Alinea at Home: Cucumber, Mango, Several Aromatics

So back to the Alinea cookbook we go.  I had to take a few weeks off because my wife and I moved into a new house.  But now I have a lot more room to play and maybe pick up some new toys to help me make these dishes much more effectively.  This was the case for this dish.  Alinea and Next and a number of other restaurants use dehydrators to make various components of their courses.  At the old house I never had the space to buy a dehydrator something that I'm admittedly not going to use particularly often.  But now I have space and I decided to pick one up. 

Since the calendar has now slipped past June 21, I moved into the summer dishes in the cookbook and this one was the first one up. 

First up was the mango leather, essentially a mango fruit roll up.  This is a mango and salt.  The mango was chopped and then placed in a blender and pureed as can be seen below.

The puree was spread on acetate sheets.  If you're old like me and remember the overhead projectors in school, it's the same thing the teacher used to write those awful math problems.  I actually had to do this part twice.  What's shown in the picture was spread too thin and after the prescribed two hours at 125 degrees I had mango crisp and not anything I could use.

While the mango leather was dehydrating the second time I worked on the cucumber portion of the dish.  I sliced the cucumber as thin as I possibly could on my mandolin.  The water, white wine vinegar and sugar were combined in a sauce pan to make a pickling liquid.

One of the garnishes was ginger.  I sliced it very thinly and cut it into a bite sized triangle.

The second and third garnishes were coriander salt and clove salt.  I ground the spices and then mixed them with the salt.

This is the completed leather.  Naturally, this time it was a little under done but I didn't have time to wait around to finish it the way I would have liked.

The cucumber and mango leather were rolled together and then garnished with the ginger and the salts.  I served this bite with a not so special pinot grigio out of California.