More countries to cover in a culinary journey.

Playing around with google maps of the foods I have cooked or just ate from, still a work in progress.

Green shaded areas are for countries’ cuisine I have cooked food from whether once or many times.  India is a bit tricky as I have eaten and cooked South East Asian versions of Indian food, but bona fide Indian food I can’t say I have honestly sampled before.

Yellow shaded areas are for countries whether I have only tasted from but not cooked myself.


View jonowee’s culinary ‘something’ map in a larger map

As you can see all of South America, and large swaths of Africa and Asia are missing from my palate. This must be fixed.

Planning my own damn birthday cake.

Making a start in a previous post about my birthday cake, as of now I have one month to get this project done and this is how it is looking at the moment.

Revision 2.0:

  • Chocolate coated bottom chocolate sable base.
  • Airy light, chocolate biscuit joconde.
  • Bottled sour cherry compote.
  • Saint Honore pattern kirsch chantilly top.
  • Dark maroon Isomalt-coated whole sour cherries with dark couverture stems.
  • Satin dark couverture dark pattern slab walls.
  • Milk ganache glue.
  • Glossy dark couverture shard top sprinklings.

Things I need to source or test are:

  • Buying Isomalt.
  • Finding a source for Saint Honore (hopefully polycarbonate) piping nozzles.
  • Testing my current stock of liquid colouring and their heat stability and colour intensity for use in the Isomalt cherry coating
  • Chocolate shard making on acetate sheets, coating thickness and fracture patterns.
  • Chocolate dark with aluminium foil, the best thinness achievable.
  • Can I find a local source for fresh sour cherries?

At the moment I still apprehensive about using ganache in the Black Forest cake since it is not a very traditional component, along with the ganache is a biscuit base as one of those myths and legends surrounding the Black Forest cake that sway me around on whether to include them.

KKCake, final roundup.

The issues I foresaw that could cause problems did cause problems, there was one surprise that made the cake almost unusable.

Chocolate mousse
The gelatine-less underwhipped mousse, started softening under the weight of the cake when out of the freezer and moved into refrigeration. When the mousse originally leaked from the cake ring, I topped it up with almost the same chocolate mousse but without the pâte a bombe cooked egg yolks and sugar, not too unlike a light ganache.

  

Below is the original flowing pâte a bombe based mousse rewhipped, and it easily has more strength to hold itself up without freezing.

 

While the light ganache was certainly firm enough to stay out of the freezer, the white chocolate was noticeably too sweet, which brings us to or next problem.  

White chocolate
Not only did the light ganache mousse lacked the smooth, balanced flavour of the Pâte a bombe chocolate mousse; the white chocolate coated and dotted sablé disc was excruciatingly sweet.The problem with pinpointing the source of excess sweetness with the sable is that I had used too much of both the Lindt white couverture and Nestle Plaistowe ‘premium compound chocolate’. Reading the nutritional information tables for show 50% sugar content for Lindt and 55% for the Nestle, I should have been more alert with white chocolate’s sweetness, but I do wonder what the palatable difference will the 46.5% sugar content of Callebaut W2NV have. To add more context; Callebaut 811NV dark chocolate is 44% sugar, and 823NV milk chocolate is 42%. While I find the dark chocolate very pleasant, milk chocolate has the sweet kick that creeps up on me; I wonder is it the combination of sugar and milk powder that just that much sweet, or the cocoa mass masking the palate from sweetness.

Sable
My generosity with the chocolate for the sable, both in the biscuit and the sealing coat created a bogglingly thick shell that after refrigeration was only penetrable with a hot knife, well we got a flexible serrated slicing knife at the restaurant so that didn’t help. So in the future I either have to seal biscuit layers in the future with cocoa butter and or chocolate in a spray gun; and dot the couverture chunks with proper gaps between them so they don’t fuse together into a cake bomb shelter.

