Tag: molecular gastronomy

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cooking

Potato Dinner

After a year long hiatus from doing my home tasting menus, I got the urge to a do a new one around the humble potato which led to last weekend Potato dinner. We have a total of 7 diners which did slow down the plating, but having done this several times I have gotten much better at managing my time and we were done with the 7 savory courses in just under 3.5 hours despite this meal including some fairly complex dishes as well as one multi-item course.

Hot Potato Cold Potato
Hot Potato Cold Potato is a classic Alinea appetizer that has a hot ball of butter poached potato that is dropped into a cold potato soup made with truffle juice.… Read the rest

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cooking photos

Egg Dinner

One of the dinner themes I have been toying with for a while is “Eggs” and I finally got to try it out over the weekend. It ended up being a 13 course meal over 6 hours where everything included eggs, looked like eggs or looked like something that should have eggs in it. It was fairly successful with only a few minor hiccups along the way despite several of the dishes being first time attempts. The spectacular photos were all taken by Nithya using her DIY lightbox setup. The following is a description of the dishes with any tips and tricks I discovered along the way.… Read the rest

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cooking

A guide to Frozen Reverse Spherification

Mango

After my recent Spheres and Circles dinner adventure I decide to put together a quick post on how to get started with frozen reverse spherification.

Process
The basic recipe for reverse spherification is really quite simple. First create your flavourful liquid that you want to spherify and add 2% calcium lactate to the mix. Next freeze the liquid in a mould to create frozen spheres. While the spheres are freezing, prepare a 0.5% solution of sodium alginate dissolved in distilled water (5g sodium alginate in 1000g of water). Let the alginate sit for at least 2 hours to fully hydrate and also lose any bubbles that were created while mixing.… Read the rest

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cooking

Spheres and Circles

This was an interesting meal inspired by watching the Gaggan Anand episode of Chefs Table Season 2. Specifically we were watching a birds nest like dish which Nithya said might be a pani puri as well as his spherified yougurt amuse bouche. This idea of spherified Indian food combined with my fish in a barrel dish meant that this meal would have to be all about Spheres and Circles.

Spherified Mojito
Spherified Mojito
The first course was a straightforward mojito sphere encapsulating a mint leaf. Instead of using Xantham gum based preparations I decided to go the frozen reverse spherification route as described in this video.… Read the rest