Posted on Wed, Aug. 30, 2006

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Chefs borrow recipes in summer menu favorites

By David Hagedorn

Special to Washington Post

When the summer trifecta of tomatoes, corn and peaches hits, heat-induced lethargy turns into mouthwatering anticipation.

Chefs in particular welcome liberation from long months of making do with mealy hothouse horrors, frozen niblets and imported stage-prop peaches. But they face a dilemma. Thick slices of beefsteak tomatoes slathered with Hellmann’s mayonnaise on Wonder Bread, cobs of corn awash in butter and peaches exploding down chins are formidable competitors for chefs expected to present these foods more cunningly.

Chefs come up with dishes in a variety of ways. One time-honored method is, well, stealing. That’s an ugly word, but the fact is that chefs, like everyone else, often extrapolate recipes from wonderful things made by other people.

And sometimes they just go right to the source.

The recipe for today’s Tomato and Shallot Salad comes from chef Cathal Armstrong of Restaurant Eve in Alexandria, Va. He served this dish at a Fourth of July barbecue along with garlic-grilled baby-back ribs, steamed mussels and grill-roasted corn on the cob. When asked for a recipe, he said, “There’s not much to it.”

And that’s the beauty of it. It does not require much to detonate the lush sweetness of cherry tomatoes at their very best, but using shaved shallots instead of sliced red onions is a refinement that optimizes their flavor.

The inspiration for the Roasted Carrot, Chevre and Corn “On the Cob” came from crockery. For my first menu at Trumpets Restaurant (now closed) in Washington, I created an appetizer solely for the purpose of using a corn-on-the-cob plate I had noticed in a store. I couldn’t just offer a piece of corn, so I fashioned a trompe l’oeil cob by roasting a carrot, covering it with herbed goat cheese, rolling it in fresh corn and baking it. What became my “signature” dish, ironically, was one I never actually tasted: I dislike goat cheese.

The idea for Peach “Piebbler,” a combination of pie and cobbler, arose from personal issues I have with fruit pies. First, the crust. The usual crust-making method calls for rolling a rock-hard disk of refrigerated dough into a perfect circle. After a few minutes of trying to piece together cracking shards going in every direction except the desired one, I just want to scoop it all up and throw it against the wall.

And then there’s the fruit. What is the sense of taking strawberries, cherries, blueberries or peaches at the peak of flavor and baking them for an hour into mush? (Apples are an exception; they can withstand cooking time.) For the Piebbler, I made a sweetened biscuit dough, rolled out two-thirds of it as a pie dough and pre-baked a crust in a pie pan. I made the filling separately on top of the stove, heating the peaches only long enough to barely cook them through. For the top crust, I rolled out the remaining dough, cut it into eight wedges, baked them and arranged them atop the filled pie. That way, the top would not disintegrate with the first cut of a knife.

Sure, it’s hot outside. Still, there are things to be thankful for: air conditioning, peaches, corn, tomatoes, mayonnaise and, yes, even Wonder Bread.