Sour Cucumber Puree
600g Cucumber Juice
120g Caster Sugar
8g Citric Acid
8g Ascorbic Acid
7g Agar Agar

Juice the cucumbers to obtain 600g fresh cucumber juice.
Immediately mix the ascorbic and citric acid into the cucumber juice, followed by the sugar.

Separate out 300g of the cucumber juice into a pan, whisk in the agar and gently heat to a simmer whilst stirring. Hold the mixture at a simmer for three minutes then remove from the heat.

Now off the heat slowly pour the cold cucumber juice which was set to one side into the hot juice in the pan. Stir and then pour out into plastic containers to set in the fridge.

Once the gel has set use a stick blender to blend it to a smooth puree.

Reserve in a squeeze bottle

Marinated Tofu
240g Plain Tofu
1 Stick / 12g Kombu
50g Dried Shittake
500 ml boiling water
1 teaspoon dried thyme
80g Tamari
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar

Combine the kombu, shitake, thyme, tamari and vinegar in a bowl. Pour over the boiling water and leave to infuse for 2 hours.

Strain the dash and cut the tofu into 3cm cubes. Marinade the tofu cubes in the dashi at least 24 hours before cooking.

The Tempura Batter

100ml Methylcellulose Slurry (Made by blending 3g methylcellulose in 200ml boiling water then stirring until it cools and thickens - store excess in the fridge)
85ml Vodka
125g Plain Flour
2 teaspoons Chinese 5 spice
Pinch Dried Chilli
A good pinch of salt

Mix all the liquids together and stir well.
Combine the flour with the spice and salt in a bowl.
Now whisk the liquid into the flour until smooth.

Strain the batter to remove any lumps.
Pour into a cream whipper and charge with two co2 chargers.

Chill if the fridge. Ideally for arround two hours

Heat deep frying oil to 190C.

Place pieces of tofu first into flour and coat. Shake off excess flour.
Spray some batter out of the whipper into a bowl.
Dip the tofu into the batter then drop in the fryer, cook 2-3 mins until crispy.
Drain off excess oil on paper towel.

Seaweed Ash

Burn Dulse seaweed with a blow torch in a bowl until it no longer flames but just glows read.

Allow to cool, carefully place the ash in a spice grinder and powder, store in an airtight container

Plating up -

Dot cucumber purée arround the plate,
Place a few of the tofu tempura arround the plate.
Finish by sprinkling over the seaweed ash

Cheers
Eddie

So recently I haven’t posted much new in the way of dishes or ideas as I’ve been pretty mental busy. I’ve been finishing the ebook - ‘Modernist Vegetarian’, writing a course for Brian Mellors School and working on a few other big projects (some to be announced soon), plus moving flats and setting up a new work space.

All very exciting projects and there is alot of new material and ideas in the book but I wanted to make sure I keep up to date here and don’t neglect sharing some of the things I have been playing with.

This July the ebook should be out and it is full of new stuff and has been a pretty big project, it’s taken alot more perfectionism and time than putting things up on the blog does and has taught me, I think, a new kind of discipline in recording, photographing and creating dishes in general.

So anyway, I haven’t had much time but I had this dish for while and I was going to use it in the book but in the end I decided it didn’t quite fit or match up to the rest of the dishes.



Eggs Cooked and Smoked with Tea and Dashi
Yolk and Mushroom Wafer
Grapefruit
Spring Onion
Crisp Shiitake

So I’m not going to give the full recipe here right now unless there is some demand because I’m pressed for time to type it up.
But to outline the ideas here there is -

Eggs, quickly boiled then the shells are lightly cracked. Then the eggs are cooked again at low temperature in a tea flavoured dashi staining the eggs in a pattern and adding flavour. Then eggs are halved and the yolks removed and a dashi is carefully set with agar in the space left from the yolk. Finally the prepared eggs are smoked with earl grey tea. Using the PolyScience Smoking Gun - From www.Modernist-Chef.com




The egg dish is then surrounded with shiitake mushrooms crisp fryed in toasted sesame oil and finished with smoked salt.



Then there is an egg yolk and mushroom wafer. Grapefruit pieces. Spring onion.

Anyway this is just a snippet of a dish that didn’t make it to the ebook but I hope the idea might be interesting to a few of you.

Cheers

Eddie

Full page beautiful photography


Ground breaking techniques and innovative unique dishes


Eddie Shepherd

Bronze Fennel, Apple and Elderflower Infused Cucumber, Feta

This dish is inspired by having spent a lot of time at my parents house recently and seeing some of the fantastic produce they have growing in the garden. I was really excited to make something with these great ingredients and so I’ve tried to come up with something beautiful and simple. The dish is just a couple of elements but to me it is my parents garden at this time of year on a plate.

I loved the shapes and look of the bronze fennel leaves and their natural taste, so I did nothing to these except for pick the tips at random. The leaves have a slightly sweet anise flavour, almost like liquorice.

I decided to pair the fennel with elderflower that was growing near by and then also apple, which goes beautifully with both fennel and elderflower.

I prepared a sweet and aromatic infusion of apple and elderflower, with a hit of calvados and vacuum infused (see bellow) cucumber with this liquid. The vacuum infused cucumber has a really interesting texture and a translucency that makes it look like gellee once it’s been cut to small 2mm cubes.

Vacuum infusing the cucumber with apple elderflower is my play on the idea of the dish as a salad. I also used tiny cubes of feta give a nice salty and sharp touch.

I loved playing with idea of presenting the dish in a way that contrasted the beautiful natural and spiky shape of the fennel leaves with the geometric shapes I cut the feta and infused cucumber into.

Then the dish is finished with some of the beautiful purple elderflowers and with a small sprinkle of Himalayan Pink Salt over the whole dish, this helps all the flavours pop and its unique rose colour suits this dish perfectly aswell as adding a hint of crunch.



Apple and Elderflower Vacuum Infused Cucumbers

Apple and Elderflower Liquid -

200g Calvados
400g Apple Juice
4 Tablespoons Dried Elderflower
75g Caster Sugar
Zest of one lemon
Juice of one lemon

Heat all the ingredients except the lemon juice in a pan and bring to a simmer. Allow to gently simmer, occasionally stirring, for 15 minutes.

Set the pan to one side to allow the liquid to slowly cool.

Then strain and add the lemon juice.

Chill in the fridge until needed

Cucumber Infusion –

Most of us aren’t lucky enough to own a chamber vacuum machine at home so here I used a used a ‘vacuvin’ coffee saver to vacuum infuse my cucumber.



You can do this infusion at home using either a vacuum coffee saver like I did or with either a vacuvin winesaver or even a large syringe. (Although you can only do small amounts at a time in the syringe).

You can get more information on these infusion techniques by reading Dave Arnolds post here

So first off I cut thin (a couple of millimetre thick) strips of cucumber flesh.

Place the cucumber strips in the vacuvin tub. Pour over all of the chilled apple and elderflower liquid to cover the cucumber well. I then used the mesh from an old sieve that just fitted the tub to keep the cucumbers submerged during the infusion.

Now pump out the air as directed in the vacuvin instructions until you have a vacuum. You should see air bubbling out of the cucumber strips.

Hold the vacuum for a minute, then quickly allow the air back in, this will force liquid into the space left from removing the air from the cucumber

You may need to repeat this process – I got my best results by infusing twice.

Once infused the cucumber will turn translucent. You then just need to cut the cucumber into small 2mm cubes.

Feta

Simply cut good quality feta to the same 2mm cubes as the cucumber

To Plate Up

I simply placed a few springs of the bronze fennel around the plate. Then placed cucumber and feta cubes all around the plate and finished off the dish with a sprinkling of fresh elderflowers and a pinch of Himalayan Pink Salt.

Elderflower Smoked Halloumi, Rhubarb Relish, Lightly Pickled Radish, Rhubarb ‘Glass’. With Radish Sprouts, Pea Shoots and Edible Flowers.

This is a vibrant dish packed with bright summer flavours. I wanted it to be exciting, lively and reflect my childhood memories of summer aromas and tastes. So really this dish is based on those happy recollections refined into an elegant and delicious dish which for me offers a taste of the summer at its brightest.

The Elderflower Smoked Halloumi, cooked on a griddle, has a smoky flavour and hint of elderflower which are scents that take me immediately back to childhood summer holidays. The depth of flavour from the smoke and the floral elderflower notes beautifully enhance the, already moreish, Halloumi.

Rhubarb has always been a favourite for me ever since as a kid we used to harvest it from the garden and use it to make simple, homely but delicious rhubarb crumble (I think this is one of the first things I ever learned to cook). Here I’ve made a sweet and sharp relish with the rhubarb, with a hint of spice and its own background fresh elderflower flavour. This compliments the Halloumi beautifully and is at the centre of the delicate balance between sweetness and sharpness across the dish.

This course is also crowned with a shard of brittle, semi-transparent, rhubarb ‘glass’ that shatters as you bite into it, releasing an intense rhubarb flavour which compliments each element of the dish.

Then there is the lightly pickled radish with a fresh clean flavour and acidity, which cuts the richness of the Halloumi and sweetness of the relish. And finally the dish is finished with peppery radish sprouts and tender pea shoots with their distinctive fresh flavour.


Elderflower Smoked Griddled Halloumi –

300g Halloumi
Dried Elderflower

Heat a griddle pan to a medium high heat.

Slice the Halloumi into centimetre thick pieces. Cook the Halloumi for about a minute on each side (giving it a half turn while cooking each side to get a criss cross pattern if you like)

Once cooked set the Halloumi slices to one side to cool.

Trim the cooked Halloumi to even squares and place into a glass bowl.

Cover the bowl with cling film and smoke using the Polyscience Smoking Gun, loaded with dried elderflower, filling the covered bowl with smoke. Sit covered for around five minutes to allow the Halloumi to take on the flavour of the elderflower smoke.


The PolyScience Smoking Gun is available from www.Modernist-Chef.com

Toss the smoked Halloumi in a tiny bit of olive oil just to stop it drying out and store in the fridge until ready to use.

When you’re ready to serve simply heat the Halloumi for two minutes in a hot oven to bring it up to serving temperature.

Rhubarb Relish –

200g Sugar
150g Cider Vinegar
500g Chopped Rhubarb
50g Water
6 Teaspoons Dried Elderflower
One thumb sized piece of Ginger (sliced)
1 Teaspoon Grated Nutmeg
6 Black Peppercorns
Pinch salt

Place the Elderflower, Ginger, Nutmeg and Black Peppercorns into a piece of cheese cloth and tie it to make a closed wrap containing the flavourings.

Now heat the sugar, vinegar and water in a pan with the spices. Simmer for 10 minutes and dissolve sugar, then allow the liquid to cool with spices in to infuse.

Clean the Rhubarb and chop it at an angle into inch long pieces of the same size.

Add the chopped rhubarb into the pan with the infused liquid and gently heat for five minutes until the rhubarb is just tender.

Pour the rhubarb relish into sterilised jars while still warm and store until ready to use.

Rhubarb Glass –

For the Rhubarb Juice –
350g Apple Juice
800g Rhubarb – cleaned and cut into chunks
50g Caster Sugar Juice of two lemons
Pinch Salt
2 Teaspoons Ground Ginger
1 Teaspoons Ground Nutmeg

Glass –
170g The Rhubarb Juice
42g Pure-cote B790
20g Caster Sugar

First off you need to prepare the rhubarb juice.

For the rhubarb juice heat all the juice ingredients and simmer for around twenty minutes until the rhubarb softens and breaks up. Then allow the mixture to cool a little.

Now strain the contents of the pan through a sieve lined with cheesecloth and then squeeze remaining rhubarb in the cheesecloth to extract the remaining juice.

Now to prepare the rhubarb glass slowly heat the rhubarb juice, Pure-cote B790 and sugar to 90C in a small pan whilst whisking, and hold the mixture at 90C for two to three minutes, continually stirring. Remove the pan from the heat and pour the liquid into a blender.

Blend the hot mix for ten minutes on full power. Now dab a small amount of olive oil on to a couple of sheets of acetate and wipe with paper towel to form a very light coating. Pour the warm rhubarb juice mix onto the acetate sheets and form as thin a layer of the juice mix as possible by moving the sheets around. Place the acetate sheets into a dehydrator ser at 33C for 3 -4 hours until the juice mixture has become a malleable but dry film. (The coated acetate can be left at room temperature to dry overnight but I find this low temperature stage in the dehydrator works well and speeds up the process). Peel the rhubarb film away from the acetate and shape the film as desired. For this dish I roughly tore strips of the film.

Finally dehydrate the shaped rhubarb film on baking paper at 57C for 10-12 hours until you are left with crisp and brittle, abstract shaped, pieces of rhubarb glass.

(These can be stored in an airtight container - layering with baking paper along with a small wrap of silica crystals to prevent the glass from absorbing moisture).

