December 3rd, 2011 by Sarah & Trevett

fall at legume
veggies
This fall has been the most natural transition from one season to the next in the four years we’ve been open. When the first twinge of cold hits the air in September, and the Steelers are playing again and the kids go back to school, I’m normally ready to jump into fall cooking. But because we were closed for most of the summer, we were trying to cook with corn, tomatoes and beans for as long as possible this year which made me realize how quick we were to forsake summer’s bounty in years past. It’s always tempting to jump ahead to the next season, especially when we get bored with things we have worked with for many weeks. But our circumstance this year taught me about how much we miss out on when we rush the seasons.

From a vegetable point of view, fall and spring cook like mirror images of each other: lots of greens and roots. Right now we’re cooking as many greens as we can while they are around. There are also many great salad greens to be had. Many customers have asked for a traditional green salad. Chris and Aeros have some salad greens in the hoop house going and we’ll definitely have something like that soon. But in the meantime, we hope people will try the grilled radicchio and spelt salad or the escarole with warm bacon vinaigrette, poached egg and pickled vegetables.

Pretty soon many of the green things will be gone, except for things grown indoors. I’ve been resisting the rutabagas, turnips, parsnips and sunchokes just yet because I know they’ll be at the center of our vegetable life until the middle of May. But it won’t be long until all the cooking greens will have been picked and it will be time to flood the walk-in with the ‘Nips. Chris and Aeros have half a ton or so of roots in cold storage for us, and I’m curious to see how long they last us at our new volume. They are also going to be experimenting with green things in their greenhouse this year, and we’re looking forward to having a bit of green throughout the winter.

Working with Chris and Aeros has absolutely transformed the way we cook at Legume. Without this partnership with Who Cooks For You farm, we would not be able to put a high percentage of high quality organic vegetables on the plate. Thanks to them, along with Penn’s Corner Farm Alliance and Clarion River Organics, every winter it is becoming possible to cook with a higher percentage of beautiful food than it was the year before. Cooking with a significant amount of local, organic food can be a 52-week a year thing, not just a warm weather thing. People like Chris, Aeros, Neil and Nathan and many others are quietly doing important work to make this possible for chefs here in Pittsburgh.

It’s important to point out that we are still heavily dependent on conventional farms too, especially in the winter. We’re not perfect. However, it is true that we are able to serve way more quality stuff in the winter than we did five years ago. Who knows what it will be like in another five?  It’s an exciting thing to witness.

Chefs need your help to cook seasonally. Try escarole. Try radicchio.  Try a fish that isn’t farmed salmon the next time you go out to eat. You, the eater, create the demand. There is a way to eat that connects us with the seasons and with life itself. It’s beautiful and exciting and actually very healthy for you. Most good chefs in this city have something seasonal on their menu at all times. Trust them.

appreciation
It is hard to resist the temptation to offer a list of excuses and disclaimers when writing about the first two months of our opening. Suffice it to say that my worst fear—that we would get busy before we were ready for it—came true.

Difficulty is a great teacher, and we have certainly learned a lot over the past two months. I was talking about this with Legume’s sous chef Jamilka, and we were reflecting on how far we have come in two months and how in a way it feels as though we just opened three weeks ago. All the cooks are in survival mode—we have worked long six-day weeks since the opening. While there are signs that a touch of madness has set in, it’s amazing that tension and burnout hadn’t erupted sooner. I think it’s a real testament to the maturity of the team we have in the kitchen that we haven’t killed each other yet given the long hours and the difficulties we have faced together.
We had our busiest night of service ever this past Saturday and it went very well. We have gotten much better managing the reservation book so as not to overwhelm the kitchen at one time, and we are now doing with eight cooks on the line what we were trying to do with six. These two adjustments have made a world of difference.  I’m not ready to say that we have hit our stride yet—and I’m sure that we have a few rough services ahead of us—but we are learning quickly and building a strong, tight-knit team in the process.

Legume would not be able to produce the food we do without a great amount of sacrifice on the part of our cooks and servers. They have all put in many more hours than I have asked for, and most have taken a cut in pay to be here. It’s a little bit unbelievable.

Professional cooks are a rare breed of human. What is it that keeps a cook working for an under-slept, stressed out chef so good at pounding away at their vulnerabilities? I don’t know. My cooks have been through a lot over the past two months, but they still keep coming back and giving 100% every day. I don’t understand why they do it, and I don’t understand why I did it for my mentors. All I know is that there is something unbreakable in the heart of a true cook.

Finally, we want to thank all our loyal customers, those who followed us from our Regent Square location and those who’ve newly found us in Oakland. We are grateful to have served you, and we thank you for your patience while we get settled in our new space. We hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

full service bar
Have you seen our bar? It has a life of its own. We think you should check it out which is why we’re offering a super-blowout happy hour explosion until Christmas. $2 off all drafts, $5 well drinks and $4 house wines. Happy hour is Monday-Friday from 4-6p and 10p ’till midnight.

