MxMo LXXII: Drink Your Vegetables

This month's Mixology Monday is hosted by Rowen at the Fogged in Lounge, one of the blogs I always enjoy visiting during my daily blog pilgrimages. The theme for this month is Drink Your Vegetables.

I guess I knew this theme was coming. I actually came up with this drink while looking at the pan I baked some sweet potatoes on for Easter dinner. Just in time to try it and have it ready to use for this month's MxMo. So here it is...

I don't have a name for it (I'm open to suggestions) and it's not very practical to make unless you happen to eat a lot of sweet potatoes but I enjoyed it.

Wash a couple (or more) of large sweet potatoes. Poke them all over with a fork, digging in deep. Bake them on a pan in a 400 F oven for about an hour or until you see a syrup cooking out of the holes you poked and collecting on the pan.

Deglaze the pan with just enough water to dissolve the sticky sweet potato syrup. Stir it around and get it all to dissolve, the extra-cooked stuff on the pan adds a nice caramelized taste and a pleasant background bitter note. Roll the baked potatoes around in the liquid to collect the syrup on the skins as well. Fine strain the liquid and add sugar at 1:1.

Express the oils from a piece of orange zest into a glass, add a drop of toasted walnut oil. Wipe around inside the glass with a stirrer or something.

2 oz bourbon
2 tsp sweet potato syrup
1 dash Angostura bitters

Stir with ice, strain into the above prepared glass.

I originally strained it over a big piece of ice in a rocks glass since it's just an Old Fashioned with a sugar substitution but the big ice cubes are the one thing I forgot to prepare for this post... so I drank this one sans ice and still enjoyed it.

MxMo LXVI: Bein' Green

                                                      

This month's Mixology Monday theme, brought to us by the Wordsmithing Pantagruel blog, is the color green. Left open to interpretation, as long as "green" is featured, it sounded too fun to pass up.

Patong is reputed to be the party beach destination in, already famous for it's beaches, Phuket, Thailand. So when I decided to go with a Thai flavor theme for my drink, it seemed an ideal namesake. I'm an amatuer at creating drinks but I was pretty happy with the result. The W&N speaks loudly in this one but I like it so it worked for me. I had this image in my head of some guy in a small Thai village mixing this up with his homemade hooch and I imagined that hooch wouldn't be at all subtle so I wanted something that demanded attention without hiding everything else. I think I got that. The problem with being pretty new at this creating thing is confidence. I always wish I had a critique from someone with more experience before going public. But I didn't, so here it is...

Patong Swizzle
1 1/2 oz Wray & Nephew overproof rum
3/4 oz fresh lime juice
3/4 oz Thai syrup*
1/2 oz unsweetened pineapple juice

Swizzle with crushed ice, top with more crushed ice.

*Thai syrup
1 cup coconut water
2 stalks lemon grass, trimmed, sliced and crushed
4 kaffir lime leaves
1/2" piece fresh ginger, chopped
1 slice from a hot green chile
4 fresh mint leaves
4 fresh basil leaves
6 fresh cilantro leaves
sugar

Heat coconut water, lemongrass, lime leaves, ginger and chile at a slow simmer for ~5 minutes. Remove from heat, cover and infuse for ~20 minutes. Blanch herbs in boiling water for ~10 seconds, shock in ice water and add to coconut water. Blitz everything with a stick blender and strain (I strained through a medium strainer, squeezed the liquid from the pulp through then strained it through a fine strainer). Measure the liquid and dissolve in an equal amount of sugar.

