Our annual xmas party is in two days and I've had the pleasure of selecting cheese and wines for the after party. The problem is not to go to extremes when doing this. My personal tastes have become a little eccentric one might say so I've tried to keep my selection as mainstream as my taste buds can allow me. The basic layout is simple:
Five cheeses with the possibility of accompanying wines or a more generic wine selection for the less adventurous.
- A soft, creamy cow cheese - a sweet white wine to match
- A goat milk cheese - here I'll try a semi dry white
- A blue veined cow cheese - a sweet red?
- A harder ewe variant - maybe a dry, full bodied red with good alcohol stregth
- The acquired taste one - with matching wine
And plenty of a dry, full bodied red and a dry french white for the drinkers.
Keeping in mind that the cheeses should be fairly mainstream I ended up with:
- A mature Brie de Meaux - accompanied by a Koehler-Ruprecht Kallstadter Saumagen Riesling Eiswein 2001
- Chevre St. Maure PGO - A bottle of Ch. des Armuseries Vouvray 1998 will be perfect with this. Loire all the way.
- A semi hard Gorgonzola Dolce from Lombardia accompanied by a Tedeschi Capitel Monte Fontana Recioto della Valpolicella Classico 2003
- A Sicilian Pecorino Sardo, the younger and more mellow cousin of Pecoriono Romano. I'm not sure about the wine to this one yet, but I'll trust a stroke of divine inspiration tomorrow when shopping. (Maybe a Taurasi?)
- And finally... a Livarot from Normandy. I love this cheese but I know it can be a bit pungent for less trained palates. But I hope to gain a few more fans to this wonder of a cheese. And to go with the colonel I'll try to get some hard cider or maybe a bottle of good quality calvados.
To accompany the cheeses I picked a variety of French jams, a jar of Ambrosoli honey, fresh sourdough bread, assorted fruits and some breadsticks.
Kudos to Kamozawa & Talbot - I smoked it!
Ok, this one is still a bit sketchy and needs some work.
10 pieces of skin from chicken breasts
Corn starch
1l frying oil
Salt
a handful of wood chips
My trusty old smoker
The crips
- Dry off any liquid and/or goo from the skins
- Drizzle corn starch over the skins
- Heat oil to 190 c
- Fry skins until crisp
- Dry off any excess oil, salt lightly
Then the smoke
1. Prepare the smoker
2. Cold smoke the skins lightly for 3-4 minutes
Season the crisps as you please...
One of the privileges of my job is that I pick up a lot of stuff that professionals in media and technology talk about. One of the more interesting things lately is the many ongoing and intense discussions about how to relate to the rapidly changing media landscape.
Corporations are curios about and sometimes afraid of the new ways people communicate and consume media. And who do they turn to to get answers? Their ad agency, media strategists,
pr agency or "new media" agency.
The problem is that we don't have all the answers. What is really happening in the media landscape? Are the changes we see a transition to something else or are the changing ways people consume media and communicate setting in a new paradigm?
A researcher told me that if the decline in newspaper readers in Scandinavia continues at the current rate the last newspaper will be published in 2021. The success of youtube and their likes shows us that the concept of channels and networks may be a dying way of distributing content. The bloggers, vloggers/vodcasters and podcasters demolish the established control and filter mechanisms thus opening a floodgate of unrated, uncensored and uncontrollable information never seen before.
I'm convinced that the broadcast model of distributing content is dying. The only question is how fast they will loose the grip on us and the way we consume information. I don't think we'll, to paraphrase Scott Adams, see a paradigm shift without a clutch, but I'm convinced that the changes we see are both important, dramatic and accelerating. We are indeed living in interesting times.
This was all fine, but it left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. In general, Norwegians are selfish, hyper commercial, hyper consuming people with very little thought of other but them self.
I wish more people had the opportunity to listen to these very inspirational people that dedicate them self to helping children. I wish that I and the people around me did more to help. I wish we could care just a bit more. Mr. Gautam certainly made an impact on me and I'll try to care and help more in the future....
- 600g blue congo potatoes, peeled and diced
- 200ml single cream
- 55g salted butter
- 600g red onion, julienned
- 100g salted butter
- 100ml light olive oil
- 250ml water
Kudos to Ferran Adrià - yo da man
Gear:
a 1L siphon and 2-3 cream chargers
The potato emulsion
1. Boil the diced potatoes in salted water for 20ish minutes
2. Drain, preserve 200ml of the potato water
3. Liquefy the potatoes and water in a blender
4. Add the cream, little by little
5. Add the butter, melted and chilled, also little by little
6. Blend until you have a smooth emulsion
7. Salt to taste
8. Strain and funnel into the siphon
9. Load the air and shake, rattle and roll
10. Keep warm in a bain-marie at 70 c
The onion jam
1. Fry the onions gently in oil and butter for about 20 minutes
2. Drain off excess fats and add 50 ml water
3. Cook until water has evaporated. Repeat four times. This should take 20ish minutes
4. Salt to taste
5. Keep warm
Bringing it together
As a side dish, lay out some onion jam on a (warm) plate. Siphon a golf-ball sized knob of potato foam on top.
