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?

Apple Pie

Lemon Meringue

When we lived in Houston, there was a 24 hour pie shop nearby.  Any time of day or night you could get delicious pies.  One of the best there was lemon meringue.  So, when I was choosing what pie to make, this was  natural choice.

There's nothing particularly complicated about making a pie like this.  I did this to get some practice.  The meringue is fairly labor intensive if, like me, you don't have an electric mixer.  Come to think of it, I don't have electric devices in the kitchen besides a blender.  Anyway, the pie dough is made first.  A simple mixture of flour, butter, and water (dash of salt for flavor).   The ratio seems simple enough, but I'm not completely sure whether it scales well.  3:2:1 is the ratio, by weight for flour:butter:water, at least in US measures.  Since I like using metric in the kitchen, the ratio is still roughly the same, but with small adjustments  2.88:1.88:1.   This is something I'm noticing more and more, but the ratios seem to be more often nice and neat (i.e. rational) with "US" measures (pounds and ounces)  than when using metric.  I'm not sure why this is.

The dough is chilled so the butter can firm up again, it is scaled to about 284 grams per crust and rolled out into a rough circle.

If you've made any sort of custard or pastry cream before, the filling is pretty much the same sort of thing.  Instead of a cornstarch thickened milk/cream mixture, you have cornstarch thickened lemon juice, zest, and water, egg yolks, and sugar.

The topping is a basic sweetened meringue.  A little more sugar than I'm used to using (e.g. for macarons), but still the same sort of thing.  For this, it is 2:1 sugar:egg whites.  

I had a little trouble getting mine to stiff peaks.  It seemed to want to stay in a ribbon stage after getting opaque and silky, almost like a cooked italian meringue. I think I still got decent results, though.