I’ve seen my fair share of tasting menus but only because I’ve spent the last decade working in fine dining.
If you’re lucky enough to have a job in a good restaurant, the chef wants you to taste everything — it’s the only way to really know what you’re talking about when you’re serving people or how to get a dish just right if you’re cooking it.
But it wasn’t until last summer that I had the privilege of sitting down at a table at Ceraldi in Wellfleet and being treated to one small course after another of his inventions. We reserved for a special occasion — my boyfriend Kyle’s birthday. If not for that, yet another busy season was going to go by without our ever getting there.
The restaurant’s chef and owner, Michael Ceraldi, creates a different menu every day, coming up with around a thousand unique dishes between May to October, each one made with local organic ingredients. He never trained formally, he told me — a surprise, considering what an impressive operation he runs. He went to Syracuse University to study art, did a semester in Florence, fell in love with Italy, and went back to apprentice in Bologna. That meant peeling a lot of onions. It was like being the rat in the movie Ratatouille, he said.
Everything we ate on that humid August night at Ceraldi was impressive, but there was one dish Kyle and I found ourselves still talking about deep into this winter: a deconstructed mirepoix with halibut.
The French word mirepoix may sound like something rarified, but it is the simple starting point of many dishes. For it, onion, carrot, and celery — which Chef Michael refers to as “the humble vegetables” — are diced fine and sautéed, disappearing into an aromatic background for soups and braises.
But here they were the stars of the show: A piece of fresh halibut lay on a swoosh of celery root purée next to a carrot sformatino, which translates as something like “a little formed thing” — it was made in a flan mold. The combination was topped with bright magenta pickled baby sweet onions.
With every bite, I made sure I had the halibut, carrot, celery, and onion all swirled together on my fork. I cook for a living, so I’d put these flavors together countless times. But tasting them in this completely novel way was just so much fun. “I must eat this again,” I thought. And on the way home that night, I promised Kyle I would recreate it one day.
Now, in the late winter lull, I was certain I could pull it off. So certain, in fact, that I wasn’t nervous about the fact that I’d asked Ceraldi to taste my version of his dish. “Sure,” he said.
It turned out I was a little overconfident. But Chef Michael was kind. My celery root purée was stellar. The pickled onions were the right color but maybe a little too sweet. The halibut I overcomplicated by pan searing — he simply oven roasts his at 400° F for 5 minutes. But the sformatino — oof, a disaster.
The dense, luscious carrot flan had been my favorite component of that summer dinner. Now, here I was serving Michael Ceraldi a version that was at once too fluffy and too soupy. Imagine a souffle with the worst possible texture.
“So, tell me how you made the sformatino,” was his first question.
I roasted a pound of carrots until they were caramelized, I told him, then blended them with a quarter cup of heavy cream, a quarter cup of vegetable stock, 3 egg yolks, garlic, salt, and a sprinkle of nutmeg. Then I poured the mixture into buttered ramekins and baked them in a bain- marie at 225° F for 45 minutes.
I was delighted to learn that Ceraldi also uses a pinch of nutmeg in his carrot sformatino. I had, however, guessed wrong about pretty much everything else.
First, I should have used a lot more eggs to create the dense texture of the dish I had admired. I should have listened to my instincts; I know for a flan you need a ton of yolks, but all the reference recipes I researched used only a few, and I foolishly believed them.
My next mistake was using veggie stock, again as most of the reference recipes had. But adding a watery component like stock, Chef Michael said, would steam the egg mixture and force it to bubble. And bubbles are the enemy of everything custard-like. Besides, he told me, he rarely uses stock in a dish like this because it’s prone to muting the very flavor he’s trying to highlight, in this case, the carrot.
And just like that, he shared his recipe. I’m planning to make the whole dish over again.
MICHAEL CERALDI’S CARROT SFORMATINO
Makes 8-10 sformatini
Note: Restaurants use stainless-steel custard cups for a flan like this, but more home cooks have ramekins and they work fine.
1 quart chopped carrots
1 bay leaf
3 cups heavy cream
5 egg yolks
3 whole eggs
Salt to taste
Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
1. Peel and simmer carrots with the bay leaf until tender. Drain carrots well, discard bay leaf, and set aside. Meanwhile, scald the cream.
2. Blend the carrots and the cream thoroughly to make a very smooth purée.
3. In a bowl, whisk the yolks and whole eggs. Add a little bit of the carrot and cream mixture to the eggs — you don’t want the warm mixture to cook them.
4. Slowly add the rest of the carrot and cream mixture, whisking as you go, and season the mixture with salt and nutmeg. The texture will be like melted ice cream.
5. Spray steel cups or ramekins with vegetable oil (or butter them), pour in carrot custard, and bake the sformatini in a bain-marie at 300° F for about 30 minutes. Keep a close watch and test the custard with a cake tester — it should come out clean. You want the custards to set, but you don’t want them to overcook.
6. Remove each sformatino from its cup by running a thin paring knife or cake tester around the edge, tapping the ramekin on the counter, then setting it upside down on the plate and giving the plate and cup a firm shake to release the sformatino.
