Nitro-Scrambled Egg and Bacon Ice Cream, Pain Perdu, Tea Jelly
Specialty Equipment: electric slicer, syringe, vacuum machine, fine digital scale
Specialty Ingredients: skimmed milk powder, malic acid, gelatin 170 Bloom, liquid nitrogen
Days: 2
Dish as in The Fat Duck:
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Liquid nitrogen part 2. Egg and bacon ice cream. Possibly the most famous dish of the Fat Duck. Known around the world. I can understand why. Here’s an at home version.
Two things had to be made 24 hours in advance of eating the dish: (part of) the custard base for the ice cream and the candied bacon. The latter needed to be very thin slices, made by cutting a frozen block of bacon on an electric slicer. I’m sort of done with stepping into a shop, making a ‘strange’ request and have eyes stare back at me in amazement. Luckily my friend, the guy cooking the liquid nitrogen recipes with me, owner of three burger joints in Amsterdam, could slice bacon for me. It was not frozen prior to cutting, but still very thin.
With bacon slices at hand you have to vacuum pack them for a few hours with either a sugar syrup or maple syrup (see the rest of the paragraph), unpack them, brush them with maple syrup and dry them for 24 hours. I put it in the (possible) discrepancies post, because reading the recipe, it is unclear if you have to vacuum pack the bacon with sugar syrup or maple syrup. Prior to the vacuum pack instruction the recipe asks to make a sugar syrup, but later on there is no mentioning what to do with it. I read the first maple syrup as sugar syrup, hoping they made a typo.
Left, slices under vacuum, on the right, not.
You have to dry the slices at 60˚C for 24 hours. Mine curled up a bit at the edges, but I’m not sure for what reason. Maybe you should be extremely careful in laying the slices on the rack to make sure there are no small overlaps (which happened when I straightened out the slices, no pun intended).
To the crazy bit, the ice cream (actually, an ice cream made from tinned sardines may be even more crazy). It is made by roasting sweet-cured back bacon and smoked belly bacon, soaking the bacon in milk for 12 hours, adding skimmed milk powder, egg yolks and sugar to the milk, heating it to 84˚C, sieving it and blending it for 5 minutes. In short so to speak. We used good quality bacon and stayed away from supermarket pork.
A not so nasty snack of bacon scrambled eggs on brioche.
The tea jelly is made similarly to the hot and iced tea, minus the gellan preparations. We substituted Darjeeling tea, one of three teas used, with a tea at hand.
Another unusual component to an already unusual dish is the tomato jam. It is made by cooking dices of peeled tomato, dices of peeled piquillo peppers, powdered sugar, white wine vinegar, Worcestershire sauce and coffee beans to a jam consistency. To give it some starting fluid you have to macerate the piths from the tomatoes with sugar, a bit like extracting fluid from strawberries with sugar. The amount of peppers needed is so small, we used tinned, roasted piquillo peppers (which had a good flavor), instead of pulling an ‘in search of’ for fresh ones.
The base for the ice cream is a pain perdu, a caramelized piece of eggy bread or French toast. By the way, all these names are nothing compared to the Dutch one: ‘wentelteefje’. I’ll let you look up the literal translation yourself.
After putting slices of brioche in the fridge for a couple of hours, we vacuum packed them in a mix of milk, eggs, vanilla and liquor (we used cinnamon, because I didn’t have walnut) and let them drain. It’s a funny sight putting the brioche through the vacuum machine, seeing the bread soaking up the milk when the vacuum is released.
Ok, so everything was ready. It’s not a really complicated dish, the recipes and equipment can just be difficult to acquire. The first step to plating was the frying of the brioche in clarified butter. When it has a nice brown exterior you have to swipe the pan clean, put sugar in it, let it caramelise, add the brioche to the pan for the second time, and let it take up all the caramel.