Happy hour isn’t the only great thing about the bar. We were very lucky to make friends with Miki Szabo this summer, an amazing woodworker who went above and beyond our vision of what we wanted in the bar. (Like all good artists, Miki couldn’t stop.) Legume cooks Justin and Andrew spent many hours this summer planing and hand sanding the local walnut paneling by hand.

We are still dreaming up a bar menu. It will get here soon. In the meantime, you can order anything off the regular menu in the bar. (It’s nice to finally have a place to feed folks who just want to drop in for a quick bite!) With cold season coming on, we’re really excited about all the warm cocktails the friendly bartenders are dreaming up.

house fermenter
We are excited to have Naomi Auth as our official house fermenter. Right now we have many beautiful vegetables rotting in a controlled manner. Can’t wait to begin offering them in a week or two.

caroline’s pour
2009 Domaine Champalou Vouvray La Cuvée des Fondraux
Didier and Catherine Champalou have been making various styles of Vouvray at their estate since 1983. Rather successfully, at that. The Chenin Blanc grape is cultivated from the clay and flinty soil well known in the Loire Valley. The Champalou Family work diligently to allow the grape to speak on its own. They joined a group of winemakers who practice sustainable viticulture known as Terra Vitis. They also farm according to the biodynamic system, which takes the lunar cycle into account. By tasting the grapes while still on the vine, they judge when the sugar level is appropriate. This type of hands on approach in the vineyard is rarely seen with the technological advancements that have catapulted mass-quantity trends. Once the grapes are picked, they are transferred to large wooden barrels where they lie on their lees for just under a year. This step adds a lovely richness and complexity.

The wine has a small amount of residual sugar leaving it off dry. This can make pairing very interesting and fun. Notes of honey, ripe grapefruit, lemon zest and pineapple all show through on the nose with acidity to back it up. There is a subtle balance on the palate bringing acid, sugar, fruit and minerality forward. Its minerality would go well with any fish, charcuterie, herbaceous dishes, roasted vegetables and even poultry.

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.

November 3rd, 2010 by Trevett

november
The meeting of summer and fall is over, which makes November the first real culinary month of autumn.  Sure, we made a few token batches of pumpkin soups, a batch of goulash and cooked a few root vegetables in October, but uncle October gave us too many delicious tomatoes, beans and herbs this year for it to feel like the cold weather was really on its way.  But at the market today it was very apparent that the growing season is drawing to a close and that it won’t be long before we are resigned to many months of root vegetables and cabbage.

In some ways, that’s a relief.  Now that the first few frosts have hit, we’ll finally permit ourselves to start using canned tomatoes again.  It’s a bittersweet thing really:  it’s a bummer that we won’t see a fresh one until next July, yet a relief that we won’t have to blanch, peel and seed any more until then.  It’ll also nice to know that the fruits and vegetables we’ll be dealing with for the next seven months or so will have long shelf lives.  In the summer, we put a lot of energy into managing the ripeness of our vegetables and fruits.   A tomato has about a one or two day window of when it is perfectly ripe;  green beans need to be used up within a few days of receiving them; eggplant becomes bitter too long after being picked.  In short, the vegetables of summer demand a lot of attention.  Fall and winter veggies, on the other hand, have a much longer shelf life.  “Relax dude,” the Nips say (parsnips, turnips, rutabaganips)  “we’ll be just as tasty after a month of sitting in your walk-in as we are right now!”  Right on bro!

But the growing season is not over yet, and the markets are still abounding with wonderful fall fruits, root vegetables and leafy green things.  The Monday East Liberty farmer’s market has a remarkable selection of pears, apples and quince right now, and there are only three more weeks to enjoy it.  Paul’s orchard has been supplying us with delicious Asian pears and quince this fall.  Right across from those guys is the Grumpy Bluebird guy with heirloom russet apples, which are the most amazing apple I’ve ever tasted.  Almost as delicious as the russets have been the apples from an old forgotten orchard near Daniel Miller’s farm in New Willmington.  He’s not sure what variety they are, and neither am I, but they’ve worked out very well in the applesauce and dried apples that we’ve been putting up.

Our favorite apple producer, however, is third generation farmer, Tim Heilman from Kistaco farm.  Tim will supply us with most of the apples we’ll be using this year.  He supplies us with all of the cider we use to make vinegar throughout the fall and winter and he also is responsible for the mix of apples we use in our crisps.  (People ask us what apples we use in the crisp, but I have no idea.  It’s all Tim.)  He also supplies us with all of the peaches and most of the cherries we use.  Last but not least, Tim gave us some homemade applejack last year, which we used this past weekend to braise the pork shoulder in.  It was just phenomenal.  (It’s almost too delicious to cook with, except that Tim warned me about the awful hangovers.)  Don’t forget to visit Tim and all of the other farmers at the Saturday East Liberty Farmer’s market—Pittsburgh’s oldest and only year-round market.

