Okay is okay- churros and friends

I apologise. The title is misleading. It's just that friends sounded better than friend.
So my childhood friend is in town and wanted something fruity and... Cool I guess.
With not much time (literally half a day) I pulled out my secret stash of inspiration. These 'a la minute' (or should I say a la jour) are usually not complex to understand. Stemming from a insufficiently provocative idea, these light and fluffy churros were an excellent vehicle to test out some new things- commercial yogurt and a hot Phirni espuma.
A little bit of yuzu in the pomegranate gel did wonders in elevating the flavour. I simply froze some pomegranate seeds for an instant granita. Such a simple thing I've ignored all my life!
I guess at times, simpler things are okay by me.

Grapefruit yogurt sherbet, hot phirni espuma, pomegranate yuzu gel, frozen pomegranate seeds, churros

Bye Summer/ Why my socks are strange

I'm finally back from the hiatus? Not sure if a couple of weeks classifies as one; creativity is a demanding process at the least. The past few weeks have been somewhat transitional. Abstaining from creating this period has given me a sense of clarity- what my food is about and where it's headed next. I've almost always been around fancy, fine, food. But I'm going to be a hypocrite and say that this isn't it for me. The from where I stand, it's not sustainable. But most importantly, the result never seems to be worth the time. What is to a dessert with a jillion components? It never posed itself as dramatic- like a simple lemon tart perhaps. Minimalizing juxtaposition mars the beauty of the dish.  I guess it's safe to say that even though we search for balance in a dish, components usually need to present themselves in extremes and be slightly off. An apple tart slightly acidic, fudges a tad too sweet an chewy are in 'balance' by not being completely neutralising. And that, is a facet I'm keen on exploring. Summer's almost over in my country (technically Autumn has started but leaves don't fall at 32 degrees) and I wanted that one last zing of the season. Lemon sorbets. It's been stuck in my mind for months, however, I was keen on waiting for galgals (a really nice big Indian citrus) to be back in season. Just because I'm trying to be a minimalist doesn't mean that passes as a complete dessert for me. I added some blood limes (!!!) to the sorbet after churning. Assuming that the freezing point was higher than the sorbet itself, the blood like vessels would freeze, giving bits of ice and flavour bursts to the sorbet.  Cream. First thing in my mind and my only stop. I made a little panna cotta set with cocoa butter and flavoured with a little yuzu juice. I was keen on skipping the gelatin just for trials sake. I didn't want white chocolate, mostly because I've been trying to avoid it in my dishes. However, chocolate has become such an indispensable part of the pastry kitchen, I gave up to cocoa butter. I genuinely wanted to stop at a cream, but stepped a bit further with some passion fruit and barley water. I didn't think barley water would really work as it is texturally. And so came about the 'faux passion fruit'. I'm still as amazed when I see chia seeds 'set' liquids. Them along with some freeze dried passionfruit et voila, une fruit de la passion!  I also promised on my facebook to address why I wear different socks on each foot. It started out of laziness when I was young- I could never find the other half of the pair of socks! Time constraints made me give up- I would eventually struggle looking for socks. A couple of years down the line- I entered the food industry, and with white coats and black pants days, everything seemed far too monochrome and organized. I guess theres a little whim in things being slightly off- somehow, wearing socks that were bright and different throughout the day made me happy. Anytime I wanted respite from a tone, I could just look down...

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)

The 5- Hour Barbecued Pumpkin

My backyard has these gorgeous climbers with pumpkin blossoms and no pumpkins. Digging deep into my reservoir of originality, I decided to serve them with a roasted pumpkin.
In all honesty though, pumpkin flowers when done up as fritters loose a lot of flavour.

I commenced by placing an entire pumpkin on my barbecue.
some 4/5/6 hours (the fire went out for an hour I think, also I have no idea when I put it on) later:

The gateway to the most delicious seeds you've eaten is the flesh of the pumpkin itself.

The skin looked near burnt but tasted like the sweetest pumpkin I had ever eaten- the darker the better. The pumpkins in India are grown for a tart sabji, so sweetness isn't exactly its prominent flavour profile.

Nevertheless, knowing how well fragrant citrus goes well with pumpkins, I had to give the combination a go. I somehow found some delicious, juicy grapefruit in my city and they're literally the best citrus I've seen around here. Seizing the opportunity to turn it into a sorbet, I really wanted to add some crispy caramel to this dish- the sorbet required it and so did the pumpkin. It was either this or honey. Guess what made it to the dish..
Initially the idea was to simply dry tapioca starch with some sugar and fry it up to get this nice, light cracker. I instead ended up with burnt sugar, floating around in smoking oil. The more you know...

