When it comes to deciding what dish or really kind of any dish we always think price is 100% a huge Factor what do we want to spend what do we want to do uh what are we trying to accomplish so we've got three different styles of caviar I've got a salmon row I've got a trout row and then I've got a really beautiful Russian osetra coming from a sturgeon obviously the Russian sturgeon osetra that is the most expensive if you're going to splurge this time of year you go with a sturgeon there's a lot of different varieties of sturgeon um we have etra here today it's beautiful there's kind of this Walnut flavor to it soft um it's a black caviar beautiful sort of buttery Walnut flavor Nutty flavor um so so so good and sort of the top tier of the caviar that we have today then I would move into salmon caviar salmon caviar would actually be the second most expensive here and salmon caviar is fantastic it's got a great pop High salinity also a butteriness to it there's a great great butteriness to salmon caviar and then you have trout row trout row I think is one of my favorite it is my favorite of the inexpensive caviar because it's this very sort of subtle saltiness and I like to say if you are new at caviar and you want to explore if you're new at rows fish rows in general and you want to explore maybe go with the trout row I feel like the trout is sort of the beginner that it's a fish egg that you can get behind because it's beautiful ocean saltiness um with a super mild flavor super super mild flavor so it depends on what you want to do and it depends on what you want to spend I've just given you three different examples of caviar that you have a difference in flavor and obviously a difference in price you can also do all three if you want have all three on your platter and let people choose what they want and they can sort of have an opportunity to taste a variance of fish row so we've got the caviar there we've got the creme fresh here and and now we're going to just plate some chips and the chips are just going to go right into the center so on your sheet tray these were your salted Canon back chips we're just going to throw those into the middle so this is like the Feast of seven fish equivalent to like your cheese board or your shuder board something that you would put out while you're cooking in the kitchen while your guests are arriving while everyone's just kind of getting their jackets off and grabbing a drink and they're so excited to see you and they're so happy to be there for the holidays and then all of a sudden you're like oh no there's just no regular cheeseboard this time we've got homemade chips with an herb crem fresh and a variety of caviar and the thing is it sounds really fancy but it's so easy to make the other thing is too there is always this right like caviar is so precious it really isn't like let's just take a chip and sort of dip it right into the creme fresh and then top it with some cavar and eating it it's really just chips and dip there's tiny little plates that people are just kind of scooping a little bit of creme fresh onto their plate you know a couple of chips a couple of scoops of caviar I've got a salmon row and then we've got the trout H so so so beautiful and then a little bit of the osetra that goes right there there's also an opportunity to maybe cut some bags so that people can kind of walk around with a little bag of potato chips this actually is a bag that I just cut from these larger bags here you kind of just cut off the top and open them up put a couple of chips right into that bag just like that amazing you can actually just put a little bit of crem fresh right over the chips right maybe even just a little bit of caviar that goes on top of that and it's almost like a portable finger food as you're walking around I will 100% take one of those chips out of the bag but when you have chips and cavar you just kind of take a little chip smear a little caviar so good the natural salinity from those fish eggs they're cured so they're so beautifully salted the creme fresh is bright and refreshing and it's that connector it's the glue for the caviar to hang on to the chip and these chips I don't normally say this is the best of something but these are some really good chips this makes me a very very happy Christmas Eve Diner

When it comes to deciding what dish or really kind of any dish we always think price is 100% a huge Factor what do we want to spend what do we want to do uh what are we trying to accomplish so we've got three different styles of caviar I've got a salmon row I've got a trout row and then I've got a really beautiful Russian osetra coming from a sturgeon obviously the Russian sturgeon osetra that is the most expensive if you're going to splurge this time of year you go with a sturgeon there's a lot of different varieties of sturgeon um we have etra here today it's beautiful there's kind of this Walnut flavor to it soft um it's a black caviar beautiful sort of buttery Walnut flavor Nutty flavor um so so so good and sort of the top tier of the caviar that we have today then I would move into salmon caviar salmon caviar would actually be the second most expensive here and salmon caviar is fantastic it's got a great pop High salinity also a butteriness to it there's a great great butteriness to salmon caviar and then you have trout row trout row I think is one of my favorite it is my favorite of the inexpensive caviar because it's this very sort of subtle saltiness and I like to say if you are new at caviar and you want to explore if you're new at rows fish rows in general and you want to explore maybe go with the trout row I feel like the trout is sort of the beginner that it's a fish egg that you can get behind because it's beautiful ocean saltiness um with a super mild flavor super super mild flavor so it depends on what you want to do and it depends on what you want to spend I've just given you three different examples of caviar that you have a difference in flavor and obviously a difference in price you can also do all three if you want have all three on your platter and let people choose what they want and they can sort of have an opportunity to taste a variance of fish row so we've got the caviar there we've got the creme fresh here and and now we're going to just plate some chips and the chips are just going to go right into the center so on your sheet tray these were your salted Canon back chips we're just going to throw those into the middle so this is like the Feast of seven fish equivalent to like your cheese board or your shuder board something that you would put out while you're cooking in the kitchen while your guests are arriving while everyone's just kind of getting their jackets off and grabbing a drink and they're so excited to see you and they're so happy to be there for the holidays and then all of a sudden you're like oh no there's just no regular cheeseboard this time we've got homemade chips with an herb crem fresh and a variety of caviar and the thing is it sounds really fancy but it's so easy to make the other thing is too there is always this right like caviar is so precious it really isn't like let's just take a chip and sort of dip it right into the creme fresh and then top it with some cavar