Heston Blumenthal has obsessed over the creating the perfect roasted potatoes and I think he pretty damn close. I adapted his recipe for local conditions and mellowed the tastes a little. Heston loves to use olive oil, rosemary and garlic when doing potatoes. I prefer diluted olive oil, thyme and garlic. If you want to have a go at this then make sure you get just the right potato for this. In the UK Heston has concluded with the Maris Piper variety. Unprepared, the only thing I had were local ecologic potatoes of the Folva variety (I think) , probably not the best choice. I have to do some research on the optimal variety here in Norway. Right, here goes:
- 1 kilo potatoes
- Very light olive oil or a 50/50 mixture of a neutral cooking oil and olive oil (I used rape-seed oil)
- 4 cloves of garlic
- A few thyme twigs
- salt
1. Pre-heat the oven to 190 °C
2. Pour oil into a roasting tray about one cm up and place in the oven.
3. Peel and quarter the potatoes. Rinse them in running cold water for a few minutes
4. Boil the potatoes until very soft in salted water (10g salt pr. liter)
5. Sieve off water. The potatoes should be dry before...
6. You put them in the roasting tray, tossing them so that they are covered with oil.
7. Turn the potatoes every 15 minutes or so. Do this three times.
8. Add the garlic and thyme and finish off the potatoes for another 15 minutes.
9. Take the potatoes out of the roasting tray, dry off excess oil and salt them.
(10 servings)
750g clean-cut sushi grade Haddock filets, diced
Juice of 10 limes
100ml Tequila
3 green chillies, seeds removed and thinly sliced
5 tomatoes, seeds removed, diced
5 big cloves of fresh garlic, thinly sliced
2 large red onions, diced
A handfull of chopped chilantro
2 Avocados
250ml milk
Salt
Pepper
5 passionfruits
A few chilantro twigs
Ceviche
1. Juice 10 limes, strain juice into a lagre ziplock bag.
2. Add the Tequila to the bag.
3. Add the diced haddock and seal the bag, squeezing as much air as possible out.
4. Refidgerate for 2 hours
Veggies
1. Slice, chop and/or dice all the vegetables
2. Strain the lime and tequila (aka tigermilk) of the haddock
3. Dry off excess juice from the haddock
4. Mix haddock and veggies
5. Salt to taste
Avocado foam
1. Half two avocados and remove stones
2. Scope out avocadoflesh and mash it in a bowl
3. Add one tablespoon tigermilk
4. Add 250ml milk
5. Salt to taste
6. Whisk the mixture until you have foam
Bringing it together
1. Wet the rind of ten martini glasses with some of the tigermilk
2. Dip the rind in salt, creating the margarita-look we want
3. Fill the maritiglasses half way up with the haddock/veggie mixture
4. Top with avocado foam
5. Decorate with a teaspoonfull of passionfruitseeds and some chilantro leaves
And now... fish!
The first course in the upcoming national championships must contain 60% haddock. Now, last year the main course had this requirement. After all out hard work and intense training this was what ruined our shot at the 1st place. We forgot the fish and started cooking it much to late and ending up serving the judges fish that was raw in the middle. So this year we'll stick to serving the bloody fish raw.
Enter chemistry. In parts of South America lime juice is used to 'cook' fish without heat.
The methods and ingredients differ quite a bit from country to country, but the lime juice always plays a big part.
So why does lime juice seemingly cook fish? I'm glad you asked. It doesn't. The acid in lime juice does however 'pickle' the fish, causing it to loose its translucency and making the proteins shed water and thus become more 'tough'.
The end result is delicious and perfect as a snack or a small dish. Now, there are a couple of other things from that part of the world that I quite enjoy: Tequila, habanero chillies and cilantro. So let's throw that in and see how it turns out. To make the appearance more interesting we'll serve this margarita-style in frozen martini glasses with a rind of lime and salt...
The deadline for finishing our menu for the national championship for amateur cooks this year is fast approaching and we are moving fast to meet this deadline.
I've been working 24/7 on the perfect apple cake/pie/? to serve as a part of the dessert and am almost there.
This is a very painful process given that most all apple-based cakes taste great, so how to take the extra step towards perfection?
As always I tend to fall back on molecular gastronomy. I've tried to analyze just what happens, chemistry wise, when an apple cake is baked hoping to learn the flavor formula thus enabling me to remodel this using other techniques allowing me to enhance tastes and textures I want to enhance. So far my conclusions are pretty trivial.
Sous-vide and/or slow baking does not produce any better results then higher temperature cooking does. Even though Pierre Herme thinks one should do 20-hour apples, that is 10 hours of slow cooking and 10 hours of resting, I've found that there is little or no benefit to this technique compared to a much faster process using higher temperatures and extremely thin apple slices.
The same blending of tastes seems to take place in my improved two hour process. I even think exposing apples to higher temperatures gives a slightly better result since the caramelizing of the sugars present is different. Well, we'll see...
Chubby Hubby tells us how... Go there!