I’m not really sure if the bread is supposed to be warm when you serve it, but we went straight to the tableside preparation, so the bread was still slightly warm when served. To make the ice cream we put it in a nice copper pan, and started adding liquid nitrogen with a ladle. What happens next was really amazing, especially when you do it at home. Ice cream in a mere 20 seconds! Not the granular stuff that usually comes out of my ice cream machine, but smooth ass ice cream.
Dramatic vapor.
So, first of, the candied bacon was not fully dried, it could use a few more hours in the dehydrator. Or soaking it in a sugar syrup was not the way to go and putting it longer in the dehydrator would not have made a difference. Besides that, the dessert came out great.
The pain perdu is absolutely amazing. Very, very tasty. I’m gonna make it all the time. Working your way up you come to the jam and the ice cream. The jam is odd at first, but delicious after the first bite. As for the ice cream, opinions varied. Some liked it, others not that much and I was kind of in the middle. I mentioned it before and this recipe really stands out, you can’t deduct a dish from a recipe. Every piece of bacon, and egg for that matter, differ, so you really have to know what you’re aiming for to replicate this Fat Duck dish. I thought the bacon flavor was a bit too pronounced, but I have no idea how the ice cream in Bray compares. We should really finalize the plans to go eat the real deal.
So, a successful recipe, but not a mind-blowing experience. Though I should mention the liquid nitrogen preparation at the table is cool stuff, especially with unsuspecting eaters. If you ever get a chance to pick some up I would definitely do it.
A small note. In all the chaos in the kitchen we forgot to add the tomato jam to the plate we photographed, but didn’t when making it for everyone. What we did forget was the tea jelly. Such a shame, because it is an incredible rich dish and a citric tea would really balance it all. Here’s a picture of the final dish with the jellied tea, but in the end I didn’t like the photo. It isn’t really clear in the photo, but the jelly was just set and looked just like egg white, another smart play on the egg theme.
Bacon-and-egg ice cream! This is one of the few things I’ve actually prepared, based on bits and pieces found online. Here’s the result:
(Yeah, I know, that looks more like a “home cook” version than a “restaurant” version. I’m way out of my league here!)
There are videos online showing the preparation of the actual ice cream – these videos show a young Heston (with hair!). It looks like since then, the dish has evolved quite a bit. Was the nitro part always in there? Also, the salted butter caramel (which is great) no longer seems part of the recipe.
I didn’t think the ice cream tasted very egg-y despite the 24 yolks per litre. Perhaps my thermometer is a bit off, because the salted butter caramel was slightly too light as well.
Overall, a dish I recommend making, even if you don’t have liquid nitrogen available.
The various parts of the dish keep relatively well (except for the pain perdu)- most of the components of this dish can relatively easily be prepared days in advance if you’re planning a dinner party.
He Marc, the recipe changed a bit since the one in the video, especially the presentation. The mushrooms have gone, the caramel as well, although present in the preparation of the pain perdu and the ice cream is made tableside. I also think the preparations of the individual components changed slightly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6CLoRuvGcY
Yeah, you could definitely make it without liquid nitrogen. I would churn the ice cream, let it freeze until quite hard and scrape it like a granite to give it a scrambled egg appearance (my plan if I couldn’t get liquid nitrogen).
Fantastic commitment here and the result looks superb. Having had the dish at the retaurant within the last few months, it was served on our occasion with the hot and iced tea. A really clever dish when presented and “cooked” tableside however I fear for you that the illusion may now be lost somewhat when you do eventually make the pilgrimage.
Keep up the good work. You are inspiring me to open the book and give a few of the less detailed recipes a go in the coming dark winter months.
Thanks.
How was the ice cream? A big egg and bacon hit or more of a background flavor?
First of all, telling you that I’m really astonished with this web and the cooker, that I think has a really very high level on cooking execution.
I had allready done this recipe at home.., being one of the “easiest” recipes cointaned in the Big Fat Duck Cookbook. But, obviously, instead of nitrogen liquid I made an Egg and Bacon icecream.
