Chocolate Mousse

To those of you with a vague understanding of scientific principles, this will probably make sense.

For those in the opposite camp (and I put myself firmly in this bracket), this will probably seem a little bit like sorcery.

If this technique had been demonstrated by an enterprising 16th century chef, he would probably have been burnt at the stake for dancing with the devil and engaging in nefarious culinary exploits.

This is a chocolate mousse made entirely out of chocolate and water.



There is nothing else involved. No binders, no emulsifiers, no eggs, no eye of newt or bollock of bat. Nada. Zilch.

Chocolate and water.

It is one of the few ‘experiments’ I’ve attempted from Hervé This’ book Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavour (Columbia University Press, 2006).

Despite references to ‘metabotropic glutamate’ and ‘sugar chains forming molecular skeletons to carry carboxylic acid’ much of the book remains within the grasp of the average home cook and offers some valuable material to those looking to improve their cooking, or at least seeking a more thorough understanding of what goes on when frying pan meets egg.

When I read about the possibility of making a chocolate mousse within seconds and only two elements, I had to try it.

The lack of any extra ingredients in this chocolate mousse enables the purity of the chocolate to really shine, important if you’re working with high quality produce or single estate chocolate, for example.

The flavours aren’t dulled and there is an intensity of flavour I’ve not experienced before. It also opens up all sorts of possibilities for adding additional flavours, if you so wanted.

Perhaps a drop of chilli or a little vanilla extract.

So, how do you go about making this magic mousse?

Melt equal parts (by weight) of chocolate and water together in a double boiler. Remove the bowl, place it in some iced water and, using a good old fashioned balloon whisk, start beating the liquid.

You should notice a change in the texture almost immediately.

Keep whisking and then remove the bowl from the water to stop it from cooling too much and solidifying again.

Stop whisking once the ‘mousse’ is at the required consistency. If you go too far, don’t worry – just re-melt the chocolate and keep trying until you get the texture you want.

For my ‘cauliflower cheese’ I kept going until I had a slightly grainy texture but for a dessert you probably want something a little lighter.

Food sorcery at its finest, and most simple. Now all I have to do is avoid visiting Salem.

I’m on Twitter…

Cauliflower Cheese

One of the challenges facing molecular gastronomy is knowing where to draw the line between innovation and tradition.

Some dishes have become classic for good reason – they taste really good just the way they are. As such, alterations can be seen as pointless frippery. Experimentation for the sake of change.

Why ‘deconstruct’ a guacamole when regular guacamole is pretty close to perfection?

For culinary innovation to be successful, the resultant dish must maintain the integrity of the inspiration, or else the point has been missed and all that remains on the plate, and on the palate, is the bitter taste of disappointment and a hunger for the original.

Even Ferran Adria et al accept that not all dishes are a success. Granted, he scores more hits than misses but I’m sure his team have an awful lot of fun along the way.

And much of what this is about is having fun.

Eating (and cooking) is one of only two pan-sensory activities in which we, as humans, engage. Why shouldn’t it delight, amuse, surprise, tease or even arouse rather than just fuel?

Balancing these twin objectives – integrity and amusement against innovation and satisfaction – is a real challenge. But one that is enormously satisfying when it works. This was my first effort

Cauliflower Cheese

Cauliflower cheese is one of those big classics. Done right it is like being wrapped in a warm duvet and watching a Frank Capra film. Bite-sized florets of cauliflower, still carrying some bite, covered in a cheesey white sauce and topped with even more melty cheese, just turning that slightly crispy/chewy shade of brown. Give me the dish and a fork. No plates or napkins necessary.

Stripped down it has three main elements – the sauce, the cheese and the cauliflower. It also has three textures – soft, chewy and slightly crunchy. Finally, there are three flavours – saltiness from the cheese, caulifloweryness from the cauliflower and a slight bitterness from the topping.

The challenge was to keep all these fundamentals in place without compromising the flavour or satisfying nature of the inspiration.

After much head scratching, musing and mulling, this is what I came up with:



Mozzarella spheres with deep-fried cauliflower and bitter chocolate and a cauliflower and Parmesan puree with Parmesan crisps.

I think it ticks all the boxes. And you’re going to want the recipe aren’t you? I shall make it so…

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Salt & Vinegar Crisps

With the intro out of the way, we can crack on. Let’s begin with air. Or maybe foam. Anyone know when an air becomes a foam? Answers below please.



For the uninitiated, and those without access to liquid nitrogen, vacuum packaging devices, Large Hydron Colliders and other assorted machinery, airs and foams seem to be an excellent point of entry into the seemingly murky (and achingly complex) world of molecular gastronomy.

They are also relatively easy to create and apparently hard to fuck up (although, as expected, I did manage. You shan’t be seeing my ‘poached egg with paprika foam and roasted chickpeas’ because it looked like something from low budget Korean horror movie, circa 1983).

