Posted in 1 Day on November 7, 2010|
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Vegetarian Pot au Feu, Heart of Palm Marrowbone
Specialty Equipment: pressure cooker
Specialty Ingredients: National Starch Flojel 60, T55 flour, fresh hearts of palm
Days: 1
Dish as in The Fat Duck (can’t find any photos of the dish as served in The Fat Duck):
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Freaking hearts of palm. I think the time spent trying to purchase some I could have cooked through another cookbook. I contacted local exotic food stores, local wholesalers, suppliers abroad and couldn’t get hold of them. I even scoured the freezer section of tons of stores in the hope they would have frozen hearts of palm, but in my experience it is either fresh or canned. At one time I thought I hit gold with a vegetable supplier of restaurants saying he could get them, but when I got them they turned out to be sugar canes instead of hearts of palm.
Canned. Blew. I hate I had to resort to the canned ones after failing to obtain the real, fresh deal. Fresh hearts of palm have never been on a plate before me, but I’m 100% sure the canned variety is very far removed from the former. The stalks are slim, already cooked and posses a generic canned taste. A bit like canned artichokes.
The thing is I didn’t really have an option to wait longer with this recipe. I’ve already made most of the lamb dish and had this dish in the freezer (made components a while ago when I thought I could get fresh hearts of palm), so the Big Fat Duck Cookbook is almost done. There was no time to wait for March or April, the months fresh hearts of palm are in season according to an importer here in Amsterdam. To summarize an elaborate introduction: I used canned hearts of palm.
In times with the prospect of fresh hearts of palm at my disposal I started with the vegetable consommé. It is made a bit like the one from the Gold, frankincense & Myhhr dish: vegetables cooked in beurre noisette, everything pressure-cooked and clarified. Two things about the stock. It uses A LOT of vegetables. Five kilos in total or 2½kg if cut in half. My pressure cooker has nothing to be ashamed of size wise, but it took some higher mathematics to fit all the vegetables in.
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