Because they tasted great as they were, I simply let the sugar caramelize in the oven a bit longer. Inspired by my tapioca caramel, I decided to crisp up some yogurt the same way- and it worked wonderfully. Living in such a humid place, both the crisps stored extremely well too. For the first time- no weepy caramel, no sticky hands and zero frustration in dealing with an oven that can't seem to go below 160.
To end this post abruptly, a poached egg yolk for fat.

5 Hour Barbecued Pumpkin with its seeds. Pumpkin Blossom from the backyard, Poached Egg Yolk, Grapefruit Sorbet, Caramel Tapioca Sheet, Crispy Yogurt

Bitterness

Grapefruit. The only bitter fruit known to mankind.
I'm joking, of course.
Bitterness is something that people try to avoid as much as possible. Calibrated correctly, it can be addictive- with the right amount of sugar, salt and acid.
Nevertheless, a very, very, delicious citrus. I remember trying pamplemousse a few years ago, alas it was too bitter for my then young palate. We're talking about 'what's coffee?'era.
Facing  it again after so many years, I still somewhat feared the bitter. But bitter is delicious. And so is fruit that is hard to get a hold of.

I knew I wanted an aerated curd from the get go- I look for every opportunity to chuck a fat based element into the siphon as those are literally the only textures I can make work so far. But what is that supposed to go with.....

Well, I may have cheated a bit and have stolen an element from another dessert I was working on. Which also meant scrapping it. Now I have two containers of black/ purple rice pudding and no mangosteen ice to go with. Oh well, I guess I will leave that for another day.

Hazelnut cookies were purely intuitive, the marshmallows- not so much. I had to know what marshmallow cookies tastes like. Great, apparently.
And finally to diverge from giving acidity (not that there wasn't any before) through fruit, I decided to use yogurt water- something which I have leftovers of more or less everyday.


A bitter caramel is on there strictly for complementary purposes.  

Aerated grapefruit basil curd, hazelnut and marshmallow cookies, mangosteen gondhoraj ice, frozen and fresh grapefruit segments, wood sorrel, caramel, yogurt whey jelly.

Cake Inverse

Given my profound interest in philosophy, I cannot help myself but attach meaning to a dish. Once every few months however...
The brain ticks, connecting seemingly trivial incidents disguised as a neoteric idea.

My favourite 'modernistic' piece of equipment is by far the siphon. I should not touch topics pertaining to the disasters I have had with it, or the first time I fell sick after using it.
It offers a very interesting texture- incorporating lightness without actually 'whipping' the base, per se. Sure, it does not produce a very stable foam, but the few moments after being expelled from the nozzle make up for it lack of shelf life. Unless, you freeze it that is.
In that case, you have landed yourself the technique to incorporate more fat in your base than a usual ice cream could deal with and aerate what would not be great to churn. (exceptions: soft serve)

Always warning my friends to steer clear of raw eggs, my mind ran along the idea of a cake batter. I had been thinking of using eggs in a more explicit manner, but when have they been tastier than in a cake? (more exceptions: scrambled eggs.) With a piece of a simple chocolate cake in hand, months of incubated ideas began to amalgamate- I would freeze a cake batter. Made of  baked cake. An inverse cake.

My short lived creative streak decided to travel an extra mile this time. Trying to introduce umami or salty in new ways, I was hell bent on adding crispy chicken skin. All was great, except I never had actually butchered a chicken.

After spending (just) 20 minutes simply taking the skin off in one piece, I put it in the oven with a tray on. Although next time, I try puffing it up. An hour and a half and some salt later, I removed the crispy chicken skin from my sight for obvious reasons.

Certain 'universal' flavours like caramel, vanilla and chocolate ease the adaption of some of the rather far out elements in desserts. I had my frozen chocolate cake, so I further added a vanilla custard and the chicken skin to a crispy caramel.

Acidity is just as important in a dessert as salt. My personal preference dictates addition of some aroma, in a manner that engages olfaction noticeably- enough to juxtapose a general taste perception which involves the tastebuds, and one which relies heavily on olfactory receptors. For this reason, I added the zests of four different citrus- gondhoraj, Tahitian lime, citron and blood lime. I had to be careful of the fat levels on this considering my frozen cake was heavy, so I used guar gum to thicken the milk for the ice cream to get it to the desired texture. To reinforce the zests in the ice, I made a yuzu syrup to go with it.

frozen cake batter, Ice cream of many zests, Vanilla custard, Yuzu Syrup Crispy chicken skin, Crispy chicken skin caramel