Prune, Blue Cheese, Preserved Meyer Lemon

While working with the blue cheese, I thought I felt something "pruney" about it.   I happened to have a jar of prune juice  waiting for use.

I mixed 250 grams prune juice with a 100 gram simple syrup and 8 grams of methylcellulose (F450).  One of methylcelluloses' neat tricks is that you can make heat stable foams out of them, which I did.  You simply whip as you would if you were making a meringue.

I then dehydrated piped puffs of MC-prune juice mixture until they were crispy.

To incorporate the blue cheese, I used the left over Carrageenan mixture  from the toasted walnut oil experiment (see previous pictures).  One of kappa carrageenan's neat properties is that it will release its liquid when agitated (syneresis).  So, I blended my left over blue cheese custard, pressed through a chinois twice, and and filled the prune juice puffs with a smooth "blue cheese pudding"

To add another dimension I broke into one of my jars of preserved meyer lemons and sliced a piece thinly.

You get a burst of intense salty-citrus flavor right off the bat.  This seems to come from nowhere, as though it burst through out of nothingness.  Then, crispy crunching and sweetness from the prune, which disappears very quickly.  This disappearing act is one of the nice features of the methylcellulose "meringues." And slowly mingling and then shining through is the piquancy and saltiness of the blue cheese.

A nice experience, and sure to be refined in the future.  Any ideas?

Walnut Oil and Danish Blue

I spent part of today working on an idea that came to me while falling asleep last night.  This is destined to be a component rather than a main ingredient.  Its hard to recall exactly the train of thought, but I was thinking about yogurt covered raisins at first.

In my first attempt I used the following proportions:

Walnut Oil Pebbles:Tapioca Maltodextrin at 100:24

Milk:Blue Cheese:Kappa Carrageenan at 100:20:1

There were two problems I needed to deal with.  First, the walnut oil pebbles did not crisp in the pan, but would stick and lose outer layers of malto.  Second, when coated with the blue cheese mixture, the malto balls would simply release the oil and melt away.

I tried increasing the ratio malto to 40%.  This worked much better when heating the malto balls.  They held together much nicer, and started to brown a bit.  I'm still having trouble getting a blue cheese coating, however, since the malto would absorb the extra liquid before the kappa had a chance to set.

Ok, maybe I need to make the malto balls crispier by heating over higher heat.  This seemed to form a protective shell around the balls.  This worked a little better.

Still more playing needs to be done.  I'd like a firmer set, so I may mix in iota carrageenan and/or locust bean gum.  Also, I don't like handling the malto balls because they're quite fragile, so I think I'll try to crisp them in a hot oven next time.

The ratio in the end was this, which still needs to be tinkered with:

Walnut Oil:Tapioca Maltodextrin at 100:40
Milk:Blue Cheese:Carrageenan (Kappa:Iota):Locust Bean Gum at 100:10:1 (50:50):1

Tasting notes: the crispy exterior of the maltodextrin gave way to a creamy toasted walnut flavor.  Of course this works well with blue cheese, which was only hinted at, but that should be able to be rectified in future iterations of this.

Isomalt

I received a shipment of goodies today, among them Isomalt. Isomalt is an alcohol sugar made from beets. It is half as sweet as sucrose, table sugar. It also has some neat properties, one of which I played with tonight after dinner.

I took 1 cup and melted it in a sauce pan. I formed a ring with some metal wire I had laying around and decided to make some "glass".

This photo is of a bit of cranberry left over from making the cranberry stock for "Cranberry Frozen & Chewy" encapsulated in a thin membrane of melted isomalt. Like blowing bubbles with a ring, what I did was melt the isomalt to 240 F or so, and then dip the ring in the liquid sugar. I dropped some of the cranberry through the center of the ring. When the isomalt cools, it becomes brittle, like glass. You can pop it in your mouth and get a fun texture with the flavoring you use.

This is an extremely difficult technique. The fine cooks at El Bulli manage to do this perfectly. They have better equipment that keeps the isomalt at the perfect temperature, and with a better method of creating the shell.