Thomas Keller serves these to every table at Per Se before they’ve looked at a menu or ordered a glass of wine. They arrive on a tray, standing upright in a row of salt, sesame-flecked golden cones filled with a dome of pale pink salmon tartare — miniature ice cream cones, reimagined in savory form.
The idea came from a Baskin-Robbins. Keller was struck by the specific pleasure of an ice cream cone: the crunch, the cold filling, the size that makes you eat it in one or two bites, the shape you recognize before you’ve even tasted it. He spent time translating that pleasure into something his kitchen could put in front of every guest at the beginning of every meal. The result — salmon tartare and sweet red onion crème fraîche in a sesame tuile cone — first appeared at The French Laundry in Yountville in the mid-1990s and has been served identically at Per Se in New York since it opened in 2004. Per Se’s nine-course tasting menu is $425 per person. The cornet is free, in the sense that it comes before you’ve spent anything — which is part of why it lands so well.
The recipe appears in The French Laundry Cookbook (Keller with Michael Ruhlman and Susie Heller, Artisan Books, 1999). It is one of the most reproduced Keller recipes online, and also one of the most frequently attempted and failed at home. The technique is specific.
Three things that make home versions fail
The rolling window is 30 seconds. Tuiles are baked flat and then shaped while hot — as they cool, the sugar solidifies and the tuile becomes brittle and will crack rather than bend. Most home cooks bake an entire sheet of 8 to 10 tuiles and then try to roll them all in sequence. By the time they finish rolling the third or fourth, the rest have set. You must work one at a time: bake the sheet, pull out one tuile, roll it, hold for 30 seconds until firm, slide it off the mold, then immediately move to the next. If a tuile stiffens before you get to it, return the pan to the oven for 20 seconds — the sugar will re-melt.
Crème fraîche goes in first, not last. The natural instinct is to fill the cone with salmon tartare first (it’s the main ingredient) and top it with a dollop of crème fraîche. Do the opposite. Salmon tartare contains olive oil and natural moisture that immediately begin to migrate into the sesame tuile walls. Fill the cone crème fraîche-first, enough to seal the bottom tip, then dome the salmon tartare on top. The cold, thick crème fraîche acts as a barrier — assembled this way, the cornets stay crisp for 25 to 30 minutes after filling. Assembled salmon-first, they go soft in 10 to 15 minutes.
Hand-mince the salmon; do not use a food processor. Processor blades crush rather than cut. Crushed salmon cells release their liquid immediately, turning the tartare grey, wet, and paste-like. A sharp knife, a cold cutting board, and a gentle rocking motion produce fine, distinct pieces that stay pink and hold a dome shape. Move quickly, keep everything cold, and stop when the pieces are small but still identifiable — the tartare should be fine, not pureed.
About Per Se
Per Se opened on the fourth floor of the Time Warner Center (now Deutsche Bank Center) at 10 Columbus Circle in New York City in February 2004. It has held three Michelin stars since 2005 — continuously, for twenty years. The restaurant’s tasting menu currently runs $425 per person, plus wine and tax, with a $200 per person deposit required at reservation through Tock.
The French Laundry, which preceded Per Se by a decade (Keller took it over in 1994), is at 6640 Washington Street in Yountville, California, in Napa Valley. It has also held three Michelin stars since 2007. Reservations for both restaurants are booked months in advance.
The cornets appear at both. They are the first thing every guest eats.
The butter technique
Keller’s batter calls for butter “softened but still cool to the touch” whisked to a “mayonnaise-like consistency” before any other ingredients are added. This matters more than it sounds. If the butter is too warm (room temperature, not just soft-cool), the batter spreads unevenly and the tuiles bake with thick and thin patches. If the butter is not whisked smooth enough before the egg whites are added, the egg whites don’t incorporate cleanly and the batter is lumpy. Take the butter out of the refrigerator 10 to 15 minutes before you start — it should yield to pressure but still feel distinctly cool against your palm — then whisk it alone first, until it is completely smooth and has taken on a slightly fluffy, creamy appearance. Add the cold egg whites next, whisk until smooth, then fold in the flour mixture. The cold egg whites help re-firm the batter slightly, which is what produces the clean spreading consistency you need.
Refrigerating the finished batter for 30 minutes before spreading is not optional — it firms it to the point where it holds a clean circle when spread, rather than running into an irregular shape.
On making the cornets without molds
Metal cream horn molds are available at restaurant supply stores and baking shops for about $12 per set of 12. They are the correct tool. If you want to practice before committing to buying molds, heavy aluminum foil works: cut a rectangle roughly 5 by 4 inches, roll it diagonally into a tight cone with a closed tip and an opening about 3/4 to 1 inch in diameter, crimp the seam so it holds its shape, and spray the outside lightly with non-stick spray. The foil cone works but is slightly less rigid than metal — hold the tuile around it a few extra seconds before sliding it off. Make 12 to 18 foil cones before you begin baking, because you cannot stop mid-roll to make a new mold.
Serving
Stand the finished cornets upright in a small container of granulated sugar or kosher salt — the grains hold them vertical and cushion them from rolling and cracking. Fill them right before service. Two to three cornets per person is the right portion for an amuse-bouche. Three per person on a table of eight is 24 cornets total — exactly what the recipe yields from 4 oz of salmon.
Bring them to the table upright, in whatever vessel keeps them standing, and serve immediately. They take one or two bites. Keller designed them to make people smile.
They do.
