TGRWT #20: Pumpkin and Cooked Chicken

pumpkin noodles - fried chicken - walnut sauce - parsley puree - olive oil

This months TGRWT (they go really well together), hosted by Docsconz, is pumpkin and cooked chicken. Cooked chicken, in this case, refers to chicken cooked any way other than roasting. I don't have actual recipes to share for this round because I was running late on getting my entry together and was pretty much winging it. The noodles are roasted pumpkin puree, water, a little sugar, salt, pepper, cayenne and agar. The chicken was simply cut into cubes, brined, very lightly breaded and pan fried in a little olive oil. The walnut sauce is chicken stock, toasted walnuts, toasted bread, roasted garlic and pecorino romano that was pureed, sieved, seasoned with walnut oil, salt and pepper then thickened with ultratex. Parsley puree and olive oil are pretty much self-explanatory. The goal was to get all of the components of a traditional pasta noci on the plate with the pumpkin and chicken. I enjoyed the combination and may even take the time to refine this dish a bit for future use. Mainly by making actual pumpkin pasta rather than the agar noodles. They were really pure in flavor which was appropriate for the purposes of this challenge, keeping the key ingredients forward, but I missed the texture of a traditional noodle.

Wild Blueberry

I've picked over 50 gallons of wild blueberries this year... so I suppose it's about time I did something with some of them.

TGRWT #14: Malt and Soy

Malt and Soy was a fun challenge. No weirdness to get the head around, no overpowering element to try to get the other ingredient to stand up to. They really do "go really well together".


So my entry is inspired by Rob's admonition at the beginning that "drinking a beer while eating Chinese take-out doesn't count!". What I did was melt some soy marshmallow with a little butter. Then I stirred in some puffed barley (made by overcooking barley, drying it and flashing it in a fryer) and toasted sesame seeds and rolled it into a thin sheet. I brushed the sheet with a malt gastrique made by cooking malt syrup, malt vinegar, sugar and lemon juice to a thick syrup. I cooked a piece of salmon sous vide at 104 f. for 20 minutes, cut a block and rolled it in the gastrique-brushed barley sheet and sliced it into cubes. A nice malty beer finished the dish.

The Johnny Iuzzini Chocolate Doughnut

This recipe was a lesson in missing the obvious. I play with sodium alginate and methocel fairly often, I have a basic working knowledge of what they do. Why the heck did this idea never occur to me? I guess that's part of why he's a top-level pastry chef and I'm some guy blogging about doing one of his recipes.
It's actually a pretty simple process. You heat water and cream, sheer in sugar and methocel, emulsify it into chocolate then mix in a sodium alginate solution and a bit of salt. This forms a fairly thick ganache that you then pipe into mini savarin molds and freeze. The fozen ganache rings are given a soak in a calcium lactate bath, air dried, dipped in an egg and flour batter and breaded with panko and salt. They're given a few hours on a rack in the fridge to set the breading then deep fried.
What you get at the end is almost exactly what you see in the picture that accompanies the recipe. Why almost? Because in the picture they look like actual mini doughnuts. What you end up with by following the instructions as written is mini half doughnuts. Nice and rounded where the ganache was in the mold, flat on the back. So, in the interest of obtaining the nice symetrical doughnuts in Chef Iuzzini's picture, I decided to bond two of the half doughnuts to form one nicely shaped doughnut. Much better, worth the extra effort. I simply took two doughnuts, heated the flat surface of one with a torch, pressed them together and tossed them back in the freezer for a bit. It didn't take long to do all of them and I've already thought of an easier way to do it that I'll try next time. I'm wondering if this was a step that was unintentionally omitted from the recipe because the ganache made exactly double the number the recipe says it will. I did a half batch and got 60 of the half doughnuts, the full recipe is supposed to make 60 total.
Anyway, here they are.

Breaded and ready to fry:


Fried, crispy on the outside...


...and creamy on the inside...


...just as Chef Iuzzini promised. He delivered with these. They're fun and tasty and they made me smile. Finally, just for a little more fun, I decided to plate them. So here they are with coffee ice cream, toasted cinnamon caramel and chocolate mousse powder.