Alinea at Home: Trout Roe, Coconut, Licorice, Pineapple

Well third dish into this project and we have our first mediocre dish.  The fact that this dish isn't necessarily surprising to me, but ultimately disappointing.  Not surprising because coconut might be one of my least favorite flavors and disappointing because of how good the trout roe I was able to get and how much mail order stuff I had to get to pull this one off.  Unfortunately, for as high quality as the roe was supposed to be, thought its saltiness kind of overpowered the dish.

What I do like at least so far about a lot of these dishes is how make ahead a lot of components can be.  For this dish everything except assembly was basically done prior to this evening and all I had to do was basically was plate the dish. 

 The first step was to make the licorice syrup. Water, sugar, pepper corns, freeze dried licorice powder, star anise, molasses and sherry vinegar.

On the left I toasted of a small amount of peppercorns and star anise.  On the right I added the rest of the ingredients and brought it to a simmer.

The mixture then simmered until it was reduced by half.  At this point I put it in a squeeze bottle and held the mixture in the fridge until I was ready to use it.

 The second step was to prepared the coconut chunks that were to be the based of the dish.  The recipe called for a young coconut, which of course weren't available at the store so I went with what they had which was a mature coconut.  Ultimately that decision came back to bite me in the ass.  Oh well.  After figuring out how to crack into the coconut I peeled the flesh from the shell and reserved it in the coconut milk.

 Now time for the coconut pineapple "rocks", which of course I failed to put on the final plate.  I'm such an idiot sometimes.  The sum total of the ingredients were freeze dried pineapples and coconut milk powder.  I crushed the pineapples and then mixed it it with the powder and sealed it up in a vacuum bag.  Once compressed I broke the mixture into the rock shaped forms you see in the final picture.

 Now for one of the stars of the show, and note to self, especially after reading This lady's awesome blog I will used canned juices when the recipe calls for a unique juice from now on.  But in order to make the primary base of this dish I had more coconuts, sugar and salt.

 I dispatched of the hairy shells of the coconut and then put the flesh pieces into a food processor hoping to puree the crap out of them and be able to extract enough juice to make the base.  Not so fast my friend, I had to wet the mixture with left over coconut water.

 This is the completed base.

From there I put the base in a NO2 canister and aerified it a bit before putting it into the freezer.

These two pics are the start of the pineapple foam.  Pineapple juice, sugar, salt, xanthan gum, citric acid, soy lecithin.  All ingredients were combined into a single mixture and reserved until I was ready to froth it.

 Now that I was ready to plate I took an immersion blender to the pineapple juice mixture and created to foam.  Thanks science and soy lecithin for our ability to create stuff like this.

And the final plate.  Yes that is a gratuitous amount of trout roe on top.  Again, for whatever reason the combination just didn't work for me. 

Oh well, onward and upward.  Another interesting dish coming up next month, shrimp and yuba.