Pi 2: Tau rising.

PI UPDATE

I mentioned the 4 pie tarts I made in honor of pie day?  Well, we only actually ate two of those that night.  That left two for the following night.  I wasn't quite happy with the custard and orange foam combo.  It wasn't bad, but needed something else.  So, with the remaining 2 pies I topped the custard with pickled blueberries and then orange foam.  This was a great choice.  The pickled blueberries were a great intermediary and really enhanced both the custard and the orange foam.  This may just be the new apple pie.

Sous Vide Cinnamon Vanilla Custard, Pickled Blueberries, Spiced Cora Cora Orange Foam and Shortbread Crust Pie Tart

Also, for those of you not aware of the controversy that's brewing in math circles, you can catch up here:  Tau Manifesto

The Final Pi Day Ever? Fear the Tau

Today is Pi day.  Or Pie day.  You may have let this pass by with nary a thought.  But evil lurks out there and it's name is Tau.  Tau day is purportedly June 28th.  And it sucks.  Well, maybe that's a little harsh.  But would you rather have Pi(e) day, or Tau day?  I thought so.  There's a movement among math types to rid the world of pie.  Yeah yeah, we'll still have cake, but sometimes pi is better.  I like math, but I'm not on board with this nonsense.  Math, this is why people fear you.  Pi is good and you want to get rid of it.  Tau is no fun at all and yet this is what you choose to market to the world.

Anyway, since this might be the last pi day ever, I decided to make pie to celebrate.  Unfortunately, I didn't really consider what kind of pie, or a trip to the grocer, so I had to scrounge for whatever I could find.  Luckily I had purchased a dozen and a half eggs at the market on Saturday.  I had enough left for a custard filling for half a pie.  I suppose that if this was Tau day and I was making tau but only had enough for half a tau, this would work out well. Then I could have pie.  But this was pi day.  And what's half a pie?  Well, in this case, it's 4 tarts.  Only I don't have tart pans, so it's four tartish desserts made in ramekins.

So, I made half a crust.  2 egg yolks cooked through, some ground almond, all purpose flour, powdered sugar, salt, butter baking soda.  Seemed pretty tasty.  Like a shortbread cookie.  It didn't fit the ramekins very well, but with some serious patch work, I got it covered.  They weren't pretty, but serviceable.


Then I made a sous vide vanilla cinnamon custard filling.  And to top the pie, I found some Cora Cora oranges that I bought last week without any real purpose.  They appeared to be the only fresh fruit option, so  I juiced them, added some honey, a little star anise and clove, then added some gelatin, poured into the whip, hit with two canisters of N2O and had a fancy orange foam.  Orange flavor, white color.  Not bad for improvised ingredients.     

Pi Day Pie - Custard Tart

Pie Day Pi - Cinnamon Vanilla Custard Tartlet with Spiced Cora Cora Orange Foam

Rescuing My Caffeinated Dreams of Blowing Sugar

Challenge #7: Coffee.

Sous Vide Coffee Panna Cotta, Coffee Fluid Gel, Milk Foam, Coffee Spun Sugar

I've been wanting to try some blown sugar work after seeing a demo from Joan Roca (might have been Jordi Roca doing the demo, but Joan was narrating). I thought it would make a nice dish this week. I planned to blow sugar into a large coffee bean shape, fill it with a coffee panna cotta and dust with cocoa and ground chocolate so that it looked like a giant coffee bean on the plate.  The diner would crack the bean with their spoon like a creme brulee shell to expose the rich panna cotta within.

The inspiration: Apricot from el cellar de can roca

 
It seemed like a decent enough plan.  I worried that the panna cotta might dissolve the sugar shell before it set, but in case of disaster, I planned to line the inside of the sugar shell with cocoa butter, thinking the fat would protect the sugar from moisture and could set up nice and thin.  If only I could get to that point. 

What I learned is that blown sugar work is not something I can learn in a couple of hours. I was able to inflate a few sugar balloons, but they were all mishapen and collapsed on themselves and basically wouldn't cooperate.  Even with help, all I ended up with was something that looked like the stomach of an anatomy model, and a pretty nice round ball that promptly shattered when I tried to set it down.  So, after a frustrating evening, I punted on the blown sugar until another day.

That's improper sugar blowing technique.

It popped

Sugar Stomach...As good as it got, still not good.

Breaking Bad

Reconfiguring my dish, I made a sous vide coffee panna cotta with 400g heavy cream, 100 g mascarpone, 200g whole coffee beans, and 75 g sugar. I bagged and cooked it sous vide at 92C for 2.5 hours. I bloomed 5g of gelatin in 50g of milk an added it about 10 mintues before the end.

I wanted to stick to strictly coffee, sugar and cream in the dish, so I also did a 24 hour cold brewed coffee and made a fluid gel sauce, and served with some milk foam and coffee flavored spun sugar.

