Alinea at Home: King Crab, Vinegar, Aromatics, Seaweed

So my intro to this blog said I would share my failures with you.  This is definitely one of them.  Ultimately, I don't think this is not recipe error, but more user error.  The combination sounds funky, but ultimately I get how it would work.  I just took a couple missteps along the way.

The first step was the vinegar portion of the recipe.  In this case the vinegar got turned into jello.  The jello consisted of salt, white vinegar sugar agar agar gelatin sheets and water.  I soaked some three of the sheets in the water and then mixed the vinegar, salt, sgar and agar agar and eventually combined the two.

Once all the ingredients were mixed together I poured a portion of it into a dish and let it set in the fridge for a couple of hours.

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Now time for the crab.  I've got a whole leg here.  This is sort of where I went wrong.  Long story short I should have cooked the crab in some way before going into this dish.

After extracting a portion of the crab leg, I poured the rest of the vinegar gel mixture over the top and let it set for another hour or so.

One of the flavor component of this dish was seaweed.  I took a bit of this and chopped it thinly.

No pictures of it but I cooked up some sushi rice for the side.  The crab was cut out of the dish and then placed under the broiler for a bit.  Another reason why I wished I had cooked the crab first.  Anyway the picture above is the final plate.  Like I said initially the favors would have all worked, except that the raw crab was a texture thing for me and I could on finish one bite.

Tapenade Crusted Salmon

Last week with the holiday was a series of relatively simple dishes.  This first one was really easy and nice mid-week dish if you are so inclined.  Tapenade is simply an olive paste and this dish takes a salmon filet, puts an olive crust on the flesh side and then you pan fry it.  That's it. 

The tapenade included nicoise olives, olive oil, anchovies, pine nuts and garlic.  That's the most complicated thing about this entire dish.  I took all of the ingredients and took them for a spin in the food processor which completed the paste.

  

Now I'll grant you a piece of salmon that beautiful probably didn't deserve to be treated this way it probably would have been much better served at a sushi bar.

I took the tapenade out of the boil and then pressed it on to the flesh side of the filet while the pan heated up.

The flesh side when into the oil that was put in a non-stick skillet, I flipped it after just a few minutes and let the oil do its work on the skin side.

The final plate.  After I cut into the meat I realized that I probably had the oil too hot as the crust was crispy but the fish was still basically raw on the inside.  Thankfully, I'm not one that gets too upset by that.