Airs and foams have come in for a bit of stick recently with some chefs apparently desperate to adorn all their dishes with a garnish that looks like gargled frog spawn. This is a bad thing.

But they do have their uses. They are light, delicate and carry flavours in a completely unexpected way. They’re also tremendous fun.

If you think you’ve never experienced such a level of gastronomy, think again. Unless, of course, you’ve never had a cappuccino – foam at its most famous. Or Foamous. *Sigh*

Using milk is one way to create the effect. Another is to use a chemical derived from soya beans or egg yolks called lecithin.

Although predominantly used in food production as an emulsifier (a go-between that helps the combining of fats and water – as in a béarnaise sauce), lecithin can also be added to virtually any liquid then whizzed up to create delicate bubbles of flavour.

Not wanting to ruin another perfectly good egg (see above), I thought about other possibilities and came round to the idea of using an air to flavour homemade crisps – something I first encountered at Midsummer House in Cambridge where we had crisps with a sweet balsamic foam as a pre-lunch nibble.



It was a neat twist on olive oil and balsamic vinegar, so often a satisfying starter when served with crusty bread. Time to get experimental.

With this in mind, instead of deep-frying the thin slices of potato, they were brushed on both sides with extra virgin olive oil and put into a hot oven.

Meanwhile, I mixed 75g of balsamic vinegar (not the good stuff) with the same amount of water, added 0.5g of lecithin and let it dissolve into the liquid.

Using a ‘wide mouthed container’, as recommended by another blogger, I then applied a hand blender to the surface of the liquid in an effort to create the small, stable, bubbles that form the ‘air.’

Oops.

There are still dots of balsamic vinegar on the ceiling, the fridge, the kettle and, probably, my hair.

Panicking, I plunged the blender deeper into the dark liquid.

Oops. Again.

The blade managed to cut cleanly through a small raised nipple in the base of the plastic tub and all I could do was watch as foamy (hooray!) vinegar and water slowly leached out onto the surface and down onto my socks.

Sometimes all you can do is watch as the horror unfolds. So that’s what I did.

Two towels later I remembered the potatoes, now a slightly darker shade of brown than I’d anticipated.

Oops thrice. Time for coffee.

Composure and cool regained I forgot everything that had gone before and started again.

Peel potato. Slice thinly on mandolin (carefully avoiding the cutting off of fingertips). Brush lightly with EVOO and bake in a slightly cooler oven for about four minutes on either side. Salt with Malden sea salt on emergence and leave to cool on something slightly absorbent. Like David Guest’s face. Or some kitchen paper. I tend to use the latter.

Meanwhile: mix vinegar and water with weird yellow powder and blitz carefully with a hand mixer. Leave for five minutes then collect the resultant bubbles into a small receptacle. A shot glass or small espresso cup will suffice.

Phew.



Dip each crisp into the foam and then shove it into your expectant mouth. Prepare yourself for a flavour explosion and a melding of textures so wondrous you’ll want to streak naked through the streets. Or at least have another. And then keep going until they are all gone.

For more delicate morsels, follow me on Twitter.

What Might Have Been...(an introduction to 'Molecular Gastronomy')

Between the ages of about 12 and 16 we spent, as a family, three summers in a tiny coastal town on Spain’s northern Costa Brava.

At the time, the resort of Roses was known for few things apart from the inevitable mini golf course, a go-karting track and perfectly serviceable stretch of beach. It was bustling enough in the evenings without feeling oppressive and enjoyed a steady trickle of tourists, predominantly from Germany and Britain.

How things change.

Sort of.

Roses’ most famous landmark is now a restaurant. But not just any restaurant: the best restaurant in the world. Officially. Ferran Adria’s El Bulli has once again been awarded the accolade of serving the best food of any establishment on the planet.

The restaurant’s name (meaning ‘bulldog’ in honour of the orginal owner’s pets) has become a by-word for culinary experimentation, as well as excellence, and Adria’s influence continues to make its mark on menus all over the world.

His, now notorious, style of cooking has been dubbed ‘molecular gastronomy’ but the name is considered to be something of a misnomer with even the founding fathers of this new cuisine trying to throw off the tenacious label to try and make it sound less inaccessible.

Where is all this going? Well, sadly, at the time I was holidaying there, El Bulli, despite having notched up two Michelin stars, was not the place of gastronomic pilgrimage it now is. It was known amongst the tightly knit fraternity of the foodie elite, but certainly didn’t feature on my culinary radar, nor that of my parents.

As a result, we never went.

It saddens me to know that at the time, there were some nights the restaurant would struggle to make ten bookings.

They now receive about two million requests a year with only a tiny handful – 8,000 – lucky enough to bag themselves a place during the six months it is open.

But, whilst I might not have direct experience, or even a reservation, I am in possession of the next best thing.

A while back I wrote about receiving the Texturas starter kit, the equivalent of a foodist’s chemistry set to allow budding ‘molecular gastronomists’ (since no better term has been invented I’ll struggle on with this one) to replicate some of the cutting edge techniques that have made Ferran Adria truly famous.