 

Tuile

Always love a crispy tuile, this Pierre Herme recipe with the lovely textures of sliced almonds was sublime. Since I have a oven size limit, so I had to join three 30cm strips to cover the 85cm circumference of the cake.I think I should spray the tuile with cocoa butter to seal its crispness better during refrigeration.

 

Chocolate motif
I made couverture spirals and a trapezoid in the afternoon after work before rushing off to the birthday dinner. Since the boxes I bought from the Re Store only came with a price and nutritional information table, I had to guess the tempering temperatures, which were too missing from the Lindt website. Tried to melt the buttons within the crystallised range; but the bowl itself got too hot and the small quantities being worked on, pushed it pass the limit. The Lindt white chocolate website. Tried to melt the buttons within the crystallised range; but the bowl itself got surprisingly hot and the small quantities being worked on, pushed it pass the limit as my test sample didn’t crystallise.

So I had to heat the chocolate to ‘stage B’, unfortunately after the ceramic bowl I melted the white couverture in the microwave got too hot as well and retained too much heat. So after half an hour wasted mixing the bowl with one third buttons to try to crystallise the hot chocolate, but the ceramic bowl had too much residual heat. I ended up pouring two thirds of the hot chocolate into a metal bowl and into the fridge to drop the temperature of the remaining uncrystallised hot chocolate to a stable level.

The dark couverture for the spirals crystallised with alot more ease as it was easy to spot the characteristics of stable chocolate while mixing. But while making the spirals, I decided to work outside in the garage in the early evening as the kitchen was too warm. But outside it was a tad too cool and the dark chocolate crystallised so quickly that while still flexible, the chocolate started to pull away from the acetate sheet while I was rolling it, so the spirals lacked the high quality shine that is the given standard with smooth plastic sheets.  

  



 

Textures, because I love it.

Blasted impenetrable chocolate coated sable disc.  

 

Orginal post: 11APR2012, 1839. Edited: 11APR2012, 2123. 

Triple-Cooked Chips (Fridge drying method)

Is it worth the extra work? Definitely, I know you should give verdicts at the end, but stop me if you can, oh too late.
Depending on the width of your pan to do the first simmering, it adds an added twenty minutes of work for each batch of chips simmered to what you would normally do for standard fat chip frying. The rest of time is letting the chips dry out undisturbed.

 

The recipe I am using for this version of the triple-cooked is based on the refrigeration drying method used in Heston Blumenthal’s BBC television series In Search of Perfection, in the more recent Channel 4 series How to cook like Heston, he uses the freezer; while at his The Fat Duck restaurant cookbook, the chamber vacuum sealer is used to dehydrate the potato chips.

Before I carry on with the techniques, I’ll just let you know my choice of spud for this first attempt is the Western Australia developed Royal Blue potato. I deem it as a waxy variety potato, but it cooks out to some amazingly fluffy dishes.As ever, I still hate Ruby Lou’s for any potato dish.

From my understating of the process for the triple-cooked chip is to:

