Strawberries with ginger and pepper tuile and balsamico pearls

I noticed that I have been mentioning the restaurant The Fat Duck frequently lately. I must admit that I am slightly hooked on that place for the time being. Now I just watched a television program from their kitchen, and there I saw something that intrigued me. They used vacuum to compress strawberries and to quickly infuse them with flavor. Since I have a vacuum machine with my sous vide kit, I thought I should try this out. So I set out to make a dessert based on that and a couple of other elements I found on the internet.

The strawberries

This being October in Norway,
good, tasty strawberries are not found in the shops, so I had to buy some that looked nice, but that really did not taste much and also felt a bit dry. After rinsing them, I dusted them with icing sugar and placed them in a vacuum bag. I then sucked the air out. This I could not really do this at full pressure since that would make juice flow into the vacuum machine, so I stopped it once I saw that some amount of juice reached the edge. This is not optimal since we want some of the cell walls to break and air to be crushed out of the berries. Restaurants will have a more powerful and machine that works differently so that they can use a larger pressure. Anyway, I repeated this two more times.

So what did all this hocus pocus do? Well, since strawberries are quite delicate, the pressure from the vacuum will start breaking down cell walls and perhaps also suck any air out of the berries. In this way the berries are compressed and concentrated. The original recipe uses a chamber vacuum sealer where the berries are placed inside a chamber where all the air is pumped out. This may create a lower vacuum pressure, and at very low pressure, liquids like water boils at very low temperatures. In this way, the berries are actually subject to some form of heat treatment.

Anyway, when tasting the processed berries together with the un-processed ones, there was a clear difference. The un-processed berries were quite dry, a bit tough and tasteless. The processed berries on the other hand were moist (since juice had been leaking from them), but also softer and had a deeper and more condensed taste. They had taken on some of the characteristics of strawberry jam, but they were still strawberries.

The ginger and black pepper tuile

 Pepper goes well with strawberries. Perhaps not the most widely used combination, but it adds depth. I found this recipe on the web:

http://realfood.tesco.com/recipes/ginger-and-black-pepper-tuiles-with-ice-cream.html

I mixed the batter and spread it out. In hindsight I should probably have spread it thinner and/or done them at a lower temperature for longer because they did retain a slightly moist kernel in stead of being crunchy.

The balsamic vinegar pearls

Spheres in different sizes have become one of the icons of what is known as molecular cooking. Ferran Adrià perfected this in his legendary former restaurant el Bulli. These are often done using some form of alginate solution that dripped into some form of calcium solution. I have tried this, but have not really had much luck. I will experiment further and document my efforts in these pages.

Recently I came across this recipe:

http://www.modernistcookingmadeeasy.com/info/modernist-recipes/more/balsamic-vinegar-pearls-recipe

This uses agar agar as a gelling agent and exploiting the fact that agar agar when cooled from boiling temperature sets at around 35 degrees. So dripping a solution of agar agar in balsamic vinegar into cold oil that has been in the freezer for 30 minutes, the droplets will cool and set before they reach the bottom of the oil. This proved to be an easier way of making spheres.




To plate, I cut the berries into slices and arranged on a plate, placed the black pearls on top, added to small basil leaves and a piece of tuile before sprinkling icing sugar over the whole thing. All in all a good desert with lots of taste. Just make sure there is not too much ginger in the tuile as that will easily overpower the rest.