Cooking with Keller: Chesapeake Bay Soft-Shell Crab "Sandwich"

We will have an ongoing series called "Cooking with Keller" where we will try recipes from Thomas Keller's cookbooks.  We enjoyed dining at many of his restaurants so we wanted to try some of his dishes at home.

Here is a guest post by my husband, Wil.  I'm a very lucky gal to have a husband who loves food like me.  I think he is using his summer time off quite nicely if you ask me, especially when I get to reap the benefits of his experiments.

Thanks to a sale on dressed soft-shell crabs at Whole Foods, I took my first stab at making a dish from the French Laundry Cookbook.  (To see why I'm glad they were dressed, see this blog.)  What I liked about making this dish was learning to make all the different components, including:

tomato confit

and brunoise.

The cool thing about the brunoise is that it utilizes the dark green part of the leek, which is often discarded in recipes.

Here is the end result:

"Tartar sauce", crouton, soft-shell crab, tomato confit, mesclun from my "garden", and fried capers.  It was very tasty.  Soft, crunchy, savory, and tangy.  Overall, there was a good amount of prep, but nothing too difficult.  Looking forward to the next dish I'll try!