  • Stage 1: Cutting
     Cutting to the right thickness is very important, if it’s too thin in any dimension, you’ll get ‘all crust, and pomme puree sloshing inside; not the most pleasant mouth feel. 15mm to 20mm is ideal.
  • Stage 2: Expelling excess surface starch.
    Washing the cut potatoes until water runs clear. I’m still not sure why it’s done, or how the science works for this stage as I’m too used to frying freshly cut potatoes starch on and all.
  • Stage 3: Simmering, first cooking stage.
    Bring salted water to the boil, then added the rinsed chips and cook on the gentlest simmer for about twenty minutes for my cut and type of potato until the surface of the chip just starts to overcook and fall apart.The chips are gently removed onto a write rack for drying. I chose to use the widest saute pan available (27cm, 11”) to ease inspecting and retrieving the cooked chips from the water. I think this first cooking stage does a few fundamental things that make the crazy crispiness posture triple-cooked chip; cooking and breaking the starch bonds within the potato do that it’s not too firm when frying and to let moisture escape during frying with less restriction. Other carbohydrate breaking method I’ve read about surrounding triple-cooked chips are sous vide for minimal rough handling of the potato pieces, and ultrasonic exposure to obliterate even more starch bonds. Simmering in water also to me injects moisture into the chip to prevent excess dehydration of the interior which would cook out some kind of aerated potato tempura batter, and have enough internal moisture to stream the chip during frying for a fluffy inside.
  • Stage 4: Drying
    Like a pomme souffle puffs, you are drying on a skin for the first frying to form the crisp skin. I left mine for almost a whole day in the fridge on a wire rack.
  • Stage 5: First frying, low temperature.
    Like your normal fat chips and wedges, frying at 130°C to seal the skin and par-cook the chip ready for final frying. Unlike the usual fat potato affair, the recipe calls fit just sealing and the slightest colour instead of light gold.
  • Stage 6: More drying.
    After frying, the chip has steamed up the crust a bit, so into the fridge on a wire rack for more drying until you are ready for final frying fit your meal.
  • Stage 7: Final frying, home run.
     At 180°C, fry the died chips to a lush golden colour.The chip has a thick enough layer of fat and water waiting to puff up during frying. But don’t overcook the chip, or else it will steam its internal fluffiness into mushy pomme puree, and the mouth feel will be like eating insects with crisp exoskeleton and slushy guts. Something I did notice was that it took much longer than usual to brown the chips cook; I guess that’s a combination of washing and cooking away do much surface starch (carbohydrates/sugars), and the first low temperature frying that didn’t brown the surface as much as normal chips and wedges.

 [More pictures to be added soon.]

KKCake, half time assessment.

Always a risk trying new recipes for a big project, just dangerous if all the recipes are new, and I did get bitten.

Biscuit Joconde: Turns out misinterpret “ground almond mix (50/50)” in the biscuit joconde recipe as just almond meal; where it should have been read as almond meal and icing sugar mix, TPT (tant pour tant), or broyage. So the biscuit joconde tastes and feels like fluffy marzipan, bland almond and rough feel on the tongue. Hopefully I got enough sugar syrup in. I got caught by this more traditional recipe and its choice of words, unlike the one I’m used to.

White chocolate mousse This is a pâte a bombe based white chocolate mousse, I unfortunately wrote down some errors on paper while trying interpret the correct recipe and almost killed the cake with leakage with a too soft mousse. Two opposing force conflicted with the success with this mousse; firstly I’m used to having gelatine in the mousse to set, and secondly in order to not have gelatine prematurely setting before we get it into our moulds we would soft whip the cream. I soft whipped the cream; which without gelatine, a not very flat tray ; leaks the drained the blood from my skin as much as it did from the mould.

The recipe should have been clearer as three-quarter (firm) whipped cream, and the “ganache together” should have read as chocolate with some cream, instead deflating the pâte a bombe. I should have rewhipped the completed soft flowing mousse firmer, to compensate for the lack of gelatine.

If I had chosen to cut a wide disc of almond sponge that wedged itself against the cake ring, I’m sure I could have stopped almost all the leakage. 

FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!
 

White chocolate: Holy shit Nestle Plaistowe is expensive compound chocolate; at Cash & Carry $3.80 for 180 grams, that’s $21.11 per kilogram. Whereas I can get Lindt Piccoli White couverture buttons at the Re Store for $11.50 for 500 grams, or $23 per kilogram. Premium compound chocolate can go shove it! Nestle Melts taste and chew horribly, the next easy option is Nestle Snow Cap buttons in five kilogram boxes which I know are cheap as.

Clarified butter flocage: Worked better than expected, an improved on the veg oil concoction I tried last time for cocoa butter free flocage. But did have to up the 1% titanium dioxide colourant to 3% to compensate for the goldenness of the clarified butter.

 

    

Caramel mango: *Sniggers* Yeah… the frozen mango cheeks pureed themselves after mixing with the caramel. Oh well. 

 

KKCake is short for Kong Kong’s Cake. 

Original post: 04APR2012, 1027. Edited: 11APR2012, 1720.