90 votesA signature dish in Chef Roger Souvereyns’s highly-esteemed hotel and restaurant Scholteshof, this recipe for endives and foie gras is a recipe he created for his fortieth birthday and lovingly shares with everyone. He uses a large silver spoon to present the appetizer and advises for you to do the same as eating this dish from a spoon will allow a better sensation of the flavors, the spices, and the composition. A voluptuous and earthy dish, sautéed endives with foie gras make a wonderful birthday presentation to surprise a friend or loved one with. Serve it with a glass of Graves Rouge for a transcendent experience.
Belgian endive is used in this recipe, which is a type of chicory. Chef Souvereyns harvest the vegetables fresh from his kitchen garden. Other varieties of endives can also be used such as chicory, escarole, Bavarian endive, Batavian endive, and grumolo. The endives contain a lot of water so it has to be cooked quickly in very hot temperatures so that the water evaporates and the endives retain their delicious crunchiness. Otherwise, they will swim n their own juices and turn out soggy; this will make for a poor presentation and unpleasing texture in the mouth.
Foie gras is available in raw and cooked form. In making this recipe, make sure you use raw foie gras. Like the endive, it is cooked in a searing hot pan with very little oil until the outer part turns a nice brown. The foie gras has to be cooled so that it can be sliced very thinly, as thin as carpaccio, with the help of a mechanical slicer. If it is not cool enough, the foie gras will break apart when sliced and will fail to make a good presentation, which is a key factor in this highly refined recipe.
Slice the cooked foie gras with a cutting machine, in order to obtain
very thin slices of about 1/10 of an inch in thickness, as thin as carpaccio. To do this, the foie gras must be cool, not
frozen but cold enough to stay whole and not break.
Slice
the endives into chunks about three centimeters in length. Heat oil and butter in a pan and sauté the endives
on high heat. Season with some salt. Add
sliced onions and pepper. Cook quickly to get rid of the water otherwise the
endives will be swimming in their own juice and turn soggy. Add a touch of
shredded nutmeg. To eliminate the bitter taste and caramelize it a little,
sprinkle a bit of fine sugar. Add the truffles cut into julienne slices. Deglaze with few drops of sherry vinegar.
Arrange
sautéed endives in a large silver spoon or small serving plate. Place the two
pieces of thinly sliced foie gras over the endives. Season with four kinds of freshly ground
pepper.