Lightly Pickled Radishes

100g Radishes - Thin sliced
100g Cider Vinegar
50g Caster Sugar
5g Salt

Stir together the vinegar, sugar and salt until the sugar is fully dissolved. Now simply pour the liquid over the radishes sit for 2-3 hours to lightly pickle the radishes.

I’m actually working on a new quick pickling technique at the moment and once I’ve done more experiments I might come back and update this element using that technique when I’m happy with it.

Plating Up –

Place a couple of tablespoons of the Rhubarb Relish in the centre of the plate.

Sit two squares of the hot Elderflower Smoked Halloumi on top of the relish having cut a small slit in the top of one of them.

Delicately sit a piece of the Rhubarb Glass in the slit cut into one of the pieces of Halloumi so that the glass stands upright and place a couple of pea shoots around the glass.

Now take some of the lightly pickled radish slices and dab with paper towel to remove excess liquid. Place these overlapping in a circle around the rhubarb relish and finish by garnishing with a few sprigs of radish sprouts and a couple of edible summer flowers.

Cheers

Eddie x

Goats Cheese Parfait, Avocado and Dill Pollen Puree, Yuzu Soured Goats Milk Froth, Dill Oil. With Crushed Pine Nuts, Cucumber, and Preserved Lemon Zest

This refreshing chilled dish focuses on the flavours of goats cheese, dill, and avocado. The central frozen square of goats cheese parfait is rich and refreshing and acts as a base for the dish. The yuzu soured goats milk froth is sharp and light while the avocado puree is thick and smooth, with the delicate flavour of dill pollen. Then the dill oil, which splits the goats milk froth, unites the dishes flavours. Finally cucumber cubes and crushed pine nuts give an added texture contrast to this small, elegant dish.

Goats Cheese Parfait

300g Soft Goats Cheese
100g Goats Milk Yoghurt
200g Double Cream
2 Free Range Egg Yolks

First off whip the cream to soft peaks and set it to one side.

Next blend together the goats cheese, egg yolks and goats yogurt along with a little salt until smooth.

Finally fold the whipped cream into the goats cheese mixture and season to taste.

Spread the mixture to about 1 cm deep in baking trays lined with baking paper and place in the freeze.

Once frozen cut the parfait into small squares and reserve in the freezer until you’re ready to plate up.


Avocado and Dill Pollen Puree

200g Avocado Flesh
30g Avocado Oil
15g Glucose Syrup
25g Lemon Juice
3 tsp Dill pollen
Salt and pepper

Simply blend all the ingredients together until smooth. Then pass the puree though a fine sieve. Check the seasoning and chill in the fridge for at least two hours before using.


Yuzu Soured Goats Milk Froth

50ml Yuzu Juice
25ml White Wine (dry)
250ml Goats Milk (whole)
Salt

Heat the yuzu juice and white wine in a pan till boiling, then simmer and reduce for two to three minutes. Add the goats milk and simply bring to a gentle simmer for 2-3 minutes whilst whisking. Add salt to taste.

Chill the soured goats milk in the fridge. If it begins to separate simply stir to recombine.

Reserve chilled in the fridge

Dill Oil –

50g Fresh Dill
100g Olive Oil

This technique for making herb oils is something I’ve been playing with as a way to make flavourful herb oils without waiting a long time for them to infuse or needing to heat the oil.

Using my technique herb oils can be made quickly and you can use oils which would otherwise be spoiled by heating.

So for the dill oil – First blanch the fresh dill in boiling water for about 45 seconds before plunging quickly into ice water.

Now squeeze as much water out of the dill as possible through cheesecloth.

Next set the dill on some paper towel and dry in dehydrator for one hour at 33C (or sit in a warm dry place until excess moisture has dried out).

Next I use a rapid infusion technique – which you can read more abour here and see a video of here

So, you place the dill and oil into a cream whipper and charge with two bulbs of nitrous oxide. Shake the whipper for one minute then allow it to sit for a couple of minutes.

Now vent the gas and pour out the oil and the dill. Now blend the oil and dill together well. I blended this for five minutes in a jug with a hand blender since it was a small batch.

Finally strain the oil through a double or even triple layer of cheesecloth and store until ready to serve.

Garnishes –

One Cucumber
One Preserved Lemon
A couple of teaspoons of Pine Nuts

For the cucumber cubes first off peel the cucumber then cut strips less than a centimetre thick of the flesh (you don’t want the seeds for this). Then simply cut the cucumber flesh in to even cubes of just less than a centimetre.

For the preserved lemon zest simply use a zester to collect the zest of the preserved lemon.

For the pine nuts, just crush or chop the nuts into small pieces.

Putting it together

Place a square of the goats cheese parfait in the centre of a chilled dish.

Now froth a little of the yuzu soured goats milk with a small whisk and then take a couple of tables spoons of the lightly frothed milk and mix in a little dill oil. Gently stir these together and then spoon the mix over the parfait onto the plate. The milk and oil will separate out on their own to ensure a good distribution of the small oil droplets but also giving a nice visual effect.

Now on one side of the square of parfait delicately place a little of the crushed pine nuts. Then take a quenelle of the avocado and dill pollen puree and place it on top of the crushed pine nuts. Finish by sitting a pinch of the preserved lemon zest on top of the puree

Next, on the other side of the square of parfait, place 3 or 4 of the cucumber cubes, equally spaced.

Then that’s it your ready to serve this refreshing chilled dish.

Hope you like this.

Cheers

Eddie x

Chocolate Mousse, Orange Glass, Smoked Salt Hazelnut Caramel, Crystallised Micro Coriander (Vegan)

This rich, intense chocolate mousse, foamed using a cream whipper, is dairy and egg free but really packs a punch of full on deep chocolate flavour. Here I’ve paired it with complimentary flavours and contrasting textures. There’s a brittle, delicate Orange Glass. Sweet, aromatic, crystallised micro coriander. And finally caramel coated hazelnuts finished with smoked salt.

Chocolate Mousse (Dairy and Egg Free)

110g Dark Chocolate (Minimum 70% Cocoa Solids – Dairy Free)
330g Water
80g Caster Sugar
15g Coco Powder
20g Smoked Brandy (click here for smoked brandy method)
2g Xanthan Gum
2g Soy Lecithin

First off melt the chocolate in a glass bowl over a pan of simmering water. Meanwhile in a separate saucepan combine the water, sugar and coco powder and bring to a simmer whilst whisking.

Next stir the hot sugar and coco mixture into the melted chocolate. Mix well for a minute or two, and then stir in the smoked brandy.

Set the chocolate mixture to one side to cool completely. Once cooled blend in the Lecithin and Xanthan gum with a hand blender. Now set the mix to one side to sit covered overnight (12-24 hours).

After it has been sat overnight you are ready to foam the mixture. First give the mix a good stir to loosen it up a little (it will be quite thick). Next spoon the mixture into a ½ liter cream whipper and charge with one bulb of Nitrous Oxide.

Shake the whipper vigorously for around 30 seconds, then when you’re ready to serve invert the whipper to dispense your chocolate mousse (if you want a more aerated mousse use an additional bulb of nitrous but I prefer the texture with just one).

Bellow you can see a video of me demonstrating the foaming technique used in this dish.



Cream Whippers available from - www.Modernist-Chef.com

Orange Glass

165g Fresh Orange Juice
40g Pure-cote B790
15g Caster Sugar
5g Icing Sugar
Tiny Pinch of Salt
1/2 Teaspoon Ground Cardamom
One Tablespoon Freshly Squeezed Lemon Juice

Slowly heat all ingredients except the lemon juice to 90C in a small pan whilst whisking. Hold this mixture at 90C for two to three minutes, continually stirring.

Remove the pan from the heat and pour the liquid into a blender, now adding the fresh lemon juice.

Blend the hot mix for ten minutes on full power. Now dab a small amount of olive oil on to a couple of sheets of acetate and then wipe them with paper towel to create a very light coating of oil.

Pour out a little of the warm orange juice mix onto each of the prepared acetate sheets and form as thin a layer of the juice mix as possible by moving the sheets around. Next place the acetate sheets into a dehydrator set at 33C for 3 - 4 hours until the juice mixture has become a malleable but dry film. (The coated acetate can be left at room temperature to dry overnight but I find this low temperature stage in the dehydrator works well and speeds up the process). Carefully peel the orange film away from the acetate and shape the film as desired. Here I tore small pieces of the film into simple shapes.

Finally dehydrate the torn orange film on baking paper at 57C for 10-12 hours until you are left with crisp and brittle, abstract shaped pieces of orange glass.

(These can be stored in an airtight container - layering with baking paper along with a small wrap of silica crystals to prevent the fruit glass from absorbing moisture).

Crystallised Micro Coriander

100g Caster Sugar
100g Water
Micro Coriander

Firstly make a simple sugar syrup by heating the water and sugar together whilst stirring until the sugar is completely dissolved.

Now allow the syrup to cool completely.

Then dip the clean fresh micro coriander into the sugar syrup, one piece at a time (this is easiest using tweezers). Shake any excess liquid of the herbs and place them, well spaced out, on a non-stick sheet.

Now simply place the sheet into a dehydrator at 35C for 8- 12 hours until the coated micro herbs are crisp and dry on the outside (its worth checking on the herbs half way through and carefully turning them over if necessary)

Smoked Salt Hazelnut Caramel

200g Caster Sugar
50g Hazelnuts
Smoked Maldon salt

First make a simple caramel by gently heating the sugar in a non-stick pan until it melts, then continue to heat the sugar until it reaches a golden colour. Now stir in your hazelnuts and immediately pour out the caramel onto a heatproof mat (or lined baking tray) to cool. Sprinkle a little smoked maldon salt over the caramel whist it is still tacky.

Then smash the caramel into small pieces and reserve until your ready to put together the dish. (You can store the caramel in an airtight plastic tub, ideally with a small wrap of silica crystals for longer life)

To Serve

Put a little of the broken salted hazelnut caramel in the bottom of a glass. Now dispense the chocolate mousse from the cream whipper into the glass. Finally place a piece of the orange glass into the mousse so that it stands up and finish with a couple of pieces of the crystallised micro coriander. Serve immediately.


Cream Whippers and Nitrous Oxide are available from -

More videos coming soon

Eddie

I will be adding more video to the site soon. For the moment here is a short video of some of my work so far.
Hope you like it.

Eddie

Wasabi ‘Mayonnaise’ (Vegan)

This dip is the perfect accompaniment for my tempura recipe. It can also be easily adapted to make a plain mayonnaise, herb mayonnaise, Aioli etc by simply removing the wasabi and adding appropriate flavourings of your choosing.

85 ml Soymilk
300ml Vegetable Oil
One Teaspoon Mustard
Juice One Lemon
1 Tablespoons Rice Wine Vinegar
4 Teaspoons Wasbai Paste
1 Clove Garlic

In a food processor blend the garlic, mustard, lemon juice, wasabi and vinegar for one minute.

Now add the soymilk into the food processor and blend for another minute.

Next slowly drizzle the oil into the soymilk mixture whilst blending.

As you pour in the oil into the mixture whilst blending it should gradually emulsify and thicken. Continue drizzling in the oil until the desired mayonnaise texture is reached. Add seasoning to taste (bending it in to combine).

Garnish with sliced chilli and finely sliced spring onion.

This dish is a celebration of grapes, with just a couple of simple complimentary flavours. Where it really gets exciting here is in highlighting the beautiful flavour of grapes by playing with textures and sensations in the mouth to showcase a fantastic ingredient in a new way,

The ‘Purple Grape Glass’ is brittle and delicate but delivers an intense, lingering flavour. The fizzy, carbonated fresh grapes are refreshing and palate cleansing, cutting the sweetness of the sugar strands. They also have a solid, then smooth and yielding, fast frozen edge. Finally the fragile, crisp, crunchy fennel sugar stands provide an extra hit of sweetness along with the distinctive and complementary flavour of anise.

This recipe uses fantastic bit of kit called an ‘Anti-griddle’. Its available on the www.Modernist-Chef.com shop. It’s an amazing piece of modern kitchen equipment made by PolyScience, with a ‘griddle’ surface which chills down to bellow -35C . The anti-griddle allows you to freeze items incredibly quickly (thus giving you a smoother texture as ice-crystals don’t have time to form) and to freeze objects upwards from the ‘griddle’ surface by increment, allowing you to achieve unique textures and temperature contrasts within elements of a dish.

In this recipe the cut edges of halved carbonated grapes are frozen on the anti griddle. The top three quarters each grape stays soft and unfrozen so you keep the taste and texture of fresh grapes (with an added fizz). But you also get a texture and temperature contrast within each grape, and a really bright clean flavour from the frozen edge.

Whippers and The AntiGriddle available from



Above - The Purple Grape Glass

Purple Grape Glass

165g Purple Grape Juice
40g Pure-cote B790
15g Caster Sugar
5g Icing Sugar
Tiny Pinch of Salt
0.5g Ground Cinnamon
15g Freshly Squeezed Lime Juice (roughly equal to the juice of half a small lime)

Slowly heat all ingredients except the lime juice to 90C in a small pan whilst whisking, and hold the mixture at 90C for two to three minutes, continually stirring.

