- These are our 45-day aged, 45-ounce porterhouse steaks.
We're an Italian restaurant with a big wood-burning grill.
Having a big kind of meat on the menu
seemed a little bit appropriate.
And I wanted to make sure if we're gonna do this,
I wanted it to be big, bold, and almost egregious.
- So I'm just gonna heavily salt it on all sides.
The aggressive salt helps keep that flavor
throughout the poaching process.
And then it just goes in our walk-in for two hours.
- We've already started these and you can see
the moisture's coming out of them.
This is after two hours.
The redness is coming out,
it's changing color, it's changing texture,
and then all of that's going inside.
After this step we kind of brush all this salt off.
We then poach them in butter before service.
- [Kara] You're not trying to like sear the steaks off
in the butter, you're just trying to do a light poach.
You're just looking for it to be about 90 degrees.
- This is a true Italian sense, right?
You know bistecca alla fiorentina,
we can't get the access
to that exact piece of meat.
So this is our interpretation of it.
What the butter does for us is to be able to cook this
at a temperature that's consistent.
And we don't want them to overcook.
Obviously this is a very large cut of meat,
and not wanting to be wasted.
In order for us to be able to execute them outside
on that wood burning grill,
it would take an hour for us to do this
start to finish from raw.
(upbeat pop music)
First thing, it's Monday morning.
It's time to light the fire.
So basically when we get this going,
we gotta use the kindling to get it started,
and then what we're gonna do after that
is have our wood in the chamber and then move the coals over
to get this middle part going.
And that will be the center of our hearth all day long.
So our centerpiece is our very large wood-burning hearth.
This grill was custom designed for us
so that we have the ability to move all of these around
all day long.
Some things that do not need quite as direct flames.
Down here we cook our steaks,
so we keep a bed of coal so they're closer to it.
So we have a a shoulder and then lamb bellies
all from the front end of the lamb.
Super fatty, super delicious.
So we take these two components, we season them,
we braise them, and then we roll them.
The lamb is definitely our biggest project
to tackle each week.
There's so much that goes into it for the end result.
- Basically all we're gonna do here
is take out this little bit of rib that's left here,
and take out the shoulder blade from the other side
and butterfly it in half,
so that we have a lot more surface area to sear later.
To pick up the flavor from the fennel and the salt
and the celery and chile when it braises.
We save these bones for the stock
that we actually braise the lamb shoulder in.
It's a mother stock.
We've been using the same one essentially since we opened.
We just keep adding to it.
It's where a lot of the depth and the flavor comes from
from the lamb, and our lamb dish.
It is really super important at this point.
- So we're gonna salt the shoulders.
We're gonna salt the bellies,
and then we're gonna let them sit overnight.
Our next step after the lamb has sat overnight
with fennel seed and salt,
We're gonna place it on the plancha
to start rendering out some of that fat
and getting the caramelization on the exterior.
About 20 minutes they'll sit here, they'll caramelize.
We're not rushing them.
We don't want it to be super high heat.
We wanna really just draw out the moisture
from that fat to crisp them up.
Yeah, this is like a three day process.
- Nice and seared on both sides.
And here's our reserved braising liquid
from our last braise,
and that just simply gets poured over the top.
And this gets covered in foil,
and goes into a 350 degree oven for about three hours.
Right now we're just opening it up
and we're gonna pull a piece out
and just make sure it is tender and jiggly.
Nice, tender, pulling apart.
- The lamb is finished braising.
We start pulling it out of its braise.
It's a nice mix of both belly and shoulder.
This is a piece of shoulder so you can see the meat.
So we're gonna leave that whole.
But any of this stuff that we don't want to eat,
we're gonna pull off.
We're gonna taste this first.
That makes sure that this doesn't need anymore salt.
Pretty good.
Once they get pulled outta here, if they're not perfect.
There's no going back.
The fat is really important.
This kind of fat stuff is delicious.
So when we roll it, we want all that fat to go with us.
Ideally, this is done when it's hot.
The reason why we do it when it's hot
is that once we roll it, it stays together.
We are binding this lamb solely
by its protein and fat content.
- I rolled it up in between two pieces of plastic wrap here.
We're tying the end so that nothing can get out again.
Then I got a pair of tweezers and give a couple pokes.
Squeeze the rest of the air out of it,
and we're gonna repeat the process again
of what we just did.
- You gotta do the fling thing.
You really gotta show off.
Come on.
- You really get a twirl?
- Yeah, you got the do the twirl.
All right, you ready to twirl?
- Ready to twirl.
Okay.
So as part of the fun part about this
is that we are letting gravity help us.
A lot of this technique I learned making salumi
back at Lupo back in the day, the testas, the coppas.
We shoved a lot of things into small spaces.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna let gravity,
and we're gonna keep tying this down
farther and farther and farther until it hits
that nice tightness and then we double tie it.
So it's one less thing we have to worry about.
- All right, so after we got our roulade,
this is just crushed ice covered with water.
And this is what we call an ice bath.
This gets submerged in there,
and hopefully it'll firm up within the next hour or two.
- When creating this menu, I was really trying to find a way
of treating fish differently.
And swordfish is a fish I love dearly,
and it can accept a lot,
and it can be beaten up a little bit.
