perfect mid-rare grilled rib eye's in 6 minutes!

60 seconds to stack 5 apples

fresh blonde morels

nordic skyr yogurt

grilled rabbit terrine

diver scallop ceviche, saba shio

Lots of pics i’ve been building up over the last couple weeks. Top left: Paul,Jay and i went to a demo of a piece of equipment we purchased for Uchiko called a Combi oven made by Rational. It’s an insane Jetson’s type technology that was originally designed by a German physicist in the last 1950′s for a cooking competition for the German national chef team. The basic idea is it’s a combination convection oven/ steamer and computer controls the exact temp and humidity levels in the cooking chamber to exact specifications for what your trying to do. The technology was updated later in the 80′s by KFC to hold their fried chicken when it came out of the fryer so it would be perfect for a longer amount of time. Honestly, i had minimum expectations for the machine…but after a fantastic demo we were all floored. The chef took the raw ribeyes and put them on a dry aluminum grill sheet and put them in the oven; bing! In less than 7 minutes they came out done and perfect! Unreal. Although i doubt we’ll ever use the oven for steaks or anything like that, we can’t wait to get in our new kitchen and start experimenting on our own on tons of new specs and applications.

Quick challenge for my sushi guys: Can you stack 5 apples upon each other? Yoshi and Camacho both took on the task, and although neither did it in the 60 seconds…Yoshi was a success in the end!

Lovely morels in this past week. Nice pairings with them; and although i hate to wash mushrooms and take away some of their natural woody goodness..we had to give these a good wiping and get any of the exess grit/sand washed away before use. Nothing worse than that mouth feel to me of raw sandy grit. It’s up there with the mucus ness of grated raw yamaimo and miely (sp?) tomatoes.

A product i’ve never seen or tasted before came in this week at Uchi: Icelandic skyr. It’s almost a cheese of sorts…with all of the milk fat removed. Gorgeous whispy palette and a crisp acidic finish. We paired it with many things during the week to experiment; but the best had to be the grilled rabbit terrine with gastrique.

2 dishes made on the fly for a photo shoot for the sommelier journal: Our new “Koviche”, a ceviche of raw diver scallops,tomatillos, black lime salt, red curry-apple gastrique and a cereal tuile.

Also, grilled norwegian mackerel belly with fleur de sel, truffle puree and hyrdoponic bitter greens. We’ll have a grilled mackerel on the Uchiko menu with tomato + salt similar to this as well.

Lots of fun teaching the sous chef’s at Uchi how to prepared “Uchi” style composed dishes; on point with each of them coming up with one spec per week on their own for us to try and tweek before putting on the daily menus. It’s educational for all of us and i can’t begin to describe what joy it brings me to taste such wonderful food every day made by my staff. Kudos!

Uchiko tile install and wood window

"let's all stand where the sushi chef's will be." ;0)

Fantastic 3 hour walkthrough of the Uchiko space this morning. Moving faster than ever! What used to seem like quite a large space is shrinking exponentially every day…and that’s a good thing. We want Uchiko to feel every bit as comfortable and inviting as the space is at Uchi currently and have worked very hard to make it translate like that. Not overly done, or fancy, or pretentious. Still focus on being an Austin neighborhood restaurant…that just happens to be world class!

Testing of Uchiko dishes on Uchi’s daily special sheet over the last month has come off great.  Lots of positive feedback and excited customers..waiting to see what else is to come. It is by design, just a teaser. The entire Uchiko menu will be available soon…but your going to have to eat there. ;0)

local heirloom tomatoes

Tomato. It’s nice with the advent of so many growing techniques we can get really fresh ripe delicious tomatoes almost year round here in Austin. We use them in many different ways and applications for our sauces and composed dishes at Uchi , the options are limitless. Here are 10 methods we’ve used in the past year:

1. tomato water

2. tomato terrine with verjus

3. fried tomatoes

4. candied tomato rind

5. tomato confit

6. roasted tomato sorbet

7. tomato seed vin

8. pickled tomato

9. tomato+ mackeral

10. tomato gelee

Uchi sushi chef's coming of age...

I had a pretty crazy night last night. My wife Rebekkah is due to birth our 3rd little girl Amelia at the end of the month and was in false labor all night. Feel so bad for her; we’re both at the end of our leash and ready to get this pregnancy thing over with! How i came about to roll the dice and end up with 3 daughter’s? I’ll never know, but i wouldn’t trade it for the world. Sometimes work at Uchi people ask me if i want to keep trying and “go for a boy”. “Nah” i usually say. “I’ve got my own boys right here.”

It’s hard to explain the pride you get when the people you’ve worked with, and worked for you, start to blossom and find their place in the world; their “calling” if you will.  I live through all of them vicariously every day, and to see them finally start to “get it” and truly be happy with what they’re doing is incredible.

These are 3 of the best. Far left is Utsunomiya Motoyasu who i worked with at Musashino back in the day; then he came to work for me at Uchi a couple years back. Since then, he opened a trailer on the east side wit the help of our Chef de cuisine at Uchi Paul Qui called “east side king’s”; named after his band. It’s done really well and they got a call last week that ABourdain might make an appearance by the end of the month to taste some of their goodies. So proud!

In the center is Jay Huang. He’s worked at Uchi from the beginning 7 years ago with a stint for 12 months in Taiwan away. His progression over those years is stunning; growing from an all knowing,indepent force with the desire to do everything all of the time,…Jay has now come of age and is ready to take on the responsibility of Sous Chef at our new space Uchiko this summer.

Far right: Yoshi Okai. He has been with me at Uchi for 5 years at least and has grown from a kid who just wanted to play punk music in his band and made sushi on the side just to make a living, into a full fledged sushi chef ready to take on the task of becoming one of the head chefs at Uchiko as well. Masazumi Saio not pictured will maintain his status at Uchi to assure our loyal cliental that sushi at Uchi remains on the cusp of everything great we’ve put forth in the past.

These are just 3 of a hundred talented faces i’ve been fortunate enough to employ over the last 7 years at Uchi. The culture we have now is beyond compare, and it’s a big part of what makes Uchi such an inspired place to work and eat every day.  It’s all about the people.

(getting sappy; a little emotional after a night full of anxiety and sleeplessness. All these men are great, but really….little girls hold the keys to life; love mine more than life itself. Love to Rebekkah)

milk dessert components

hazlenut dessert components

Taking a bunch of  photos now for the Uchiko training manual. We’re breaking each composed dish down to it’s ingredients/components to make the training that much more seamless. I’ll start throwing some more pics up soon to keep giving all of you some more “sneak peeks” on some of the new menus flavors and dishes.

Above are 2 of the desserts out of 5 proposed.