September 28, 2018 Brunch – Duck, Mushroom, and Egg Sauté Dinner – Maize

September 28, 2018 Brunch – Duck, Mushroom, and Egg Sauté Dinner – Maize

What a difference a day can make, food wise.  From one of the worst meals yesterday, we enjoyed our best meal in Romania today at Maize, a farm to table fine dining restaurant pushing the envelope of creative cuisine in several interesting ways.

We started the day cooking brunch in the apartment.

We de skinned and diced the PPI roast duck from Li Wu two nights ago.

Suzette diced two stuffed mushrooms and added them to the additional PPI Chinese vegetables from Li Wu and diced a potato and the 1/3 onion and sautéed all those ingredients and then pushed the duck and veggies to one side of the skillet and fried four eggs with the veggies and duck to make a wonderful breakfast.

Our duck hash brunch'

At 11:00 we took an Uber to the National Museum of the Peasant where we visited yesterday, except today there were vendors and music and food in abundance for the National Folk Celebration.

Suzette drank a beer and immediately started shopping and I drank a glass of must, which is fresh picked wine grape juice that has just begun to ferment.

We then walked over to the music venue and watched several folk dances.

  

Then we noticed a cobbler who also made Romanian hats and belts.  We bought a replacement belt for the secondHartman bag I carry and I found a black sheep skin hat for $25.00 which I bought.

Here is a picture of me with the cobbler/hat maker.

The cobbler and me in our traditional hats 

There were all types of handicrafts.  Suzette bought several pairs of hand stitched wool socks for her
staff and straw sandals.  We stayed until 2:45 when we ubered to a private art collection of K. h. Zambaccian, who donated his collection and house to the government.

It was another jewel of a collection more densely displayed than the Anschutz Western art collection in Denver.

The collection has the only Cezanne in Romania and several other post impressionists, including a wonderful Alfred Sisley and several Matisses, plus more paintings by the early 20th century Romanian artists than we saw at the National Museum, such as Pallandy.

                                               The Alfred Sisley painting

At 3:45 we walked to Maize and found out it was closed from 4:00 to 5:00, so we made a reservation
for 5:00 and went downstairs to its outdoor bar and drank water and a glass of Reces Pinot Noir Rose and waited an hour.

We returned at 5:00 and were seated immediately.  We were given a waiter who spoke English that made it easy to order.

We had looked at the menu when we made our reservation at 3:45 and Suzette knew she wanted Polenta ball filled with octopus tentacles in polenta.  I ordered the grilled pigeon.

We were first served a house appetizer of a half of a grilled Persian cucumber garnished with four small dollops of seasoned goat cheese and fried vegetable chips on one end and on the other part it had been dusted with a green powder that appeared to be ground fried kale because the there was fried kale and micro greens garnishing the goat cheese dollops. This was a beautiful introduction to the quality and creativity of the food at Maize

We were hungry and when the waiter said it would take 30 minutes we asked for soup, but the waiter said there was no soup, but he would bring us something “small and delightful”.

Soon he appeared with a lovely glass bowl with a wide flat rim and in the depression in the center was a pile of fried vegetable chips that covered a large dollop of smoked cream sitting on a smear of basil infused oil and a rectangular wooden hand carved bowl filled with dried grass on which rested two small grilled dark wheat rolls.  I sliced the rolls into two flat discs and gave one to each of us and we spread the smoked cream on them with a few fried vegetable chips and enjoyed them immensely.  I have never tasted smoked cream but found it delicious.

The smoked cream garnished with flash fried vegetable chips

The grilled rolls

We ordered a bottle of Lilias 2016 Feteasca Regala, which went really well with the cream.  Feteasca Regala is an elegant grape, perhaps Romania’s best white grape.  It has a good balance of fruitiness and acidity and a richness of flavor that I find appealing.

After another fifteen or twenty minutes our entrees and vegetable dishes were served.  Besides the two entrees we ordered a bell pepper stuffed with Mashed potatoes and sauced with a creamed mushroom purée flavored with bits of black truffle.  The other side dish was a platter of ten different vegetables, some of which,  had been marinated in soy sauce and grilled.  Here are more photos.

Suzette loved her dish a ball of polenta in which three octopus tentacles had been baked. A chef accompanied our waiter to the table and cut a circular cap in the polenta ball and removed the cap and then with surgical tweezers removed the octopus tentacles to a bowl filled with a few crisp thin fried pork skins sitting on a basil oil sauce.

The chef then injected smoked cheese foam into the container of polenta. The smoked cheese is a Romanian cheese that is similar to a smoked Gouda.  The foam mixed with the soft polenta to make a

creamy smoky octopus flavored polenta that was delicious, especially with pieces of octopus.

My dish was a little more challenging.  I combined an elegantly roasted pigeon roasted to rare glazedwith a lemon and orange reduction and garnished with flash fried micro greens; simple direct, classically correct. The  pigeon halves were served in a bowl sitting on a pile of roasted corn kernels and corn puffs that had been sautéed in a sauce made with a yeast with an assertive flavor and pieces of charcoaled cheese that gave the corn kernels a smoky heavier flavor, not easily discerned.
The pigeon was garnished with an array of flash fried micro greens and a form of aramanth, probably from the pigweed plant, sautéed in a light sauce.  I enjoyed the use of a native member of the aramanth family of plants, because I consider it a super food, a highly nutritious and cleansing food group.

In my opinion the treatment of the corn did not enhance the pigeon.  I found the corn kernels, overly firm with a strange dark flavor.  I later learned from the chef that he had sautéed fresh corn kernels in a sauce made with a specific type of yeast, which he let us taste and which had a nutty flavor.  The treatment of the corn was not to my liking. A favorite traditional dish In New Mexico, where I live,  utilizes corn kernels are dried as an ingredient in Posole, to give it a more varied texture. That form of posole’s texture is soft and firm, while the dish tonight was mostly firm, plus the kernels sautéed in the yeast sauce had a musty fermented flavor. So that part of the corn sauce did not work for me, perhaps due to my distinctly different cultural orientation.  Taste is a culturally acquired sense.

   My taste unfortunately has a New Mexico Cuisine orientation in which hardened corn kernels  (chichos), dried kernels of corn are cooked into dishes and I lack an Romanian oriented palate that is accustomed to sour, fermented dishes.  Also, the char grilled blackened cheese further rusticated the dish and detracted from the elegance of the beautifully grilled pigeon, in my opinion, even though it was a lovely farm to table statement.

Perhaps the two most interesting things I learned from this lovely meal were that farm to table and use of locally foraged ingredients is a growing trend in high end restaurants all over the world and the food served at Maize allows you to examine your own perception of taste, because you are tasting the best local ingredients prepared in creative combinations and often utilizing non-traditional preparation techniques.

After dinner we ubered back to the apartment to pack and try to get to bed early because we would need to leave for our flight to Oslo at 4:00 a.m.

Bon Appetit