Blumenthal's Vodka and Beer Battered Fish

Sorry for the delay in an update, I've been sick for the better part of the past week, and haven't gotten a chance at the office to update until now. Finally, here we go, Heston Blumenthal's recipe for Vodka and Beer Battered Fish. I found the recipe while reading an article by Harold McGee in the New York Times. Recipes like these really capture the essence of Molecular Gastronomy, how can we make something like fried fish better and more consistent by simply studying and finding out the reactions that occur when we combine certain ingredients or the way we cook them. The recipe came from Blumenthal's series of In Search of Perfection (books and tv) when he was playing around with different starches to use in his battered fish recipe.

As McGee writes, explaining why vodka enhances the dish:

"The key to the Fat Duck batter is the alcohol, which does a couple of very useful things. It dissolves some of the gluten proteins in the wheat flour, so no elastic network forms and the crust doesn’t get tough. (You’ll notice when you combine the ingredients that the mix becomes mushy rather than sticky.) Alcohol also reduces the amount of water that the starch granules can absorb, and boils off faster than water, so the batter dries out, crisps and browns quickly, before the delicate fish inside overcooks. The crispness lasts through the meal, and revives well the next day in a hot oven."

Below are some photos with the final results, and it came out amazing. I used Panga which is pretty common in Spain, even though its fished in Vietnam, frozen and then imported. But I haven't really seen it in the states. Next time, I obviously plan on using fresh fish, but considering the fish had been frozen it was really incredible. Really crispy on the outside, and amazingly moist and perfectly cooked in the middle. I had some extra batter left over, so I filleted some chicken breast into really thin slices, powdered them with some salt, pepper, paprika, and a little brown sugar then battered and fried them, and they came out very tasty and moist as well.

This is the chicken which were powdered lightly with rice flour
(fish went through same process as well)
Fryin' Fish
Fish Fried
Fish and Chips

Draft Declaration

Draft Declaration

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Dabbling with Texturas

On my recent visit to Barcelona I stopped into Solé Graells, a culinary-focused shop that sells just about anything related to cooking. They also happen to produce and distribute the Ferran and Albert Adria line of Texturas which are some chemicals they use in their kitchen for spherification, gels, foams, caviar, thickening, stabilizing, etc. I bought the basics for spherification (sodium alginate and calcium chloride), sodium citrate to control the ph level, and some xanthan gum for thickening. My first experience with spherification was with the earl grey tea ravioli which is supposed to have a little cube of lemon juice in the middle, which didn't really work out too well. The taste seemed a little watered down for me and the amounts seemed a little off when I was making the ravioli, I ended up having to add more sodium alginate than the recipe called for. The caviar worked a little better, but still a little bland. I heated up some whole milk and added some miel de caña (sugar cane honey) which ended up being pretty tasty combined with the caviar. I'll let the photos do the talking for now and this weekend I'll try experimenting a bit more and have something more worthwhile of detailing.

Tea Ravioli (above)
Tea Caviar
Tea Caviar with Milk and Honey
Tea Caviar hanging out with some Deformed Ravioli Outcasts

My first dabble had some limited success but the lemon cubes kept melting before the ravioli solidified, making a mess. I'm guessing I need to freeze them at a lower temp. and it took me a while to get a hang of making the actual "raviolis."

Pork stuffed Pork, Tenderloin stuffed with Pancetta

This was inspired by what was in the fridge and had to be used before it went bad. Luckily, it was really delicious, and the fattiness of the pancetta balanced out the lean meat of the tenderloin.3 cloves garlic
2 carrots
3 ripe tomatoes
3 small cebolletas
1 Green Pepper
750 g Pancetta
2 Pork Tenderloins
1 guindilla pepper
4 sprigs of thyme
Cognac
1 tbsp honey mixed with 1/4 cup hot water
s + p

I started off by slicing the garlic and dicing the cebolletas and the rest of the veggies. Put a few tbspns of olive oil in a saute pan and added the garlic once heated, for about a minute then the onion. Let that go until the onions had sweated for a few minutes and then added the carrots and pepper.
While I let that cook for a few minutes, I had cleaned the tenderloins trimming any additional fat, and silverskin. Then I butterflied the tenderloins in half and salted the interior with salt and pepper and then added the 2-3 strips of pancetta.
Closed the tenderloin and then with some butcher's string tied it up (a technique I'm still trying to get better at, particularly distributing and tying it correctly so it looks uniform). I then seared in a separate pan both tenderloins, and added the tomatoes to the vegetables.
After the pork had seared off, I cubed up a couple strips of extra pancetta and cooked them for a couple minutes and then deglazed the pan with 1/4 cup of cognac, and added that to the pan with the veggies and pork.
Finally, I heated up a quarter cup of water and melted a tablespoon of honey (milflores) into it and added it to the veggies. I tied up 4-5 sprigs of thyme with some string, and added that along with a guindilla pepper into the pan. I let everything cook, covered, in the pan for about 30 minutes on low heat, flipping the tenderloins half way through. After 30 minutes the pork tenderloins were about 168 degrees celsius when I removed them and let them rest while I reduced the veggies and juices into a sauce.

