Kitchen Project: Sweet Potato Mille-Feuille

It’s official! Gnomerie Kitchen has a date for its first dinner. On November 21st I’ll be hosting four people for a six course test run of the Gnomerie Experience. I’ll be honest and say that there’s equal parts excitement and nervousness flowing through me right now but this is finally the chance to start finding my own way. My guests this first time out will get a tour of the flavors of autumn produce. My menu will run the gamut of some of fall’s favorite flavors combined with only enough extra ingredients as needed to elevate them for, I’m hoping, an excellent first service. While the finished menu is still up in the air I’ve settled on sweet potatoes, butternut squash, cabbage, carrots, corn and will close the meal with apples as a dessert.

In creating this first menu I remembered an idea I got from Chef Ken Miller, sweet potato Mille Feuille. The initial idea was to use a veg sheeter to produce squares of sweet potato that would be baked to crispness and then layered with a savory sweet potato filling. At the end of the day, however, this produced non uniform squares of varying doneness that wouldn’t work at all. Sweet potatoes contain a lot of moisture which inhibits many attempts to achieve success with applications that require them to be crispy. My next step, making a sweet potato Pâté Sucrée, produced a dough that needed so much flour to become workable that it tasted only of flour and had the texture of tree bark.

I decided to use sweet potato flour to assemble a puff pastry, since this is the traditional component for Mille Feuille. Puff pastry is a welcome challenge for any interested in cooking. The folds and turns along the way to lamination of the dough produces hundreds of layers of pastry interlaced with butter. As this butter hits the hot oven air the moisture evaporates and separates the layers of pastry. This creates a ridiculously tender, flaky and rich pastry. In my next installment, we’ll get a look at the finished and, hopefully, successful product. See you soon!