TGRWT #22: Raisin

After a long vacation, TGRWT is back! The theme is raisin and there's a new twist to this round... no second ingredient given. Instead, we've been encouraged to use the foodpairing site to find our own pairings. I went with bacon, apple and walnut for the pairing ingredients and, since my usual inclination is to think sweet, with raisin making that an even easier choice, I decided to go savory with the dish.



fried bacon
60 g egg whites
340 g cold soda water
162 g flour
18 g crisp coat (you can omit this and use 180 g flour)

Cook bacon strips until lightly browned but not crisp, drain on paper towels. Beat the egg whites to soft peaks. Combine the flour and crisp coat. Whisk the water into the flour mixture and fold in the egg whites. Very lightly coat the bacon strips in the batter and fry in 375 F oil until golden brown and crisp. Drain on a rack.

pickled raisins
150 g raisins
115 g cider vinegar
115 g water
50 g sugar
5 g salt
1/2 jalapeno, minced (I used a ripe red jalapeno for color)
1 clove garlic, minced
2 g mustard seeds
small sprig fresh thyme

Heat everything to boiling, simmer briefly, cool and store in the fridge for at least 8 hours.

toasted walnuts
Chop walnuts, lightly toast them in an oven or hot pan, toss with roasted walnut oil and smoked salt.

apple butter
apples
brown sugar
cinnamon
nutmeg
cloves
salt
vanilla extract

I didn't bother with measurements for this one, just kinda winged it and adjusted to taste about halfway through the cooking. I put everything except the vanilla in a slow cooker, cooked it on high for a couple hours stirring now and then, set the cooker to low and let it go with occasional stirring for about 10 hours. I then pureed it with a stick blender, bumped the cooker back to high and cooked it with the lid off for a while to thicken. I added the vanilla at the end and put it in the fridge to chill.

Ultra-Sperse 3
fresh thyme
cracked black pepper

Whisk Ultra-Sperse into some of the apple butter. (I do this to keep any liquid from seperating out on the plate and to help it hold it's shape better, it's completely optional. I'd give a measurement but I didn't measure, I just looked for the texture I wanted.) Put a strip or two of the warm bacon on a plate. Garnish with drained pickled raisins with some of the garlic and jalapeno, toasted walnuts, a few dollops of apple butter, fresh thyme leaves and cracked black pepper.

Verdict: In my opinion, a tasty and well balanced dish. Perfect? Of course not. But I was very happy with the result for a first-round untested idea. It was no great stretch to imagine raisin, bacon, walnut and apple tasting good together so I tried to put a little imagination into how I used those ingredients to maintain some of the spirit of TGRWTs past where the pairings were not always easy to picture working well together.

Would I cook it again? Absolutely. A future rendition would probably include a little more heat, the jalapeno I used was a bit on the tame side, and more thought put into the plating but I was pretty happy with the result overall.

Caribbean Corpse Reviver

Good stuff! Found this one on one of my daily pilgrimages to the temple of cocktail exploration, the Cocktail Virgin Slut blog. Click here to learn more about it and check out the recipe.

Eeyore's Requiem

Toby Maloney's ode to the donkey with the blues is one of my favorite drinks. Pleasantly bitter, just like it's namesake, with Cynar tying in the thistles he loves (as long as they're not broken). The recipe I had when I first tried this called for 2 oz Campari and no gin but all of the more recent versions I've seen are as below. It's tasty either way in my opinion.



1 1/2 oz Campari
1 oz Martini Bianco vermouth (the recipe calls for Dolin but that's not available where I live)
1/2 oz Tanqueray gin
1/2 oz Cynar
1/4 oz Fernet Branca
15 drops orange bitters (I used Twisted & Bitter)

Stir with ice, strain into glass, twist 3 pieces orange peel over glass.

Nelson's Blood

The recipe...

2 oz dark rum
1/4 lemon, squeezed
1/4 orange, squeezed
1/4 oz lemon juice
1/4 oz blood orange juice
1/4 oz brandy
1/4 oz falernum
2 oz ginger beer


What I did...

2 oz Doorly's XO rum
3/4 oz blood orange juice
1/2 oz lemon juice
1/4 oz E&J VSOP brandy
1/4 oz falernum
2 oz ginger beer

So basically I just went with all blood orange, which isn't specified in the recipe, because that made more sense to me than squeezing a little juice out of two oranges. Correct or not, it was tasty.

MxMo LXIV February 20, 2012: Tiki!