The sous vide coffee panna cotta was awesome. I was really just sort of winging it based on Chef Grant Lee Crilly's discussion of coffee butter and fat extraction of the beans. I figured the cream also had a high fat %, so it was worth a try. There was almost no acidity or bitterness, but the fruity notes of the beans really came through. Flavors that are subtle when brewed were forward and prominent in a way I didn't really expect.  I used a local roasted Terra Verde coffee which I find to be an excellent medium roast that really let's some of the herbal qualities of the beans shine.  The rest of the dish paired nicely, although didn't have the visual impact and playfulness I'd hoped for originally.  The rich creamy panna cotta, the strong roasted coffee sauce, topped with some foamy milk goodness and an ethereal sugar that started to melt into the other components.  It was pretty awesome.  And pretty much covered the spectrum of tan.  Next time, maybe some color.
 

Coffee, Coffee Cream, Coffee Sugar and milk?

Challenge coffee complete!

Chocolate Panna Cotta, Banana, Many Textures of Peanut Butter

This week's challenge from Chefsteps was a sous vide dessert.  I thought about banana cream pie, but got beat to the punch when someone else made a killer rendition first.  I wasn't really sure what to do, but Jamie suggested Peanut Butter Cups.  Seemed like a good enough idea: chocolate, peanut butter, pretty delicious combination.

I played around with the idea.  I thought I'd flip it, and surround the chocolate with peanut butter.  Also, throw some bananas into the mix as an homage to the banana cream pie that wasn't.  And bananas go well with chocolate and peanut butter.

I started with chocolate panna cotta.  Panna cotta is my new go to because it's easy and works as well sweet as it does savory.  This time, I wanted it to be intensely chocolate.  I cooked the cream and blended in enough chocolate to get the nice rich chocolate look I was going for.  Then, I blended in about that much chocolate again.  300 g total chocolate, to about 600 g of cream / half and half.  It seemed about right, so I added gelatin, and poured into plastic cups to set.  It was amazingly chocolately.  I licked the warm remnants from the pan. 

Next I started on the peanut butter.  Rather than run of the mill creamy, stick to the roof of your mouth PB, I wanted to play around with texture.  I thought many different textures all based on peanut butter would be interesting.  I came up with 9 different possibilities but that seemed like a lot, so I whittled those down to 5.  I'd made Powdered Peanut Butter before so that was easy.  I also figured I'd do a microwave Peanut Butter Sponge Cake a la Ferran.  Then Peanut Butter Ice Cream seemed like a good idea.  I used one of Jeni's splendid recipes and it was ultra creamy and delicious.  Then I found Thomas Keller's recipe for a Peanut Sablé, which without the accent is a type of weasel, but with the proper accent becomes shortbread.  The biscuit was good with rich buttery, salty, peanut flavor.  I should've rolled it a little thinner, but it worked pretty well.  And finally, I figured I'd do a Peanut Butter Sabayon.  Which is the French version of the Italian whipped custard dessert Zabaione, only with peanut butter.  As far as I could tell, no recipe exists for a peanut butter sabayon.  I adapted the Modernist Cuisine at Home recipe with a big scoop of peanut butter.  It was rich and delicious, yet airy and light and still warm when served.  Even with three N2O charges though, the foam didn't quite hold.    

I thought I'd caramelize the bananas, then decided I wanted a little more fruit, so I also poached some bananas in a bit of honey and cinnamon.  That's a good combination.  Banana, honey, cinnamon.  Put it in a ziploc bag, squeeze out the air, and throw in a 60C bath for about 20 minutes.  Yum.

Chocolate Panna Cotta, Banana, Many Textures of Peanut Butter

Chocolate Panna Cotta is in the center topped with Peanut Sablé.

12:00: Powdered Peanut Butter
02:00: Peanut Butter Ice Cream on a bed of shaved Chocolate
04:00: Cinnamon Honey Sous Vide Poached Banana
05:00: Peanut Butter Sponge Cake
07:00: Caramelized Banana
10:00: Peanut Butter Sabayon (sous vide)

The plating ended up a little messy, but I think the overall effect worked out ok.

Oh yeah, and I was picked as one of the winner's of the challenge!  Check it out.  And look at Chris Koller's Raspberry Chocolate Gateau.  It is absolutely gorgeous.  Obviously I need to work on my presentation skills.

Kitchen Chemistry 101: Meat Glue and Other Powders of Powers.

When I am able to break away from the office for 'lunch', I usually head to the Y for a quick workout.  Out of the 23 (or thereabouts) treadmills they have, there are two that allow you to plug in your ipod and watch videos on the screen.  I am always disappointed when I can't get one of these, but when I do, I spend my running time watching the Harvard lecture series on Science & Cooking.  If you have not watched it you should.  Watching a lecture about food while on the treadmill may seem counterproductive, but certainly no more so than watching a video about treadmills while eating.  Also, it gives me ideas.

Last Monday, I started Wylie Dufresne's lecture on Meat Glue Mania.  I think you know where this is going.

On Friday, my order of Meat Glue showed up.

And Saturday, I had appetizer duty at our monthly gathering for food and games.  The timing couldn't have been better.