The Brioche with pain perdu and the tomato jam were excellent. Not so with the Ice Cream, that not really convinced me (unless it was ok, but not brilliant for me and I think not a “pre-dessert” for a three Michelin stars).
I was then fearless, trying to imagine that maybe The Fat Duck is not an excellent “food” restaurant and it was really based on “theatrics” (nitrogen liquid and so). Because, obviously, I know that my Bacon & Egg Ice Cream was far from the one served at The Fat Duck but, at the same time, necessarily “close” in flavour and taste to the original one.
But, finally, I will put an end to that question.., because I had booked a table at The Fat Duck for next December. A lot of money, but I think it will worth the trip and its elevated price, and also that the Bacon & Egg is one of the “lowest” recipes of the Fat Duck (in fact, actually is officialy out of the Tasting Menu)
By the way, my icecream was very balanced, having both very strong bacon and egg yolk taste. Although I think that marries very well with the cane sugar.., I really didn’t dislike it but neither did it really struck me most.
He Ferran, thanks for the comment.
I had the same thing, a really strong flavor. Let me know how it was when you go in December (if it’s on the menu).
Ice cream was balanced and not overly eggy or bacony. Difficult to describe to be perfectly honest but it definately had a savoury element without being too strange.
The best dish on the menu by a long way however was the pigeon which you have already cooked. Simple clean and bold flavours without the theatrics. Simply astonishing.
nice photo. with flas?
Thanks. No Flash. Don’t have one except for the one build in the S90.
I tried to recreate the hard light, shadow rich photo of the book, so one main light at an angle behind the pain perdu. Here’s a low res iPhone photo of the setup (with the lime mousse). http://bit.ly/9myrTw
Hi , I’m planning to make some ice cream using liquid nitrogen , but have no idea of how much I will need to get , can you advise me on how many litres of liquid nitrogen I will need to freeze a litre of ice cream custard
He Craig, I’m not an expert on the matter, but can say we had about 1.5-2 liters of liquid nitrogen and could easily poach a number of meringues and process 600ml of custard. Somewhere in the book it is mentioned you need three times the weight of a food item to completely freeze it (probably to -196C), so with the texture of ice cream you probably need a lot less.
The biggest worry would be the storage of the liquid nitrogen. We didn’t have the best dewar flask available and it sublimated pretty quickly (it was gone after one night), so either use a professional one (if that makes a difference, anybody has real-life experience?) or procure it the day you’re gonna use it.
i live in the uk and have no idea where i get liquid nitrogen or dry ice from! any suggestions or recommendations to getting some?
I’ve once got a quote for for liquid nitro but it was well over a hundred pounds including rental of the dewar flask and delivery. They were business-to-business only, too. If you REALLY want it, it can be done, but for usual hobby purposes it’s probably a bit overpriced; Perhaps your local university can help.
Dry ice is comparatively straightforward and can be had at more reasonable prices (in 2010 I was quoted 17.74+11.35 collect charge excl. VAT for 10kg of pellets). Try boc.com (phone 01293892202) or green-gases.com.
For some dishes, dry ice mixed with ethyl alcohol might give you an acceptable substitute for liquid nitro (I haven’t tried!); at -114C the freezing temperature of pure alcohol is lower than the boiling temperature of CO2. Treat it with respect though as it’s got some safety issues compared to liquid nitro; some people describe it as “freezing napalm”. The nitro poached lime mousse has some vodka in there so the alcohol wouldn’t be a showstopper. The added alcohol flavour might be a problem for the bacon-and-egg ice cream though- either find the nitro, book a seat at the Fat Duck or churn in a regular ice cream machine.
You’re on your own mate. I had a really difficult time getting these two products, so have no idea where to get them in the UK. Good luck.
Wow! Lovin’ your website. You’re brave to take on a book like this. Your motivation is inspiring! Can’t wait to see more.