lobster ravioli
Fall is a great time for lobster, which is why we are having Lobster Ravioli night this coming Thursday.  Because of the popularity of Lobster Ravioli night, we’ll be ordering extra lobster and we plan to have some ravioli available for the first seating on Friday.  (Please come on the early side if you want to guarantee the availability.)  Our ravioli is good because we keep the filling simple: it’s just lobster cooked in very salty water with a little bit of mascarpone cheese.  From the bodies we make a delicious sauce, and we usually serve it with some kind of root vegetable puree, either celery root or parsnip, and maybe some sautéed mizuna.

shaker dried corn
“By this time the sweet corn was also ripe, and then my grandmother (assisted by me and the magic Dutch oven) prepared one more of the distinctly great Pennsylvania Dutch food achievements—Shaker dried corn.  This is another item which it seems astonishing to me that the rest of the country does not know…I honestly believe that the taste of Shaker dried corn is better than the taste of corn when it is fresh from the cob.”  From the Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook by Justus George Frederick.

After learning about Shaker corn this spring from Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook, I was really eager to try it.  The idea of a dried corn product that originated in Pennsylvania is exciting to me—even if Eastern PA (where Shaker dried corn originates) might as well be another state.

We have three sources of “Shaker Corn.”  The first is sweet corn we dehydrated ourselves this past summer.  After making two batches, we realized it was way too costly to do it this way, and so we started asking around to see if anyone else had heard of it.  In July I asked two different Amish farmers—Sam and Nettie from Sommerset and Daniel from New Willmington — if they had every heard of such a thing.  They hadn’t, but they were willing to dry fresh sweet corn for us.  I had totally forgotten my requests until several weeks ago when Daniel showed up with several bags of it, and again two Saturdays ago when Brian Greenawalt, who visits Sam and Nettie every week and sells their produce at the Saturday East Liberty farmer’s market, had a big bucket of dried sweet corn for us.

I’m not sure if what we have is authentic Shaker dried corn, since it is something I’ve only read about.  If you’re an expert on Shaker dried corn and want to tell me it’s not authentic, that’s okay with me; whatever this stuff may or may not be, it is delicious.  There is a nuttiness reminiscent of canned corn and a nice tooth that is unbelievably similar to fresh corn.  Whether or not the flavor is better than that of corn on the cob as Justus claims is a matter of personal opinion.  If you appreciate canned cream corn like I do, then you’ll love Shaker dried corn.  We’ll be offering it as a side this week and then saving the rest for the winter.

whole animals
Most of the meat we cook at Legume comes cryovaced in plastic bags.  In the fall and winter, when our basement kitchen is cool, we occasionally buy a whole animal and break it down ourselves, partly for our own education and partly for fun.   Practically speaking, it’s not the best way to keep the labor costs down at the bistro.  Butchering whole animals consumes a considerable amount of energy, time and space—three things no restaurant ever seems to have enough of.

When meat comes to us already cut up in a plastic bag it is too easily viewed as merely another food “product.”  But when it comes in whole—with eyeballs looking back at us—it is much easier to remember that we are working with something that was a living, breathing animal.  This is important, especially as the weather gets cold and more of the food we are using comes from God-knows-where.  Working with whole animals from farmers we know gives us an opportunity to stay connected with the communities that provide us with wonderful food in the warmer months.  From a culinary perspective, working with whole animals has taken my cooks and I down paths which we may not have otherwise traveled.  It has led to failures and unexpected rewards.

This fall we will be lucky enough to receive two whole pigs and four goats from Riverview Dairy farm.  This is the fruition of several conversations I had last spring with Samuel, the owner.  We’re trying to find a way to make serving Samuel’s goat and pork a more regular thing, and much of it will depend on how many other chefs want to be involved.  Kevin S and Justin S are each taking one as well, and I can’t wait to see (and learn from) what they do with them.

legume events

lobster ravioli night November 4^th
Lobster ravioli will be available all night on Thursday and for the first seating on Friday evening. Give us a call or click here to request a reservation.

offal night November 18^th
On November 18^th, we’ll be serving some of the foods we’d be serving all the time, were there a regular demand for them.  Some of the dishes we plan on serving include: Lamb’s Tongue and Neck Terrine; Duck Liver and Quince Mousse; Eggs shirred in Tripe Stew; and perhaps some other surprises as well!  If this excites you but not your dining companion(s), they can rest assured that we will also be offering our regular a la carte menu. Give us a call or click here to request a reservation.

whey fed pig (tentative) November, 12^th, 13^th and 19^th.
We’re butchering the pig on the 11^th and serving the chops on the 12^th, the shoulders on the 13^th and the house-cured roasted ham on the 19^th.  The rest of animal will appear in various terrines, pates and sausages around this time as well. Give us a call or click here to request a reservation.

riverview dairy tasting menu
Throughout the month, we will periodically be offering a three or four course tasting menu featuring dairy and meat products from Riverview Dairy.

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