Getting closer to Heston, literally.

Pic thanks to : http://www.hestonlive.com.au/

So for Christmas this year, I received a ticket to go and see Heston Blumenthal speak when he came to Perth.

I had to wait all the way until May to do it, but the day finally came! Now, the pictures in this post will be a little light on, since I was in a dark theater so not a lot of point.

Now, to say I was excited would be an understatement and some small part of me worried it could only be disappointing after all that build up. And perhaps if I hadn't read previous people's reports of the event, I may have been a little disappointed.

It was really enjoyable - but different to what I had anticipated when buying the tickets.

When I got tickets I was expecting a cooking show - whereas in truth it was more a autobiography of sorts. As I'd read reports that this was more of the flavour, I was able to enjoy it immensely for what it was, rather than some other idea I'd had in my head.

The start of the evening was very positive as I met up with my good friend (who happens to be a chef) for dinner at the Greenhouse. Reviews of that place had been mixed but we both enjoyed our tapas style dinner.

Arriving just before entry, we trekked up the two flights of stairs to our Upper Gallery seats (we could wave at the gods from there). Thankfully however, we got 1 row back from the front edge, in the center and had a clear view of the stage, with its large screen and kitchenette off to one side.

The downside of the evening was that there was a compere (provided by a TV station), who seemed mostly to exist to provide as with advertising periodically, by repeatedly telling us who the sponsors were. Doing so once I could have forgiven, but this happened around four times. If I'm paying significant dollars (and it was) I don't expect to have to put up with advertising. Very irritating, but the only real annoyance of the evening.

On to the show: Heston basically spoke through his history, interweaving the stories with anecdotes or explanations of concepts that related to the story at hand. Occasionally, food would be cooked to demonstrate a point and sample lucky people in the plush front seats got to eat some of it. (Yes, I was totally green with envy.)

He spoke of his first experience of a Michelin Starred restaurant at age 11 in France on holiday with his parents, and then linked that to a story about how we perceive (and recall) taste as a function of the experience as much the food - the company, the sights and sounds, the event and so on.

He then went on to discuss opening his restaurant, The Fat Duck and different amusing anecdotes about starting with all secondhand equipment and just him and a dishwasher guy and so on.

For me, the highlights were him showing footage and talking through the Fat Duck both front of house and behind the scenes, including explaining some of the more unusual technology that they use to achieve certain effects.

One that stuck in my mind is his explanation of how they make the fob watches filled with consomme for a Mad Hatter's tea party dish. He explained how the make a consomme, then reduce it by freezing, using a centrifuge and other cool toys (or as he called them "kit") to be able to make a jelly solid shaped like a watch that would restore to a drinkable consomme without affecting the flavour. Very cool. I'd seen this in his Feasts show, but it was cool to see more detail on this (and to find out you can order them in the restaurant!)

He also spoke about the inspiration for different dishes, why you need to rest your steak, why searing steak doesn't seal in the juices and how your sense of smell is most closely related to memory of all the senses.

But the one that got me; that, more than anything made me desperately want to be able to eat at his restaurant - was the Queen of Hearts playing cards made from white chocolate with a jam tart filling!

But, it would seem my own seat at the Fat Duck is but an unlikely dream - besides being on the other side of the world, and having no budget to do so, Heston noted they receive 25, 000 or more calls a day to get a seat. So if I ever do win lotto, it will take an awful lot of phones calls to secure a seat before I'd be booking my plane tickets sadly.

We did get a nice carry away (which is used right at the end of the show) - a little atomiser of essential oils that smells like a memory of a lolly shop and appropriately labelled "Like a Kid in a Sweet Shop"

Reflecting, as a follower of his for some time much of the information I had heard before and I can understand why some people were disappointed. Personally, I found it  very enjoyable and inspiring.and it left me, if nothing else, dreaming of making inspired food - that I have some chance of actually being able to eat!

Meal One: Mother's Day lunch, part one - Roast Chicken, Roast Potatoes and Glazed Carrots

So it was Mother's Day coming up, and both my own mother and my husband's were coming to lunch.
So I decided that this would be my first official Heston meal.

Heston Blumenthal : Meal 1.

Menu -

Roast Chicken (Heston Blumenthal at home)
Roast Potatoes (Heston Blumenthal at home)
Glazed Carrots (Heston Blumenthal at home)
Peas (frozen, my freezer)

     followed by

Liquid Center Chocolate Puddings (Heston Blumenthal at home)
with Salted Caramel Icecream.

Now, I'm only go to cover the Mains in this post, with the pudding to come in the next blog post.

Getting organized

So I realized that with so many components on the go, I'd need to make a a list. I ended up with a list for the fridge that listed everything I needed to do, and when, along with the various oven temperature shifts.  It was a good thing, because this is what made me realise I would need to be up around 7am. On a Sunday. Mother's Day Sunday. See the sacrifice there? I'm such a martyr to the cause! :)

If anyone following along wants a copy, let me know and I'll send it to you! There was a couple of minor adjustments required from the recipe, mostly because the potatoes needed a different temperature to the chicken so some small fudging was required, but it didn't appear to affect the outcome.

Brining the chicken overnight

So this  is something I've not done before - brining. This is basically soaking meat in salty water to increase the moisture content of the product so when you roast it, it doesn't dry out. I'd heard of doing this for Christmas turkeys, but never actually tried the technique.

Not wanting to use a tub that had been used for non-food related things (ewww) I went and bought a new one. (It now has FOOD written in large letters along the side).

