Turn The Beet Around
Chef Chris McCord of Gunshow makes the most of root vegetable season by transforming beets and potatoes with meticulous technique.
For Gunshow’s Chef de Cuisine Chris McCord, selling a dish is contingent on equal parts flavor, visuals, and menuing.
“Everything is based on produce. At that time in the fall, it was really just beets and potatoes.” Gunshow operates in a dim sum-style service, with the cooks themselves rolling out carts stocked with plates and plates of food. With three seatings per night, McCord acts as the conductor, plating food while coordinating the choreography of service, generally pushing out ten savory courses and three desserts. Although they can sometimes be a hard sell at Gunshow, beets were the only vegetable exciting McCord, so he reached up his sleeves and pulled out a technique to create chewy, juicy, and deeply flavorful beets. “The whole dehydrating process creates a new texture. A lot of our techniques are figuring out how to rework a vegetable,” he says. “This one was a banger, and came in towards the end of the menu.” So how did McCord get the beets to fly off the cart? By pairing them with a succulent lamb and pork mortadella, a tangy and fresh goat sour cream, and a rich, fluffy take on Duchess potatoes.
Chef Chris McCord | photos: will blunt
lamb and pork mortadella, chewy beets, duchess potato, goat sour cream
Lamb and Pork Mortadella
McCord views the centerpiece of this dish as an excellent teaching opportunity for his young cooks. “It’s fun for people to learn how to form the mortadella, to run through that process,” he says. “We learn how to properly stuff them, not just cram the farce into the casing.” Starting with fresh, on-the-bone lamb and pork shoulders, the team at Gunshow breaks down the meat and grinds it with all of the usual mortadella suspects, like cumin, coriander, and caraway, with a few wrinkles thrown in, like ají dulce chiles. Once the meat is ground, speed is the name of the game. “For all of our sausages, they need to sit for at least a day with the salts, spices, raw garlic, and booze,” he says. “I think it helps to firm the sausage and give it a better spring, so it’s a race to get them into a Lexan to marinate.” After it’s stuffed and poached, the sausage gets portioned and seared off, and serves as the anchor of the plate.
Chewy Beets
Starting with cleaned, peeled, and salt-roasted beets, McCord and his team quarter the sweet and earthy root vegetables and throw them in a dehydrator for four hours. “Ideally, the edges are a little chewy, like fruit leather,” he says. They’re stored in a vacuum sealed bag with either Sherry or Banyuls vinegar and salt, and allowed to marinate. For service, they’re picked up in a rich demi made with the bones and scraps from the mortadella production for a bright vegetable component.
Duchess Potato
McCord starts his potatoes with a pâte à choux, and folds in freshly boiled potatoes with a drunken goat’s cheese, compounding on the reduced booze and funky goat dairy flavors in the dish. “We thought drunken goat’s cheese would be funny, and that’s big for sales. Key words definitely help sell dishes,” says McCord. Seasoned with butter, salt, and dill, three Duchess potato balls are fried off per order.
Goat Sour Cream
“I was going to the market and just picking up jugs and jugs of goat milk,” McCord says. A product of a fantastic relationship with his farmers, the goat sour cream is spooned in little pools across the plate, providing a lactic tang with a hint of barnyard funk, and serves as an excellent foil to the richness of the mortadella and Duchess potato.
