Can anyone offer a theory as to where this phenomenon came from or how to make it happen again?
I recently roasted some shallots in their brown crisp skin (don’t know another name for it). I have been trying to get my wife to appreciate shallots. The shallots were about the size of a golf ball and I placed them in a glass baking dish lined on parchment and drizzled olive oil over them. I had a 2.5 lb bone-in ribeye in the slow oven at 225 (I prefer this method to sous vide) so I just slipped them into the oven. After 80 min, I took the ribeye out to sear in my cast iron pan (it was gloriously med rare and juicy), I cranked the heat up to 350 and left the shallots in for another 30 min. They came out incredibly sweet, of course, but I found something interesting on the parchment: a sort of gelatinous sheet (small in size) the consistency of fruit leather. There were only a couple of these things about the size of the flat side of the shallot and about as wide. The flavor is out-of-this-world. My wife insisted that I try to find out how to duplicate them. I had a theory that they were shallot skin softened by the olive oil that accumulated on the parchment paper here-and-there. I don’t think so. I had another theory: they are juice that squirted from the shallot onto the parchment paper after which it was partially dehydrated and blended with the olive oil into the sweet shallot leather. Sure would like to know how to make this again.
