M’s birthday, part 1
Tilth is a term that refers to soil having the proper nutrients to grow crops. Connotatively, it means that a restaurant or company cares about the land in which their products were grown. I understand it as the the reuniting of merchant and farmer, the consciousness and care that goes into a chef’s decision to source their food from local farmers that respect the earth.
Tilth is also a Seattle restaurant that jon and I have been intending to go to for (literally) two years. Now renowned chef, Maria Hines, puts an emphasis on local, sustainable, and organic foods in her innovative and flavour-forward cooking.
Jon’s been on a biscuits-and-gravy kick lately, and we only go out to breakfast restaurants that offer it. We’re unofficially starting a “best in Seattle” race. So the b&g got us in the door to Tilth, but boy am I glad we stayed for the rest.
Starving, we started out with a fig and hazelnut scone, which was served with a spiced butter. Two things:
1. Scones are rarely scones. You know those triangle muffins you get at starbucks? not a scone. Scones are dense, dry, and are much improved by jam. Tilth gave us an awesome cross between the lifeless wedge of flour that I think of as a traditional scone, and the super-moist sbux-scone. It was rather lovely.
2. Spiced butter tastes like Christmas to me. Jon would probably prefer regular anything over its holiday-spiced counterpart.
3. (bonus!) This stuff made me wonder why I don’t keep compound butters around the house. They’re so easy to make, but add such a burst of flavour to ordinary things.
The salt (in back) and sugar that are on the table:
Tilth make this thing called the “perfect egg”, also called “eggs sous vide”. When you cook an egg at a really low temperature for a really long time (an hour), it turns into this creamy, juicy goodness. Jon mentioned that it was similar enough to a soft-boiled egg, so maybe all the extra time isn’t worth it. I thought the yolk was creamier than any egg I’ve ever had. (this may have had to do with the quality of the egg as well.)
As I’ve mentioned before, I lose all cognitive reasoning abilities when I’m hungry. Coupling that with the fact that jon *always* chooses better things than I do, we’ve fallen into a habit of him picking his top two or three choices on a menu, and then I’ll get one of those. He picked out the Pumpkin Cardamom French Toast with candied pumpkin, rum syrup, black tea chantilly. Oh, it was fantastic. We decided that it must have been baked (a technique we’ll have to try!) because the pieces were so thick, yet it was cooked all the way through.
And then there was the main event, the biscuits and gravy. The biscuits were so cheddary that they made me forget what I was eating. The smoked pulled chicken gravy was much lighter than the traditional, and the addition of preserved lemon brightened the whole dish up. It was well balanced and well prepared. I’d say for a “non tradition” b&g, it takes the cake.
All things considered, I can’t imagine why we’ve waited so long to check Tilth out. We’ll definitely have to go back for dinner at some point.