and eating it it's really just chips and dip there's tiny little plates that people are just kind of scooping a little bit of creme fresh onto their plate you know a couple of chips a couple of scoops of caviar I've got a salmon row and then we've got the trout H so so so beautiful and then a little bit of the osetra that goes right there there's also an opportunity to maybe cut some bags so that people can kind of walk around with a little bag of potato chips this actually is a bag that I just cut from these larger bags here you kind of just cut off the top and open them up put a couple of chips right into that bag just like that amazing you can actually just put a little bit of crem fresh right over the chips right maybe even just a little bit of caviar that goes on top of that and it's almost like a portable finger food as you're walking around I will 100% take one of those chips out of the bag but when you have chips and cavar you just kind of take a little chip smear a little caviar so good the natural salinity from those fish eggs they're cured so they're so beautifully salted the creme fresh is bright and refreshing and it's that connector it's the glue for the caviar to hang on to the chip and these chips I don't normally say this is the best of something but these are some really good chips this makes me a very very happy Christmas Eve Diner

When it comes to deciding what dish or really kind of any dish we always think price is 100% a huge Factor what do we want to spend what do we want to do uh what are we trying to accomplish so we've got three different styles of caviar I've got a salmon row I've got a trout row and then I've got a really beautiful Russian osetra coming from a sturgeon obviously the Russian sturgeon osetra that is the most expensive if you're going to splurge this time of year you go with a sturgeon there's a lot of different varieties of sturgeon um we have etra here today it's beautiful there's kind of this Walnut flavor to it soft um it's a black caviar beautiful sort of buttery Walnut flavor Nutty flavor um so so so good and sort of the top tier of the caviar that we have today then I would move into salmon caviar salmon caviar would actually be the second most expensive here and salmon caviar is fantastic it's got a great pop High salinity also a butteriness to it there's a great great butteriness to salmon caviar and then you have trout row trout row I think is one of my favorite it is my favorite of the inexpensive caviar because it's this very sort of subtle saltiness and I like to say if you are new at caviar and you want to explore if you're new at rows fish rows in general and you want to explore maybe go with the trout row I feel like the trout is sort of the beginner that it's a fish egg that you can get behind because it's beautiful ocean saltiness um with a super mild flavor super super mild flavor so it depends on what you want to do and it depends on what you want to spend I've just given you three different examples of caviar that you have a difference in flavor and obviously a difference in price you can also do all three if you want have all three on your platter and let people choose what they want and they can sort of have an opportunity to taste a variance of fish row so we've got the caviar there we've got the creme fresh here and and now we're going to just plate some chips and the chips are just going to go right into the center so on your sheet tray these were your salted Canon back chips we're just going to throw those into the middle so this is like the Feast of seven fish equivalent to like your cheese board or your shuder board something that you would put out while you're cooking in the kitchen while your guests are arriving while everyone's just kind of getting their jackets off and grabbing a drink and they're so excited to see you and they're so happy to be there for the holidays and then all of a sudden you're like oh no there's just no regular cheeseboard this time we've got homemade chips with an herb crem fresh and a variety of caviar and the thing is it sounds really fancy but it's so easy to make the other thing is too there is always this right like caviar is so precious it really isn't like let's just take a chip and sort of dip it right into the creme fresh and then top it with some cavar and eating it it's really just chips and dip there's tiny little plates that people are just kind of scooping a little bit of creme fresh onto their plate you know a couple of chips a couple of scoops of caviar I've got a salmon row and then we've got the trout H so so so beautiful and then a little bit of the osetra that goes right there there's also an opportunity to maybe cut some bags so that people can kind of walk around with a little bag of potato chips this actually is a bag that I just cut from these larger bags here you kind of just cut off the top and open them up put a couple of chips right into that bag just like that amazing you can actually just put a little bit of crem fresh right over the chips right maybe even just a little bit of caviar that goes on top of that and it's almost like a portable finger food as you're walking around I will 100% take one of those chips out of the bag but when you have chips and cavar you just kind of take a little chip smear a little caviar so good the natural salinity from those fish eggs they're cured so they're so beautifully salted the creme fresh is bright and refreshing and it's that connector it's the glue for the caviar to hang on to the chip and these chips I don't normally say this is the best of something but these are some really good chips this makes me a very very happy Christmas Eve Diner

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone I'm Antonia lefaso welcome to my kitchen I'm so excited for this cook along with y'all doing the Feast of Seven Fishes which is my favorite holiday Christmas Eve it's an Italian American tradition to have a bounty of seafood on that night I've been cooking Feast of seven fish in my house for so many years and I love this dish so much it's caviar with a housemade potato chip with an herbed creme fresh I like to say when you are doing these kinds of Cook or you're following a recipe have all your ingredients out and have all your equipment out so you're not trying to find I don't know you know a lemon juicer or a tablespoon or a bowl we are going to start by making our potato chips because those take the longest so I've got some kenen Beck potatoes here feel free to use a Yukon if you can't find a kenon Beck that being said I think that kenon Becks are the best for making a homemade french fry from scratch and a homemade potato chip from scratch um the starch content is kind of perfect so it cooks and Browns evenly like the best potato for it okay so we've got three sort of mediumsized kenon Beck potatoes you know potatoes can range uh to be sort of very small and very very large these are sort of medium which is perfect um and I've got a Japanese mandolin okay very very different than a French mandolin the French mandolins tend to be a little bit more expensive um and they are sort of bulky metal and I think a little bit harder to work with I love the Japanese mandolin they're easy to wash they're easy to use