56. Mandarin Aerated Chocolate Redux

Mandarin Aerated Chocolate
Specialty Equipment: water bath, vacuum machine, thermometer, moulds
Specialty Ingredients: mandarin essential oil, cacao butter, yellow pectin, tartaric acid, glucose
Days: 1
Dish as in The Fat Duck:

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Mandarin Aerated Chocolate attempt #1 ended in tears. It’s the only recipe I had to make a second time (although I have to refrain myself from redoing the first half of the posts), to look back without any regrets. I also just wanted chocolate to work with me for once in my life. No rest for the chocolate fuck-ups.

I reread the comments on some of my posts and decided to ditch the water bath altogether. Instead I opted for an au-bain marie and, thanks to a very handy tip from Mitchell, a hair dryer as weapons of choice. To melt all the crystals I heated the chocolate to 54˚C, as instructed in the book (where they use a water bath).

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52. Vegetarian Pot au Feu

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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47. Nitro-Poached Green Tea and Lime Mousse

Nitro-Poached Green Tea and Lime Mousse, ‘Lime Grove’
Specialty Equipment: water bath, whipping cream canister
Specialty Ingredients: high methoxyl confectioner’s pectin, matcha tea powder, malic acid, liquid nitrogen, lime grove fragance
Days: 1
Dish as in The Fat Duck:

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It has been a productive weekend. A number of ingredients of my ‘been looking for them for ages and can’t find the fuckers’ list could be crossed off and we made 2½ dishes on Saturday. ‘We’ are the couple of the Lasagne of Langoustine dish and I. The half in two and a half is the Vegetarian Pot Au Feu, which had to be called off due to a last minute cancellation of the fresh hearts of palm (we already made some components). What did get made are the recipes of the book requiring liquid nitrogen. We had a chance to use freaking liquid nitrogen at home (see this post how I got it)! It was so much fun, but first the necessary steps to have some Fat Duck use for the nitrogen: making a lime mousse.

The mousse is served as a palate cleanser at The Fat Duck, giving a cold, sweet and sour sensation. It’s made by mixing a pectin base with matcha tea powder, malic acid, vodka, egg white and pasteurized lime juice. When I first read the recipe some time ago I always wondered why you would have to use pasteurized lime juice. By coincidence I read a post on the blog of Dave Arnold and Nils Norén on clarifying lime juice and their comments on freshly squeezed lime juice. Apparently lime juice does not keep well, deteriorating pretty rapidly, whether you boil, refrigerate or freeze it. The pasteurization probably has something to do with this characteristic of lime juice.

A note on the pectin. You have to use high methoxyl confectioner’s pectin. I had no idea what these words meant and started to read articles on pectin. In this article it’s explained that pectin could, in general, be divided in a low methoxyl and high methoxyl camp. The former reacts with calcium and the latter with sugar and acid. I’ve been using a slow-set yellow pectin, which gels at a certain sugar and acid level, so I figured it would be suited for this recipe. The word ‘confectioner’s still bugs me a bit, have we used the right pectin?, but the mousse turned out fine, so I guess we did.

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44. Flaming Sorbet

Flaming Sorbet
Specialty Equipment: fine digital scale, PacoJet, vacuum machine, water bath
Specialty Ingredients: spray-dried apple granules, malic acid, gellan F, vitamin C, fructose, dry ice, popping candy
Days: 1
Dish as in The Fat Duck:

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The most advanced sorbet dish^TM. Just look at the list of ingredients and equipment. Spray-dried apple granules, gellan F, PacoJet, dry ice… A definitive wolf in sheep’s clothing. I had a difficult time acquiring a sane amount (read ‘not wholesale’) of dry ice and felt like leaving it out, but my Fat Duck insanity started to kick in. ‘No way I’m leaving the stuff out.’ In the end I found a courier service in Amsterdam, who delivers dry ice for the company Icebitzzz and had a doable minimal purchase amount of 3kg.

These were all the boxes of the postmodern pantry required for the dish. The key ingredient is gellan F, which stops the sorbet from melting when setting it on fire. In essence the sorbet is a frozen fluid gel. It is made from spray-dried apple granules, malic acid, apple juice and water.

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43. Edible Rose Bush

Edible Rose Bush
Specialty Equipment: fine digital scale
Specialty Ingredients: rose essential oil, gum arabic, spray-dried apple granules, freeze-dried raspberry granules
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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I’ve read about the use of rose petals, but never used them. It was time for a change. My local flower shop had some (obvious) and an exchange later I took three home. The lighter one on the foreground was an extra from the lovely girl at the shop.

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