Lunch at the Fat Duck - Part 6

And now, a classic:

"SOUND OF THE SEA"

Heston Blumenthal has always been interested in what he calls multi sensory eating. The idea is that it is not only the taste and flavour of what you put in your mouth that contributes to the experience. All your senses are involved in making you feel whatever it is you are feeling during a meal. Many have experienced that the simple pasta dish that you enjoyed so much sitting on a balcony in Italy looking out towards the distant hills of Tuscany becomes just a simple and possibly a bit boring pasta dish when eaten in a hurry alone by the kitchen table at home. So the theatre that goes on in a restaurant, the "cast", the "props", the smells and the sound are important parts of the food experience.

This next course started by the waiter bringing a shell for each of us containing an iPod. We were instructed to put on the ear plugs to get in the right mood. We did and were immediately transported to the seaside. The sound of crashing waves were every now and then interrupted by seagulls and other birds. I could almost feel a light breeze brush against my forehead.  Or perhaps that is just an romantic afterthought, but anyway, it effectively put us in the mood.

Then the next course was put before us. This was definitely one of the most visually stunning pieces of nourishment I had had for quite a while.  The "plate" was specially made for the dish and consisted of a wooden box filled with sand and topped with a sheet of glass. On the glass was what looked like more sand, pieces of seafood that visually gave me the impression of a coral reef, and some foam that looked like a wave of seawater had been frozen in time just as i crashed onto the reef.

The sand on top of the glass was of course not not sand. According to the recipe in the the cookbook (which may have been altered since the book was written), it is based on tapioca maltodextrin. I actually guessed that when I ate it because I have tried using that stuff myself. Tapioca maltodextrin has the property of being able to dehydrate fat or oils. You can see this in action here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5TToltpSUM

And you can buy the stuff here:

http://www.modernistpantry.com/tapioca-maltodextrin.html

There are several types of maltodextrin out there, but you need this type in order to bind oils as shown here. The nice thing about using this stuff in this way is that you end up with a powder that not only tastes like the oil you started with, but actually reverts back to its oily state when you get it in your mouth. So you can serve this as oil for a salad without the oil making the greens soggy, but once you get it in your mouth, it reverts back to oil.

So the sand on top of the glass is maltodextrin with an oil made from miso, cod liver oil and grape seed oil. This is mixed with sauteed baby eels, kombu, breadcrumbs and brown carbonised vegetable powder (whatever that is). By the way, according to the book, the real sand in the wooden box is a bit of Venezuela's shoreline. Just so you know.

The foam is (from what I can make of the recipe) based on a light broth made from different seaweeds, seafood and vegetables foamed by adding lecithin, just like I described here:

http://morten-moen.blogspot.no/2014/01/in-my-lab-foams-part-4-lecithin.html

The sand and the foam is then plated with different seafoods and seaweeds. It all came together as a dish that really took you to the seaside (nicely helped by the sound from the iPods). The delicate flavours of the seafood were heightened by the saltiness of the foam and the richness of the "sand". And did the sound help? Yes, it did. It actually generated an atmosphere of summer by the sea.

Amazing!

Lunch at the Fat Duck - Part 2

The Fat Duck is a not a large restaurant. It holds around 12-13 tables and can seat a little more than 40 guests. All tables are round (as far as I can remember). Contemporary art line the white walls. There are dark wooden beams in the ceiling, and you are constantly reminded to mind your head from one of the attentive waiters each time you move around. And the waiters really are attentive and professional. Toilets are up the stairs in the corner (mind your head), and there you can also find the wine "cellar". You cannot enter the wine kingdom, but you can peek in through openings in the wall.

We were seated at our table and given a copy of today's tasting menu. I had notified in advance that one of us was vegetarian, but does eat fish. We got two printed menus, one for her where the meat dishes had been substituted with other dishes, and the regular one for the rest of us. There was not an a la carte menu, but only the 14 course tasting menu at 195 pounds. They also offer three different sets of wine pairings with different price tags, but we chose one bottle of white in stead from the large book of wines.

And then the food started coming. The first course was a small amuse bouche made from dried beetroot foam with horseradish cream. You can see a bit of the making of this in this video on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnEy6VLSGX4

at around 1:33.

Popping it into my mouth, it proved to be very light and crunchy and released lots of beetroot flavour with a hint of horseradish.

This little mouthful gave us a hint of things to come. It was visually stunning, even though it was quite simple, rather like a small piece of jewellery. It was packed with flavour, and it was perfectly balanced. You could pick out all the flavours, but nothing was overpowering. Just perfectly balanced.