they're lightweight um and they're pretty inexpensive so the way you sort of have the setting okay is there's a little knob on the back and I just kind of want to open it so as I turn it counterclock wwise this top piece kind of presses down so the blade is shallow so that'll give you the thickness so the first couple of slices are going to be a throwaway because we're trying to get the right uh size so before I can see that we want to do a half about a quarter inch thick we're going to throw away these little pieces we don't need them we're going to leave the skin on just wash them really really well make sure there's no dirt obviously potatoes grow in the ground so there is dirt you want to just give them a nice grub but the skin of the Kon Beck potato is delicious and edible do not peel it so you want to go ahead and cut these into a quarter inch rounds and I have a bowl ready to go cuz we're just going to give these a little bit of a rinse you want to really make sure that you are using the guard so that you protect your fingers because a mandolin cut are not fun that said if you're going rogue and you want to learn how to do it go slow the blade is very very strong um and very very sharp uh and I kind of just go with it I go back and forth I'm not scared of the mandolin as I get closer though to the bottom I will bend my fingers back as much as they possibly can I flatten the palm of my hand to the mandolin and I hold my fingers up high almost like an airplane woo so the higher that I do that and then I slow down the mandolin is not not going to be able to slice my hand if I'm going slowly my hands like this it's the fingers that get in the way and don't sacrifice a finger for this piece of potato just throw it away um and then if you see any pieces like this that come up right there's always sometimes a bruised you know potato that happens we just want to pull those pieces out we don't want to use them so just make sure you go through your pieces to make sure that they look and feel the way they're supposed to again pulling away those first couple of pieces we don't need those but we'll take these that's my discard pile and three potatoes I always like to say listen I'm a huge potato chip junkie love them love them love them think about this right whenever you travel in Italy or if you're in a sort of a European style restaurant as soon as you sit down and you're ordering a glass of lamb Brusco or prco or apparal Spritz the first thing they put in front of you are some crispy potato chips to eat that's essentially where I got the inspiration to do this dish for the Feast of Seven Fishes right okay we don't need our mandolin anymore we're done I'm just going to give these potato chips a quick rinse and then we're going to start frying them in batches and then we will get on to making our herbed crem fresh so I filled the Kon Beck potatoes with just a little bit of cold water from the sink and I'm just going to spread them out and open them up sometimes potatoes when you slice them they stick together they don't want to come apart and what I'm trying do is just release some of that natural starch from the potato um if there's too much of that starch on the potato when it goes into the fryer they're going to Brown faster than they cook okay this will also preserve if you want to keep them in water until you're ready to fry you can do that and again this is something that you can do a couple of days in advance I would say not more than two days in advance slice a whole bunch of potatoes put them in cold water throw them in your fridge and then you've got perfect potatoes ready to fry on the day of okay so I'm going to go ahead and rinse this one more time I rinsed it one more time and now we're ready to fry you can actually see the water this time around is less starchy right I moved it around a ton of that starch was released Second Time Around not so much starch got it all in the first time so you can do this in batches um I go right from the water into the fryer dipping it onto a towel so that it doesn't get any water into the fryer obviously we know this water and oil does not mix so really be careful about putting any kind of water into the fryer now these are in water so as they touch oil they will 100% start to spark a little bit the oil will get a little testy and a little upset and a little aggressive because water wants nothing or oil wants nothing to do with water but don't worry about that it'll dissipate just make sure that the majority of water has kind of been touched off so we're just going to start throwing these into the fryer and I'm using a tabletop fryer and I don't have the baskets in it I'm letting them just kind of free float in here the baskets for me kind of just get in the way um especially with something like potato chips we want to give the potato chips room to go into the fryer I know it looks strange that I'm kind of doing this right I'm not just going to throw them all in there I'm doing like one at a time so that they don't stick to each other just kind of giving them their place inside of the oil and we're going to do this in two batches so I'll leave that potato for the rest so about one and a half potatoes per batch and then I take a slotted spoon and I just kind of gently move the potatoes around in the oil you're going to do this whether you're using a dutch oven or the tabletop electric fryer like I have here but I really like moving the chips around for a couple of different reasons okay they're going to cook so much much more evenly if you just throw trips into a fryer and leave them alone they tend to find each other they come back together they get stuck together and there's not that beautiful golden brown that's perfect on both sides you know there's there's all of these little tricks that you can do to make the perfect potato chip um but it's really about taking the time in the operation to really make sure that the dish is perfect you want to have a sheet tray with a little bit of paper towel line to go right you need to make sure that you have the equipment standing by so that you can do it safely and that you can do it with ease okay and that's about being ready so I'm going to just cut some uh Dill right here and the dill is great just right out of the fridge or if you want to stick it in some water to keep it fresh I also like to put a paper towel over the top and that really keeps the herbs nice and fresh um the dill stem I think is really nice and soft and totally usable in this kind of application so I'm going to be a little more free flowing when I pull the herb off its stem um just by taking it like this and just kind of pulling it if there's a little bit of stem that's fine because Dill stem nothing wrong with it okay so just pull pull pull leave that off to the side so good throw these away keep those waste notot want knot pull all those out we don't need the stems you are able to use the stem so if anyone wants to make I love chicken soup and chicken soup with a little bit of Dill stem really kind of gives you that sort of matzah ball Jewish deli kind of flavor um so if you ever want to use dill stems to make a nice chicken noodle soup that's always the move all right so I'm just going to ball my herbs up we're