Today I'm going to revisit a great type of meat: Tenderloin of Icelandic foal. This meat is absolutely one of the best I've ever had the pleasure of working with and I've used it only once before, when competing in the Nordic Amateur Championship this winter. I've got the meat ready for an eight hour sous-vide now and I'll finish it off on the barbecue or in a grill-pan if the weather stays crappy. Today I'll serve it old-school with perfect fries, seared tomatoes and a emulsified sauce.
I stumbled upon great quality onion-eyed grenadier (Isgalt in Norwegian) when shopping yesterday. I've not worked a lot with this fish before so I promptly bough a kilo or so. Back home I did not have sky high ambitions, but below are some pictures of my experiment. Turned out ok, not great. I think I'll sous-vide the fillets next time.. Furthermore the presentation needs to be a lot better. I'm thinking of cutting the potato in half exposing the contrast between the salt wrinkled skin and the fluffy potato flesh. The sour-cream souse needs to be laid out differently. I'm going to try a new technique detailed by the great Chef Achatz enabling me to create a rectangular sheet of dressing laying it out over the fish and potato and when it melts it creates a perfect sheet over the fish and potato. Last, but not least the spring onion must be presented better, how I've not figured out yet.
Rhubarb holds a special place in almost every Icelanders heart. It's one of the few things that grow in the cold and barren climate and for me rhubarb is a great childhood memory. Much to my joy I discovered great quality spring rhubarb at the shop yesterday. I picked up a bunch without giving much thought to what to do with them. The last couple of days have been very hot here in Oslo so today I decided that a cold, sweet rhubarb soup would be nice in the heat. To make it a bit more interesting I made a quick panna cotta to go with and. After boiling the soup I was left with quite a bit of pulp that I could not get myself to throw away. So I added a final twist to the soup... I used my immersion blender to break up the fibers and then I sweetened the pulp ever so slightly before I carbonated it. The result - Cold Rhubarb soup with Panna Cotta and carbonated Rhubarb pulp... very nice and the carbonated pulp added a bit of curiousness to the dish.
Martin over at khymos.org updated his brilliant collection of Hydrocolloid recipes. Martin makes his e-book available as a free pdf download. Hurry over to khymos and grab a copy.
For once I decided to go dead simple with a meal. This quick throw-together consists of three components: asparagus, spring potatoes and a garlic purée. The only time-consuming part is the purée, but it's so worth it, and it can be done days or even weeks beforehand. Ok, on to the purée:
Man, don't you love the fact that there is always so much new stuff to learn. Last week I read a pretty interesting post from chadzilla talking about the effect of adding water to baking soda before it's added to other ingredients in a recipe. This never occurred to me as important but what an amazing difference it makes. Now, chadzilla and Chef Fabian figured out that when adding a bit of water to the baking soda when baking cookies made an amazing difference in how much the cookie rises during baking. Adding hot tap-water boosted the effect even further. Now, this had to be replicated so when making pancakes for lunch today I actually made four small batches. The first batch without baking soda, the second with the baking soda added to the dry ingredients, the third with baking soda mixed with cold water before adding it and the fourth with baking soda mixed with hot water. The difference is truly stunning. In the latter two batches one could clearly se big bubbles forming and when frying the pancakes the outcome was even greater then expected. The first batch produced, as expected, flat, compact pancakes. The second batch slightly risen pancakes. The third batch gave me great, light pancakes and the final batch produced crazy, fluffy pancakes that had a brilliant texture. No pics, sorry. The kids killed the camera.
“a form of blogging that lets you write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) about your life on the go and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging (IM), email or the web.”
About a year and a half ago there was a slight buzz around a new phenomena coined "Microblogging". A new service called Twitter launched in October 2006 and gained some traction the next few months before it exploded in the blogosphere around February/March 2007 driving crowds of tech-savvy, so called early adopter to the service.
It's not often that so many of my interests meet in one project leaving me bubbling with enthusiasm, wanting to quit my day job, send away my family and dive head-first into a project not resurfacing before it's done. The Candyfab 4000 does this to me. The Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have conjured this ingenious project aiming to build a low-cost DYI solid freeform fabricator utilizing sugar as a low-cost medium for printing 3D objects. How cool is that? A DYI 3D printer with edible results. Pair this up with molecular gastronomy geeks and the possibilities are endless. I want one of those!!!! Head over to candyfab.org and be amazed!
Recent Comments
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Marcelo said:
[this is good]I recently made a panacotta with almost the same ingredients, but i didn't use the vanilla pod, I only used... read more
on Cold Rhubarb soup -
Tar said:
ah, but thats where the blog food-chain kicks in. You get attention with ADHD nano-blogging, drawing potential readers to your... read more
on The use and abuse of Microblogging -
rygh said:
[this is good]Cool - a macroblog about microblogging ;-)BTW. I think posts with 2000words++ will only be read by the people who... read more
on The use and abuse of Microblogging -
Marcelo said:
[this is good]Thanks for posting it! it was an interesting point of view...i have encountered this reaction when i completely RUINED a... read more
on Baking soda + water = ?
Rosemary sounds cool in panna cotta if the flavor is not to overpowering. The panna cotta recipe here is a... read more
on Cold Rhubarb soup