Franck Dangereux's recipes 
from his superb book FEAST

 

RIPE FIGS GRATINATED IN ALMOND SABAYON WITH ORANGE WINE AND MILK SORBET

"Their soft texture combined with crisp seeds is extremely sensual. For me figs, evoke generosity, I think because you can eat the whole fruit, and also because of the way they burst open when they are ripe, as though their skin can’t contain them any more."

12 – 16 ripe figs

Orange Wine:
2 oranges
½ bottle red wine
1 small cinnamon stick
100 g sugar

Milk Sorbet:
370 ml water
250 ml milk
2 small tins condensed milk

Almond Sabayon:
4 egg yolks
80 g castor sugar
50 g almond powder
210 ml whipped cream

Make the orange wine the night before or even a few days in advance. Squeeze the juice from the oranges into a pot with the red wine, cinnamon and sugar. Add the orange skins to this and bring to the boil. Simmer until the liquid reduces by half. Discard the skins and the cinnamon and keep the wine syrup in the fridge.

Make the ingredients for the milk sorbet in an ice cream maker or by hand.

For the almond sabayon, cream the yolks and sugar until smooth, add the almond powder and mix. Whip the cream by hand in a wide shallow bowl until it is stiff, but not able to turn into butter. Fold the whipped cream into the almond mixture and refrigerate.

To assemble, slice the figs across the diameter into 1 cm thick wedges. Place four fig slices in the middle of each plate. Put each plate under the grill in the oven, about 15 cm below the element. Grill on maximum until the sabayon melts and goes brown and the figs are hot. Keep an eye on it as it cooks very quickly. Drizzle orange wine around the figs and sabayon. Place a scoop of milk sorbet on top, and enjoy the taste of summer.

ROAST RACK OF LAMB WITH SWISS CHARD AND ALMOND FLAN AND ROOIBOS, ROSEMARY AND CORINTH JUS

I discovered rooibos tea in South Africa, and it has since become popular all over the world. It has such a distinctive flavour – I don’t really enjoy drinking it on its own, but it is wonderful to stew fruit in, and combines perfectly with certain sauces. 

Its best to buy your racks of lamb from a butcher and ask for them to be trimmed and cut to size, rather than buy ready-trimmed racks from the supermarket, because you need the trimmings for the base of the sauce. You could just make the sauce from stock, but using the trimmings makes all the difference between good and magic. 

Serves 8

8 racks of lamb, 4 bones in each, trimmed (keep all trimmings to make the sauce)
olive oil
salt and freshly ground black pepper
pine nuts for garnish

Flan:
2 bunches Swiss Chard
300 ml cream
300 ml milk
6 egg
2 tbsp flaked almonds
pinch nutmeg
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Sauce:
1 litre lamb stock
trimmings from the lamb racks
1 large onion, peeled and cut into large cubes
1 large carrot, peeled and cut into large cubes
1 large celery stalk, washed and cut into large cubes
5 tbsp Corinthe raisins
4 rooibos tea bags
1 tbsp chopped rosemary
200 ml chardonnay
100 g butter
vegetable oil (sunflower or canola)
500 ml water
2 tsp cornflour diluted in 2 tbsp cold water

Chop the lamb trimmings – all skin, fat and bones into small cubes, and place in a large heavy-bottomed pot. Don’t add oil; the fat melts and allow the trimmings to cook until brown all over. Pour off the fat and add the cubed onion, carrot and celery to the trimmings left in the pot. Fry until the onions are transparent, then pour in the lamb stock. Reduce by half, so that you are left with about 500 ml.

While the stock is reducing, bring 500 ml of water and the four rooibos tea bags to the boil, in another pot. Once boiling, remove the tea bags and add the raisins. Bring back to the boil, then switch off and leave to cool. By the time it is lukewarm, the raisins will be soft. Strain the reduced stock through a fine sieve and scoop any remaining fat off the surface of the strained liquid.

Remove the raisins from the cooled tea (keep them aside) and combine the tea water with the strained stock. Add the chardonnay, place on the heat and reduce by half. Whisk in the diluted cornflour, add the rosemary and butter, and put the raisins back into this sauce (you can do all this the day before, if you prefer.)

A flan in France is traditionally anything sweet or savoury made with a solidified egg mixture – like quiche without pastry. For this you can use either Swiss chard or young spinach, as long as it has white stems as well as green leaves. Shred the leaves into 1 cm green strips and ½ cm white strips. Wash these in lots of cold water. Blanch the leaves in a pot filled with rapidly boiling, salty water. Cook for 10 – 12 minutes or until the spinach yields when you press it, so that it’s not too crunchy, but still has a bright green colour. Refresh by plunging quickly into ice-cold water. Strain and squeeze all the water out.