Remove the pan from the heat and pour the liquid into a blender, now adding the fresh lime juice. Blend the hot mix for ten minutes on full power.

Now dab a small amount of olive oil on to a couple of sheets of acetate and wipe with paper towel to form a very light coating.

Pour the warm grape juice mix onto the acetate sheets and form as thin a layer of the juice mix as possible by moving the sheets around.

Place the acetate sheets into a dehydrator ser at 33C for 3 -4 hours until the juice mixture has become a malleable but dry film. (The coated acetate can be left at room temperature to dry overnight but I find this low temperature stage in the dehydrator works well and speeds up the process).

Peel the grape film away from the acetate and shape the film as desired. For this dish I tore small pieces of the film and simply crumpled them up a little, pinning then in that shape with transparent cocktail sticks.

Finally dehydrate the shaped grape film on baking paper at 57C for 10-12 hours until you are left with crisp and brittle, abstract shaped, pieces of purple grape glass on cocktail sticks.

(These can be stored in an airtight container - layering with baking paper along with a small wrap of silica crystals to prevent the fruit glass from absorbing moisture).

Fennel Sugar Strands

40g Isomalt
20g Glucose Syrup
20g White Fondant
0.75g Ground Toasted Fennel Seeds (about ¾ of a teaspoon)

Heat all the ingredients except the ground fennel to 165C in pan.

Once the sugar mixture hits 165C remove the pan from heat and let it rest for a few seconds, then quickly stir in the fennel powder. (The mixture should be clear and uncoloured except for the fine fennel powder suspended in it).

Pour the hot sugar mixture onto a silicon mat (such as a ‘Silpat’)

As soon as the sugar is cool enough to touch, but still flexible, pull and stretch thin pieces of the ‘caramel’ into long, fine abstract shapes, working quickly.

You want a variety of shapes – some small flatter pieces and some long thin strands of sugar. Allow the fennel sugar strands to cool and harden on baking paper.

(As with the fruit glass these can be stored in an airtight container – layered with baking paper along with a small wrap of silica crystals to prevent the sugar stands from absorbing moisture).

For the Grapes

A mix of good quality Green and Red seedless grapes
Two Co2 chargers

Take about 20 mixed grapes and cut them in half.

Place the halved grapes into a cream whipper and charge it with two Co2 chargers. Then place the whipper in the fridge and chill for at least two hours.

Complete the following steps once you are ready to serve the dish (and have prepared the Fennel Sugar strands and Grape Glass)

Lightly oil the surface of the anti-griddle and turn it on around ten minutes before your ready to use it so it can fully chill down to temperature.


Above - The Anti-Griddle

Now, when you have everything prepared, fully vent the gas from the cream whipper, then carefully open it up and remove the grapes.

Place the grapes, cut side down on the lightly oiled anti-griddle. Allow the cut edge of the grapes to freeze and the freezing to continue up the grape by about a 2-3mm (this will happen very quickly)

When the grapes are frozen at the base remove them from anti-griddle surface with a silicon spatula. This should be done as close to serving as possible so that the edge of the grape remains frozen whilst the rest is fresh and fizzy from carbonation.

Putting it together

Alternately place the prepared grapes and some of the smaller pieces of fennel sugar in a small shot glass.

Arrange a couple of the longer thin strands of fennel sugar protruding from the shot glass.

Finally take one of the pieces of purple grape glass on its cocktail stick and gently press the tip of the cocktail stick into one of the grapes in the shot glass, so that the purple grape glass sits above the shot glass.

Using Methylcellulose in this tempura batter helps to create an incredibly light, crispy batter inside which the vegetables essentially steam whilst they’re cooked. It helps to keep moisture in the coated ingredients and also reduces the about of oil absorbed through the batter.

As well as using methylcellulose here I’ve also replaced some of the water in the batter mixture with vodka, which boils out very quickly during frying, giving you a fantastically crunchy, crisp texture.

Finally I also carbonate my tempura batter in a cream whipper to help get a beautifully light batter.

350g Vodka
450g Water
250g Plain Flour (or Rice Flour)
Pinch salt
Pinch chilli powder
8g Methylcellulose
Plus your choice of ingredients to batter – ie shitake mushrooms, broccoli, baby corn, carrot batons, strips of peppers etc.

Blend the methylcellulose into 250g of the water using a hand blender.

Next whisk the vodka into the flour (seasoned with a pinch of salt and chilli powder).

Now add the methylcellulose mixture into the flour and finally whisk in the remaining 200g of water.

Whisk the batter until smooth then pour it through a sieve.

Take 500ml of the tempura batter and pour it into a cream whipper then charge this with two Co2 chargers (soda chargers).

Give the whipper a good shake and place it in the fridge to chill of around two hours or until your ready to it.

When your ready to make your tempura invert the cream whipper and dispense the batter into a large mixing bowl.

Dip your ingredients to be fried into a little flour then into the batter before gently placing them in a deep fat fryer (at 190C). Only fry a few tempuras at a time.

The tempura will cook very quickly (less than two minutes), take them out of the fryer when they are crisp and crunchy and serve up with a dipping sauce or with as part of a larger dish.

Read my Methylcellulose Introduction here

Go to my Molecular Basics Section

Methylcellulose is Available from

www.Modernist-Chef.com

Savory Beetroot Meringue (vegan)

Methylcellulose here replaces egg white in giving the meringue its structure and texture. These meringues are then dried until crisp in a dehydrator. Here I’ve used low sweetness products (isomalt and glucose syrup) to replace some of the sugar in order to create savory Meringue but sweet meringue could be made in the same way by simply upping the sweetness.

An added bonus of this technique is that it’s suitable for vegans and people who can’t have egg products.

The full recipe is bellow and you can read my Methylcellulose Introduction by clicking here.

Methylcellulose –

An Introduction and two recipes –
- Savory Meringue
- Super light and crispy Tempura

Available from


Methylcellulose is a popular hydrocolloid which can form a gel or act as a thickener when hydrated. Particular to methylcellulose is that it gels when its heated rather than once it cools. Because of this unique quality it’s often used to make mousses and gellees which are firm when they are hot but melt as they cool. Due to this many chefs have used methylcellulose in the pursuit of creating a ‘hot ice-cream’, the idea being to create something with the texture of ice-cream but served hot which then melts in the mouth as it cools (personally I haven’t come across a version of this yet which I think really works i.e. really gives an experience like eating ice-cream only hot –but I hope someone will crack it at some point).

Methylcellulose is used in various ways in modern cuisine. It can be used to great effect to create foams. Can be added to liquids which may then be dried to form films and baked into crisp brittle sheets. It can act a replacement for egg whites in some recipes as it can be whipped in a similar way to provide a similar structural element in a recipe (like with the beetroot meringue recipe bellow).

It’s also used in some deep fried foods, as when it comes into contact with the hot oil in a fryer it forms an oil impermeable film. Due to this using methylcellulose in deep fried products both reduces the amount of moisture which escapes from the coated ingredient and also reduces the about of oil absorbed into the coated item – this can help to achieve a crispier, lighter product with a great texture.

Methylcellulose is one of the very few modern ingredients I use which is not entirely ‘natural’ but synthesized from natural ingredients, namely cellulose - often from cotton. Its non-toxic and non-allergenic and a perfectly healthy and safe ingredient to use in food so don’t be scared off by the fact it’s synthesized. Bear in mind you most likely consume it fairly regularly already as it’s used in huge variety of products including foods and medicines (even vitamin tablets).

Typical use levels –

0.5% - 2% typical concentration for use in cooking

To replace egg whites use 2g Methylcellulose blended into 35g water to replace each egg white. Note – Methylcellulose prepared this way will whip to stiff peaks but you need to be persistent in your whipping to get it to nice stiff peaks.

You can buy Methylcellulose here.

I will return to this post soon to add recipes and techniques for foams, hot gellees and mousses which melt as they cool, films, and brittle sheets - all using methylcellulose.

Savory Beetroot Meringue (vegan)

‘Lentil Salad’ (Vegan)
Green Lentils - Apple Film - Savory Beetroot Meringue (egg-free) -. Horseradish Soymilk Emulsion - Celery - Walnut – Watercress - Citrus

For a while I’ve wanted to do a very modern vegan dish that plays on the stereotypes people often have about vegan food (ie -the use of lentils).

The recipe is based on flavours that work together brilliantly and often come together in simple salads. My idea was to work with these flavours but play with the textures and the presentation and hopefully give a modern refined twist to a simple salad.

Savory Beetroot Meringue – (I have now updated the technique for this, the one bellow works but I now make my juice based meringues the way you can see here

All the modern ingredients used in this dish can be found on


350g Beetroot Juice (this will be reduced to 300g)
35g Isomalt
20g Glucose syrup
20g Caster sugar
Pinch Salt
2 Tablespoon Lemon Juice
Pinch Chilli Powder
11g Methylcellulose
1.5g Xanthan Gum

Bring the beetroot juice to a simmer and reduce it to 300g. Now whilst stirring add in the Isomalt, Glucose, Caster Sugar, Lemon Juice, Chilli Powder and Salt to taste and stir until they are dissolved. Set the mixture to one side to cool.

Take 250g of the beetroot juice mix and blend in the xanthan gum with an immersion blender. Once the mixture has thickened add in the methylcellulose and blend again until fully combined.

Now either my hand or in a kitchen aid whip the beetroot mix to stiff peaks (this may take a while but you need to persist and get it to stiff peaks).
.
Once whipped to stiff peaks delicately spoon the whipped beetroot mix into a piping bag a carefully pipe small meringues onto s nonstick sheet.

Finally dehydrate the meringues at 57C for around 10 hours until dried, light and crispy (dehydrate for longer if necessary).

These can be stored in an airtight container

Apple sheet –
For the Apple Juice mix -
300g Apple Juice
3g Sodium Alginate
Pinch Salt
Grated Zest of one Lemon
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon cracked black pepper

Calcium Lactate Solution -
100ml water
5g Calcium Lactate

Bend sodium alginate into the apple juice until it thickens. Now stir in the lemon zest, cinnamon, black pepper and a pinch of salt.
Now let the apple juice mix settle in the fridge for an hour.

Next prepare the calcium lactate solution by blending the powdered calcium Lactate into 100ml of cold water. Pour this solution into a spray bottle/atomizer.

Now spread a little of the apple juice mixture in a thin layer on a flat nonstick surface (a baking sheet or even just a flat plate will do). Now spray the apple mixture with the calcium solution, this will cause the apple mixture to begin setting. Leave it for five minutes then you should be able to gently lift and turn over the apple sheet so you can spray the other side. Leave the apple sheet for a further five minutes then cut it into strips (these will be used to roll up the lentil mixture in). Finally heat the cut apple sheets in the microwave for 20 seconds to dry them out a tiny bit. Now set to one side on greaseproof paper until ready to use.

Lentils-
125g Dried Green lentils dried (for 250g cooked)
2 bay leaves
40g Crushed Walnut
1 Carrot - Diced
1 Stick Celery – Diced
2 tabs fresh chopped parsley

Rinse the dried lentils then cook them in salted water (starting with cold water) with two bay leaves for approx 15 minutes until cooked but still retaining texture. Now drain them and rinse again with a little cold water.
Now place the cooked lentils in a bowl and mix in the diced celery, diced carrot, crushed walnut, chopped parsley and a splash of olive oil. Season to taste.

Horseradish Soymilk Emulsion

170ml Soymilk
600ml Light Olive Oil
One Teaspoon Mustard
Juice One Lemon and Zest.
2 Tablespoons White Wine Vinegar
One Tablespoon Horseradish Puree
2 cloves Garlic

In a food processor blend the garlic, mustard, lemon juice and zest, and vinegar for one minute.

Now add the soymilk into the food processor and blend for another minute.
Now gently in a slow stream (as slow as possible) pout the olive oil into the soymilk mixture whilst blending.

As you drizzle in the olive oil while blending the mixture should gradually emulsify and thicken. Add seasoning to taste (bending it in to combine). Place some of the emulsion in a squeezy bottle and store the rest in the fridge.

Putting it together –

Take a small spoonful of the lentil mixture and place it at the bottom of one the strips of apple film and roll it up like a small cannelloni. Make up three of these for each plate, trimming them to neaten them up.

Place small dots of the emulsion on the plate swiping them with the tip of the squeezy bottle to make teardrop shapes.

Place three of the small apple wrapped lentil parcels on the plate and garnish them with a little orange zest.

Delicately place a little watercress around the plate and place a few of the beetroot meringue around the plate aswell.

Cheers

Eddie

Shitake Mushroom, Butterbean and Pea Korokke. With - Pickled Ginger. Shaved Cucumber. Apple Beetroot and Wasabi Gellee. Crispy fried Kombu.

