Spring Fling Experiment

This was really tasty, though not yet in its final form. It's a mango gel sheet, pineapple coconut pearl tapioca, raspberries, maraschino brulee, and lime sugar. Wild Sweets Chocolate has a recipe for a hot fruit gelee using agar and gelatin. When warm, it should make a wonderful wrap. The pineapple and coconut may end up as separate components as I'm not particularly happy with how the tapioca turned out. More than likely I'll end up doing a coconut jelly and just brunoise some pineapple. Over all, a pretty successful experiment that I'll be trying again soon.

It Feels A Little Like Christmas

Martin Lersch at Khymos has updated his hydrocolloid recipe collection. It's a wonderful resource for learning how to use the chemicals commonly associated with molecular cuisine. Download it and start playing with your food today.

Smoking In Manhattan

...is illegal, but smoking a Manhattan is perfectly acceptable. To make sure some of the smokiness made it to the drink, I first placed the ice in a Mason jar, laid it on its side, and smoked the jar with cherry wood. Then I placed it in the refrigerator to absorb some of the smoke. I went ahead and measured out my liquor, some wonderful Maker's Mark bourbon (as an ambassador, I say unto you, when drinking bourbon, drink Maker's Mark) and sweet vermouth, trying to minimize smoke loss when it came time to open the jar.

Since I didn't have any maraschino cherries, but I did have the juice, I mixed it with some sodium alginate, and decorated the glass. I also bruleed a bit of the mixture and used it to rim the glass. The maraschino brulee was pretty damn tasty on its own. I'll have to find another application for it sometime.

Next I popped the lid to the jar, poured in the liquor, then tilted the jar and smoked it one more time. An appropriate shake time, and then sweet inebriation. It's a little more work than I care to put into every cocktail, but the smokiness and the maraschino brulee added a little extra something to the first Manhattan of the evening.

Smoked Salad

Sometimes you just can't help playing with your toys. In this case I made a fairly simple spinach salad with bacon, mushroom, and cheddar cheese. I usually add pecans, but since I didn't have any, I decided to smoke the whole thing with pecan wood. I let the smoke infuse for about ten minutes. The smokiness was pretty subtle, though a little more pronounced when I took a bite with mushroom. The bacon was cooked on the stove top on medium heat so as to render the fat. I deglazed the pan with an appropriate amount of apple cider vinegar so that I had a nice warm vinaigrette. While not ready for fine dining, still a damn fine dinner.

Smoked French Fries, The Second Time Around

So I was feeling lazy and hungry and succumbed to the temptation of fast food, in this case Mcdonald's. Since I got some fries, I thought I may as well smoke 'em. I dumped them in a bowl, covered in plastic wrap, and smoked them with applewood. They were even better than normal. Now to figure out if it worked this time because the fries are thin, because they're actually fried as opposed to baked, because I used a different smoke, some combination of all these, or none of them.

Pesce & Peche

Orange roughy, peaches, tea caviar & spaetzle. I cooked the fish & peaches sous-vide, 15 minutes at 125 degrees. The tea caviar is the tea/alginate mixture left over from the other night, dropped into a 1% calcium chloride solution for a minute, then fished out and rinsed with cold tap water. The spaetzle is just a basic spaetzle recipe. It's garnished with a little chili oil and mint oil. I'll have to try this again, but low roast the fish & peaches instead, perhaps adding a bit more liquid. That's the problem with having to use a FoodSaver instead of a fancy commercial vacuum sealer. Sure, I could freeze any liquid before adding it to the bag, but I don't always have that kind of prep time.

Putting It Another Way

I strained the coconut milk and reheated it, placed it in an N2O siphon. It thickened up slightly, but I think I may not have allowed it to sit long enough to achieve whipped cream consistency.


The cellophane noodles were softened in warm water and sauteed in chili oil. Not the best idea I've had as I now dread having to clean that skillet.


While not terrible, it didn't stand up to the previous night's version.

In The Mood For Food Porn?

Today I received the book Wild Sweets Chocolate by Dominique & Cindy Duby, and all I can say is, WOW! Even if I never actually cook anything from it, I feel I am a better cook for just having seen the beauty and ideas contained within its pages.

Coconut-Poached Catfish

Catfish poached in coconut milk, garlic, cilantro, lemongrass, coriander seeds, cloves, Chinese fivespice, and the lemon sugar mixture left over from the tea experiment. The fish was seasoned with salt & cayenne for a little bit of heat. After the fish was ready, I reduced the liquid down to use as a sauce. Served with cellophane noodles, this was a wonderful dish worth making often.

Needs Work

The tea/alginate solution wasn't quite thick enough to allow me to make the ravioli-like spheres that I wanted. Hopefully a night in the chill chest will give me better results tomorrow. The adornment is a lemon zest & sugar mixture.

Smoked French Fries

An idea from ideasinfood, I used a recipe for oven fries from Cook's Illustrated and added hickory using the handheld smoker. The hickory didn't add as much flavor as I would have liked. The other issue is that smoking the fries like this is that they steam when wrapped up, losing some of their crispness. Next time I'll try smoking the potatoes before baking.

Ratatouille You Might Not Recognize - Iterations 1 and 1.5

Eggplant, zucchini, red bell pepper, onion, tomato, & parsley, all ingredients in a traditional ratatouille. I pureed the bell pepper in my trusty Vita-mix, strained and added 1%, by weight, sodium alginate. Then the puree gets spread out and misted with a 5% calcium lactate solution. Next I juiced some onions, then mixed the juice with agave nectar. This was necessary since onion juice has a bit of a bite, and not the sweetness onion takes on when cooked. This mixture is brought to a boil and tapioca pearls are added. Pearl onions! Andrew from Top Chef deserves a nod for hipping me to tapioca pearls. The zucchini is cut into matchsticks and pickled in lemon juice and rice wine vinegar. I used the caviar from the tomato, since it is supposed to be high in umami. The parsley coulis is taken from The French Laundry Cookbook. The eggplant was marinated in balsamic vinegar in a FoodSaver Marinator. This thing is nice since the vacuum forces apart the tissue, or in this case the fiber, of whatever is being marinated, allowing deeper penetration of the marinade. Then I fried it.

Overall it was okay, but needs tweaking. The bell pepper had the texture of Ethiopian bread, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The pearl onions didn't cook all the way through, which is. The ingredients when combined on the fork just didn't do it for me.

Here we have mostly the same ingredients, but I didn't fry the eggplant, and I accidentally left off the pearl onions. This iteration definitely tasted better. So frying is not the way to go.

While preparing this dish, it occurred to me that there are few different techniques I would like to try out, such as dehydrating the bell pepper, and roasting the onions before juicing. So you will be seeing this dish again.

On a philosophical note, how much can you deconstruct and reconstruct a dish and still have it be the same dish?