Mix the cream, milk and eggs together and whisk briskly. Add salt, pepper and nutmeg. Brush a muffin pan with melted butter and put it in the fridge so that the butter hardens. Chop the cooked, drained spinach finely and divide this between the openings in the muffin pan (you need eight muffins, but make extra if you like). Whisk the flan mixture again and pour it over the spinach so that the muffin openings are filled to the rim. Sprinkle with chopped almonds and bake in a preheated oven at 180ºC for 15 minutes. Leave to cool in the tins for a few minutes, then run a knife around the outside of each muffin and turn them out of the tins.

To cook the lamb, preheat the oven to 200ºC. Season the lamb racks with salt and pepper on all sides and sear in a large frying pan with a little hot oil, two or four at a time. Fry on high heat on the bone side for 2 – 3 minutes until you have a good brown colour then turn and fry on the fillet side for 2 minutes. Place the racks in a large roasting pan and sprinkle all over with fresh rosemary. Bake at 200°C for 10 minutes, then remove from the oven and leave to rest, out of the roasting pan, for three minutes. By this time it should be perfectly medium-rare to medium. If you prefer it medium to well-done, leave in the oven for 12 – 15 minutes. Either way, the lamb must rest for at least three minutes after cooking, or you will lose all the juices when you slice it.

Towards the end of the lamb’s cooking process, toast the pine nuts for a couple of minutes on a tray in the oven. While the lamb is resting, place a flan on each plate and heat the sauce. Slice the racks into individual chops, arrange on plates, pour over the sauce and garnish with pine nuts.

GRILLED YELLOW FIN TUNA WITH A GINGER, LIME AND CHILLI BROTH AND JAPANESE SEAWEED

If you buy tuna loin, which is off the bone and has had the skin removed, remove the small bit of brown meat on the part of the loin that was next to the bone. This is the fat of the tuna and it is delicious when the tuna sit cut in thin slices and barbecued, but when you grill it and leave it medium rare, it doesn’t taste as good as the rest of the tuna. So take it off. When you‘ve remove the brown meat, cut the loin into nice thick medallions about 2 cm thick.

Serves 4

4 thick tuna steaks (approx 230 g each)
1 tsp freshly grated ginger (washed and grated with the skin on)
1 tsp chopped garlic (note: never buy ready-chopped garlic.  It is a horrifying product)
half an onion, finely chopped
juice and grated rind of 2 - 3 limes
2 tsp Thai fish sauce
1 tsp chopped red chillies (double this if you like your food hot and spicy)
200 ml canola oil
80 ml water
1 bunch coriander, washed and finely chopped
1 tomato peeled and chopped into small cubes
half a small packet of Japanese seaweed, rehydrated (buy from any shop selling Asian ingredients)

To start the sauce, take a quarter of the oil and heat it in a pot. I use canola oil a lot, because it is a healthy oil and has absolutely no flavour of its own. It absorbs flavour from other things. If you make the sauce the day before and the next day taste only the oil it will be scented and redolent with chilli and lime and garlic. Fry the onion in the hot oil, then add the garlic and ginger and the chilli. 

All the goodness of the ginger is just under the skin, so leave the skin on, after washing it thoroughly. And when you grate it finely, on the same side of the grater that you would use for parmesan, the fibres stay behind in your hand and you are left with the juicy pulp of the ginger, the good part.

Use two limes if they are large, three if small. Grate the skin and squeeze the juice, removing the pips. Add the lime juice, the fish sauce and about 80 ml water to the pot and deglaze. Simmer this on low heat for about 10 minutes, then remove from the heat and add the chopped coriander and the chopped peeled tomato. The easiest way to peel tomatoes is to put them in a bowl, boil the kettle, pour the boiling water over the tomatoes, leave for one minute, then put under cold water and the skin will come off easily.

Once the sauce is ready, prepare the Japanese seaweed. It comes in a small packet, dried in white, green or red. Once you’ve rehydrated it – for half a packet you need to soak it in about a glass of water – it has the sharp, clean taste of the sea. Chop it coarsely and arrange a small bunch on each plate.

To cook the fish, use a heavy, cast-iron griddle pan, an essential piece of kitchen equipment. Make it really hot. For a griddle pan to work properly you should use very little oil, preferably none. Instead, pour a little olive or canola oil into your hand and wipe it on each side of the tuna, so that there is a slight film of oil on the tuna. Season the fish with salt and pepper on each side and grill it. When the tuna has brown markings on the one side, (approx 1 ½ minutes) turn it over and cook it until it has lighter brown markings on the other side. If the steaks are 2 cm thick and your griddle pan is hot enough, it will then be medium rare and hot inside. The thicker the steaks the longer they take to cook.

On each plate, pour some of the sauce on the seaweed, and put the tuna on top. It is a delicious summer lunch or dinner.

Feast, Published by Quivertree,
available at selected bookshops and at The Foodbarn.
(See Cook's Corner for more details).

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