The centerpiece of this dish is my take on Japanese ‘Korokke’. Usually these would be potato-based patties that are bread crumbed and deep-fried. Here I’m using butterbeans to replace the potato and adding shitake mushrooms, peas and spices to the mix. They’re then shaped into little balls, coated with breadcrumbs and black sesame seeds and deep-fried.

My version of Korokke is served with sharp, hot pickled ginger, cooling cucumber shavings and an Apple, Beetroot and Wasabi Gelee, which has a beautiful flavour and sweetness but also adds another layer of texture contrast to the dish.

The finishing touch is the, addictively tasty, crispy fried Kombu. It’s is a type of kelp that’s used a lot in Japanese cooking. It’s a great source of Umami, the fifth taste -…link… and its used to make Dashi, a Japanese stock. In this dish the Kombu is shredded and deep fried which works great with all the other flavours and textures, that is as long as you can manage to resist snacking on it long enough that it actually makes it onto the plate.

Korokke -

50g Dried Shitake Mushrooms
230g Drained Rinsed Butter Beams
50g Frozen petit pois
One bunch Fresh Coriander
One carrot – finely diced
1 Thumb Sized Piece of Ginger – finely chopped
1 Green Chilli – finely Diced
2 Cloves of Garlic - chopped
2 Shallots – finely diced
Toasted Sesame oil for frying
Soy sauce
2 Tablespoons Rice Wine Vinegar
Fine white Bread Crumbs
Black Sesame Seeds
Egg wash for bread crumbing
Plain Flour for bread crumbing
Oil for deep-frying

First off, in a bowl, pour 1lt of boiling water over the dried shitake mushrooms and leave them to soak for one hour.

Then drain the mushrooms and gently squeeze out any excess liquid (its worth keeping the soaking liquid from the mushrooms as you can use it to make a great Umami rich Dashi at a later point – look here for more info)

Thinly slice the shitake. Now heat 4 tablespoons of toasted sesame oil in a wok. Toss the shitake into the wok and stir-fry until they absorb all the oil. Now add six tablespoons of soy sauce and two tablespoons of rice wine vinegar and continue to stir-fry until the mushrooms have absorbed all the liquid. Now you can set them aside to cool.

Now stir-fry the Chilli, Ginger, Shallots, Garlic and diced carrot in a little sesame oil for around two minutes. Add this to the bowl with the cooked mushrooms and set to one side.

In another bowl crush the drained butterbeans well with the back of a fork then mix in the frozen peas. The mixture should be pretty solid and hold its shape. Now mix in the cooled cooked mushrooms and stir fried spices. Roughly chop a handful of fresh coriander and add this to the mixture.

Season the mix to taste then form it into small balls and place these on a tray.

Now mix together breadcrumbs and black sesame seeds in a ratio of about 4 parts breadcrumbs to one-part sesame seeds in a bowl.

Beat three eggs in another bowl and in a third bowl place a handful or two of plain flour.

To Breadcrumb the Shitake and butterbean Korokke roll each one first in the flour, then in the egg wash and finally in the breadcrumb and sesame mixture, making sure they are completely coated. These can now be reserved on a tray in the fridge until you’re ready to cook them.

To cook them, heat a deep fat fryer to 190C and cook a couple of the balls at a time – frying them for 2-3 minutes until golden brown and hot through to the centre. Drain off any excess oil on a little kitchen towel. These can be briefly kept warm in the oven while setting up the plates.


Beetroot, Apple and Wasabi Gellee –

300g Beetroot juice
300g Apple juice
One teaspoon Wasabi Paste
Pinch Salt
2g Agar Agar Powder - Available from www.Modernist-Chef.com

Whisk the juices and wasabi together with a pinch of salt and place in a pan, Bring the liquid to a simmer and gently reduce the liquid by half, intermittently skimming off any froth that forms on the top of the juice. You should end up with 300g of total liquid.

Allow the reduced Beetroot Apple and Wasabi liquid to cool down to room temperature.

Whisk the Agar into the cooled juice mixture and place it back on the heat. Bring to a simmer whilst stirring.

Pour out the juice mixture into a wide plastic container so the Gelee is about 1cm deep and leave to cool and set.

Once set cut out a small circle of the Gelee for each Korokke (just bigger than the Korokke that will sit on them). Also cut a small amount of 1mm dice of the gelee to be used as garnish.

(You can see more on Agar and its uses in a post I did here)


Crispy Fried Kombu –

Place four or five strips of dried kombu in a large bowl and cover with boiling water. Leave to soak for around an hour then drain (as with soaking the shitake mushrooms you can hold onto the soaking liquid and use it in the future to make an Umami rich Dashi).

Finely slice the Kombu into thin strips about 10cm long and deep-fry at 190C for about a minute until the oil stops bubbling rapidly and the strips are crispy.

Drain on a little kitchen towel and lightly season with a pinch of salt.

Finishing Touches –

Using a peeler take thin strips of cucumber. Tear some pickled sushi ginger down into thin strips. This is powerful stuff so you won’t need too much of it to get a real flavour impact.

Prepare some spring onion curls as a garnish by slicing spring onion extremely thin lengthways and placing these thin strips into ice cold water for around an hour to curl up. They can then be drained and used as garnish.

Plating up

Place a Circle of the Beetroot Gelee on the plate and sit one of the Korokke on top. Put a little of the crispy fired kombu around the plate. Place slightly crumpled strips of cucumber and pickled ginger around the kombu. Finally garnish the Korokke with a little of the spring onion curls and finish by carefully placing a few pieces of very finely diced Beetroot Apple and Wasabi gelee over the spring onion.

www.Modernist-Chef.com

Beetroot and Apple Caviar

Two liters vegetable oil chilled in the freezer
300g Beetroot juice
300g Apple juice
Pinch Salt
Note - the juices will be reduced to get 300g total liquid – they are only reduced to intensify their flavour so you could skip this step and just start with 300g total liquids.
3g Agar (1% of total liquids weight)

The start of this preparation is the same as for making a gel –

First reduce the juices to intensify their flavour. - Mix the juices together with a pinch of salt and place in a pan to bring the liquid to a simmer. Gently reduce the liquid by half, intermittently skimming any froth that forms on the top of the juice. You should end up with 300g of total liquid.

Allow the reduced Beetroot and apple liquid to cool down to room temperature.

Whisk the 3g Agar into the 300g of cooled juice mixture and place it back on the heat. Bring to a simmer whilst stirring.

Now – Pour the hot liquid into a squeeze bottle (or you can use a pipette, syringe or ‘Caviar box’ to form your spheres– if so pour the liquid into a bowl ready to use). Let the Liquid cool a little (but not enough that it begins to gel, - don’t let it get bellow 45C)

Pour the cold oil that’s been chilling in the freezer into a tall container; now drip the agar mix into the cold oil from a small height.

The droplets will gel as they are cooled by the oil and form into small ‘caviar’ spheres which sink to the bottom of the container.

Sieve out the set spheres and rinse under hot water. The ‘Caviar’ is now ready to serve.

Note – These spheres are set all the way through, for spheres, orbs and caviar with a liquid centre look and my post on Sodium Alginate and Reverse Spherification

Back to Agar Overview

Back to Molecular Basics

www.Modernist-Chef.com

I think this is one of the most exciting things you can do using agar. Really quick, really effective, yet simple clarification of liquids. All you need to clarify juices or stocks is some Agar powder, a whisk, some cheesecloth and that’s about it (I’ll assume if your reading this you own a sauce-pan). Dave Arnold developed this technique and you can see his detailed blog on the technique here.

One of the huge advantages of this is not only the clarity achieved and the fact that its vegetarian but also that its really quick, it can be done start to finish in less than an hour which is super quick compared to gelatin filtration which can take a couple of days!

So here I’m going go through the process of how to clarify orange juice as an example. This principle can be applied to other juices and stocks. One of the brilliant things about this technique is there is almost no loss of flavour. Blind Tasting the clarified juice next to the original juice its not easy to pick them apart.

Clarified Orange Juice.

750g Orange Juice
2g Agar (roughly 0.25% of the total weight – This is a tiny bit higher that Dave Arnold suggested using but it worked best for me – this might just be down to using different brands of Agar)

Pour 250g of the Orange Juice into a pan and whisk in the Agar. Bring this to a simmer whilst stirring.

Remove the pan from the heat and slowly pour the other 500g of room temperature Orange Juice into the hot Orange and Agar mix whilst stirring.

Then quickly pour this mixture into a bowl over an ice bath to set to a gel.

Once completely set gently break up the gelled Orange Juice with a whisk into ‘curds’ of gel.

Place the broken gel into a double layer of cheesecloth (or a tea towel). Lift this up over a coffee filter above a bowl where the clarified juice can collect and gently squeeze the cheesecloth. You should get a steady thin stream of clarified juice coming from the cheesecloth bundle.

And there you go, it’s that easy – you’ve now got clarified Orange Juice (or what ever you have decided to clarify).

Pretty Cool!

Back to Agar Overview

Back to Molecular Basics

Agar is such a fantastic and versatile ingredient with so many applications that I might in future do further separate posts expanding on the ways you can use it and the effects it can help you achieve. For the moment here though I’ll give you a quick overview of the ingredient and focus on demonstrating four of the ways it can be used to great effect.

• Simple Gelling (Gelee)
• Agar Clarification (transparent clarifications of juices or stocks without loss of flavour)
• Cold Oil Spherification (‘Caviar’)
• Fluid Gels

• For gelling Agar needs to be hydrated in a liquid and heated up around 90C in order for it to set as it cools.
• When cooling Agar will set rapidly at around 35C
• Once an Agar gel is been formed it won’t melt again until it reaches 80 -90C
• Agar is typically used in concentrations from 0.2% to 2% (for most applications)

Sodium Alginate is available from -

www.Modernist-Chef.com

Introduction to Sodium Alginate and basic ‘Reverse Spherification’

In this post I’m going to focus on using sodium alginate in a process know as ‘Reverse Spherification’ to create orbs about the size of an egg yolk, which hold their shape but burst into liquid in the mouth. This fantastic technique can be both really enjoyable to experiment with and give you some delicious results with a novel texture/eating experience. And when creatively and intelligently applied Spherification, and the principles behind it, can open up a world of new culinary possibilities and help us create extraordinary dishes.

So I’m going to try and give you a little bit of basic information and advice on how to use this ingredient and technique and then provide a simple recipe that’s easy to try at home that uses this technique. That way wish any luck you can get comfortable enough with the basics that you can go on to do more complex preparations and be creative in your own way.

First off it’s worth briefly making a quick distinction between the two basic forms of spherification, ‘Regular’ and ‘Reverse’.

‘Regular’ spherification involves adding sodium alginate to a liquid, for example a fruit juice, and then ‘dropping’ this liquid (via a pipette, syringe, squeezy bottle, ‘dropping spoon’ etc etc) into a calcium bath.

Generally, for best effect, Regular Spherification into a calcium bath needs to be done too service, just before the spheres are to be consumed as the orbs very quickly solidify all the way through, (this isn’t the case with ‘Reverse’ Spherification, but I’ll go into the science of why this is in more detail elsewhere).
I’ll create separate posts soon on ‘Regular’ spherification (using a calcium bath) and also on making smaller ‘caviars’. However, as I mentioned, for the moment here I want to focus on ‘Reverse’ spherification.

(Above - Spheres of flavoured yoghurt) made with reverse spherification)

So in ‘Reverse Spherification’ flavourful calcium rich liquid (either naturally calcium rich or spiked with something like calcium lactate) is dropped into a sodium alginate solution (thus the ‘reverse’ of dropping a mixture containing sodium alginate into a calcium bath). The calcium rich liquid reacts with the sodium alginate and a thin film is formed around it, giving you ‘Spheres’ or orbs that are liquid on the inside.
So first off I’ll give you a bit of basic information on Sodium Alginate which is the vital ingredient you will need for this technique, and in the UK you can buy from www.Modernist-Chef.com (Note it the El Bulli ‘texturas’ range its called‘Algin’).

Ok, so basically Sodium Alginate is derived from brown seaweed, its not some scary chemical concocted in a lab so don’t let that be a n excuse to not have a go using ingredients of this type.

It’s a hydrocolloid, which means it can form a gel or act as a thickener when hydrated. But particular to sodium alginate is that it rapidly forms a gel when it comes into contact with calcium. These gels are heat stable (they won’t melt) to above 150C. This allows us to heat up orbs made using spherification, so they can be served hot, as I did in a recipe you can see here.


(Above - Mushroom and Nutmeg Fillo Wrap. With hot Lemon Dill Spheres and Blueberry Puree)

It was largely Ferran Adrià who made the use of sodium alginate popular amongst chefs through pioneering the spherification technique for haute cuisine at his famous restaurant ‘El Bulli’.
Now, for simplicity in this first post I’m just going to focus on making spheres from naturally calcium rich liquids. This means you don’t have to add calcium to the liquid you want to make orbs from. But once you master this basic technique you’ll find it’s really easy to add calcium to almost anything from fruit juices and sauces to … well pretty much any liquid you want to make orbs from (by blending calcium lactate into it for example), and just following the same basic steps.