This is my first time participating in an MxMo event but I've followed many of them and I hope it won't be my last time joining in. This month's round is brought to us by Doug Winship at the Pegu blog and the theme is tiki.

"Cracking Jenny's teacup" is said to be pirate-speak for a night spent in a house of ill repute. True or not, it's easy to imagine it being tossed about on the boat after a night ashore... so I went with it. This is my first serious attempt at creating a drink so I hope I haven't angered the tiki gods or (perhaps worse) the tiki faithful. I suspect the tea aspect may be taking liberties so toss me in the volcano bowl to appease them if necessary.



Crackin' Jenny's Teacup

1 oz Kraken Black Spiced rum
1 oz Appleton Estate Extra rum
3/4 oz lime juice
3/4 oz tea syrup (1:1 strong black tea and sugar)
1/2 oz pineapple juice
1/4 oz ginger syrup (1:1 syrup infused with fresh ginger)
1 dash roasted pineapple bitters
1 dash chai tea bitters

Shake with ice, strain over crushed ice.

The roasted pineapple and chai tea bitters are from the Canadian company House Made. A cottage business and I don't know if they're interested in growing larger but the bitters are really nice. I used them mainly to reinforce the pineapple and tea in the drink and to enhance the spice notes from the Kraken. Also, as is evident in the picture, I have a lot to learn about garnish but I had fun and enjoyed the result.

Anyway, if you try it, or even if you don't, let me know what you think. I have a lot to learn about creating drinks and feedback from those who know what they're doing is one of the best tools I can think of for helping with that.

Wake up time.

I admit it, I'm a horrible blogger. I put this blog to bed a long time ago due to lack of content and updates. I'll go ahead and state for the record that that's probably not going to change much. The posts will probably be few and far between and very unlikely to be seen by anybody. That's okay, I can live with that.

The truth is, sometimes I need this as a vehicle for other things I want to do. Participating in online food and, hopefully for the future, drink challenges is something I enjoy. Those challenges usually require some way of providing access to what you do to those who are participating and this blog is a way of providing that access. There will almost certainly be posts not related to online challenges when there's something I want to share but they are not likely to appear often enough to sustain any sort of interest.

In case this sounds like I'm saying "get off my lawn", I'm not. I enjoy the world of sharing made possible by the internet. I just don't want to give any false impressions that this is ever going to be a fountain of entertainment. That said, glad you stopped by...

A new interest...

Cocktails have never really been my thing. Maybe the occasional gin and tonic or bourbon and coke on a night out but that's about it. I don't drink much to begin with and when I do it's usually beer. For some reason I began browsing the cocktail-related discussions on eGullet and something occured to me. Cocktails are an excellent lesson in balancing tastes and combining flavors because there's nothing to hide behind. There are also some cool techniques being used by modern bartenders (mixologists if you insist) that, once I learned about, I had to try. It appeals to my need-to-learn. That little corner of curiosity that keeps me in the kitchen half the night when I should be sleeping after hearing about some cool new cooking technique. This particular cocktail involves a couple of techniques (infusion and fat washing) to produce Don Lee's twist on the classic rum and coke... The Cinema Highball.


butter and popcorn infused rum - coca cola

Royal Foodie Joust: Fish, Nutmeg and Coconut

Another really cool Royal Foodie Joust hosted by the Leftover Queen blog. I missed a couple rounds, the deadlines came and went faster than I realized, but I managed to get this one done a whole day early. I didn't shoot for unique (I think Rob already cornered that category with his really cool entry) or particularly modern this time. It's dedicated to the cuisine of Jamaica and I stayed pretty much traditional with the ingredients and cooking methods with only a few minor changes to allow for the challenge ingredients and what is available locally this time of year.


escovitch cod - coconut milk rundown - green banana porridge - pickled red onion - nutmeg

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.

