A Funny Little Cheese Course - Recipe

This was just pure play. I wanted to see if I could do a cheese course that would look like cheesecake, but not be particularly sweet. I landed on a Laura Chenel chevre with a little salty crust and strawberry granita.

A cheese course, like an amuse bouche or a tapa is an opportunity to be a little less constrained, because you don't need to make something that would be appropriate in an entree-sized portion. You can use bold flavors and surprising combinations without rapidly tiring the palate.

The strawberry component has one ingredient: strawberries. I just pureed the heck out of them and then made a simple granita by stirring/raking them with a fork every 15 minutes or so until frozen. The stirring keeps the ice crystals small and smooth. Needless to say you want to use exceptional strawberries for this; don't even bother if you only have hard tasteless berries that made a 2000 mile trip to your grocery store.

I wanted to pay homage to the classic graham cracker crust of a cheesecake, but go salty instead of sweet. I landed on coarsely pulverized rice crackers and mini-pretzels with a little butter, fennel pollen and black pepper.

Goat Cheese with Strawberry Granita and a Pretzel Crust
Vegetarian
Serves 4 as a cheese course

• 1 cup strawberries, hulled
• 25 g. rice crackers (I used the wafer-shaped ones from Trader Joe's)
• 10 g. mini-pretzels
• 25 g. unsalted butter
• big pinch of fennel pollen
• few grinds black pepper
• 3/4 c. chevre (preferably Laura Chenel brand)

1. Puree the strawberries thoroughly. Place them in a shallow plastic container in your freezer. Every fifteen minutes or so, give them a stir with a fork, raking through the ice crystals to break them up. In about two hours or less you should have a nicely frozen granita.
2. In a mini food processor, combine the rice crackers, pretzels, butter, fennel pollen and black pepper. Process until you have fairly uniform small crunchy bits, say 1/4 - 1/2 the size of a grain of puffed rice cereal. Taste and mix in a little more salt if needed.
3. To serve, spray or rub a 1" ring mold with a light coating of oil and place it on a plate. Press in a 1/2" layer of the crust mixture. Top that with 3 tablespoons of the chevre, again, presing it into the mold, then gently push the "cheesecake" out of the mold. Repeat for the remaining plates. Remove the granita from the freezer and scrape it with the fork again to restore the texture. Top each plate with a tablespoon or so of the granita and serve immediately.

Avocado, Grapefruit, Mango, Yuzu, Cilantro

Avocado with grapefruit tartare

Apparently these are among my favorite ingredients for late-night culinary experiments, probably because there is so much that can be done with them raw. By playing with different cuts, you can achieve suprising and pleasing textures. The flavors are so automatically compatible, it is hard to do anything wrong. 

This would work great as an appetizer before either a Latin or Asian meal.

Mixed in with the ruby grapefruit are little cubes of yuzu gelee. On the plate are a few drops of cilantro oil (hard to see), and black salt. The salt contains volcanic charcoal, which will easily run when exposed to water, so I prefer to use it on a dry plate or only at the very last second before serving.

To cut the avocado this way, first halve it and remove the pit. With the skin still on, lay a half cut side down on your board. Working very carefully so as not to de-digitalize yourself, put one hand on top and use a serrated tomato knife to make a cut parallel to the board. Then remove the skin just from that slice. Rub it right away with a bit of grapefruit juice to avoid browning.

For the grapefruit, cut supremes and drink all of the juice to fortify yourself. Cut the supremes once lengthwise, then finely dice.

For proper cilantro oil, blanch and immediately shock a bunch of cilantro to preserve the bright color. Dry thoroughly. Puree with 1/2 cup neutral vegetable oil in a high speed blender and strain thoroughly first through a sieve and then cloth. You can remove any water by freezing. The version in the picture above was made with a half-arsed version of this technique which is why the color is weak.

For the yuzu gelee, whisk together 20 grams of yuzu juice (available at a good Asian grocery), 1 teaspoon of sugar, 0.6 grams of LM pectin (I use Pomona brand), and a tiny pinch of the calcium stuff included in the pectin packet. Bring to a boil in the microwave, and immediately pour into a tiny plastic square mold. Refrigerate until gelled. Dice.

A little bit of minced red shallot would be good too.

Using Dry Ice to Carry Scent - A Culinary Fog

Lapsang souchong fog

It is a popular device in modern restaurants to serve clouds of perfumed smoke as a way to enhance a dish, adding another layer of sensory experience. Smoke can be produced with a small smoking gun, or expensive paraphenalia, and served to the diner along with the rest of the food under an enclosure. Alinea fills plastic bags with the smoke, wraps them in beautiful pillowcases, punctures them with a pin, and rests the plate on top.

When I was using dry ice for a homemade anti-griddle, I got to thinking about whether the beautiful fog it produces could be a different way to produce a scented "smoke". It turns out the answer is yes, in the simplest possible way. If you simply make a strong infusion of whatever aroma you want to carry, and then at the last minute add a small chunk of dry ice, you can pour the fog into your serving vessel, cover it, and bring it to the table. When the diner removes the top, the scent greets them right away, and if in a glass, it can actually be drunk.

My first experiment was with lapsang souchong tea. This tea is profoundly smoky to begin with, so I thought it would be kind of amusing that the fake smoke actually smelled like smoke. In the picture above I served it with drinking chocolate, cherry-smoked Japanese salt (from The Meadow in Portland, Oregon - a terrific salt & chocolate shop), and lapsang souchong pudding. I would have preferred cherry blossoms, but only the plums are in bloom this week.

I also tried cinnamon and that carried just fine too. Looking forward to experimenting with other volatiles.

[By the way, not surprisingly it turns out that this idea has been used for several years by Grant Achatz and Heston Blumenthal, and no doubt others. Thanks to Alex from Ideas in Food for helping me find the reference.]

One potential advantage to this technique is that you can make a low temperature infusion, preserving the unheated natural aromas. I think I'll try lemongrass next, as that would be an example where traditional smoking might not work so well.

A couple of words about safety. First of all, dry ice is really cold. It can hurt you. Learn how to handle it safely before messing with it. Second, inhaling too much of that smoke or using it in an enclosed space can be toxic. It is CO2 after all. Here is some basic safety info (which I don't vouch for, just passing along).