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.