TGRWT #11: Banana and Cloves

khymos.org is doing another installment in the "they go really well together" series. Bananas and cloves. I've been following the series with great interest for a long time but I've never participated. This time I decided to join the fun so this is my entry...


pork - banana - clove
Pork tenderloin brined in water, salt, sucanat, cloves and peppercorns then pan fried. Banana slices pickled in vinegar, sucanat, cloves and salt then breaded and deep fried. The pork and banana are skewered on a vanilla bean and plated with a clove gastrique.
I liked the banana and clove as a flavor pairing and thought it worked really well with the pork. The dish needs a little refining but I was happy with the result. Thanks for the inspiration Martin!

Campfire

Toasted marshmallow ice cream. That was the idea. Simple enough. Brown some marshmallows in the oven or over a burner and off you go, right? Well, it works that way. But it's not right. There's something missing.
The campfire.
That's what's missing.
A marshmallow toasted over the stove is good but it's just not the same. The smoky smell. The ash floating around. It has it's influence on the marshmallow eating experience.
So a campfire was needed but not practical (at least not in my kitchen, if you have a fireplace in yours then you're set). How about a mini campfire? This was the solution I went with. I smoked the marshmallows for a bit in a stovetop smoker then toasted them over a small fire built in an old pan. Now they taste like a toasted marshmallow should taste. From there it was easy. I plated it in a s'mores theme to stay with the campfire idea by adding a graham cracker puree, a chocolate-graham crumb and a cube of aerated smoked chocolate.

Toasted Marshmallow Ice Cream

300 g toasted smoked marshmallows (I cold smoke the marshmallows then toast them over a wood fire)
500 ml whole milk
500 ml heavy cream
5 ml vanilla extract
pinch salt

Heat the milk and salt. Add the marshmallows and stir until dissolved. Add the vanilla, pour through a sieve into the cold cream, stir and chill in an ice bath. Age overnight in the fridge and freeze in whatever you usually use to make your ice cream.

Savory Cake

My first post on my first-ever blog and I don't have a clue how to go about doing this so I'm just going to make it up as I go.
The problem: someone wanted to do a mousse roulade. A simple task. Make a biscuit roulade, fill it with mousse and roll it up.
Problem solved.
Problem not solved... they want a mushroom mousse rolled in a not-sweet "cake".
Ok, leave out the sugar. Oh, you don't want a rubber cake.
Hmmm.
Well, after some thinking, some guessing (of both the educated and not-so-educated variety) and a late night experimenting I came up with a solution. I'm not claiming it's the only solution or even the best solution but a solution nonetheless. The result is a completely neutral "cake" that is not at all sweet and can be flavored as required for the task at hand. Fold in some chopped herbs, some minced sun dried tomato, lemon zest, minced olives, vegetable powder, whatever makes you happy. The result is flexible, rolls easily without cracking and is not rubbery. Is it as tender as the sweet versions? Maybe not... but it's pretty close.
I plan to continue to refine this recipe in the future and welcome anyone else interested to join in or make suggestions but, for now, I'm pretty happy with it.


Savory Biscuit Roulade

180g egg white
120g egg yolk
40g flour
60ml warm water
30g melted butter (brown butter would probably be nice, didn't try it)
7g salt
14 g sugar
1.4g xanthan
2.5g methylcellulose, SGA-7C

Mix water, salt, butter and flour to just smooth. Whip whites to frothy, add combined sugar, methylcellulose and xanthan and whip on high to almost stiff. Beat egg yolks to pale. Mix in flour paste. Mix in part of the whites. Fold in remaining whites and spread on lined, sprayed and floured pan. Bake 220c (425f) 'til done (just under 15 minutes in my oven on an 18"x12" pan). Cool in pan covered with damp cloth. Trim edges and have fun.

Now to my theories, which I confess were based on my own ideas and experiences and have no scientific value whatsoever...

Theory 1: methylcellulose would help stabilize the meringue during whipping and even more so as it heated until the structure set enough to support itself.

Theory 2: xanthan is commonly used in gluten-free baking to help with texture which led me to believe that it may help with texture here, which would take a hit from the loss of sugar, as well.

I have nothing scientific to offer as to whether either theory is correct, all I can point to is the results.