Food from Historic Heston - Cucumber Ketchup

In my previous post I wrote about my new favourite cookbook, "Historic Heston Blumenthal" where Heston gives us recipes based on his research into old English dishes. The contents of this book is just as intimidating as that of his previous huge book "the Big Fat Duck Cookbook". Recipes are huge and make use of modernist ingredients and techniques that many home cooks have never heard of. Is it possible to cook any of them? I have managed to cook some dishes from the Big Fat Duck, and I want to try my hand at something from Historic as well.

Before you try these recipes it may be useful to know a bit about modernist techniques and ingredients. I have written several posts about that in this blog, but more comprehensive resources can be found at

• http://www.chefsteps.com/
• http://www.molecularrecipes.com/

Also it may be wise to try to find some of the smaller recipes in the book. An easy way of doing that may be simply to count the pages used for the actual recipe. Many of them spread out over three large pages, but some is only one. One of these is the Cucumber Ketchup recipe. Another reason to choose this recipe is that there is a video on youtube showing the head chef at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal making it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzhvIZYSes

The name of the entire dish is

Roast Scallops with cucumber ketchup, roasted cucumber, butter emulsion, broad beans, bergamot and borage

Cucumber is of course a central part of this dish. I made half a recipe, but still used two and a half cucumbers. These are used in three ways:

- As roasted blocks
- As compressed small cubes
- As juice for the ketchup base

The cucumber blocks were cut from the cucumber and just fried in oil until they got a brown, caramelised exterior. After that I had them in a medium hot oven for some minutes.

The slices of cucumber that you can see in the picture above to the right will become small cubes in the ketchup. These will provide crispiness to it. In the recipe, these slices are compressed using a chamber style vacuum machine. What this does is that is compresses the meat of the cucumber so that it takes on a more dense, semi transparent and rather wonderful texture.

Vacuum machines are used to place food in plastic bags without air when you want to cook the food sous vide, meaning cooking the bag in temperature controlled water bath. There are two main types of these machines. There is the edge style, which I have, that just sucks the air out of the opening of the bag, and then there is the chamber style that actually places the food in actual vacuum. This latter type is what you need here, and they are terribly expensive, so that is basically out of reach for most people. So compressing in a vacuum machine is out of the question.

I am quite sure, however, that I have read somewhere that you can do something like that using a spuma bottle or whipping siphon, and I have one of those. So I put my slices of cucumber into the bottle, charged with two N2O cartridges and waited a bit. I discharged the gas, opened the bottle and ... nothing, really. Did not work. I could see no difference from when I put them in. A bit of a disappointment. I have to research that properly. The cucumber cubes needed to go into he ketchup in their natural state. So I just cubed them up and put them aside.

Another element that is added to the ketchup is pickled shallots. This element is very easy to make. I just heated vinegar with sugar and salt to dissolve them, let it cool and added finely diced shallots. The recipe calls for Chardonnay vinegar. I could not get hold of that, so I used a good white wine vinegar in stead. I do not really know, of course, if the strength of my vinegar matches the one in the recipe. This is a typical trade-off I think I will have to make every now and then in order to be able to make these dishes.






Now for the actual cucumber ketchup. The basis for this is cucumber juice. I juiced the rest of the cucumbers using my Phillips juicer. When my wife bought this rather clumsy looking machine I felt that we really did not need it, but now I am growing rather fond of it. It makes a beautiful job of juicing just about any vegetable. Anyway, it had no difficulty whatsoever of turning the cucumbers into juice. 

The ketchup is actually a fluid gel. Fluid gels have become something of an icon for modernist cuisine. I wrote about fluid gels in this post. Basically it is about taking a liquid, making it into a gel using one of several gelling agents and then crushing that gel into a puree. This gives you a puree (or sauce) that has a very smooth texture and that may give you more flavour that purees and sauces thickened with "old fashion" starches.

The gelling agent we will be using is Gellan F. I combined vinegar (again substituting with the brand I had) and sugar and heated that to dissolve the sugar. I then combined the cucumber juice, salt and Gellan. The recipe calls for a specific type of food processor called a Thermomix. This is a machine that can mix and heat at the same time. I do want one, but it is not cheap. In stead I combined the juice, Gellan and salt cold in a pan and mixed thoroughly using an immersion blender. It is important that the Gellan is mixed completely with the liquid, and that is easiest done while the liquid is cold. I then brought the mix to a boil. Gellan needs to be heated to about 90 degrees Celsius before gelling. After that I placed the mixture over ice, and as it cooled down it formed a quite strong but brittle gel.

To crush this gel to get the fluid gel you may used an immersion blender, but the blender will often mix in quite a lot of air into the gel resulting in a very cloudy result. I have learned that using a normal blender results in less air being mixed in, resulting in a clearer fluid gel. So I put the gel and the vinegar and sugar solution into my blender and started it up. It needs to work for a bit of time in order to produce a really smooth gel.

Adding the cubed cucumber and the pickled shallots with some dill finished of the cucumber ketchup.









This dish also has a butter emulsion. This is just cubed, tempered butter that is whisked into a small amount of water to form an emulsion. To this, the recipe adds bergamot juice. Bergamot is a citrus fruit the size of an orange with a yellow colour similar to a lemon. I have never seen bergamot juice in any shops, so adding that was a bit of a problem. What I do know is that bergamot is what gives the characteristic taste of Earl Grey tea. 
I opened am Earl Grey teabag hoping to find a component there that would be bergamot, but the flavour is probably added to the tea leaves as an oil or something. I found nothing. I then opted to actually infusing the butter emulsion with some Earl Grey tea for a short time. I was a bit anxious of leaving it too long as I really did not want to make tea. I probably left it in for 60-90 seconds, and I do believe that it made a difference. Whether it made the right difference I do not know.

Now to the scallops. These were just lightly fried on one side to get them caramelised there and just warmed a bit on the other side. A bit of salt and pepper finished them off.

I heated broad beans in the butter emulsion and plated up with a layer of cucumber ketchup on the plate, a fried cucumber block cut in two pieces on the ketchup, the scallops placed on and around the cucumbers, beans spread around and the emulsion over as a sauce. The recipe calls for borage leaves, but I did not have that either, so I put some dill on top.

I served this up for my daughter and me, and we both gave it a good verdict. 

Making food from the Historic Heston book IS possible if you have a bit of basic knowledge about modernist techniques and ingredients and if you are willing to compromise a bit on some of the ingredients. I will absolutely be trying out more dishes soon!