Fire in the Rabbit Hole! (A home version of Next Restaraunt's Childhood Campfire)

Campfire!

 
It started out innocently enough, as it so often does.

Someone I don't know and have never met posed a question on the internet.  Well, a couple of questions, I guess.  I figured, as a citizen of the world, or perhaps more accurately, the internet, it was my responsibility to help this person I don't even know find an answer to their question.  I am here to help.  That question went like this:

"Edible Charcoal? Any ideas?  I googled and found out Next did an edible woodfire with sweet potatoes.  How?"

Now, I didn't know the answer to that question, though it did sound vaguely familiar.  But I had a secret weapon.  You probably haven't heard about it, but it often helps me find answers to things I don't know the answer to.  It's called Google, and you should probably check it out sometime.  Using this little known site, I quickly found an interview with Chef Beran in which he discussed the particular dish from the Childhood menu.  There wasn't much in the way of specifics, but it did state that he cooked sweet potatoes in a stock so that they came out looking like charcoal.  Then he figured out how to powder alcohol with aroma in order to set it all on fire.  I shared this info that I found on the internet back onto the internet, where hopefully it would be found by the mysterious internet stranger who I really had no other way to contact.  I suggested this may give him a place to start if he wanted to attempt this dish.

And then I went one step further.

In that interview above was reference to a lecture that Chef Achatz had given at Harvard.  I'd seen a recording of the lecture several years back, as it had served as the inspiration for my home version of the In The Rocks cocktail.  I hunkered down with another little known resource on the internet called YouTube.  Again, you may not be familiar with it, but it is basically a compendium of all things video on the internet.  Using this relatively unknown site, I located that specific lecture in it's entirety.  (I realize I am giving away an awful lot of secrets here, but perhaps with these useful tips, you too can help mysterious strangers on the internet.)  In that lecture, Chef Achatz drops a few more details about the dish.

I shared this new information that I had found on the internet back onto the internet yet again:  Sweet Potatoes cooked in a syrup of vanilla, cinnamon and blue corn to look like charcoal.  Tincture of Vanilla, Cinnamon and 95% Grain Alcohol powdered with tapioca malltodextrin and mixed with powdered sugar for the fuel to the fire.  Plated with apricot puree, streusel, bourbon ice cream, english toffee caramel sauce.

I really felt I was helping this mysterious internet stranger now.  And it probably could've ended there.  But I made one more lingering statement at the end of my internet post: 'Now I want to give this a try.'  


And down the rabbit hole I went.  You say something like that on the internet, and you are committed.  There is no turning back.  So, I went out and bought some Everclear.

190 Proof.

"Warning: Overconsumption May Endanger Your Health." Hmmm.  Health endangerment.  That's not what I'm looking for.

"Caution: Do Not Apply to Open Flame.  Keep Away From Fire, Heat, and Open Flame.  Contents May Ignite or Explode."  Excellent.  There it is.  Exactly what I need!

Marshmallow Tincture Ingredients

I didn't want to wait weeks for a proper tincture, so I thought I'd try a quick pressurized infusion.  I chose my aromatics: licorice root, vanilla bean, cinnamon, cardamom, and lavender blossoms.  Added those to everclear in a whipping siphon.  Charged with a couple nitrous canisters and in two hours had a nicely infused 190 proof grain alcohol.

Tincture of Everclear, Licorice Root, Vanilla Bean, Cinnamon, Cardamom, Lavender

I took that, mixed with n-Zorbit, a modified tapioca starch used for turning fats and oils into powders and blended in the food processor.  Success!  The n-zorbit successfully absorbed the alcohol into a powder.  I sifted this with powdered sugar and spooned a little on to a plate.  Willfully ignoring the warning on the bottle, I applied an open flame to the powder.  Voila!  It quickly ignited and burned cleanly, leaving behind a slightly burnt, slightly caramelized crispy crust with a taste reminiscent of campfire marshmallows. 

 Combustible Marshmallow Powder was born! 

 

You can find my detailed recipe here:  
Combustible Marshmallow Powder

Now that I had my fire, I needed to bring together the rest of the dish.  Here, I took a slight departure from the Next dish that had served as inspiration for the concept and decided to go with pressure cooked bananas as my charcoal stand-in, rather than sweet potato.  I kept the apricot puree.  Rather than bourbon Ice cream, I went with butter rum sherbet.  And for a little crunch and texture, I made some sea foam powder.  This tantalizing concoction is a crunchy blend of sponge candy, brown butter solids, pecans, salt and butter all bound together with some more n-zorbit.

Brown Butter Solids

Sponge Candy

With all the components prepared, all that was left was to plate the final dish. Here is "Campfire":

And if you'd like to try it yourself, I've posted that recipe here as well:
Campfire

 
I have yet to hear back from the mysterious internet stranger, but I like to think that he is out there somewhere now, serving plates of food, and lighting them on fire.  And so, with my help, the world is a better place.

Campfire:  Apricot Puree, Sea Foam Powder, Butter Rum Sherbet, Pressure Cooked Banana, Combustible Marshmallow Powder

Diner's View of Campfire:  Apricot Puree, Sea Foam Powder, Butter Rum Sherbet, Pressure Cooked Banana, Combustible Marshmallow Powder

Here's links to the recipes for the other dish components as well.  Use them in this recipe, or adapt them for other applications:

Pressure-Cooked Bananas
Brian Douglas's Version Of Butter Rum Sherbet
Sea Foam Powder

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!