Preparing a sodium alginate bath.

So first you’ll need to prepare a sodium alginate solution by blending 5g of sodium alginate into one litre of cold water. My preferred way of doing this is with an immersion blender (hand blender) in a plastic rectangular tub where the liquid will sit about 10cm deep (but you could blend in a food processor or similar).

Sprinkle the sodium alginate into the water and moving the blender around blend for about 2 minuits until you have a nice smooth solution. Let this solution settle in the fridge for at least 30 minuits to allow air to escape from the solution (it will appear clearer when settled).

Dropping Technique

Here I’m focusing on the preparation of larger spheres, but I will deal with making smaller ‘caviar’ balls in another post.

So there are two ways that I’ll talk about here of making your orbs, dropping using a spoon and freezing as a hemisphere prior to dropping.

A lot of the time my preference is to use the ‘Dropping Spoon’ technique, but for this to work best the liquid you want to make spheres from needs to have a certain viscosity, about the thickness of yogurt, this can of course be achieved my thickening the liquid prior to dropping (i.e. with xanthan gum) if its too thin.

Recipe -
Spheres of Yoghurt, Honey, Black Pepper and Poppy Seeds. With Crushed Walnut and Strawberry Puree

So first prepare a sodium alginate solution as above by blending 5g of sodium alginate into one litre of cold water. Leave this to settle in the fridge for thirty minutes before using.

For the Yoghurt mixture - in a bowl mix together 200g natural Greek yoghurt, 60g Honey, One Teaspoon cracked black pepper and three teaspoons of poppy seeds and stir well.
Now carefully drop spoonfuls (as described above) of the yoghurt mix into the Sodium Alginate solution and leave the small orbs that form for 30 seconds to a minute to react. Refresh the spheres in cold water and remove them with a slotted spoon when ready to serve.

Serve with crushed walnuts and a simple strawberry puree made by blending fresh strawberries with a little icing sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice to taste. I sometimes thicken purees like this with xanthan gum (which I will right a post on soon) to get the consistency however I want it, but for a first go at this technique a very simple puree will do, or even just some chopped fresh strawberry.

To see more advanced recipes where I have used a version on this technique follow the links bellow.


Mushroom and Nutmeg Fillo Wrap. With hot Lemon Dill Spheres and Blueberry Puree


Amuse Bouche

I hope this is useful

Enjoy yourselves xx

Visit www.Modernist-Chef.com for more hydrocolloids and starter kits

www.Modernist-Chef.com
.

For More detail on modern techniques and videos see my new ebook
‘Modernist Vegetarian’


And you can buy all your Modern Ingredients and equipment from -

www.Modernist-Chef.com

This brief introduction to modern techniques/ingredients etc (what’s often unfortunately labeled ‘molecular gastronomy’) is just in its infancy, I’ll come back to it and develop this blog entry to make it both more precise and cover more ground but for the moment I hope it gives a tiny introduction to those of you new to this stuff.

This is a very much over simplified and generalized post, (this won’t present information of great interest to my chef followers or those already quite familiar with the famous modern restaurants, chefs and techniques). But if you are new to alot of this stuff I hope it gives a little context and a start point for getting your head around it. For more detail others have written on this subject more eloquently than i ever could.

I should quickly note here though that I personally dislike the term ‘molecular gastronomy’ or ‘molecular cooking’ as do most chefs labeled with this term, I think avant-garde, modern or modernist are more appropriate, so from now on in this blog I will refer to the grouping of these techniques, ingredients and chefs as modernist or avant-garde.



For some this culinary movement is typified by the assortment of techniques and ingredients used by chefs at the cutting edge of modernist haute cuisine. From preparation methods like use of liquid nitrogen, foams and sous vide (cooking vacuum packed food in a water bath), to ‘spheres’ and ‘caviar pearls’ which burst into liquid in the mouth and even ‘flavouring’ the atmosphere around dishes with scent. These all allow the modern cook to potentally create an exceptional dining experience.

At the forefront of this exciting, ground breaking and sometimes controversial culinary movement have been creative, influential chefs like Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, Grant Achatz, Tomas Keller and Rene Redzepi to name but a few. They have blazed a trail creatively, developed new techniques and popularized use of specialist ingredients, that have now become accessible for use in home kitchens.

Fundamentally though for me this aspect of cuisine is about creativity and aspiring towards excellence. It’s not about throwing out traditional techniques but exploring everything that is at our disposal and embracing innovation in many forms across various disciplines.



So how does all this fit with vegetarian cooking? In the past high end cuisine may have been characterised by foie gras and veal stocks, and these still have a prominent place in most haute cuisine restaurants. However this new movement has to some extent levelled the playing field for vegetarian cooks, with almost all of the ‘new’ ingredients being vegetarian and vegan, and by demonstrating that dishes can be built up in variety of ways (not simply with a traditional meat of fish central element) and be exciting and of the highest standard still. Ingredients are approached in new ways without expence or fashion determining their value. And I personally think, especially in veggie food, this imaginative, creative approach has opened up an exciting new range of possibilities for chefs and diners alike and where creatively and intelligently applied is playing an important role in taking modern vegetarian cuisine to new heights.



New techniques have given us new ways to give food fantastic textures and contrast, something that is arguably even more important when cooking without meat. Whilst modern ingredients offer another huge advance for vegetarian cooking in the form of various hydrocolloids such as Agar Agar and Gellan, which allow gelling and setting without gelatin. Meaning its possible to make things like vegetarian marshmallows, panna cotta, jellies and mousses, which were previously out of bounds. And that’s just the beginning, these same ingredients let us make flaming sorbets that don’t melt when they’re flambed, make hot mouses and gellees, do fast effective clarification and explore textures within a dish in increadible ways.

• Measure your ingredients exactly. Many recipes or ingredients require precision so weigh all liquids as well as solids in grams and use accurate scales, ideally that will measure to 0.01 of a gram.
• Be prepared to have a couple of goes at something to nail the technique. If its totally new to you it might not work first time but stick with it. And if something doesn’t work try to identify where it could have gone wrong before you try again.
• The most complex solution isn’t always the best. For example to alter texture in a dish simply slicing something in a novel way might be most effective.
• Most importantly make sure your food is delicious! The techniques and effects are great ways to augment your food but it still has to taste great! So always use the best quality ingredients you can and taste everything as often as possible while your cooking.

Fruit Glass (example of texture manipulation)

Smoked Griddled Aubergine wrapped Lemon and Black Pepper Goats Cheese with Crouton, Balsamic Reduction and Orange Sauce.

This delicious starter is really pretty simple to make but it’s beautifully flavourful and moreish. The sharp goats cheese cuts the robust flavour of the smoked griddled aubergine, while the sticky, sweet balsamic reduction and aromatic orange sauce bring this dish together and gives it an elegant finish. It makes a great start to a meal with its balanced yet bold flavours, and demands attention as something a little different but utterly delicious.

The quick smoking of the aubergine is done with the polyscience smoking gun which is a great bit of kit.


The smoking gun is available here


www.Modernist-Chef.com

Its a brilliant and versatile piece of kitchen tech that I’d recommend to anyone really into their cooking.

The Recipe makes 10 servings as a starter or canapé.

Goats Cheese –
125g Goats cheese
Zest of two lemons
1 teaspoon of cracked black pepper

Simply mix the goats cheese, lemon zest and black pepper together in a bowl
Then roll the goats cheese mix into about 10 small sausage shapes and reserve in the fridge until ready to use.

Smoked Griddled Aubergene –
Two Aubergines
One Finely chopped red chilli
Chopped Fresh Parsley
Polyscience Smoking Gun
Oak Smoking chips
Seasoning

Slice down the length of the Aubergines to get strips about ½ a cm thick.
Place these in a colander and toss with two of tables spoons of salt and leave them to sit like this for an hour, the salt will draw out some of the bitterness from auberegenes. After an hour thoroughly rinse the salt off the slices.
Now place them in a bowl and toss with a splash of olive oil, one finely chopped red chilli, a sprinkling of chopped fresh parsley and a little salt and pepper.
Pop the Aubergine strips on a hot griddle pan for one to two minutes on each side until they’re is just cooked through.
Now place the hot Aubergine into a large bowl and cover with clingfilm.
Use the Polyscience Smoking Gun, loaded with oak smoking chips, to fill the covered bowl with smoke. Sit covered for one minute to give the aubergenes a smokey flavour.

Finally your ready to place one of the pieces of the rolled goats cheese at the bottom of each of the, still warm, smoked Aubergine strips and then roll them up and pin in place with cocktail sticks. Now simply pop them in a hot oven for one minute to make sure they are hot when you serve them.

Croutons –
Cut 6cm wide circles of good quality bread – about 1cm thick – using a pastry cutter.
Fry these in olive oil, in a pan on a medium heat, for around a minute on each side until golden brown. Sit the cooked croutons on kitchen roll to allow some of the excess oil to drain off.

Orange sauce
150ml cointreau
50ml Dry White wine
600ml Orange Juice
Pinch Salt
Thumb sized piece of ginger cut into thin strips
2g Xanthan gum

Bring the cointreau and white wine to a simmer and reduce for two to three minutes. Now add the orange juice, ginger and pinch of salt. Continue to simmer the sauce until it has reduced by half. Stain through a fine sieve and allow to cool, then blend in 2g of xanthan gum and transfer the sauce to a squeezy bottle. This can either be served cold up heated up when plating the dish.

Balsamic reduction
200ml Good quality Balsamic Vinegar

Bring the Balsamic up to a boil in a saucepan then drop the temperature to a simmer and allow it to reduce by about three quarters. It’s ready when it reaches a syrupy consistency. Let it cool and place in a squeezy bottle.

To serve –
Sit each of the hot rolled up smoked Aubergine and goats cheese parcels on top of a crouton in the centre of the plate and alternately dot the orange sauce and balsamic reduction around the plate.

I hope you’ll give it a go (even if you don’t have a smoking gun), its well worth it.

Eddie x


www.Modernist-Chef.com

Mushroom and Nutmeg Fillo Wrap. With Lemon Dill Spheres and Blueberry Puree

This is a really zesty, fresh tasting dish thats perfect with a glass of chilled white wine. The flavours compliment each other beautifully. Sharp lemon dill sauce and the sweet and tart blueberry puree cut through the richness of the buttery, indulgent, Fillo wrapped mushrooms with nutmeg. Then the texture contrasts on the plate add excitement and playfulness, with crispy fillo pastry, cooked mushrooms, and spheres of lemon dill sauce that burst into liquid in your mouth. It’s a dish with real impact and is, I hope, both delicious and kind of fun.

Serves 4

For the Fillo Wraps

700g mixed mushrooms -– I use a mixture of Portobello, Closed cap and Chestnut mushrooms. 3 cloves garlic 4 Shallots Tablespoon fresh chopped oregano Zest and juice of one lemon
Half a glass of white wine
50g butter, plus a little for frying
One and a half whole nutmeg, freshly grated
A small pot of melted butter
8 Sheets Fresh Fillo Pastry cut to 20cm squares

First fry the chopped shallots and garlic with a tablespoon of butter and a little olive oil for about a minute.

Roughly chop the mushrooms and add them to the hot pan to fry for a couple of minutes before pouring in half a glass of white wine for the last minute of cooking until the mushrooms are just done.

Drain the liquid from the cooked mushrooms and transfer them to a bowl. Now add 50g butter, a tablespoon of fresh chopped oregano, the zest and juice of one lemon and the grated nutmeg into the bowl and mix together well.

Place half the mushrooms in a blender and blitz to a rough mix then roughly chop the left over mushrooms before recombining them together with the blended mix. Add salt and pepper to taste and a touch more butter if necessary to hold the mix together. Chill the mixture for a couple of hours in the fridge before using. It should become a moldable consistency that will hold its shape when pressed into small balls.

Now cut several sheets of fresh Fillo pastry to 20 Cm squares. For each fillo package brush one sheet lightly with melted butter then place another sheet on top of the first and again gently brush this with a little melted butter.

Take a generous tablespoon of the chilled mushroom mixture and shape it into a ball and place this in the centre of the double-layered fillo square. Then lift up the corners of the square and bring them together above the mushroom mix, pinching in any loose pastry at the top. Twist the bundle to make a small closed package containing the mushroom filling. Brush the outside of these little fillo pastry bundles with a touch more melted butter and now these can either be cooked straight away or reserved in the fridge.

When ready to cook them place the filled fillo packages on a baking sheet on the middle shelf of the oven at 220C for 10 to 15 minute until golden brown and crisp.
Serve them piping hot

Blueberry Puree –

250g Fresh Blueberries
Juice of one Lemon
Pinch of salt
2g Xanthan Gum

Blend the fresh Blueberries, lemon juice, and small pinch of salt in a tall container with a hand blender till smooth. Pass this mixture through a sieve. Now Blend in the Xanthan Gum and pour into a squeezy bottle, reserve in the fridge until ready to use.

