steak au poivre - part 4

For the last club members weekend at the track I signed up to prepare the dinner. There were going to be around committed seats of 30, I was told 3 days in advance so I could shop for the right quantity of ingredients. I wanted a dish with widest appeal so steak au poivre it is. By now I have made this dish a few times for myself and feel confident that I could scale it 30x without the need to measure or weigh.

For the salad I prepared from scratch a miso wasabi vinaigrette for serving with baby vegetables. It is a vinaigrette that I recreated and improvised after tasting one with miso in a Japanese restaurant in Hillsboro, Oregon. It is very simple with portion to taste of lemon zest, lemon juice, miso, wasabi powder, maple syrup, freshly ground pepper, olive oil, and sesame oil. No vinegar is used.

I grated the zest off the lemon and then used a squeezer to extract the juice

I made the vinaigrette at home to easy the burden of preparing it on site

For the main dish, I reduce the size of the steak but added three scallops and three prawns per serving. Each serving also has a garnish of three pieces of carrot and three okras. Because of the juice from the prawns and scallops the green pepper sauce was incredible rich and full of umami. By now I prefer to substitute the cognac with a good bourbon instead as good and reasonably priced cognac doesn't exist.

as always cooking for a big party I couldn't take any photos

without the help of a good sous chef the presentation and plating took a backseat

Because of the stock from the scallops and wild shrimps, the sauce is better than any that I had made for myself. Most guests couldn't figure out what hit their tongues. If there is one most important insight into cooking, it is you want to minimize flavor lost but not by flavor added. Most processed food is against this basic principle. 

For the dessert I served the cheesecake bought from Costco. The reception was overwhelmingly positive, and people could not stop raving about the dinner.