We portion all of our fish out prior to service.
These are portioned around between seven and eight ounces.
I'm gonna grab our fish cure,
which is a mix of salt and sugar and zest.
What this does is firms up the fish and imparts flavor.
You want to do it before service,
let it hang out for 15 minutes or so.
It'll tighten up the outside, firm it up a little bit
so that it accepts the smoke.
And then once we poach it, it'll give it that opposite
where it'll soften up in that side.
See where the smoke's going?
I'm gonna watch them.
So we're gonna start off with 30 minutes up here.
For me, I get really nervous about cooking fish
on a grill without skin.
There's nothing to protect it, right?
It's just like naked canvas that doesn't want to be cooked.
You know, a fish with a skin, there's fat in it
and there's water, and there's oils that render out
to create that and protect the rest of it.
So here we're protecting the swordfish by poaching it
in a vat of garlic and oil.
Normally we would poach it,
but for right now a quick tester,
we're gonna just get it on the grill
so that we can keep it moving.
And we're just gonna give it a quick taste
to make sure it's where we need it to be.
So we have our testers.
We're testing for smoke, we're testing for seasoning.
One that was on a little bit of a harder temperature
than the other.
So they both taste the same.
One's a little more drier,
got a little bit more touch on the on the grill.
This is a great way of being able to understand
what happened on one side of the rack
versus the other side of the rack.
And then bringing them together, they're ready to go.
To go along with our swordfish, we have sun gold tomatoes
which we're gonna be smoking and drying over the grill.
And then we rehydrate them in garlic and oil
and that becomes our sauce for the swordfish.
So this is a whole dish that requires
a lot of love and attention, and a lot of smoke,
and a lot of time.
The smoke comes from underneath.
The skin protects it, so it stays more of its shape
and then it just dehydrates from in.
We don't want to make them
into those like stereotypical sun-dried tomatoes.
We still want some body left to them.
We want them to still be a tomato,
not a piece of tomato leather.
It can't overpower the swordfish.
The swordfish has to be the star of the show.
So we have our first batch of sun golds going up there
to smoke and dry.
I would say that we'll probably do this
about six more or seven more times today
to have enough for tonight's service.
And all these coals, I'm gonna bring these over.
So now we have a nice bed going over here.
Once that log goes down to coals
then we can start cooking on that side.
It's building this whole bed of coals right here,
and we just keep sliding them over
and sliding them over.
All night long.
We're gonna go to the other kitchen right now.
Upfront, and we are gonna be making Pizza Bianca
which is one of my favorite things to make in this kitchen.
It's a combination of salsa verde, and aioli,
and pickled peppers and anchovies.
This is our pizza dough.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna split this in half
and then these are gonna be the beginning
of our Pizza Bianca.
All right so these guys, we stretch them out.
This is a little garlic oil.
It's gonna rub it all over here and then salt.
With these, I'm gonna hit them towards the back corners
to see if we can get them as close to the flame as possible.
They'll puff up, we'll get a little color.
and then we're gonna trim the top
and then retoast them again.
These little crevices are great.
We want those little pockets.
So we make a garlic aioli with lemon roasted garlic.
This dish was based on something I ate in Piemonte,
and it was so amazing that I wanted to make it
for this restaurant
so I could share it with everybody else.
So now we're gonna take this salsa verde,
which is just like mustard, capers, and anchovies,
and tarragon, and let it fall where it will.
If it gets in those holes, that's great.
And these are senise peppers from the south of Italy
that we soak in red wine vinegar.
We rehydrated them in water, and then take the meat out
from the inside and leave the skin.
(crunching)
Oh, did you hear that noise?
- [Camera Operator] That was great.
- [Hillary] You got that noise?
- [Camera Operator] That was excellent.
- Oh man.
These anchovies come from Spain.
Look how long they are.
There are just some of the most delightful anchovies.
What's happening right now is our line check.
So before service they give me all the main players.
Any sauces or vegetables or vinaigrettes,
we taste them all before service.
So if there's any problems, we can fix that right now.
And it could go one way or the other way.
It could be really salty, it could be undercooked,
it could be terrifying at the same time.
And then if it's wrong and then we have to fix it,
and we have tables sitting down right now
it's really, it's a scary situation.
The good news is that it's not scary today.
It's quite tasty.
- So this is our finished lamb log after it comes out
of the ice bath, the lamb roulade,
and we portion it into seven to eight ounce portions.
So depending on the thickness,
it's usually about an inch slice.
I double loop it twice.
That kind of holds it nice and tight.
- The lamb has a crust,
and it's soft and supple on the inside, so it's creamy.
And then we cover it with a celery pesto
with pickled celery and pistachios.
The pickled celery vinaigrette cuts that fat
and it's one of my favorites.
Ordering in a bistecca.
- [Chefs] Ordering bistecca.
- [Hillary] Mushrooms is two on 25, please.
Swordfish is 24.
All the food here was created out of something
that I have eaten, or seen, or touched
that I wanted to do again.
And I wanted to share the stories,
and the adventures, and the journey.
My point was for people to leave the outside world
and to come to Ci Siamo and enjoy,
and to be transported to someplace else.