Alinea at Home: Sardine, Nicoise Olive, Dried Tomato, Arugula

When I saw this recipe in the Alinea cookbook it looks so simple, so innocent, this bitch was anything but.  Talk about frustrating.  First frustration, nicoise olives.  So these are not easy to source in local stores so I turned to the internet.  Found them easily enough via Amazon.  Turns out the source I found was sold out and it took an additional two weeks for them to come in.  Then the tatami iwashi.  In all my research it turns out that the real deal is nearly impossible to find in the US, so I thought I would try and source what Alinea at Home used but again no such luck.  In fact when I went to the only Asian market in town and told the shopkeeper what I was looking for he looked at me like I was crazy.  So I went to plan C when I was at the store today, canned sardines and rice paper.

 The first step was the nicoise olive cream.  So for all the trouble I went to to get nicoise olives, all I needed was the brine.  Which normally would be fine, because I would just eat the olives.  Big problem, the olives I got are all sorts of awful, almost no olive flavor at all.  The first part to make the cream was to blend 150g of the olive brine with about 3 grams of ultra tex 3 which is a modified starch.  Once those were combined I started on the cream portion.

For the cream, 250 grams of heavy cream got whipped into stiff peaks. 

Once the cream was done, it was folded into the olive mixture and then went into the fridge until I was ready to serve.  I'll be honest, after reading Alinea at Home's post on this I was a bit concerned about how well the cream would set up.  Turned out not to be an issue.

Once the cream was ready this is the rest of the ingredients were easy.  Arugula, sun dried tomatoes, rice paper and canned sardines.  I boiled some water and poured it over the rice paper to make it pliable.  Once that was done I wrapped it around the end of a wooden spoon and deep fried it.  I chopped the sardines and put them on the bottom of the plate. 

This was the final plating.  Awful I know, despite its simplicity this dish was a pain in the ass.