So we continue on through the Alinea cookbook. Probably the hardest part of this dish was procuring the skate. Skate is a pacific ray fish that is not in the common food lexicon of most americans. I did find a company out of Washington state that sells it so I ordered it up and off I went.
The first step was to make the powders that make up the garnishes for the plate. The first one I made was caper powder. Two jars of capers.
I washed off the brine and got them ready to go into the oven. The recipe calls for the use of a dehydrator for these steps but I ain't buying a dehydrator (my kitchen is simply too small), so I used my oven. Of course my oven doesn't go down to the recommended 150 degress so I dried these suckers out at 170 and just kept my eye on them. All told it took about 3 hours to dry them out completely.
It's amazing how much shrinkage happens when you dehydrate something.
Once the caperes were dried I took them for a spin in my spice grinder and this was the result. The powder went into a plastic bag until I was ready to use it.
Lemon powder was next. All told I took the rind off of 9 lemons (that task is no freaking fun at all) and trimmed them down to make sure I got as much of the pith (the white stuff) off as I could. Once I had the requisite amount of lemon peel I simmered them in the simple syrup three separate times. I didn't get any pictures of the rest but once the lemon peel was candied they went into another 170 degree oven and dried for another three hours. The dried peels also went into a spice grinder and had the hell beat out of it.
Parsley powder was the third and thankfully final powder to be made. I took two bunches of parsley and pulled off the leaves (also a horrifying task). Once I had the leaves these also went into a 170 degree oven for a couple of hours. The dried parsley also went into the spice grinder.
Ok, closing on the finish, time to make the crust for the fish. Dried bananas and spray dried cream powder. The cream powder I put into the oven until it was golden brown. While the banana chips went into a spice grinder. Once the powder was brown the two powders were mixed together.
Green beans. These got sliced really thinly.
Once the beans were prepped I prepared the beurre monte which is just an emulsion of two, yes two sticks of butter and a bit of water.
Once the beurre monte was ready I cooked off the beans in a little bit of the beurre monte until they were tender.
The final components for the home stretch. The green beans, banana, cream crust, skate, beurre monte, and caper, parsley and lemon powders.
I portioned out the skate and then poached it in the beurre monte until it was cooked.
And the final plate. The powders were sprinkled on the plate and I swirled them around the plate. The banana was sliced and put in the corner and then topped with the green beans and the fish.
This was a fun dish that I'm glad I made. There was a lot of work and I'm sure the taste would warrant another go around, though salting the fish before crusting it probably would have helped.
No comments:
Post a Comment