For the Lemon Dill Spheres –

Juice of one lemon 50ml white wine (dry) A good handful fresh Dill chopped
300ml Single cream Seasoning (salt and course black pepper)

Sodium Alginate Bath –
5g Sodium Alginate
1 Litre Water

This is a criminally easy and quick sauce to make, but its lovely - fresh, delicate, sharp and moreish.
First prepare your sodium alginate solution by blending 5g of sodium alginate (available from www.Modernist-Chef.com) into one litre of cold water in a large mixing bowl. Leave this to settle in the fridge for thirty minutes before using.

Now for the sauce heat the lemon juice and white wine in a pan till boiling, then simmer and reduce for two to three minutes.
Add the cream, and chopped Dill and simply bring to a gentle simmer for a couple more minutes, while stirring, to thicken the sauce a little, Season to taste.

Next chill the sauce then drop small spoonfuls of it into the sodium alginate solution using a ‘dropping spoon’, and leave for one minute to react, before refreshing the orbs in cold fresh water.

The small, calcium rich, orbs will react with the sodium alginate and a thin film will form around them so that they hold their shape but will burst to liquid in you mouth.

To serve - Heat the orbs by placing them in a saucepan of cold water and gently bringing this up to just below a simmer (about 80 to 85C, keep it at this temperature for around two minutes to heat through). Remove the spheres carefully with a slotted spoon just as your ready to serve the dish.

Putting it together –
Place one of the fillo packages in the centre of the plate with circles of the blueberry puree around it. Finally place three of the hot lemon dill spheres around the plate (putting each of them ontop of one of the circles of blueberry puree helps to keep the spheres from sliding about on the plate).

Enjoy x

Sodium Alginate is available from

www.Modernist-Chef.com

Ingredients -
200ml Your choice of spirit to infuse with smoke
Smoking chips/sawdust (or your choice of smoking chips or even teas, spices etc.)

Equipment –
Polyscience Smoking Gun (Pictured Above)
Mosa Cream Whipper (Pictured Above)
Two 8gm Nitrous Oxide Cartridges

Pour the spirit into your cream whipper. Now using the smoking gun fill the whpper with smoke via the rubber tube connected to the smoking gun and quickly screw on the cream whipper top. Now you’re ready to use a fast infusion technique to get that smoky flavour into the brandy. Charge the cream whipper with two 8gm Nitrous Oxide cartridges. Shake the whipper for 30 seconds then let it rest for a further 30 seconds. Now slowly vent out the gas with the whipper in the upright position. And there you go, you now have your smoked spirit. This basic fast infusion technique (which I’ve written about elsewhere) was developed by Dave Arnold, but I don’t think anyone has used it to infuse smoke into alcohol in this way before. So this may well be a new technique, or at least a new variation.

To ee a recipe where I use this technique Click Here

Smoked Brandy Chocolate Torte with a Crackling Cumin Spiced Base
(can be vegan – see bottom of page)

This Torte is incredibly rich and indulgent with beautiful deep flavours. But it’s also really quick and easy to make. The Smoked Brandy adds flavour that compliments the chocolate and mimics its own smoky notes, whilst the cumin provides subtle heat to the dessert and an earthy quality that works really well here. Then finally the pop rocks in the base lighten the dessert and add an element of fun with their crackling, popping in the mouth sensation

First off prepare your Smoked Brandy – This uses a really cool, new, super fast technique. See the Bottom of the page for the recipe and technique or click here
(If you don’t have the equipment to make this you can use plain brandy but the flavour profile will be different and I’ve put a link below to where you can affordably buy the equipment to perform this super quick technique)

Now make the base
150g Digestive Biscuits
70g Softened Butter
One Tablespoon Honey
Two Tablespoons of Neutral Flavoured Pop Rocks
One Tablespoon finely ground toasted cumin seeds

Blitz the digestives to fine a breadcrumb consistency and pop them in a bowl along with the ground cumin. Now mix in the softened butter and syrup. Work this mix briefly until it begins to stick together. Finally gently mix in the pop rocks.

Gently press the base mix into the bottom of a cake tin and smooth down with the back of a spoon.
The Smoked Brandy Chocolate Mix

300g Dark Chocolate (Good quality 70% plus cocoa solids dark chocolate is a must for this dessert)
150ml Single Cream
Seeds of one Vanilla Pod
Three Tablespoons Maple Syrup (or you could use a simple syrup)
Eight Tablespoons of your Smoked Brandy (see below or click here)

Place the chocolate and vanilla seeds in a metal or glass bowl above a pan of water just off the boil. Once the chocolate is melted stir in the cream, then the Smoked Brandy and finally the Syrup. Stir together until you get a smooth glossy mix. Pour onto the base and smooth the top flat. Chill for at least four hours in the fridge but ideally overnight.

Smoked Brandy Recipe and Technique
Ingredients -
200ml Brandy
Applewood smoking chips

Equipment –
Polyscience Smoking Gun (Pictured Below)
Mosa Cream Whipper (Pictured Below)
Two 8gm Nitrous Oxide Cartridges

Pour the brandy into your cream whipper. Now using the smoking gun fill the whpper with applewood smoke via the rubber tube connected to the smoking gun and quickly screw on the cream whipper top. Now you’re ready to use a fast infusion technique to get that smoky flavour into the brandy. Charge the cream whipper with two 8gm Nitrous Oxide cartridges. Shake the whipper for 30 seconds then let it rest for a further 30 seconds. Now slowly vent out the gas with the whipper in the upright position. And there you go you now have smoked brandy. This basic fast infusion technique (which I’ve written about elsewhere) was developed by Dave Arnold, but I don’t think anyone has used it to infuse smoke into alcohol in this way before. So this may well be a new technique, or at least a new variation.



Cream Whipper and Smoking Gun. Available from

www.Modernist-Chef.com


For a Vegan version
Simply replace the butter with vegan margarine
Replace honey with maple syrup
Replace the cream with soy cream
And double-check your dark chocolate and biscuits are vegan.
This recipe works great as a vegan version, I’ve tried doing it this way and it comes out perfect.

Umami Rich Shitake Mushroom and Noodle Broth (Serves two as a main course).

This Japanese inspired dish is really rich in Umami (the fifth taste) and makes a beautiful main course with incredible flavour. For more information on Umami check out my blog on the subject.

Ingredients-
50g Dried sliced Shitake Mushrooms
2 Cloves of garlic chopped
3 Shallots diced
1 red chilli - roughly chopped
1 thumb sized piece ginger – cut into matchsticks
3 tablespoons Toasted Sesame oil
4 tablespoons Dark soy sauce
2 tablespoons Lemon juice
2 teaspoons ‘Ume plum seasoning’ (or if you can’t get this use a little rice wine vinegar)
1 tablespoon Vegetable stock
Fresh coriander
One-bunch spring onions
2 servings of Noodles – either use fresh egg noodles or cook some dried noodles and set to one side.
Optional - One Piece dried Kombu. It will add an extra umami boost, but it will also give a suble seaweed flavour to the dish aswell.

First off for this dish put the dried shitake’s (along with the Kombu if using) in a bowl and cover with 1 litre of boiling water, let them soak and rehydrate for at least an hour. It’s really important that you remember to keep the water that you soaked the mushrooms in, as this will be the base for our Umami rich broth.

Heat the sesame oil in a pan or wok and stir-fry the ginger, shallots and chilli for about a minuit, then toss in the garlic and fry for another minuit. Roughly chop the shitake mushrooms and throw them into the pan to cook for two minuits.

Now pour the liquid you rehydrated the mushrooms in (a simple ‘Dashi’), over all the ingredients in the pan and bring the liquid to a simmer (if using kombu simmer the soaked piece of kombu in the liquid aswell) . Next in goes the soy sauce, veg stock, ume plum seasoning, lemon juice and just a very small pinch of salt and pepper. Check the seasoning, adding soy rather than salt if you desire it to be saltier, and lemon juice if you want more acidity.

Next pop you noodles into the broth (cooked them separately first if using dried noodles) and simmer for another minuit. Finally chop a few sprigs of fresh coriander and a bunch of spring onions and pop them in for the last minuit or so of cooking. Serve it up in some nice bowls with chopsticks, and garnish with fresh coriander, spring onion curls and a sprinkle of black sesame seeds (remove the kombu, if using, before serving).

Chilli, cumin seed and fenugreek flat bread
Makes about 12.

7g dried active yeast
375ml warm water
Pinch Sugar
600g plain flour
1 tablespoon salt
olive oil
2 tablespoons chilli flakes
3 tablespoons dried fenugreek leaves
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
150g melted butter
5 garlic cloved
pinch cracked black pepper
Chopped fresh corrianda


First make the garlic butter by mixing finely chopped garlic with the melted butter and seasoning with pepper, set this to one side. If you want you could make clarified butter (ghee) at this point but a simple garlic butter is fine for us at the mo.
Now activate the yeast in the warm water and sugar. (Leave it for around 10 mins to become frothy).
Add this to a bowl filled with the flour, salt, olive oil and the spices.
Kneed together into a dough. Its worth really kneeding it well, for about ten minuets, so get right into it and enjoy it, or bang it in a mixer and have a beer.
Place the dough in a covered bowl in a warm place to rise for around an hour and a half after which it should be about twise the size.
Knock the dough back to its origional size and divide it into 8 pieces.
Roll out the breads to 5mm thickness. Brush with a little oil and cook, oiled side down on a hot griddle pan for a minuit on each side until bubbles appear in the bread.
Spread with the garlic butter mix, sprinkle with chopped fresh corrianda and serve.

Cinnamon and vanilla Bavarois with Dark chocolate Kahlua Ganache and coffee tuile.
Cinnamon and Kahlua Bavarois
Makes 4 individual puddings or one 13cm cake tin.
 
Base –
100g digestive biscuits
50g Melted butter
One tablespoon golden syrup
 
First make a simple biscuit base for the desert by mixing together 100g of digestive biscuits, which have been broken down to the consistency of fine bread crumbs, with 50g of melted butter and a table spoon of golden syrup. Press this mix into the bottom of the molds you are using or line the base of a cake tin with it.
 
Bavarois –
65g Caster sugar
Two tea spoons ground Cinnamon
6g agar agar
2 free range egg yolks
250ml whole milk
One vanilla pod
250ml double cream lightly whipped
 
Mix the agar agar into the milk and allow to soak for 5-10 minuits.
Mix two free range egg yolks and 50g of caster sugar in a bowl.
Heat the milk, agar agar and the seeds of one vanilla pod in a pan to just below boiling point. Keep stiring the mixture till the agar agar is completely dissolved.
Make a syrup from 15g caster sugar two tea spoons of cinnamon and one table spoons of water and add this to the milk. Continue to stir on the heat for a further 2-3 minuits. Pour the liquid over the egg and sugar mix and stir in bit by bit.
As soon as the mixture shows the early signs of setting swiftly fold in the lightly whipped double cream. Stir to insure that the mixture has a smooth consitency.
Quickly pour the mix into your molds or cake tin, this must be done quickly as the Bavarois will begin to set as soon as it starts to cool.
Allow to set in the fridge and once set top with the chocolate and kahlua ganache and refrigerate once again until the topping is also set.
 
For the Chocolate and Kahlua Ganache topping-
150g good quality (70% cocoa solids) vegetarian dark chocolate.
50ml single gream
One tablespoon golden syrup
50ml Kahlua
 
Melt 150g of good quality dark chocolate with 50ml single cream a table spoon of golden syrup and 50ml of Kahlua, in a bowl over a pan of water just below boiling point, stirring until smooth.
 
Once desserts are set remove the molds or cake tin and serve cold.

For the coffee tuile –
60g butter
60g plain flour
60g icing sugar
one large free range egg white
2 teaspoons instant coffee
drop vanilla essence
pinch ground cinnamon

Melt butter and stir in coffee to dissolve. Mix the flour, sugar, egg white, cinnamon and vanilla essence together. Then mix in the butter coffee mix to make a pale brown/beige paste. Pop this mixture in the fridge for one hour. Then spread the mixture to about a millimetre thick on a non stick baking sheet or baking papper. Place in the oven at 200 centigrade for 5 minuits. The buiscuits can then be cut to shape whilst still a tiny bit pliable and left to cool and crisp up.
Serve with a quenelles of the set kahlua ganache coated in cocoa powder, fresh strawberries and coffee tuile.