going to run the knife through it just like that and this is going to be a nice rough chop okay we're not going to go crazy with it we're not going to totally bruise the dill I just want to bring the knife through if there's little pieces of stem in there that's okay we're making potato chips right nothing too fancy I mean it is a kind of a fancy potato chip but we don't need to get fancy with pulling that stem off the stem is totally usable here give a little rinse to my hand so another little trick that I find to be totally useful is that when you start to see the bubbles dissipate into the fryer that's when you know the potato chips are almost ready so when you put them first into the fryer you're going to see a ton of bubbles the oil's like I'm here I'm frying you I'm here I'm frying you and then as they start to really finish and get ready and get nice and crisp um the oil starts to Bubble less and that's just a fact and when it starts to Bubble less you're like okay these are almost done frying but you'll also feel the texture with the slotted spoon as you're sort of throwing those potato chips back and forth in the oil with the slotted spoon you'll start to feel them actually get crunchy as they hit the side of the fryer or they hit this your spoon or they hit one another you'll actually start to feel the texture of the potato change which is kind of cool all right so I'm going to leave that Dill off to the side just right on my cutting board let's start with the crem fresh first we're going to take two cups of creme fresh can you use sour cream absolutely I'm using creme fresh because it's traditional in using crem fresh for any kind of caviar it's a higher fat type of sour cream so again you want to take the time out as you're cutting your herbs and making our creme fresh and we are just making sure that these chips are nice and ready to go and we're going to then fry one more batch okay so creme fresh into a bowl we're going to zest lemon like that's my motion for it so you start on one side and you just kind of go up and down and you move through the lemon easily over and over again and then we're going to use this lemon for the lemon juice so it's so great so it's like no lemon Left Behind kind of a thing because we have all this great lemon oil right all the great oils that come off of the zest of the lemon are now going to season the creme fresh then along with the juice so I always like to say it's like two different kinds of lemon it's a lemon duo we will juice those two lemons into that creme fresh oh there's a little bit more you always want to make sure the back of your rasper you get all that zest off I can actually hear the chips stop and you can see it right they're not making any more noise or any more movement into the fryer they're like a perfect Golden Brown I Can Feel the crispiness of them you know that they're done pull it out I kind of just give it a little touch with my finger they're ready shake off any excess oil with your SLO botted spoon and just lay them out yep they're not making any noise they're not making any kind of bubbling or gurgling I always like to say there's like the potato chip gurgle and that's how you know that they are ready to go and as soon as they're out onto this to this uh sheet tray with a little bit of paper towel we're going to season them really nicely with salt and a little bit of chopped D and then we will start on the second batch so season generously and you want to make sure that you kind of move your fingers back and forth and what that does is kind of break up the salt particles so that they can evenly fall and distribute over the top of the chips and then you take your Cho dill and you just put that right over the chip it's going to Clump every once in a while some will stick that's okay we just want to get the essence of Dill on those potato chips taking so much out of me not to have a bite of Chip yet okay I need to wait till the dish is ready okay chips are ready second batch of chips let's go so again just taking the chips out of the water trying to get just a little Pat a little Pat onto your paper towel and then just start throwing them back into the fryer right individual have you ever seen so much care and love given to a potato chip right every little Chip is going through my fingers into the fryer make sure there's no excess water on your chips if you feel it just kind of give it another little Pat so we can avoid putting too much water into the fryer or the Dutch oven whatever it is that you want to use and then even though I put every single chip in there personally right every single chip one in there personally just going to give it a little I don't want them to stick together I don't want them to party together I want them to fry separately and do a perfect golden brown oh one little rogue chip still left in the bowl into the fryer okay now we are ready to make our creme fresh we've got a cup of creme fresh in there high fat French sour cream now we're going to squeeze some lemon juice into that creme fresh and then we're going to finish it with just a little bit of chopped chives and then we're going to talk about caviar and then we're going to eat this thing all right so I always like to like put my head away from a squeeze of lemon because you know I just little lemon in the eye is never never never a good thing never helpful um and I there's so many different ways of squeezing lemon you can kind of just do it with your hand you can cut them into little segments and then just squeeze them um you know there's the old school way where you cut it and just kind of dig it with a fork my mom likes to do that but I have to say kind of into the lemon press press these days because it's just so there's like no lemon juice Left Behind kind of a thing you know all the juice from that lemon if it's in there comes out with a lemon juicer okay going to just give that a little mix to get it started and then we're going to fold some chive in there so now we're going to just do a fine chop to our chives and throw those chives into the creeme fresh W I used to get in trouble for cutting chives wrong in the restaurant okay I have like PTSD chive cutting I swear because if there was like one chive that was off my chef would come by and be like throw them all out start over we're not really there right now you're able to kind of just cut through these chives so that they're really really small um they're going to go into the CRM Fresh So if you got one piece that's a little bit larger no one's going to count no one's going to think about it so we're going to do some really beautiful cuts to these chives but again if there are larger pieces that's okay um and also I love talking about this when it comes to knife skills okay and you're cutting these distinct pieces of chive or lemon or fish or whatever it is a you want a sharp knife sharp knives are safer than dull knives D dull knives you're always kind of like digging into things you have to push harder a knife should do its job by slicing through something with very little effort from your muscle you have to practice that's the only way the only way that it happens okay practice every single day cutting some of your favorite vegetables Sav favorite fruits