And I’ve finally got round to paying with it.

So, this is by way of introduction. And, hopefully a justification for the slightly – erm – unusual nature of the next few posts.

For more verbal foams, airs, spheres and purees, follow me on Twitter.

Braised Beef Short Ribs

Here’s a question for you: what do Geert Wilders, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Straw Dogs and beef short ribs all have in common?

Any ideas? Yes, you at the back? Correct answer! They have all, at some point, been banned from Britain by the government.

Thanks to the BSE crisis – a result of abhorrent farming practices – for two years between 1997 and 1999, it was illegal to buy or sell beef on the bone.



Steaks were fine, burgers likewise, topside and rump all legal but a request for forerib or shin of beef would be met with sirens, a lock down and a near instantaneous crack SWAT team swooping in to make arrests.

Even after the ban was lifted, getting hold of beef short ribs was harder than quoting Darwin to a Jehovah’s Witness without being interrupted. As a result this dish has probably been on my ‘Must Cook’ list for longer than any other.

Short ribs have never managed to segue their way into the British collective culinary consciousness in the same way they have in France or the States. Ask for short ribs here and you are likely to walk away with pork rather than beef.

But that seems to be changing. Finally. Whilst it might still necessitate a special request to the butcher, you will likely to be able to source them rather leave empty handed. And this, I can now affirm, is a good thing. A great and wonderful thing.



Why? Because this is quite possibly the tastiest cut of beef imaginable, not to mention being one of the cheapest. For the price of a small piece of fillet, you could buy enough beef to feed at least eight. An entire slab of short ribs will set you back about 15 quid and that will feed a small platoon.

After some lengthy discussion (‘no, not rib of beef. No, not pork spare ribs.’ Et cetera et cetera) I finally managed to secure a good sized chunk with no clue as to what to do with it.

It was one of those trips to the butcher when I just went a little crazy and named all the pieces of meat I could think of that I’d never tried but always wanted to: Marrow bone, pork hand, lamb breast. They just kept coming. I’d only gone in for half a pound of mince.

But there it was. The biggest piece of beef I’d ever seen and no idea how to cook it. who to turn to in moments like this? Hugh? Gordon? Nigel? No. This was clearly a Keller moment.

For a cookbook that is notoriously complicated, there are moments of sublime simplicity in Keller’s The French Laundry book. His Parmesan Baskets with Goats’ Cheese Mousse is an exercise in near effortless minimalism. And a tasty one at that.

And so it is with his braised beef short ribs. The beauty of slow cooking is that you can let the ingredients – and the oven – work for you. People tend to avoid slow cooking because they see numbers like ‘4’ and ‘5’ followed by the word ‘hours’. In an era where we are time short, this seems like an extravagance.

But with slow-cooking the actual hands on time is close to zero. Some peeling, some chopping, some browning and then that’s it. You’re free to go.

And when the final result is so extraordinarily tasty it almost feels like cheating.



After separating the ribs along the natural lines they were seasoned liberally with salt and pepper, lightly dusted with flour and browned in a little vegetable oil closely followed by a crude mirepoix of leeks, carrots and red onion.



The whole lot went into the biggest pot I could find and was covered with red wine (choose a butch one, something with balls like a new world Shiraz or Cab Sauv), and half chicken and half beef stock (homemade beef, chicken from a cube).

Instead of a lid, Keller recommends a cartouche with a whole cut into the middle so that’s exactly what I did - a circle of greaseproof paper placed over the top of the bubbling mass which then went into a cool oven (125 degrees C) for four hours.

After twiddling my thumbs, doing a crossword, getting impatient and finally falling asleep, it was ready. Sort of. This being Keller there was still a fair amount to do. I’ll admit now I didn’t follow him to the letter. I went a little off road from here on in but it was getting late and I wasn’t trying to retain my Michelin Stars.

The meat was removed from it’s tasty bath and left to cool while the cooking liquid was drained and reduced by about three-quarters. While this was all going on I diced up some carrot, parsnip and swede and cooked them off in salted water.

‘Looks like school dinner vegetables,’ said the Girlfriend. I bet Thomas Keller doesn’t have to put up with those sort of comments. But she was sort of right.

The meat was cut into cubes fried off in a smidgen of butter and then added to the reduced sauce along with the veggies.

Anything rich, saucy and meaty, for me, shouts out for mashed potatoes (or pommes puree seen as we are going all haute cuisine) so we knocked up a swift batch of lazy-mash (put potato in microwave. Cook. Mash with butter, milk and seasoning) and then sautéed some spring greens.



The dish was topped off with a small disc of bone marrow, fried after being rolled in seasoned flour and then, finally, it was time to eat. And it was well worth the wait.

This is food so tasty that it makes you want to sing from high on the rooftops. It was revelationary in the finest and truest sense and all I can now do is urge, plead and beg you to go out immediately, find and cook some beef short ribs and then go forth and spread the word.

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