Next up was

NITRO POACHED APERITIFS

• Vodka and Lime Sour, Campari Soda, Tequila and Grapefruit
• 
  

"Cooking" in liquid nitrogen is something that the Duck is famous for. Liquid nitrogen holds -196 degrees Centigrade and is used to freeze food very quickly.

For this dish, the waiter had three spuma bottles with different foams. We each chose which one we wanted, and the waiter placed a dollop of foam from one of the bottles on a spoon. This was then put into the liquid nitrogen and left to "cook" for some seconds. It was then taken out of the bath and held behind a candle while oils from a piece of fruit peel was squirted through the flame and onto the little ball on the spoon. It was then placed on a plate and presented to the one of us with the instruction to pick it up very carefully and pop it in the mouth.

It was like eating a meringue, only that it had not been baked, but frozen. The outside was crunchy and quite cold, but melted quite quickly in my mouth giving way to a soft interior and releasing lots of flavour. Here is a video of some of the proceedings:

https://vimeo.com/88925585

Loved it!

Lunch at The Fat Duck - Part 1

If you have read any of my previous communications, you will know that I am a fan of the British chef Heston Blumenthal and his restaurant The Fat Duck. This restaurant is a temple of modern cuisine, and I have been wanting to go there for years. So I decided that this year I will. They operate a booking system where booking for a specific day opens two months in advance, at 10 am. My plan was to try for every Saturday until I got a table. So on my first attempt, two months before Saturday March 8th, I was online and ready. And ten minutes after that I had a table for four people for lunch at 12:00. Just like that. I was almost a bit disappointed.

There is no difference between lunch and dinner at The Fat Duck. Same menu, same food, just earlier in the day. My plan was to stay in London and go to Bray where the restaurant is, eat and go back to London, and lunch seemed more practical for this than dinner. Going to The Fat Duck from London is easy. Trains leave for Maidenhead from Paddington frequently, and the trip takes around 40-45 minutes. From Maidenhead it is a short taxi ride or a 2.5 km walk. We decided to go there by taxi and walk back, which is a good choice as you may feel the urge to walk the meal off.

Bray proved to be a very cute little village with small cottages, an old church and all the ingredients you expect to find in a small English village. The only bad-ish thing was the steady traffic through the narrow main street. 

The Fat Duck is in an old and rather small building that used to be a pub. Actually, the restaurant occupies buildings on both sides of the street, but the ones opposite the restaurant are quite anonymous, even though it is there most of the work is done. In the same village, Heston B also runs two pubs. Also in the same village is a restaurant called the Riverside Inn, which also has three stars. How many tiny villages in the world can boast two three star restaurants? The riverside Inn also has rooms, so it is possible to take a couple of days, stay at the Riverside and eat at both. Bliss!

After a short stroll around the village, the clock was 12, and it was time for our lunch. I walked up to the door to this holy place, pulled it open and ... no, wait, I have friends that complain that I write too long blog posts, so to please them, I will try to keep these short. So next time: Inside The Fat Duck. And perhaps even the first course, who knows?

Food from the Fat Duck - Hot and Iced Tea

Finally I got round to it. Heston Blumenthal's Hot and Iced Tea. This is one of his most famous concoctions, even though it is not really a dish. It is more like a small comment or minor happening that he uses as an overture to the sweet portion of the menu. For the uneducated out there who do not know what this is all about, let me enlighten you. At the Fat Duck restaurant, Heston Blumenthal serves a cup that contains hot tea in one half and iced in the other, divided vertically with no visible divider in the cup. Here is a video on youtube showing Heston doing this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7i4F6vqOlc

I know this will be fuel to the fire for those of my friends that think the whole Modernist thing is just a stupid game for men and that it only is about making food look or feel differently than it should. Yes, ok, so this one is just a bit of fun. Or to produce a new and sensational feeling. Or even a laugh. So what? Why should we not allow food to be fun and playful as well? That is what I like most about Mr. Blumenthal. His playfulness. In addition to trying to make "ordinary" food taste, look and feel better, he also has fun with food. Great!

And now to the tea. The secret behind this piece of food magic is that in stead of being a liquid, the tea is what is called a liquid gel. Or actually two liquid gels, one hot and one cold. A liquid gel is really a more or less thick liquid, normally it is as thick as a sauce or a pure. It is generally made by adding a gelling agent to a liquid, let it set and then destroying the gel by mixing it with an immersion blender or by pushing it through a fine sieve. In this case, however, the liquid gels are very weak so that they can pass as liquids, but still so thick that they will not mix in the cup.