favorite proteins but you just have to practice it's as simple as that you can't really do much else you aren't going to wake up one day magically a perfect knife with perfect knife skills you have to work at it okay let's check the last batch of chips they are working well in here they're moving around they look amazing and again we're looking for that bubble to kind of dissipate as I'm moving the chips around with the slotted spatula and making sure that they're not touching each other and all the chips have been separated if you do find any chips that are not separating on their own by you moving it around with the slotted spatula feel free to take that chip out of the oil let it cool separate it yourself and then throw it back into the mix Okay Okay so we've got the Chive crem fresh with lemon and lemon juice and then we're going to get ready to Plate this cuz our chips are almost done I'm going to give it a little taste I'm not going to add any salt to this the caviar is very very salty we salted the chip and really the creme fresh is meant to be the sort of sour fresh note that brings the caviar and the chip together perfect and I've got my extra Dill right here ready to go so that we have it for garnish of the chips so you can see the chips are almost there all of that all of those bubbles are almost gone so we can get ready to Plate okay we're going to get ready to Plate this deliciousness and I'm going to give you all of the options for the caviar okay so let's get ready to just put a a little bit of that creeme fresh into this bowl yes yes yes oh I hear the chips they are finishing now we've got these chips on here we're going to make a little room for the next ones coming out so the last of the chips are out we're going to go back to that salting process where we're rubbing our pinched fingers of salt um back and forth so that really sort of separates those salt uh particles so it falls evenly on top of the chips and we're just again going to sprinkle those chips with a little bit of that chopped dill and then we're going to get ready to Plate let's talk caviar okay there's a lot of different factors that come into why we choose the caviar that we choose to go with this dish or really kind of any dish a I always think price is 100% a huge Factor what do we want to spend what do we want to do uh what are we trying to accomplish so we've got three different styles of caviar I've got a salmon row I've got a trout row and then I've got a really beautiful Russian osetra coming from a sturgeon obviously the Russian sturgeon osetra that is the most expensive if you're going to splurge this time of year you go with a sturgeon there's a lot of different varieties of sturgeon um we have etra here today it's beautiful there's kind of this Walnut flavor to it soft um it's a black caviar beautiful sort of buttery Walnut flavor Nutty Nutty flavor um so so so good and sort of the top tier of the caviar that we have today then I would move into salmon caviar salmon caviar would actually be the second most expensive here and salmon caviar is fantastic it's got a great pop High salinity also a butteriness to it there's a great great butteriness to salmon caviar and then you have trout row trout row I think is one of my favorite it is my favorite of the inexpensive caviar because it's this very sort of subtle saltiness and I like to say if you are new at caviar and you want to explore if you're new at rows fish rows in general and you want to explore maybe go with the trout row I feel like the trout is sort of the beginner that it's a fish egg that you can get behind because it's beautiful ocean saltiness um with a super mild flavor super super mild flavor so it depends on what you want to do and it depends on what you want to spend I've just given you three different examples of caviar that you have a difference in flavor and obviously a difference in price you can also do all three if you want have all three on your platter and let people choose what they want and they can sort of have an opportunity to taste a variance of fish row so we've got the caviar there we've got the creme fresh here and and now we're going to just plate some chips and the chips are just going to go right into the center so on your sheet tray these were your salted Canon back chips we're just going to throw those into the middle so this is like the Feast of seven fish equivalent to like your cheese board or your shuder board something that you would put out while you're cooking in the kitchen while your guests are arriving while everyone's just kind of getting their jackets off and grabbing a drink and they're so excited to see you and they're so happy to be there for the holidays and then all of a sudden you're like oh no there's just no regular cheeseboard this time we've got homemade chips with an herb crem fresh and a variety of caviar and the thing is it sounds really fancy but it's so easy to make the other thing is too there is always this right like caviar is so precious it really isn't like let's just take a chip and sort of dip it right into the creme fresh and then top it with some cavar and eating it it's really just chips and dip there's tiny little plates that people are just kind of scooping a little bit of creme fresh onto their plate you know a couple of chips a couple of scoops of caviar I've got a salmon row and then we've got the trout H so so so beautiful and then a little bit of the osetra that goes right there there's also an opportunity to maybe cut some bags so that people can kind of walk around with a little bag of potato chips this actually is a bag that I just cut from these larger bags here you kind of just cut off the top and open them up put a couple of chips right into that bag just like that amazing you can actually just put a little bit of crem fresh right over the chips right maybe even just a little bit of caviar that goes on top of that and it's almost like a portable finger food as you're walking around I will 100% take one of those chips out of the bag but when you have chips and cavar you just kind of take a little chip smear a little caviar so good the natural salinity from those fish eggs they're cured so they're so beautifully salted the creme fresh is bright and refreshing and it's that connector it's the glue for the caviar to hang on to the chip and these chips I don't normally say this is the best of something but these are some really good chips this makes me a very very happy Christmas Eve Dinerhey everyone I'm Antonia lefaso welcome to my kitchen I'm so excited for this cook along with y'all doing the Feast of Seven Fishes which is my favorite holiday Christmas Eve it's an Italian American tradition to have a bounty of seafood on that night I've been cooking Feast of seven fish in my house for so many years and I love this dish so much it's caviar with a housemade potato chip with an herbed creme fresh I like to say when you are doing these kinds of Cook or you're following a recipe have all your ingredients out and have all your equipment out so you're not trying to find I don't know you know a lemon juicer or a tablespoon or a bowl we are going to start by making our potato chips because those take the longest so I've got some kenen Beck potatoes here