Meat Glue is, in case you were wondering, used to glue meat together.  It is an enzyme that creates covalent bonds with the proteins in meat and can be used to bond two pieces of meat together into a single cohesive piece (Thank my free Harvard education for that knowledge).  The proper name is tranglutaminase, but meat glue is more fun, and perhaps less scary sounding.  It is commonly used in restaurants to create perfect portions of meat that appear to all but the most astute observer to be a single continuous piece of muscle.  That nice thick rectangular piece of fish on your plate...well, let's just say fish aren't naturally rectangular shaped.  Also scallops and fillet mignons aren't born wrapped in bacon, even if they should be.     

Anyway, one of the most famous and perhaps less obvious uses of meat glue is Chef Dufresne's Shrimp Noodles.  Watching the lecture, it didn't seem so hard.  Buy shrimp.  Peel (use the shells to make a nice stock) and devein.  Put in freezer until very cold but not frozen.  Put into food processor and (this is the part where the squeamish should look away) blend into a paste.  Add a small amount of salt.  Add even less meat glue.  Process until well mixed.  Pass through a very fine sieve (I had to give up on this step as my sieve was too fine to get the shrimp goo to pass through).  Fill syringe with shrimp paste place tip into a 138 F water bath and extrude the contents into a continuous strand.  As the paste leaves the syringe and hits the warm water it will instantly bond to itself, forming a shrimp noodle.  Let sit in the bath for a few minutes (long enough to refill the syringe), then remove.  Voila....Shrimp Noodle.  No pasta in this pasta.  This noodle is nearly 100% (well 99%) pure shrimp.  

Fresh Shrimp...Ready...Set...Go!

1.25# of Fresh Shrimp Paste

Loaded Syringe

Extruding the Noodle.

More Extruding...more blur.

One Noodle

The First Noodle...6 more to go.

Making Stock - Shrimp shells, carrot, celery.

Shrimp Stock....smelled good.

Surprisingly, this all worked really well.  I now had shrimp noodles ready for the final dish.  I didn't measure the length, but each noodle was probably somewhere between 6 to 8 feet long.  They were a little thicker than I would have preferred due to the nozzle on the syringe, but that was ok.  It was slightly thicker than udon noodles, but a reasonable approximation.  The theme of the night was Thai, so my concept was Shrimp Noodles with a variety of Thai flavors around the plate to mix and match.  I pickled some radish and carrots.  I chopped some scallions.  Roasted garlic.  That was the easy part.

In addition to my meat glue, I had also received several other magical powers I wanted to try out.  (Powders of power! Powders of Power!  You guys, I've been saved by my Powders of Power!)

First up was N-Zorbit M.  I don't know a lot about this other than it is basically a starch (like corn starch) made from tapioca.  It is interesting because it absorbs fats and oils and turns them into a dry powder.  This powder then immediately turns back into a liquid in the presence of water.  So, take a product that has high fat or oil content and little to no water, preferably one that works in Thai cuisine, like peanut butter.  Place in food processor with the N-zorbit M.  Pulse until it creates a very fine light powder.  Peanut butter powder.  If you take a spoonful and put it in your mouth, the dry powder will immediately turn back into peanut butter.  It looks dry, but it doesn't taste dry at all.  Once again, this worked better than I could have hoped and I had this freakishly cool peanut butter powder.

Peanut Butter

Peanut Butter Powder

Finally, I had some Kelcogel F.  This is a gellan gum thickening agent that as I understand it, works like gelatin, only it doesn't melt when it gets hot.  I wanted to make a hot foam, and thought that this could help stabilize it.  I heated up some coconut milk, added lemongrass and allowed it to steep.  Then I pureed red pepper and basil and added it to the coconut milk.  I strained it and it was ready to add the gellan F.  I had no idea how much to use, so I just sprinkled a very small amount into the hot coconut-basil mixture and hoped for the best.  When I saw it begin to thicken I poured it into the whip and charged with nitrogen.  Shook it up and hoped for the best.

All the ingredients were packed to take over to dinner.  When we arrived I heated up the stock and dropped in the shrimp noodles.  I pressed a clove of fresh roasted garlic onto the center of each plate.  Then the radish, carrot, and scallion were arranged around the edge along with a lime wedge.  When the noodles were heated, I added 1 noodle to the center of each plate, on top of the garlic.  Then I added a dollop of hot coconut-basil foam.  (It worked-kind of....it came out as a foam and was definitely still hot, but it cooled quickly and solidified into a spongy coconut-basil pillow - kind of like the consistency of the inside of a marshmallow if it wasn't sticky).  That wasn't necessarily the intent, but at least it didn't melt into a puddle.  Finally, I sprinkled a bit of the peanut butter powder on top of the noodle.  Dish served.

The Final Dish: Thai Shrimp Noodle

I think it turned out pretty well.  Definitely some things I'd tweak the next time, but overall, the flavors complemented each other and nothing completely fell apart from the plan.  The noodle had the appearance and texture of a noodle, and tasted exactly like shrimp which was the intended effect.  The basil foam was a little heavier than I intended, but the flavor was good.  And honestly, the presentation wasn't quite the way I had pictured it (ok, the noodle looked somewhat intestinal), but oh well.  For a first attempt at modern cuisine and my new stash of magical powders, I'd go as far as to say it was pretty alright.  Plates were cleaned, so success!