March 24th, 2011 by Trevett

the new space
Sometime in late spring we’ll be moving Legume to Oakland, where Moré Restaurant was located at 214 N. Craig Street. We’re looking forward to the new options created by more space in the kitchen, a cozy bar, and a more comfortable setting in the dining room.

Progress is always a little slower than we’d like.  We have a great crew of people on the job working as hard as they can on our new Oakland location, but sometimes things come to a standstill when everything hinges on a piece of paper somewhere that needs signed by someone.  We’re still aiming to be open before summer starts.

In the meantime, please visit us in our Regent Square location before we move!  And tell your friends we are still open!  We have received phone calls from people who heard we are now closed, which is false.  In our remaining time there, we will be celebrating our stay in our Regent Square location by putting many of our “best of” dishes back on the menu.  It may be the last time we serve certain dishes such as the Chicken Cooked Under a Skillet.  As wonderful as some of these dishes are, they belong to the little bistro on Braddock Avenue.

We are also announcing our last series of special dinners.  We haven’t done many special events this winter because Sarah and I have been spread thin getting the new space ready.  But when we realized that some of our favorite ‘Gume memories are from the special dinners we have held over the years, we wanted to make sure we did a few more before we moved.

I ate at Legume several weeks ago, and it was the best meal I’ve ever had there.  Normally when I eat at my own restaurant, I can’t sleep that night because there are so many things I want to fix immediately.  This is true.  But this time, there was something different.  I think part of it might be that it is easier for me to enjoy Legume when I’m not in the kitchen all the time.  But I also think that a lot of it had to do with the fact that we have really hit our stride.  I think we are finally beginning to know what we’re doing—just in time to start all over again.

catching up
Something that had always turned me off to cooking avant-garde is the idea that there was ever anything wrong with traditional cooking in the first place.  I’ve never felt bored or confined working within the realm of old-fashioned methods of cooking and so I have never really understood the urgent need for science and technology to make food “better.”  While I’m certainly not anti-technology or anti-science, I tend to get a little nervous whenever science and technology are supposed to “fix” something.   (They certainly don’t have a good track record for fixing agriculture.)

But when I watched different avant-garde chefs talk about their work at the Harvard Science and Cooking lecture series via YouTube, it became very clear that these are great cooks who are very sincere about making beautiful food.  They are also very generous about sharing what they have learned with other cooks, which is much more refreshing than the attitude held by some (not all) traditionalists who view modern cooking techniques as “cheating.”  The sincere spirit of these avant-garde cooks, along with peers I have cooked with over the years who have been very generous sharing their experience with me, has made me reconsider my own personal resistance to modern cooking. There is a lot of practical information now widely available that can be useful to any cook, even those of us with little or no interest in pushing the envelope.

We recently bought a used Winston CVap oven.  These were originally designed for KFC as holding units to keep their fried chicken crispy for long periods of time.   The beauty of the CVap for our use at Legume is that we can cook our duck confit at a very precise, slow temperature, which is not possible with traditional ovens.  It’s also been great for cooking our pates and custards, because with such precise control over the humidity and heat, we don’t even need to use a water bath. So far, we haven’t used the CVap to do anything new; it just makes what we were already doing easier.

Bavette steak (called “flap steak” in English; it sells much better under the French name) is a wonderfully delicious cut of steak which has always been kind of a nightmare to portion into nice, even-cooking pieces because of its irregular, flat shape.  With transglutanimase, we can glue the thin pieces together and get a nice, evenly-thick steak with a better char-to-inside ratio than a flat piece.  This allows us to take a lower cut of beef and make it into something a little nicer to eat.  This helps us offset the high costs we pay for hormone and antibiotic-free beef, which can cost nearly double the price of conventional beef, especially for lower cuts.   Again, we are not really doing anything new or radical with meat glue—it’s just a practical tool to make a dish we were already making easier to cook properly and with more consistency.

Legume owns an immersion circulator, but we have not used it yet.  We don’t have any near-term plans to buy a vacuum sealer to do sous vide cooking, because I’m too WTF? to submit an HACAP to the ACHD, especially when we have a CVap which is like my new BFF.   I’m not ruling sous vide out of the realm of possibility though, since it is a great way to make pastured meats palatable to folks who expect corn-fed texture.  But even if we never get around to that, at least we’ll have an excellent (if ridiculously expensive) egg cooker.

My prediction is that the young cooks ten years from now will view Xantham gum, lecithin, transglutaminase and thermal circulators the same way my generation views baking soda, cream of tartar and food processors—that is, as useful tools we take for granted that make certain things possible.  How much of this will filter into the daily cooking we do at Legume remains unknown at this point; we really have no desire to change our style.  But as we discover tools and techniques that help us execute our cooking better, we plan to make full use of them.

One of the things that makes Legume a fun place to work is we like to learn new things.  I’m not saying playing around with this modern stuff is the only way to go about learning new things, but it’s hard to deny its usefulness.  Taking an approach of exposing ourselves to new ideas and remaining curious in the kitchen is consistent with the way we have been cooking at Legume since day one.  In this sense, nothing is changing.