feel free to use a Yukon if you can't find a kenon Beck that being said I think that kenon Becks are the best for making a homemade french fry from scratch and a homemade potato chip from scratch um the starch content is kind of perfect so it cooks and Browns evenly like the best potato for it okay so we've got three sort of mediumsized kenon Beck potatoes you know potatoes can range uh to be sort of very small and very very large these are sort of medium which is perfect um and I've got a Japanese mandolin okay very very different than a French mandolin the French mandolins tend to be a little bit more expensive um and they are sort of bulky metal and I think a little bit harder to work with I love the Japanese mandolin they're easy to wash they're easy to use they're lightweight um and they're pretty inexpensive so the way you sort of have the setting okay is there's a little knob on the back and I just kind of want to open it so as I turn it counterclock wwise this top piece kind of presses down so the blade is shallow so that'll give you the thickness so the first couple of slices are going to be a throwaway because we're trying to get the right uh size so before I can see that we want to do a half about a quarter inch thick we're going to throw away these little pieces we don't need them we're going to leave the skin on just wash them really really well make sure there's no dirt obviously potatoes grow in the ground so there is dirt you want to just give them a nice grub but the skin of the Kon Beck potato is delicious and edible do not peel it so you want to go ahead and cut these into a quarter inch rounds and I have a bowl ready to go cuz we're just going to give these a little bit of a rinse you want to really make sure that you are using the guard so that you protect your fingers because a mandolin cut are not fun that said if you're going rogue and you want to learn how to do it go slow the blade is very very strong um and very very sharp uh and I kind of just go with it I go back and forth I'm not scared of the mandolin as I get closer though to the bottom I will bend my fingers back as much as they possibly can I flatten the palm of my hand to the mandolin and I hold my fingers up high almost like an airplane woo so the higher that I do that and then I slow down the mandolin is not not going to be able to slice my hand if I'm going slowly my hands like this it's the fingers that get in the way and don't sacrifice a finger for this piece of potato just throw it away um and then if you see any pieces like this that come up right there's always sometimes a bruised you know potato that happens we just want to pull those pieces out we don't want to use them so just make sure you go through your pieces to make sure that they look and feel the way they're supposed to again pulling away those first couple of pieces we don't need those but we'll take these that's my discard pile and three potatoes I always like to say listen I'm a huge potato chip junkie love them love them love them think about this right whenever you travel in Italy or if you're in a sort of a European style restaurant as soon as you sit down and you're ordering a glass of lamb Brusco or prco or apparal Spritz the first thing they put in front of you are some crispy potato chips to eat that's essentially where I got the inspiration to do this dish for the Feast of Seven Fishes right okay we don't need our mandolin anymore we're done I'm just going to give these potato chips a quick rinse and then we're going to start frying them in batches and then we will get on to making our herbed crem fresh so I filled the Kon Beck potatoes with just a little bit of cold water from the sink and I'm just going to spread them out and open them up sometimes potatoes when you slice them they stick together they don't want to come apart and what I'm trying do is just release some of that natural starch from the potato um if there's too much of that starch on the potato when it goes into the fryer they're going to Brown faster than they cook okay this will also preserve if you want to keep them in water until you're ready to fry you can do that and again this is something that you can do a couple of days in advance I would say not more than two days in advance slice a whole bunch of potatoes put them in cold water throw them in your fridge and then you've got perfect potatoes ready to fry on the day of okay so I'm going to go ahead and rinse this one more time I rinsed it one more time and now we're ready to fry you can actually see the water this time around is less starchy right I moved it around a ton of that starch was released Second Time Around not so much starch got it all in the first time so you can do this in batches um I go right from the water into the fryer dipping it onto a towel so that it doesn't get any water into the fryer obviously we know this water and oil does not mix so really be careful about putting any kind of water into the fryer now these are in water so as they touch oil they will 100% start to spark a little bit the oil will get a little testy and a little upset and a little aggressive because water wants nothing or oil wants nothing to do with water but don't worry about that it'll dissipate just make sure that the majority of water has kind of been touched off so we're just going to start throwing these into the fryer and I'm using a tabletop fryer and I don't have the baskets in it I'm letting them just kind of free float in here the baskets for me kind of just get in the way um especially with something like potato chips we want to give the potato chips room to go into the fryer I know it looks strange that I'm kind of doing this right I'm not just going to throw them all in there I'm doing like one at a time so that they don't stick to each other just kind of giving them their place inside of the oil and we're going to do this in two batches so I'll leave that potato for the rest so about one and a half potatoes per batch and then I take a slotted spoon and I just kind of gently move the potatoes around in the oil you're going to do this whether you're using a dutch oven or the tabletop electric fryer like I have here but I really like moving the chips around for a couple of different reasons okay they're going to cook so much much more evenly if you just throw trips into a fryer and leave them alone they tend to find each other they come back together they get stuck together and there's not that beautiful golden brown that's perfect on both sides you know there's there's all of these little tricks that you can do to make the perfect potato chip um but it's really about taking the time in the operation to really make sure that the dish is perfect you want to have a sheet tray with a little bit of paper towel line to go right you need to make sure that you have the equipment standing by so that you can do it safely and that you can do it with ease okay and that's about being ready so I'm going to just cut some uh Dill right here and the dill is great just right out of the fridge or if you want to stick it in some water to keep it fresh I also like to put a paper towel over the top and that really keeps the herbs nice and fresh um the dill stem I think is really nice and soft and totally