The preparation starts with making the tea. I used half of the recipe in the Big Fat Duck Cookbook page 283. I really do not know how copyrights work in these cases. Can I copy a recipe from a book and publish it in a blog? I would guess not, so I choose not to disclose details here.

Since I did this in the Christmas holidays, I used a Christmas tea instead of the prescribed Earl Grey. The recipe states that the water needs to have between 100 and 400 parts pr million of calcium. I took a chance on my Norwegian tap water, and it seemed to work fine.

The tea is made using cold water and the leaves are soaked for an hour. After the tea is brewed, I divided it in two, one for the hot part and one for the cold part. Now the fun starts. The fluid gel is made with Gellan F. Gellan is a modernist ingredient that is used for making gels. Obviously. It comes in two varieties, Gellan F and Gellan LT100. We want Gellan F here, and I have established that the Gellan variety that my local pusher at Sous Vide Norge sells is just that. The other ingredients needed are

• Sodium citrate - often used to heighten the pH value of a liquid, but here it is used to help the Gellan "hydrate without the impediments of ions" as it is stated in the forum on chefsteps.com. I am unsure how this works, but it looks like Gellan cannot hydrate properly with calcium ions present, and sodium citrate takes care of that. I will look into this when I research Gellan and other gelling agents in a later post.
• Calcium chloride - often used to add more calcium to a liquid, for example when doing spherification. It seems that for Gellan to set, it needs calcium, but since we took care of those ions while hydrating the Gellan, we need to supply new ones for it to be able to set. In other recipes with Gellan, all this is not done, and I do not know why it needs to be done here. It may be because of the rater low concentration of Gellan to make a weak liquid gel.
• Malic acid - this is an acid found in many fruits. It has a mouth watering effect in that it makes your mouth produce more saliva. This is used in an ingenious way here. The tea that we will produce is thicker than normal tea, but the presence of malic acid makes you produce more saliva which will dilute the tea in your mouth making it appear thinner. And since the cold brew will be thicker than the other one, the cold brew gets more acid. Ingenious.

I got these ingredients from Modernist Pantry at http://www.modernistpantry.com/. Buying stuff there and have it sent to Norway worked like a breeze. 

So we have one portion of tea for the cold part and one for the hot part. I added sugar, Gellan and sodium nitrate to both and brought them to a simmer while whisking. This will hydrate the Gellan. Then I made the calcium chloride and malic acid parts for the hot and the cold and added them. This will make the Gellan start to set. At this point I let the two parts rest in the fridge for almost 48 hours. 

When I got them out, they had both set into gels. At this stage, I pushed both gels through my finest sieve. This loosened up the gels and they became liquid like, but the cold one was quite much less liquid than the hot one. My sieve is not the finest there is. It may be that I should have used a finer one. 

Anyhow, I put both semi-liquids in suitable plastic bottles. Before use, I put the hot one in my sous vide water bath and the cold one was taken out of the fridge where it had been for some time and put into ice water. 

Now for the problem of a cup and divider. I have a glass with double sides so that when holding it, you will not feel the difference in temperature and have the surprise spoiled. Chris Young who worked with Heston on the tea project and now works at chefsteps.com (which I highly recommend, lots of classes, recipes and info) has revealed that they were using cardboard that were cut to fit in the cups and then covered with many layers of cling film, making them bot water resistant and more tight fitting. I poured the hot and cold parts into the glass and carefully took out the divider. The two parts stayed separated, oh joy! 

Success. The only negative thing was that the cold side felt considerably thicker than the hot side. I do not know why. I think it was supposed to be a bit thicker than the hot one, but the difference seemed to large and gave the thing away a bit. Even though the cold part had more malic acid, it did not manage to produce enough saliva to dilute it. I did this on January 1st, and we had quite much wine the night before. It could be that I was just too dry in the mouth after that... But all in all, the effect was good. 

A food magic trick, just for the fun of it.

Food from the Fat Duck: Red Cabbage Gazpacho with Mustard Ice Cream

Here we are, at my first attempt do actually make a Fat Duck recipe. The Fat Duck is of course the restaurant of celebrated chef Heston Blumenthal. As I outlined here, I have put of trying recipes from the Big Fat Duck Cookbook for years, but with a sudden onset of braveness I have decided to give some of them a try. And the first one out is the Red Cabbage Gazpacho with Mustard Ice Cream. So lets get at it.