Baileys and chipped dark chocolate parfait

Ingredients-
50g good quality dark chocolate
150g caster sugar
3 free range egg yolks
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
300 ml double cream
2 shots of Baileys

First whip the cream to soft peaks and set to one side. Then in a non-stick pan make a syrup by melting the sugar with a table spoon and a half of water, allow this to simmer for about two minuets until the you have a smooth syrup. Whisk the egg yolks until fluffy and pale then add the syrup to the yolks whilst continuing to whisk for a further couple of minuets to a smooth, thick mixture.
Chop or smash the chocolate in small uneven pieces. At this point one by one fold the Baileys, vanilla extract and chipped chocolate into the egg mix. Finally fold in the whipped cream and spoon the parfait into individual molds or ramekins and freeze ideally over night but for at least four hours.
Turn the parfaits out of their molds and onto a plate, the alcohol in the Baileys should have prevented them from being absolutely frozen solid. These look great simply garnished with a dusting of icing sugar, some grated chocolate and some quartered strawberries to add colour and contrast. Parfait is similar to ice cream and is a lovely indulgent and classy way to end a dinner, while at the same time being easy to make up in advance.

Mushroom Laksa
(could be vegan if you use egg free noodles)

Ingredients –
4 cloves of Garlic
3 or 4 red chilies
40g fresh ginger
One red pepper skinned and de-seeded
200g free range egg noodles
900ml prepared Vegetable stock
3 Cans of coconut milk
400g closed cap mushrooms
250g portabella mushrooms
A handful of fresh coriander
Lime and soy sauce to taste
chopped sping onions to garnish

Finely chop or blend the garlic, lemon grass, red pepper, ginger and chilies (including their seeds), fry these for one to two minuets. Then add the coconut milk and stock and bring to the boil. Quarter the closed cap mushrooms and slice the portabella and add them to the pan along with a handful of roughly chopped fresh coriander, season with salt, pepper, soy sauce and lime juice to taste, leave to simmer for around 15 minuits.
Whilst the Laksa is simmering bring some water to the boil and cook the noodles. To serve first put some noodles in each large bowl, then ladle out the Laksa and top. Garnish with fresh coriander. This is a great dish in any season and can be made as spicy or mild as you like. Its real comfort food but works great presented as a gourmet main course. You can experiment with adding a variety of deferent veg to this versatile and hearty meal.

Crumble -
240g Golden granulated sugar
75g Butter
175g Plain flour
30g Pecan nuts (roughly chopped)
2 tea spoons of chilli powder
2 tea spoons of ground cinnamon
8 fresh ripe plums
500g fresh ripe strawberries

Dark Chocolate and ginger sauce –
Thumb sized piece of root ginger
100ml single cream
175g Organic dark chocolate (60% cocoa solids)
1 or 2 tea spoons of honey
3 tabs butter
Crumbles cook in 25 minuits

Chop the plums (skin on), into 3cm chunks, remove the stalks from the strawberries and halve them through the centre. Stew the fruit in a 50ml of orange juice with 180g sugar and 2 tea spoons of chilli powder, a pinch of ground ginger for approx five minuets until softened. For the crumble topping, rub 75g butter (diced), into 175g flour. Mix in about 80g of sugar and the roughly chopped pecan nuts and 2 teaspoons cinamon.
Spoon the stewed fruit equally into four ramekins, top with the crumble and dust with a little cinnamon.
Bake at 180C for approximately 25 minutes until the topping is golden.
For the chocolate sauce, - melt 175g of choc with a 2/3 flat tabs of butter and a thumb of grated ginger squeezed in muslin to get juice into sause in glass/metal bowl over boiling water, add honey to taste,
Once ready take off heat and then very quickly stir in 75ml/100ml cream.

Chocolate gnocchi and spiced red wine poached pear with 'blacksticks' blue cheese sauce and walnuts.

I haven’t finished this recipe to my satisfaction yet but my girlfriend loves it so here is a working version of it. Feel free to play with it and adjust the strength of the flavours to your own taste but make sure the blue cheese you use is vegetarian (doesn’t use calf rennet).
I came up with this recipe with Christmassy, winter, festive ideas in mind.
It might sound like a bizar concoction but honestly these flavours all really go together and compliment each other beautifully – blue cheese and pear, chocolate and blue cheese, red wine and chocolate, walnuts and pears, blue cheese and walnuts, chocolate and nuts, these are all tried and true lovely pairings, this dish combines then into an intense savory main course. Also if chocolate in a savory dish sounds odd to you its actually nothing like a new idea, its been used in savory dishes in many cultures for hundreds of years.
In this dish the bitterness of chocolate gnocchi is contrasted and contained by the sweetness of the poached pear, the blue cheese sauce unites these contrasting tastes. Creaminess and crisp walnuts provide the scenery in which the other, each intense, flavour can stand out without overpowering the others. So when all the flavours come together there is a harmony.
You only need small servings of this dish, it is very intense flavour wise and the gnocchi are very dense and filling for how small they are.

For the gnocchi
400g peeled and mashed floury potatoes
400g plain flour
50g cocoa powder
Salt and pepper
One free-range egg
Pinch sugar

Sieve the flour and cocoa into the mashed potato, mix together well until you have the consistency of fine breadcrumbs. Season with salt pepper and a pinch of sugar, just enough to take the edge off the bitterness of the cocoa. Break an egg into the centre of the mix and work into the flour and potato. When the mix comes together kneed it and then roll out into long sausages about 2cm thick. Dust these with flour and then cut at 1.5 cm intervals all along the dough. Place the gnocchi into salted boiling water. Cook until they pop up to the surface of the boiling water, at this point they are ready, scoop out the cooked gnocchi with a slotted spoon and immediately refresh by dropping into cold water to halt the cooking process. Drain and toss the gnocchi in a little olive oil. These can now be set aside until ready to use.

Blue cheese sauce
75g Vegetarian Blacksticks blue veined cheese
150ml single cream
Tablespoon butter
25ml whole milk
Seasoning (not to much salt)

I’ve used ‘Blacksticks’ blue veined cheese here but you can substitute any vegetarian blue cheese to taste. This is a quick simple sauce. Just heat up the milk, butter and cream then add the cheese and melt it in, stirring until the sauce begins to thicken. Season with pepper and a little salt.

Poached pears
Red wine (check its suitable for vegetarians)
Peeled and halved pears
Teaspoon chilli powder
Pepper

Place the peeled halved pears, place in a pan and cover with red wine, add some pepper and the chilli to red wine and bring to the boil for 5 – 10 minuits until the pears are soft all the way through.

Bringing it together and serving
Place the cooked gnocchi in a pan with a little olive oil and bring up the heat so they crisp, just a little on the outside, pour over the sauce and heat through. When the gnocchi and sauce are heated through toss in a handful of walnuts. Transfer to a plate and sit the poached pear halves on the gnocchi in the centre of the plate.

Orange and herbed goats cheese crostini

200ml Balsamic vinegar
400g soft goats cheese
One bunch fresh chives
25g Fresh Basil
2 Oranges
1 Lemon
1 Baguette
Seasonal salad leaves

First make a balsamic reduction by heating the balsamic vinegar in a saucepan and letting it simmer and reduce to one quarter of the original liquid until it has a syrupy texture. Next mix the goats cheese in a bowl with the finely chopped chives and a couple of basil leaves cut into fine strips, season with pepper.
Peel and split the oranges into segments (cut between membranes above a bowl to collect the juices) add a dash of lemon juice to the reserved juice from the oranges along with a good slush of olive oil, whisk together and season to form a dressing. Lightly toast slices of baguette and set aside. Now on each piece of bread arrange a few of the orange segments and drizzle them with a small amount of the dressing, next spoon on some of the herbed goats cheese and pop the crostini under the grill for a minuit or so until the goats cheese begins to melt and colour on top. Place your crostini on plates with a small salad of seasonal leaves tossed in the dressing made earlier. Finally give each crostini a good drizzle of the balsamic reduction and serve.
The sweetness of the balsamic reduction really compliments the tartness of the goat’s cheese, whilst the oranges and lemon add acidity which gives this starter freshness and zing
to it.

So, this is my modern take on an old fashioned, simple, comforting pudding. I hope I’ve managed to keep the essence of the origional desert but add texture contrasts and, by separating the various traditional elements of the desert, highlight several of the elements individual characteristics and how they ultimately work together. The flavours of this dish are of a beautiful, lovingly made, bread and butter pudding, but the experience of eating it and the effect of isolating some of the different flavours and using different textures makes this a really interesting delicious dessert, perfect in the colder seasons. The Glazed Brioche is sweet, crunchy on top and soft underneath. The Milk fluid gel is light and flavourful. The Chambord soaked grapes provide a rich, fruity, sweet and luxurious touch. And finally the Sweet Nutmeg Butter Powder, which turns into melted butter in your mouth, ties the whole desert together.

Warm, sweet nutmeg butter powder

100g Unsalted Butter
2 teaspoons grated nutmeg
15g Demerara Sugar
15g Caster Sugar
60g (approx) Ab-zorbit Tapioca Maltodextrin (Texturas Malto)

Place the butter, sugar and nutmeg in a small pan and gently melt. Heat the butter mix, stirring occasionally, until it barely reaches a simmer and keep it at this temperature for around ten minuits. Pour the butter mixture into a plastic container and place covered in the fridge, stir after about and hour, before the butter is fully set. Then leave covered in the fridge overnight or for up to a couple of days.
When you’re ready to make the powder, cube the set butter mix and re-melt it in a small pan. Pour the melted butter into a large bowl and bit by bit stir in the Tapioca Maltodextrin until the mixture has the appearance of breadcrumbs. Now force the butter powder though a sieve to end up with a fine consistent powder.
When ready to serve heat the powder up in a dry frying pan and spoon the warm powder on to the plate. This powder will turn to melted butter in you mouth as it comes into contact with moisture.

Vanilla and Cinnamon Milk Fluid Gel

500ml Whole Milk
2 Vanilla Pods
1 Tablespoon of broken Cassia Bark
75g Caster Sugar
25g Ultratex 3

Split the vanilla pods and scrape out the seeds. Heat the Milk, cassia bark, vanilla seeds and pods and the Sugar in a small pan whilst stirring until the milk reaches a simmer. Then set the covered pan to one side to cool and infuse. Once cooled strain the milk then blend the ultratex into the milk in a tall container using an immersion blender. The Milk will thicken to the consistency of custard. When ready to serve reheat the Milk fluid gel in a pan whilst stirring then spoon onto the plate (with a cheffy smear if you fancy)

Brioche

Thin Slices of Brioche
2 Egg Yolks
1 Tablespoon Whole Milk
1 Teaspoon Honey
Pinch Powdered Cinnamon
Demerara Sugar to sprinkle

Lightly toast thin slices of Brioche. Beat together the egg yolks, Milk, honey and cinnamon and brush a little of this mix onto the top side of the toasted brioche. Now sprinkle a little demerara over the top of the brioche and gently caramelize with a blow-torch (try not to let the bread itself catch too much).

Chambord Soaked Grapes

Thinly slice green seedless grapes and leave to soak for around an hour in a shallow dish filled with Chambord Liqueur. To serve delicately remove the grapes and pat off the excess liquid carefully with a little kitchen roll. Place the grape slices overlapping on the plate.

When all the elements are assembled on the plate finish by sprinkling some finely chopped raisins over the brioche and serve.

Enjoy x

This is a really genuinely delicious starter which is beautifully simple and effective in how the flavours marry together. The principles of this dish are pretty straight forward but you do need a little equipment (and iSi cream whipper and Nitrous Oxide) and a specialist ingredient (Tapioca Maltodextrin), both of which are cheap and easy to get hold off, and available from www.Modernist-Chef.com
I’m really happy with this dish, I had a lot of fun working on it (possibly due to extensive vodka tasting), and it has some of my favorite flavours complementing and accentuating each other but most importantly it tastes great. The tomato and goats cheese is just lovely and needs no messing with, it speaks for itself. The Chocolate and nutmeg powder works amazingly with all the other flavours of the dish and instantly turns from powder to liquid chocolate in your mouth. The Final piece of the dish, the Raspberry and Basil infused and sweetened Vodka is delicious on its own but I specifically designed it to go with this dish and it is the finishing touch that completes the starter.

Tomato and Goats Cheese

First grab a couple the best tomatoes you can get your hands on, ideally get smallish sweet tomatoes. Slice the Tomatoes to bite sized pieces and arrange them on the plate. Crumble some goats cheese over the tomatoes then simply drizzle over a good olive oil and finish with a sprinkle of salt and pepper. It’s that easy.

Raspberry and Basil Vodka

170g Fresh Raspberries
7g Dried Basil (you could use fresh basil but this will alter the flavour)
250g Vodka
100g Simple Syrup (50g water with 50g caster sugar, heated and stirred till sugar dissolves then cooled)

Place the raspberries and basil into an iSi cream whipper and pour the vodka over them. Charge the whipper with one Nitrous oxide cartridge, shake for thirty seconds, then rest the whipper for thirty seconds, now vent the nitrous and strain the liquid through muslin. This is utilizing the same ultra quick infusion technique devised by Dave Arnold that I talk about here. Take 200g of the infused Vodka and mix in 100g of the simple syrup. Serve it in a shot glass with a few 2mm cubes of tomato flesh floating in the Vodka.

