Brownie and Crispy Chicken Skin

While contemplating what to pick for my final project for a course on the science of food that I'm doing, I narrowed it down to 2 bites- macarons and brownies. Macarons, regardless of how much I love them, are far too sweet, and so I'm left wondering, how can the inherent chewy character be retained without being cloying sweet? Brownies, though had a lot of parameters to play with, would have given an extremely subjective viewpoint on the ideal texture;

I started with a 'desi' chicken- a brownish bird with black patches with slightly darker meat. The flavor it had to offer was significantly better than the generic chicken I get everywhere, except the skin turned ridiculously rubbery on cooking. Ridiculous rubbery as in you could smack it for days  and you'd have no success (exaggeration). I still cant get over the wings that I cooked in the skin; the skin was so tough that the meat was 'trapped' in it. On a side note, I gutted the chicken too. Great excuse to learn some biology I say.

Harnessing flavors off the desi chicken, I made a nice rich stock, rested it overnight and reduced it the next day for the caramel. I've never completely understood resting things overnight, except that they enunciate the flavors and make them more integral.

I decided to stick to the apparently generic chicken for the crispy skin. Some of it was baked till crisp, a part was fried in rendered chicken fat and the remainder was poached in some milk and yogurt till soft and then fried off. The baked skin gave the lightest texture of the three, although the poached and fried skin had a distinct flavor from its poaching liquid. I mixed it up with some dehydrated brownie bits and made a little croustilliant out of it.

The remaining brownie was added to the ganache. Now its a nice trick to add some bakes and blit them in if you're running low on chocolate- they provide a lot of structure for the ganache and its a nice change of texture too occasionally.

It certainly isn't the perfect sort of brownie that I had in mind when I started this because it isn't really a brownie anymore; its a chocolate bar. The hiatus from my bonbons is over (I hear summer saying goodbye in the distance mostly).

A bar of Chicken Skin (baked, fried in its own fat and poached and fried) with dried brownie bits, cocoa nibs, Brownie Inaya Ganache and a salted caramel of reduced chicken stock

Ember Roasted Potatoes and Funfetti Crumbles

So after I finished doing up the pumpkin in my barbecue last week, I thought, 'why not throw in some potatoes in the embers?' And a couple of cheekus? Some ginger even?

Needless to say, the potatoes tasted amazing- after spending the entire night in the embers, the skin had gotten on a beautiful layer of the smokiness. Would be a shame to not harness it.

A while back, I did a dessert with roasted potato skin ice cream with fermented plum jam and Balinese chocolate mousse. I thought it might be a good chance to ameliorate that beautiful ice cream and so I infused the skins in some milk for a day, followed by sedimentation of the heavier coal particles that would otherwise hamper the texture if the ice cream.

That being done, the opportunity to conjuct it with another idea of using raw and roasted chocolate and the same dish to juxtapose differences seemed right (the actual product wasn't quite there and so I will dedicate another dish to it in a future post).

I used to do a lot of bonbons back in the day (till summer came and it shot up to 45 degrees, then you don't even need a melting tank) and I wanted this chocolate dish to instill a sense of being fun than technical and exploratory, as I usually do; thus came about the idea of a 'funfetti crumble' as I like to call it. It's got nothing to do with funfetti, but everything to do with fun (I guess). Composed of crispy donut bits, cocoa nib cookies, raw cookie dough, house made grated raw cocoa paste, and potato peel powder. It's sort of all that I dream to eat with ice cream.  Initially, some dried brownie pieces were going to be in there, but looking at the fudgy moistness of them, I decided to turn it into a parfait instead- a parfait soft enough to have a serving temperature of -18degrees C. I put some ganache on the place for some dense creaminess. And just for a tinge of acid (even though the raw chocolate adds to it in a form of astringency) I dusted some freeze dried yuzu pieces with passion fruit powder, just to refresh the palate in case the entire dessert got to heavy at some point.

The joys of chocolate and tons of crispy bits.

Ember roasted potato skin Ice cream, Tanzanie Ganache, Brownie Parfait, Lyo Yuzu coated in Passionfruit Powder, Funfetti Crumble (crispy donuts, cocoa nib cookies, frozen cookie dough, potato peel powder, grated raw chocolate paste)