This soup is a take on the traditional gazpacho soup from Spain, but it is made from, you guessed it, red cabbage. For some reason. red cabbage is only readily available in stores here in Norway around Christmas. One of Norway's favourite

Christmas dinners is rib of pork with slightly pickled red cabbage, so right now it is in all stores, but between January and November it may actually be difficult to get hold of. So in this country, this chilled summer soup is easiest made in November/December when there will be below zero temperatures outside. Not perfect, but still.

The recipe calls for 450 gams of red cabbage juice and suggests that two cabbages will produce this. So I buy three, just in case. A few years ago my wife bought a juicer. It is a Phillips appliance that so far has lived a quiet life in one corner of my kitchen top. My wife has been using it to make carrot juice other juices for drinking. I must admit I have not given it a thought. And this summer I actually stored it in the basement because nobody was using it. But now it is up in the kitchen again, ready for service.

So I start with one half of the first cabbage, cutting it into bits and forcing it through the juicer. Juice is pouring out. Lots of it. I don't know if it is my juicer that is extraordinary good or if Norwegian cabbages are much larger than others, but after one half of my first cabbage I have more than the 450 grams required!

The juice is mixed with 30 grams of white bread. This is then left in the fridge for two hours before straining. In traditional Gazpacho you use bread as a thickener, but here, Heston probably only wants the aroma and not the texture. Anyway, the cabbage part is ready.

The soup will be thickened with a red wine mayonnaise. This is a nice way to thicken soups giving a rich feel to it. The mayo is made my combining two egg yolks and 15 grams of Dijon mustard and then whisking in 180 grams of grapeseed oil. Actually the recipe calls for 36 grams of egg yolk. That is how this recipes go in the book. Nothing is left to chance. Everything is down to the exact gram, or sub-gram when it comes to things like Agar-agar or Gellan. I must admit that my two yolks weighted in at 42 grams, so sue me.

After whisking in the oil, the mayo is quite stiff. This is the time to add 15 grams of red wine vinegar and 30 grams of red wine. Well, the book says Cabernet Sauvignon vinegar, but that was not to be found in my corner of the world, so I used a good red wine vinegar. I do not know what this does to the taste of the finished product, but I do hope it does not ruin it completely.

To finish the gazpacho, mix the cabbage juice and 40 grams of the mayo and season with 15 grams of salt and 60 grams of red wine vinegar.

Now for the mustard ice cream. 85g of egg yolks (four yolks in my
case) is whisked together with 40 caster sugar for 5 minute. 500g of whole milk is heated to 60 degrees Celsius. Actually, there should also be 25g of skimmed milk powder. I found this out after coming home from shopping, so don't tell anyone, but I am making
it without that. when at 60 degrees, the milk is added to the eggs, and then it is all heated up to 70 again and held there for 10 minutes to pasteurize. It is then cooled and mustard is added. This recipe calls for Pommery grain mustard. Again this is something I could not get hold of. I used a strongish French grain mustard mixed with a bit of milder Norwegian grain mustard. I put the mixture in the fridge over night before I put it in my ice cream machine.

The last bit of this puzzle is the cucumber brunois. This is made by slicing cucumber thinly lengthwise, putting the slices in a single layer in a sous vide bag and pulling a vacuum on it. This will start crushing the cell walls in the cucumber, compressing it and concentrating the flavour. This is similar to what I did to my strawberries in this post. One problem with vacuuming something moist this way with this type of machine is that liquid will be pulled into the vacuum machine. I have found that if I place a piece of kitchen paper in the opening of the bag, this will absorb the liquid but still allow the air to be sucked out. Repeating this step will concentrate the cucumber even more. The sheets are then taken out and skin and the centre core removed and the flesh cut into 2mm squares.

To put it all together, make another 80g of fresh cabbage juice and add to the gazpacho. This may sound strange. Why not just add it all in the first step? According to the chapter on juicing in volume two of Modernist Chef page 338, the distinctive aromas of a number of fruits and vegetables occur due to enzymes reacting to components that are released as cell walls break down. As these components run out, the enzymes stop working and the fresh aromas disappear. But when we add a little more fresh juice, the enzyme have new fuel to work with, and the freshness returns. To serve, place some cucumber in a bowl, place a rocher of ice cream on it and pour the soup around.

So, was it a success? The colour is fantastic. The taste is quite pungent and peppery with a bit of acidity to it. The mustard ice cream came out quite well. That may also be nice to serve with pork in some way.