As some of you may have guessed, I cook a lot. Most plated dishes I post images in
discussions such as “What's for Dinner?”, but there are many times when I play
in the kitchen and produce something that is not yet ready as a plated
dish. I will post some of my experiments here.
The recent Spherification Course got me interested in making
spheres, but not with chemicals. The cookbooks
Quay and Modernist Cuisine (4.86) have techniques for cooking egg whites and/or
yolks in fat at different temps.
Having a litre of egg whites, I dripped whites into ~72C oil (I was
after soft cooked whites) until cooked and strained them out.
The whites, before separating them, reminded me of a
dividing cell.
This led me to think
about seeds, legumes, nuts, grains and other potential life that we humans eat
(yes nothing grows from a nut, but it provides nutrition to a seed to allow it
to grow).
This led to a concept plate call
Potential Life, using stuff I had in the kitchen.
I need to buy a selection of seeds, etc and
play with cooking techniques and presentation. The egg whites provide a very nice texture and colour contrast to the dark, hard nuts and seeds.
I then grabbed a small section of food grade plastic tubing
I had, sucked oil in to coat the inside, blew the oil out and replaced it with
egg white, tied off the ends and SV at 90C until all white.
A clean syringe was used to push the white
out.
I then SVed some yolks at 72C until a paste and added
between the whites.
I don't know what I
will do with it but the effect is cool.
