4 posts tagged “food”
Right. I felt an urge to make some scones today. But the though of making the same old ones I always do was not tempting. So I played around with a few taste combinations and came up with this rather intreresting taste paring. Now this not the final version at all, but a good start. Here is the recipe and instructions:
We made it to the finals this year! Here is our menu (recipes and pictures will follow after the finals)
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.
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...
