe are wonderful, but I didn’t get to EMP level crispiness. Maybe this will be incentive I need to finally buy a blowtorch? We’ll see what happens next weekend with a bigger duck.

Finally, what to do with the legs. At the restaurant, they carve the breast at your table, then haul away the carcass. A minute later, confit legs in creamy mashed potatoes show up. Obviously they’re not the same legs that were on your bird. So what to do at home so that you don’t waste half a duck? On my little duck, I took it out of the oven when the breast was 135. At that point the legs were only 150-155. So, after carving off the breast, I returned the rest to the oven for another 20 minutes or so until the legs were done and had a second duck course. A second duck course is never a bad thing!

Anyway, like many of the recipes in the EMP cookbook, this is a starting point for a fantastic dish you can make at home. After a couple of weeks of eating lots of duck, it should be locked in.

Update: It only took one more try. Use a 6lb Moulard duck and make sure your oven is set to convection. Take the duck out when the breast hits 125F. Unbelievable recipe.

The Eleven Madison Park Cookbook, picked up today at the official release in SoHo. A good number of the EMP team were on hand for the release and everyone seamed genuinely thrilled and grateful for the occasion. I’ve spent about an hour with the cookbook so far, which is to say I’ve read intros, skimmed recipes for my favorite dishes, and glanced at everything else. This is a dense tome, but it’s also one of the most visually stunning cookbooks I’ve seen. We’ll see how accessible it ends up being, but in reality it looks more labor intensive and ingredient dependent than challenging. I can’t wait to try these recipes and then return to the restaurant and let Chef Humm and his staff cook them properly for me.

The full tasting menu with wine pairings from Eleven Madison Park last night. I thought people might appreciate seeing this as an example of what you are getting yourself into if you order the full tasting menu at EMP. And you are definitely getting yourself into something… be prepared to be there for 4-5 hours and to taste some of the best food in the world. I think I’ve documented on this blog that EMP is my favorite restaurant, but this was the first time I’ve gone in for the full tasting. It’s something I would recommend anyone do at least once.