Recipe Review: Flynn Mcgarry’s Peas with Fresh Cheese and Lemon Verbena Oil
Author and Photographer: Alex Wang
Earlier this year, I published my version of a recipe for Beet Wellington by Flynn McGarry, a young chef who is the chef-patron of Gem restaurant in New York City. Recently, I was surprised and pleased to have received a recipe from his publisher. It is from the new Phaidon cookbook Today’s Special: 20 Leading Chefs Choose 100 Emerging Chefs in which Flynn McGarry shares some of his favorite recipes, including this one for Peas with Fresh Cheese and Lemon Verbena Oil. I decided to challenge myself to recreate the dish as faithfully as I could. It certainly wasn’t easy!
In a typical tasting menu-based restaurant, each dish may consist of several different components. Barring the central element like a seared meat or vegetable, most of these components are not made à la minute, and instead prepared in bulk ahead of time. This allows restaurants to minimize their workload and the amount of time it takes to get the dish to the diner, but it often makes it difficult to translate restaurant recipes to a home kitchen setting in which the average home cook wouldn’t be expected to have access to niche ingredients such as lemon verbena oil or rennet. Certainly, procuring the ingredients of this dish was the most challenging part of the recipe, far more so than the actual cooking process itself. The most technically demanding step is making the fresh cheese, due to both the difficulty of procuring rennet as well as the difficulty of maintaining precise temperatures without specialized equipment such as a sous vide machine.
https://www.amazon.com/Todays-Special-Leading-Choose-Emerging/dp/1838661352
https://www.amazon.com/Todays-Special-Leading-Choose-Emerging/dp/1838661352
If you don’t feel like making fresh cheese at home, a store-bough fresh cheese such as quark, ricotta, mascarpone, or even the inside of a burrata should be an adequate substitute. Or better yet, use my preferred vegan substitute: silken tofu passed through a sieve. As for a substitute for the lemon verbena oil, try substituting lemon zest with a bit of mint and following the same procedure.
Peas with Fresh Cheese and Lemon Verbena Oil
Serves 4
Ingredients
For the peas:
40g peas per person
For the mussel stock:
500 g mussels
250 g white wine
For the fresh cheese:
250 g whole milk
Salt
12.5 g heavy cream
7 g buttermilk
2 g rennet
For the pea broth:
Pea pods (reserved from shucking sugar snaps)
40 g mussel stock (above)
3 g lemon verbena
For the lemon verbena oil:
100 g neutral oil
30 g lemon verbena
To finish:
Lemon juice
Olive oil
Maldon sea salt
20 lemon thyme blossoms
Directions:
Make the peas:
Shuck enough peas for 40 g per person and sort into large and small peas. Save the pods for the broth. You will need 80 g each of small and larger peas. In a pot of boiling water, blanch the large peas for 30 seconds. Shock in ice water. Reserve the small peas raw.
Make the mussel stock:
Cover the mussels with wine and bring to a boil, simmer for 10 minutes, and strain.
Make the fresh cheese:
In a saucepan, combine the milk and salt to 85°F (29°C). Stir in the cream and buttermilk. Add the rennet and pour into a container sitting in a 98°F (36°C) water bath. Let cook for 1 hour 20 minutes, then let cool.
Make the pea broth:
Juice the pea pods in a juicer and strain. Weigh out 100 g of pea juice. Mix with the mussel stock. Blend the pea and mussel liquid with the lemon verbena and strain.
Make the lemon verbena oil:
Blend the oil and verbena together until lightly smoking. Strain through a tea towel.
To finish:
Separately season the raw and cooked peas with lemon juice, olive oil, and salt. Scoop 20 g of raw peas and 20 g of cooked peas into each bowl, making sure they stay separate. Spoon over a large spoonful of pea broth and drizzle with some of the verbena oil. Scoop one small spoonful of cheese into the bowl and season with Maldon salt. Arrange the thyme flowers on top.
Flynn McGarry’s dish
My dish
Conclusion
The hardest part of preparing this dish was balancing the different components so that they worked together but did not overpower each other. Although this recipe involves several components, the actual preparation of the components is quite straightforward. They involve only a few ingredients and gentle cooking to allow the fresh, pure, natural flavor of the components to shine. Flynn McGarry’s style of cooking is very influenced by the hyper-local, regionalist cuisine of chefs like Daniel Humm and René Redzepi, and it certainly shows in this dish. The crunch and sweetness of the raw peas pairs nicely with the briny, oceanic flavor of the mussel broth, while the cooked peas bring a substantial, cruciferous note and a bit of body. Subtle acidity comes from the lactic tang of the fresh cheese, which feels more appropriate here than the dominating, assertive sharpness of lemon juice. Finally, the entire dish is lifted by the fresh, citrusy scent of the lemon verbena oil and the lemon thyme blossoms. All in all, this is a delicious summertime dish perfect for a lunch in the sun.