usable in this kind of application so I'm going to be a little more free flowing when I pull the herb off its stem um just by taking it like this and just kind of pulling it if there's a little bit of stem that's fine because Dill stem nothing wrong with it okay so just pull pull pull leave that off to the side so good throw these away keep those waste notot want knot pull all those out we don't need the stems you are able to use the stem so if anyone wants to make I love chicken soup and chicken soup with a little bit of Dill stem really kind of gives you that sort of matzah ball Jewish deli kind of flavor um so if you ever want to use dill stems to make a nice chicken noodle soup that's always the move all right so I'm just going to ball my herbs up we're going to run the knife through it just like that and this is going to be a nice rough chop okay we're not going to go crazy with it we're not going to totally bruise the dill I just want to bring the knife through if there's little pieces of stem in there that's okay we're making potato chips right nothing too fancy I mean it is a kind of a fancy potato chip but we don't need to get fancy with pulling that stem off the stem is totally usable here give a little rinse to my hand so another little trick that I find to be totally useful is that when you start to see the bubbles dissipate into the fryer that's when you know the potato chips are almost ready so when you put them first into the fryer you're going to see a ton of bubbles the oil's like I'm here I'm frying you I'm here I'm frying you and then as they start to really finish and get ready and get nice and crisp um the oil starts to Bubble less and that's just a fact and when it starts to Bubble less you're like okay these are almost done frying but you'll also feel the texture with the slotted spoon as you're sort of throwing those potato chips back and forth in the oil with the slotted spoon you'll start to feel them actually get crunchy as they hit the side of the fryer or they hit this your spoon or they hit one another you'll actually start to feel the texture of the potato change which is kind of cool all right so I'm going to leave that Dill off to the side just right on my cutting board let's start with the crem fresh first we're going to take two cups of creme fresh can you use sour cream absolutely I'm using creme fresh because it's traditional in using crem fresh for any kind of caviar it's a higher fat type of sour cream so again you want to take the time out as you're cutting your herbs and making our creme fresh and we are just making sure that these chips are nice and ready to go and we're going to then fry one more batch okay so creme fresh into a bowl we're going to zest lemon like that's my motion for it so you start on one side and you just kind of go up and down and you move through the lemon easily over and over again and then we're going to use this lemon for the lemon juice so it's so great so it's like no lemon Left Behind kind of a thing because we have all this great lemon oil right all the great oils that come off of the zest of the lemon are now going to season the creme fresh then along with the juice so I always like to say it's like two different kinds of lemon it's a lemon duo we will juice those two lemons into that creme fresh oh there's a little bit more you always want to make sure the back of your rasper you get all that zest off I can actually hear the chips stop and you can see it right they're not making any more noise or any more movement into the fryer they're like a perfect Golden Brown I Can Feel the crispiness of them you know that they're done pull it out I kind of just give it a little touch with my finger they're ready shake off any excess oil with your SLO botted spoon and just lay them out yep they're not making any noise they're not making any kind of bubbling or gurgling I always like to say there's like the potato chip gurgle and that's how you know that they are ready to go and as soon as they're out onto this to this uh sheet tray with a little bit of paper towel we're going to season them really nicely with salt and a little bit of chopped D and then we will start on the second batch so season generously and you want to make sure that you kind of move your fingers back and forth and what that does is kind of break up the salt particles so that they can evenly fall and distribute over the top of the chips and then you take your Cho dill and you just put that right over the chip it's going to Clump every once in a while some will stick that's okay we just want to get the essence of Dill on those potato chips taking so much out of me not to have a bite of Chip yet okay I need to wait till the dish is ready okay chips are ready second batch of chips let's go so again just taking the chips out of the water trying to get just a little Pat a little Pat onto your paper towel and then just start throwing them back into the fryer right individual have you ever seen so much care and love given to a potato chip right every little Chip is going through my fingers into the fryer make sure there's no excess water on your chips if you feel it just kind of give it another little Pat so we can avoid putting too much water into the fryer or the Dutch oven whatever it is that you want to use and then even though I put every single chip in there personally right every single chip one in there personally just going to give it a little I don't want them to stick together I don't want them to party together I want them to fry separately and do a perfect golden brown oh one little rogue chip still left in the bowl into the fryer okay now we are ready to make our creme fresh we've got a cup of creme fresh in there high fat French sour cream now we're going to squeeze some lemon juice into that creme fresh and then we're going to finish it with just a little bit of chopped chives and then we're going to talk about caviar and then we're going to eat this thing all right so I always like to like put my head away from a squeeze of lemon because you know I just little lemon in the eye is never never never a good thing never helpful um and I there's so many different ways of squeezing lemon you can kind of just do it with your hand you can cut them into little segments and then just squeeze them um you know there's the old school way where you cut it and just kind of dig it with a fork my mom likes to do that but I have to say kind of into the lemon press press these days because it's just so there's like no lemon juice Left Behind kind of a thing you know all the juice from that lemon if it's in there comes out with a lemon juicer okay going to just give that a little mix to get it started and then we're going to fold some chive in there so now we're going to just do a fine chop to our chives and throw those chives into the creeme fresh W I used to get in trouble for cutting chives wrong in the restaurant okay I have like PTSD chive cutting I swear because if there was like one chive that was off my chef would come by and be like throw them all out start over we're not really there right now you're able to kind of just cut through these chives so that they're really really small um they're going to go into the CRM Fresh So if you got one