Making carrot caviar
Sometimes it is worth turning upside down our perceptions of food and what works well together.
This week, we had our second attempt at experimenting with tastes and textures after taking delivery of sodium alginate, calcium chloride and a syringe from Le Sanctuaire in San Francisco.
Armed with bags of white powder, we set about trying to change textures and experiment with tastes using a brilliant website to find interesting foodpairings.
On the menu:
Mango martini with duck/basil/rosewater stick
Carrot caviar with lavender
Sardines on toast
Quail, carrot and lavender
Untraditional steak & mushroom pie
White chocolate souffle…with caviar!
(1) Mango martini (mango & gin with a Duck Pate, Basil and Rosewater Jelly stick)
Mango Martini
Mango and pine flavor apparently fit well together, so our idea was to do a mango/gin martini and experiment on the “olive”.
Instead of an olive, we had a stick with the winning combination of Duck/Basil/RosewaterJelly.
Make a mango martini with blended mangos. We couldn’t quite get the texture right (it was too thick) so would recommend trying apple juice to cut down the thickness. Make the stick with a cube of rosewater jelly, a cut of duck foie pate and a leaf of basil.
Along the way we tried green tea jelly and thyme, but green tea was overwhelmed by the gin as well as the duck pate. The rosewater/duck combo was spectacular, marrying very well with the mango martini.
(2) Carrot caviar and lavender
Carrot caviar with lavender
Caveat: this recipe didn’t work in practice, we need a lot more practice at the sodium alginate / calcium chloride combination for it to work…
Caveat to the caveat: the flavors work, the concept looks beautiful, well worth trying again.
Working with sodium alginate (SA) and calcium chloride (CC) allows one to turn a liquid solution into one with a thin film around it (where SA and CC react), thus creating bubbles that burst when put in your mouth. This is reminiscent to me of salmon roe which always has a very refreshing “pop”.
I first had this at El Bulli in 2005 with Ferran Adria’s famous Olivas Sféricas (spherical olives). And in general you have to pick very strong flavors/tastes to go with this technique because the SA and CC do impact the taste (as we discovered).
We used the guide on khymos.org as a referecence and used 0.5% CC in the “water bath” and 0.8% SA in the carrot juice blend.
The “carrot caviar” came out well but it tasted of algae (from the SA) and not sufficiently of carrots. Two learnings: (1) start with a lower % of SA next time and ramp it up to find desired texture (2) use strong flavors when making these types of caviar. Actually, the mixture worked well once we started making olive sized versions, but these were hard to handle.
(3) Sardine On Toast (sardines, heirloom tomatoes, basil, bread)
Sardines on toast
This attempt was inspired by a dish I ate a couple years ago at L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Paris. He had a dish with marinated sardines combined with tomatoes and toast which was incredible.
The process was relatively simple: toast bread under a broil, turn over and lather on a basil/tomato/garlic/olive oil paste, add a slice of heirloom tomato and return to the broil for a couple minutes until the tomato softens. The sardines were gutted + filleted and then barbequed. Add the sardines and some crushed green peppercorns.
Very simple clean flavors and textures from the crusty bread to the soft tomato and the slightly charred sardine.
(4) Quail Egg “Sandwich” (quail eggs, cumin, carrot, lavender)
Quail Egg Sandwich
This was a very serendipitous combination. We had some lavender which I paired with carrots by pickling them in white wine vinegar, a syrup, shallots and the lavender. The pickled carrots sat unused as we progressed with the meal.
We ended up pairing them with quail eggs boiled and then toasted in oil with cumin. The combination of a soft and warm egg with the crunchy and cold clear taste of the carrots was great.
Potential improvements may be to have less cumin, as this somewhat over-powered the lavender. Also, just poaching the eggs would probably have worked better.
(5) A take on steak/mushroom pie (steak, mushroom, potatoes, cheese)
Untraditional Steak&Mushroom Pie
This was an ambitious experiment by a fellow co-chef. First, barbequeing steak and frying mushrooms. Second, trying to liquify it to pair it with some mashed potatoes (Joel Robuchon style)
Stop here. Liquify steak and mushrooms?!? Yes we tried but even with the help of a great blender this didn’t quite work out.
Luckily if the dish didn’t work in its original form it certainly turned out great! It was a modern take on steak&mushroom pie with a combination of mash, blended steak and mushrooms and a sprinkle of cheese all melted together under high heat. Delicious.
(6) White Chocolate Souffle…with Caviar!
White Chocolate Souffle with Caviar
Ok, now we’re getting to the ridiculous. But it turns out that white chocolate and caviar are a good fit.
The concept is simple, salt brings out flavors and this is also true in desserts. Heston Blumenthal wrote about this discovery back in 2002 of his experiments trying to find salty ingredients to match with chocolate.
This ambitious recipe from khymos.org was attempted by another co-chef (I can’t do souffles…too much attention to detail required).
The result was a soft chocolate souffle with distinct caviar undertones. It actually worked best with shavings of white chocolate on top as the taste of the chocolate didn’t quite come through.
Definitely the ultimate in decadence. Next when some caviar is to hand, will definitely be trying the caviar and chocolate disks that Heston recommends…