Next up... Heston Blumenthal's, In search of Perfection, Vodka and Beer battered fish recipe

Quick and Easy Cassoulet

I've been reading Jacque Pepin's Complete Techniques book, which is a combination of two of his previous works from the 70s and I was sitting at the office and I decided to browse online at some of his recipes on Food & Wine's website. Found a recipe for a cassoulet from his short cuts cookbook which caught my attention with the current frigid weather, something hot, filling, and with plenty of cerdo. I printed out the recipe and headed out to the butcher in town. I wasn't able to find the sausages called for in the recipe so I went with a combination of 6 chicken sausages and some delicious pork sausage, and of course pancetta. Bought 2 bottles of alubias at the supermarket, and some cebolletas, and I was set. This is more of an adaptation of the recipe than a direct recreation, due to the fact that the ingredients called for were hard to get a hold of like kielbasa (good luck finding that type of sausage in a market of a small town outside Granada). So I started by pouring the oil and a little water in a pan and adding the sausages once heated. While that was cooking I sliced and diced some onion, garlic, and the cebolleta I bought. I had bought some zucchini the other day and thought I could put it to some good use in this dish, so that got diced as well. Added the veggies and let that all cook for about 5 minutes and then added the "alubias" with their juice which I wasn't too sure about, as I don't like to add liquids from bottles or cans but I went with the recipe's direction. Added some squirts of tabasco, I like things spicy so I went with about 10-15 "dashes." I saw that it was thickening up a bit, so I added about 1/2 cup of some carrot stock I had left over. Let it reduce a little. Preheated the oven to 220 degrees celsius, and found a clay dish. I had baked some potatoes for lunch and had some leftover. I cut them in half and placed them on the bottom of the dish. Took out the sausages from the pan, and cut them up into more bite-size portions. Poured the beans, diced pancetta, and veggies into the potato-lined dish and then topped with sausages and some knife-diced baquette crumbs and placed it into the oven. The "cassoulet" was very good, but I would love to attempt an authentic and very very traditional version to see what its supposed to taste and look like, canned beans turn a little mushy after very little cooking. However, I did like that it didn't taste greasy, which I have noticed a lot in the "pocheros" and "ollas" served in Andalucia and why I hated the "callos" served at Tapaç 24 (I went to Bar Pinotxo at Mercado Boqueria earlier in the day where my friend, Rodrigo from Por mis Fogones, ordered the callos and they were delicious). While I was in Barcelona, I had decided that I was going to try either Inopia or Tapaç 24, it started raining and Tapaç was closer. I had the patatas bravas and the cap i trips (callos) and I found that sticky unappetizing taste of greasy fat in the callos at T. The patatas bravas were really overwhelmed by an aioli that tasted like sunflower oil, and thats about it. It's bad when I have better aioli in Granada than a well reviewed and popular tapas bar in Barcelona. I don't understand how making your mouth covered in a greasy broth can be appetizing, I feel like I have motor oil stuck to the roof of my mouth, so I think the chicken sausages helped cut down on that, but again I would really like to experiment with a traditional recipe and compare.

First Post and New Beginnings

A year ago this time I was in the second semester of my second to last year before graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, and I hadn't been happy for a while studying economics and international relations but I had decided to continue because I thought I had to, that it was the right thing to do with my life. I was 23 and it was about time I grew up and joined the real world, even if I wasn't passionate about it. What I was passionate about was cooking and food, but it had always been a secondary priority because I had a beaten path set. A couple months went by, and I was clearly unhappy with what I was studying and the more job titles I saw trying to find work for the summer made it worst. This was clearly not what I wanted to do. In april, I took a trip that changed the way I thought and felt about my life. I went to San Francisco for spring break, and I decided I would really like to go to sonoma or napa valley for a day and ended up going to Sonoma. The combination of the respect for the agriculture, and passion for the food and wine turned a switch inside of me and everything seemed to make sense. I wanted to become a chef. However, that summer I gave the benefit of the doubt to family pressure and that little voice inside my head that said find an internship/job related to my studies and make sure you dont like it. I did, and I hated it. That semester was my last, and I moved to Spain to start a new chapter.

This blog is dedicated to writing about the steps I'm taking towards fulfilling my goal. Also, I'll be trying to cook 1 or 2 recipes from books I have or from something interesting while browsing the net or may come across in my life every week and uploading the steps and results. Also I would like to add intermittent posts about news I see geared towards food related topics, and highlighting several organizations I find interesting, for example SlowFood or the MadridFusion convention in Madrid which takes place every January.

My influences have a wide range in terms of the type of cooking I like, but at the moment they seem towards experimental cooking: Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, Grant Achatz, Juan Roca. At the same time I'm trying to have some balance and recognize that to be able to experiment with cooking I need to learn the fundamentals before I begin jumping ahead. So while I would love to cook from Blumenthal's and Achatz's books I've been cooking and learning from some more classic and tradition-centered resources and chefs such as Jacque Pepin, Thomas Keller (more The French Laundry and Bouchon than Per Se), Tom Colicchio, C.I.A. textbook, 1080 recetas, Culinary Artistry and Becoming a Chef by Dornenburg & Page. Obviously I've been influenced by Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking which I think is a great reference for explaining the whys and hows of cooking and sparked the interest I have in reading about Blumenthal, Achatz, Hervé This, Adria, Roca, etc.

Hope you enjoy the blog!