piece that's a little bit larger no one's going to count no one's going to think about it so we're going to do some really beautiful cuts to these chives but again if there are larger pieces that's okay um and also I love talking about this when it comes to knife skills okay and you're cutting these distinct pieces of chive or lemon or fish or whatever it is a you want a sharp knife sharp knives are safer than dull knives D dull knives you're always kind of like digging into things you have to push harder a knife should do its job by slicing through something with very little effort from your muscle you have to practice that's the only way the only way that it happens okay practice every single day cutting some of your favorite vegetables Sav favorite fruits favorite proteins but you just have to practice it's as simple as that you can't really do much else you aren't going to wake up one day magically a perfect knife with perfect knife skills you have to work at it okay let's check the last batch of chips they are working well in here they're moving around they look amazing and again we're looking for that bubble to kind of dissipate as I'm moving the chips around with the slotted spatula and making sure that they're not touching each other and all the chips have been separated if you do find any chips that are not separating on their own by you moving it around with the slotted spatula feel free to take that chip out of the oil let it cool separate it yourself and then throw it back into the mix Okay Okay so we've got the Chive crem fresh with lemon and lemon juice and then we're going to get ready to Plate this cuz our chips are almost done I'm going to give it a little taste I'm not going to add any salt to this the caviar is very very salty we salted the chip and really the creme fresh is meant to be the sort of sour fresh note that brings the caviar and the chip together perfect and I've got my extra Dill right here ready to go so that we have it for garnish of the chips so you can see the chips are almost there all of that all of those bubbles are almost gone so we can get ready to Plate okay we're going to get ready to Plate this deliciousness and I'm going to give you all of the options for the caviar okay so let's get ready to just put a a little bit of that creeme fresh into this bowl yes yes yes oh I hear the chips they are finishing now we've got these chips on here we're going to make a little room for the next ones coming out so the last of the chips are out we're going to go back to that salting process where we're rubbing our pinched fingers of salt um back and forth so that really sort of separates those salt uh particles so it falls evenly on top of the chips and we're just again going to sprinkle those chips with a little bit of that chopped dill and then we're going to get ready to Plate let's talk caviar okay there's a lot of different factors that come into why we choose the caviar that we choose to go with this dish or really kind of any dish a I always think price is 100% a huge Factor what do we want to spend what do we want to do uh what are we trying to accomplish so we've got three different styles of caviar I've got a salmon row I've got a trout row and then I've got a really beautiful Russian osetra coming from a sturgeon obviously the Russian sturgeon osetra that is the most expensive if you're going to splurge this time of year you go with a sturgeon there's a lot of different varieties of sturgeon um we have etra here today it's beautiful there's kind of this Walnut flavor to it soft um it's a black caviar beautiful sort of buttery Walnut flavor Nutty Nutty flavor um so so so good and sort of the top tier of the caviar that we have today then I would move into salmon caviar salmon caviar would actually be the second most expensive here and salmon caviar is fantastic it's got a great pop High salinity also a butteriness to it there's a great great butteriness to salmon caviar and then you have trout row trout row I think is one of my favorite it is my favorite of the inexpensive caviar because it's this very sort of subtle saltiness and I like to say if you are new at caviar and you want to explore if you're new at rows fish rows in general and you want to explore maybe go with the trout row I feel like the trout is sort of the beginner that it's a fish egg that you can get behind because it's beautiful ocean saltiness um with a super mild flavor super super mild flavor so it depends on what you want to do and it depends on what you want to spend I've just given you three different examples of caviar that you have a difference in flavor and obviously a difference in price you can also do all three if you want have all three on your platter and let people choose what they want and they can sort of have an opportunity to taste a variance of fish row so we've got the caviar there we've got the creme fresh here and and now we're going to just plate some chips and the chips are just going to go right into the center so on your sheet tray these were your salted Canon back chips we're just going to throw those into the middle so this is like the Feast of seven fish equivalent to like your cheese board or your shuder board something that you would put out while you're cooking in the kitchen while your guests are arriving while everyone's just kind of getting their jackets off and grabbing a drink and they're so excited to see you and they're so happy to be there for the holidays and then all of a sudden you're like oh no there's just no regular cheeseboard this time we've got homemade chips with an herb crem fresh and a variety of caviar and the thing is it sounds really fancy but it's so easy to make the other thing is too there is always this right like caviar is so precious it really isn't like let's just take a chip and sort of dip it right into the creme fresh and then top it with some cavar and eating it it's really just chips and dip there's tiny little plates that people are just kind of scooping a little bit of creme fresh onto their plate you know a couple of chips a couple of scoops of caviar I've got a salmon row and then we've got the trout H so so so beautiful and then a little bit of the osetra that goes right there there's also an opportunity to maybe cut some bags so that people can kind of walk around with a little bag of potato chips this actually is a bag that I just cut from these larger bags here you kind of just cut off the top and open them up put a couple of chips right into that bag just like that amazing you can actually just put a little bit of crem fresh right over the chips right maybe even just a little bit of caviar that goes on top of that and it's almost like a portable finger food as you're walking around I will 100% take one of those chips out of the bag but when you have chips and cavar you just kind of take a little chip smear a little caviar so good the natural salinity from those fish eggs they're cured so they're so beautifully salted the creme fresh is bright and refreshing and it's that connector it's the glue for the caviar to hang on to the chip and these chips I don't normally say this is the best of something but these are some really good chips this makes me a very very happy Christmas Eve Diner\n"