Warm Dark Chocolate and Nutmeg Powder

100g Really good quality dark chocolate
One whole Nutmeg freshly grated
About 20g Tapioca Maltodextrin (Texturas Malto)
Tiny Pinch of salt

Break up the chocolate and place it in a metal bowl over a pan of simmering water. As the Chocolate begins to melt add the grated nutmeg and a small pinch of slat. Once the chocolate is melted stir to mix in the nutmeg. Now bit by bit, whilst stirring, add the Tapioca Maltodextrin until the chocolate has the look of breadcrumb consistency. Press the chocolate powder though a sieve to form a fine powder. When your ready to serve the dish heat the powder in a dry frying pan for about a minuit until you just begin to smell the chocolate scent rising from the pan, it won’t melt or alter the texture and will remain a powder which you can spoon onto the plate and as soon as it comes into contact with moisture in your mouth will instantly turn back to smooth melting chocolate on your tongue.

This is the first recipe for a drink I’ve put on the website and also my first go at doing something quite like this. The idea with this drink is that its made up of two distinct but complimentary elements – the drink and the foam. And if your thinking that a foam on a drink is an odd idea just think of beer and the contrast the head on it gives and its importance to the character of the drink. This wee taster has lovely warm flavours but absolutely needs to be served really cold to work properly.

Cinnamon and Ginger Infused Gin –
300ml Gin
30g Chopped peeled Ginger
30g Broken Cassia Bark

This infusion technique is the brain child of Dave Arnold of the French Culinary Institute (and www.cookingissues.com), and it’s a fantastic quick and easy infusion technique which eliminates some of the problems with some other methods of infusion and is so quick and fun to play with that if your anything like me you’ll compulsively want to experiment and thus end up with a ton of various infusions in bottles stashed everywhere after only a day or so of first trying this technique. You can read Dave Arnolds own fantastic description of the technique here.

So to make the infused gin simply place the Ginger and Cassia Bark into an iSi cream whipper and pour the gin in over the spices. Charge the iSi with two 8g cartridges of Nitrous oxide, gently agitate the whipper for thirty seconds then let it sit for thirty seconds before venting the gas. Now strain the now infused Gin.

To Make the Drink –
Mix 550ml Pressed Cox Apple juice with 250 ml of the infused Gin. This should give 800ml of the drink mix. Set half to one side and place the remaining 400ml of drink into the iSi whipper, charge this with 2 cartridges of Carbon dioxide to carbonate the drink. Give the whipper a gentle shake then place it the freezer to chill for about half an hour. When ready to pour the drink turn the whipper upside down and gently use the trigger to pour the drink into glasses. It should be now nice and fizzy.

Lime and Pomegranate Froth –
200ml Simple Sugar Syrup (100g Caster Sugar and 100ml water heated to combine)
150ml Water
100ml Lime juice
60ml Pomegranate Molasses
10ml Lemon Juice
3 Tablespoons Honey
3 Drops Tabasco
½ Teaspoon Tamarind Paste
Pinch Salt
6g Soy Lecithin

Blend the ingredients except the Lecithin together in a tall jug using an immersion blender until well mixed, now blend in the Lecithin. Pour the Mixture into a bowl and cover with cling film, slide the immersion blender under the clingfilm and into the liquid so that it is semi submerged at an angle and froth the mix. A light foam will form on the surface of the liquid, you can now set the mix to one side ready to spoon off the froth when ready.

Putting it together -
Having placed you carbonated Apple and infused gin drink into small glasses simply spoon a little of the Lime and Pomegranate Froth onto the top of each drink and serve.

Whippers and Chargers Available from -

www.Modernits-Chef.com

A plate of fresh lemon and lime pieces or perhaps sipping vinegar might not sound like a tempting sweet treat but they can be if you fancy trying a little flavour tripping with the aptly named miracle fruit.

First off to put your mind at ease its worth saying Miracle fruit is absolutely natural, and its effect of making sour and acidic things taste sweet is harmless, temporary and most importantly fun and interesting.

Ok so I should basically explain what it does and how it works. Essentially whats happening when you eat miracle fruit (whether fresh, freeze dried or as extract in tablet form -see below), is that the ‘Miraculin’ (a glycoprotein molecule) found in the fruit attaches to the taste buds on our tongue, temporarily distorting our sense of taste so that sour and acidic foods are received as tasting sweet. That is our sweet taste buds are for a short period activated by sour products. The effects of Miraculin are pretty short lived and will have completely worn off after an hour maximum.

I think playing with this effect makes for a great and possibly informative food and taste experiment. Or a cool thing to do with guests after a dinner party or just with friends over drinks. So far I’ve resisted the temptation to create an incredibly sour dessert that tastes sweet after miracle fruit (maybe guest could receive and taste it as sour at first then be given miracle fruit to flip it to a sweet dish). A major reason I’ve not done any such dish so far is two-fold. 1- Its risks being over novelty based, and would it actually be good? 2- The acidity which makes many things taste sour is obviously still present in them even if they now taste sweet. And much more than relatively small amounts of acidic products is going to mess with your insides and sting you lips etc (probably not what you want from say a dessert).

The best thing I recon is just to have some fun with this and experiment abit with how it alters how things taste.
Some cool things to try tasting I’d recommend include-
Fresh Lime - Tastes amazing, slightly addictive.
Fresh Lemon - Becomes abit like lemonade or sherbet
Various Vinegars - Because you just have to try them
Blue cheese - This is odd but interesting
Any sour or sharp booze - Booze is always a good plan
Essentially anything sour is worth a go but these are a good place to start.



I found it easiest in the UK to get hold of Miracle Fruit tablets. You just let them dissolve on your tongue and leave it a couple of minuits before you start tasting, using water to cleanse your palate.
You can get hold of the tablets here - http://miracleuk.info/

Have Fun

Here are the dates of some of my up com
ing cooking demos. Come along if you can.

Friday 16th July 2010
London Olympia
The Retirement Show
10.45 – 12.45 – I’ll be doing to demos.
http://www.the-retirement-show.com/london/programme.htm

Monday 30th August 2010
The Bolton Food and drink Festival
2pm - I’ll be on doing a demo
http://www.boltonfoodanddrinkfestival.co.uk/

Wednesday 22nd September 2010
Marple Food and Drink Festival
More details soon.

Saturday 23rd October 2010
North-west Food Lovers Festival at Tatton Park
Demo at 4pm
http://www.ivisitorguide.com/site/festival/home

This is a dessert I came up with from what started as, pretty much, a bit of silliness. One of the lads I work with had jokingly demanded that I make him some mango sorbet because at the time I was making lots of ice cream in my free time (perfecting the flaming ice-creams I’ve written about before). So every once and a while at the start of our shift he’d playfully ask when his sorbet would be turning up, never expecting me to actually bother making it. But last week I decided I was going to finally actually make some to surprise him. The snag is, once I start thinking about a recipe or new idea I get abit obsessive, I can’t just knock up someone else’s recipe. I want to start from scratch myself and make it my own. Even once I’d come up with a sorbet I was really chuffed with I kept playing with ideas to turn it into a whole, unique dish, and at some point the idea of the powders and the sherbet clicked into place.

I think the basic idea came from two things, the idea of ‘seasoning’ your own desert with the powders and the fact that the bloke from work always brings in sweets with him to keep him going during the shift (flying saucers, chewy fruit sweets etc), so I thought having the powders and sherbet to finish of the dish would be a nice way of making it personal to him. Anyway from that basic idea and some experimenting I came up with the two citrus powders (complimenting the mango but also reflecting the small amounts of lime juice and orange liquor used in the sorbet), and the sherbet which flavoured with ginger and cardamom links together the mango and coconut (in the caramel) as flavours found together in Indian cooking, and gives a nice fresh clean taste which works great with the sticky sweetness of mango.

The sherbet was something I had a lot of fun doing and has fascinated me for a while. The fizzing sensation you get on the tongue from sherbet is produced by the carbon dioxide released when the alkaline (bicarbonate of soda) and acid (citric or tartaric, or a mix of the two) react together. We have a pain response to carbon dioxide, but released in small quantities directly on the tongue, as saliva allows the powdered acid and alkaline to combine and react, it creates a pleasant fizzing sensation. Similarly in fizzy drinks it’s the carbon dioxide bubbles, from carbonating the drink, popping on our tongue that gives the fizzing sensation. I’d been quite interested in that stuff for a while and actually have another idea that’s I’ve been working on for a while that plays with the reversal of fizzy and flat in a dish and uses dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide at - 78C and below), anyway I’ll come back to that dish another time when its finished. Right, enough rambling about that, the point is that this sherbet works really well with the sorbet, its sharpness and fizz contrasting with but complimenting the sorbets smooth texture and sweetness. The Ginger and cardamom also add a clean fresh taste along with a touch of heat from the ginger which gives complexity and layers of flavour, tastes, and sensations that come in quick succession when the sherbet is eaten with the sorbet.

Even though it started as just a playful recipe I wasn’t going to spend too much time on I’m glad that in the end I did get absorbed in it and worked on it, as the result is a beautiful, refreshing, smooth, sweet sorbet, that would be perfect served on its own but with the coconut caramel you get added texture and crunch, and the citrus powders add a little sharpness and contrast. Finally the Ginger and cardamom Sherbet, the final touch for the dessert, gives a really nice finish to the dish, with a clean fizzing sensation and flavours that compliment and contrast with the sorbets smooth texture and sweetness. When combined the sorbet, powders, sherbet and caramel are amazing together, and a single bite gives you complex layers of flavour, tastes, and sensations that come in quick succession and make it a really interesting and delicious dessert.

Recipe -

Mango sorbet served on a coconut caramel disk with Orange Powder, Lime powder and Ginger and Cardamom Sherbet. (Vegan)

For the Mango sorbet –
250g sugar syrup – made by heating 175g water and 175g sugar together in a pan stirring until the sugar dissolves and a light syrup is formed – chill before using.
Juice of two limes
2 large or 3 small mangos
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
2 tablespoons cointreau
¼ teaspoon Tabasco
Pinch salt (as a natural flavour enhancer for the mango)

Cut the flesh of the mangos into cubes and place in a tall measuring jug and blend to a smooth puree using a stick blender. Next add to the mango puree the cooled sugar syrup, lime juice, cardamom, cointreau, Tabasco and the pinch of salt, Blend again to bring all the ingredients together. Place the mix in an ice-cream machine and churn until mostly frozen then transfer to a container and place in the freezer to finish freezing. Place the sorbet in the fridge for five minuits before serving to soften a little.

Ginger and cardamom sherbet

1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
5 tablespoon sherbet – Made by mixing a teaspoon citric acid ground to a powder with 40g icing sugar and a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. Mix well to make sure the ingredients are distributed evenly through the sherbet.

Simply mix the ground ginger, ground cardamom and sherbet together, making sure they a completely mixed though.

Orange powder –
4 oranges
Peel off very thin strips of zest from the oranges using a small sharp knife, making sure not to get any of the bitter white pith on the strips of zest.
Blanch the zest and in boiling water for about 15 seconds then refresh in iced water. Repeat a couple of times to remove the bitterness from the zest. Pat the strips dry on a clean towel. Place the zest on a baking sheet and place in an oven at 100C for about an hour until dried. Once cooled grind the dried zest to a powder in a pestle and mortar. Add a pinch of icing sugar to the powder to sweeten a little if desired.

Lime powder – repeat the same process as with the orange powder but with 8 limes

Coconut caramel disks –
100g Sugar
10g Desiccated coconut
Gently heat the sugar in a heavy based pan until it melts together and continue gently heating until it reaches a light golden colour. Stir in the coconut and then immediately pour the caramel out into chef rings, just enough in each to form a thin disk. Allow to cool and harden before carefully removing from the rings.


Variation – Another way of serving this that I experimented with and works really well is to grind up the set coconut caramel to a powder and serve the sorbet with that along with the three other powders.

I was utterly enamored with Japan; it was a wonderfully bizarre culture shock for me, surreal and exciting. I loved how friendly and helpful everyone was, even if they didn’t know, due to my rubbish attempts at Japanese, what they we’re trying to help us with. Perhaps not the best example but illustrative of this, was when my girlfriend and me went into a building in the center of Tokyo that we thought was a shopping centre. We spent a few minuits going up and down in the lift, surrounded by flustered looking businessmen, trying to work out where the shops were and looking touristy and confused, until one bloke took pity on us. The guy, smartly dressed in his work suit, looked awkward while he watched us trying to work out where we were. He seemed to be briefly wrestling with a dilemma before he spoke to us in broken English, nervously explaining that the building we had wandered into was filled entirely and solely with porn theatres. ‘Is all … video of women … porn … all building’ he informed us, with much head nodding and a bashful smile. It might sound weird but both me and be girlfriend found it an incredibly endearing moment (we may have laughed abit about it though), but the poor bloke was clearly there on his lunch break to ‘relax’ and was embarrassed (especially due to the unexpected presence of a western girl), but was so compelled to help us out, because we were clearly lost, that he just about overcame his anguish to assist us. It was just one of many occasions when people when out of there way, in one way or another, to help us out.