Aspen – Only a serious food nerd would ask Emeril Lagasse about his favorite salt, then follow up with an earnest question about pepper.
But this is the Aspen Food & Wine Magazine Classic, where serious food loses its mind. Must be the altitude, because the food gets more outrageous every year. Just a couple of years ago, we were eating wasabi ice cream and foie gras lollipops. Now, it’s sea urchin cappuccino.
The duck liver lollipops returned this year, wrapped in cotton candy, one of the surreal tapas from Washington, D.C., chef José Ramón Andrés: Cherry tomatoes skewered on a plastic pipette that shot manchego soup into your mouth. Savory ice cream cones filled with sour cream and sake-soy marinated salmon roe. Chrome Binaca-like canisters sprayed mojitos into glamorous mouths. Andrés, the American heir to Spanish sensation Ferran Adrià of El Bulli, designed the food for the Wines of Spain party at the Baldwin Gallery Thursday evening.
Caribou Club chef Miles Angelo matched Andrés app for app with wild-mushroom quesadillas the size of poker chips, spoons full of oysters baked with poblano, bacon and cream, and tuna tartare topped with spring-green wasabi tobiko caviar (my fave).
Beer offered a welcome break from the 45,000 bottles of wine and spirits poured over the weekend when New York chef David Burke partnered with Samuel Adams founder Jim Koch to create an entire menu from the Boston brews. Highlights: flan and mousse flavored with lager served in an eggshell perched on a pile of salt, and a gelatin dessert made with Utopias, a cognac-like beer.
“Cool” described the weather and the theme of the Food & Wine publisher’s party Friday night at the top of Aspen mountain. Bartenders served martinis from counters carved from solid ice as guests plucked crab legs and giant shrimp from ice mountains. Mother Nature added to the chill and sparkle with a dusting of snow.
The 2005 class of the magazine’s “best new chefs” had to cater its own debut in the Hotel Jerome. As about 1,000 foodies crowded the historic hotel, young chefs tried to top each other with dishes like sea urchin-crab cappuccino served in tall shot glasses (Daniel Humm, Campton Place Restaurant, San Francisco) and duck tongue soup served in espresso cups (Tony Maws, Craigie Street Bistrot, Cambridge, Mass.).
Frasca’s Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson (Boulder), took a calmer approach highlighting Colorado growers with perfectly dressed Abbondanza lettuce from Longmont, Long Family Farm pork and a ripe Rancho Durazno cherry. Put that with crispy risotto squares with lemon confit (Christophe Emé, Ortolan Restaurant, Los Angeles) and beef short ribs (Eric Ziebold, (Cityzen, Washington, D.C.) and you have a perfect, and perfectly normal, meal. Doesn’t even need salt.
Staff writer Kristen Browning-Blas can be reached at 303-820-1440 or kbrowning@denverpost.com.