I mixed up the brine solution a litre at a time. Heston suggests using a 8% solution - which is 80g of salt per litre of water. Now, it turns out, to fill a tub big enough to fit a chicken, you need a lot of water and thus, a lot of salt. More than I had counted on. I ran out of salt. But, my calculations put the finished salt levels within Heston's brining guidelines (which are 6-12% solutions) I ended up around 65g per L.

The chicken then gets soaked over night. Here is my water bath reclining chicken getting ready for her night nap.

Morning! Chicken prep for roasting.

So then the chicken gets taken out, rinsed...

 and patted dry.

Get the vegetables ready to go in the pan, along with some extra chicken wings. I wasn't entirely sure about the purpose of the chicken wings - possibly there to ensure the resulting  sauce you make has good flavour.


You cut the wing tips and parsons nose off, and then stuff the cavity with a whole lemon and fresh thyme.

Smother the whole thing with an obscene amount of butter (this meal is not diet friendly) and then into the oven at a really low temperature (90degrees) for about 3-4 hours. (Just as an aside - see my awesome new ceramic roasting dish I got for Mothers' Day? Love it.)

 

Roast potatoes, Glazed carrots

While that's going on, time to prep the spuds. I couldn't get the potato type he recommended, so these are royal blues I think. Peel your potatoes, and quarter them. Then rinse them underwater for about 5 minutes. This washes off all the starch. Apparently starch makes for bad cooked potatoes (it makes them go soft instead of crunchy - who knew?)

You then boil them until they are just about falling apart. Then treating them more gently than a drunken housemate, carefully pull them out into a colander with a slotted spoon. If you broke your slotted spoon last week making stock, just use a big spoon and drain off the water carefully, let them sit drying out in the colander.

To get the carrots ready, just peel and slice thickly and stick them to one side - you don't need those until later.

Chicken again..

Check your chicken after the requisite time (this was about 11am for me, after an 8am start).

The chicken breast internal temp should be (according to Heston) 60 degrees. Mine got to 66, so clearly it was ready. It gets to sit out on the bench resting.

Potatoes!

This works because now you crank the temp up so you can cook the pre-cooked potatoes. The pan and oil (lots of oil!) goes in to preheat, and then you pop in the potatoes to the preheated oil and coat them. Then into the oven.

Chicken - sauce

So  now you take the chicken pan and brown off those chicken wings and carrot.

Add a cup of white wine. (This was just inexpensive stuff I had in the fridge for cooking). And a cup of brown chicken stock that you slaved over the week before. (*slaving for home made stock optional). Get it reducing.

Carrots.

Stick your carrots on. You cook these with (a lot of) butter and (a little) sugar on the stove top for about 30 minutes. No water. Heston noted (at the Heston Live show) that if you cook them in water some of the flavour gets lots in the water, whereas this doesn't happen with butter. 

Back to your newly reduced sauce...

The book says to "reduce to a sauce". I found that difficult to gauge. I mean, a runny sauce is still a sauce, right?  I reduced it until it was a nice brown colour. About half the liquid I think?

Now reduced, you strain it  through a sieve.

Chop fresh parsley and tarragon. Mmm. Smells good.

Chicken goes back in the pan (which is still hot because of the all that reducing) and the oven gets cranked up to 240. This is to brown the chicken. To avoid burning the potatoes, I moved them to the very bottom of the oven.

I forgot to take a picture but while the chicken is browning you heat up the sauce and add the chopped herbs.

All ready to serve...

we have carrots ready..

roast potatoes drained on paper towel to stop them being oily..

and a roasted and browned chicken!




Ta-da! 

 

Note the breast meat, taken off and carved against the grain, "to make it seem more tender".

Things I learned from this recipe:

• The timing is really important to write out - it means you don't stress out with all the little jobs you need to do. (You even get time to stop and have morning tea!)
• The sauce was amazing! I really do think the stock brought this into its own, and the fresh tarragon I think was critical. 
• Cooking the chicken just a little longer might be good (see below under guest opinions)
• Brining is awesome. The finished meat was slightly salty, but only so as to not need extra seasoning. Meat was nice and moist.

 

Verdict:

This really was very tasty. The carrots were delicious, the roast potatoes just like good restaurant ones! Heehee. I do think this was one of the nicest roasts I've ever made.

My only reservation really is that I am starting to think that it really is a case of quadruple the amount of fat/butter/oil you would consider putting in a dish and it all becomes delicious. Not great for every day fare, surely.

And I do have to say, the homemade stock did seem to make a huge difference in the finished sauce. While I don't think I'd want to be making that all the time (unless maybe I worked from home) it certainly lifted a 'tasty' sauce into 'seriously good' territory.

Guest opinions:

Some guests (husband and mother in law) found some of the chicken a little on the pink side. I think I would consider cooking the breast to 70 degrees, as at 66 it was still a little pink, with visible veins (though only on the meat right next to the carcass).

That said, all guests stated they enjoyed it all - commenting on the chicken, said the potatoes were "really lovely" and much appreciation for the glazed carrots from my husband (they are his favourite).

I forgot to ask for a score out of ten. Oops.

Next post - liquid center chocolate puddings... and then my experience from seeing Heston Live!

Something for the side.. Salted Caramel Icecream

This recipe is not a Heston one, but is designed to go with a Heston dish next week.

It's from a book I got for Christmas - Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams.

I have wanted a Salted Caramel ice cream recipe ever since I had some on our honeymoon (almost a year ago! eep!). I did some research and found out that this woman (and her ice cream parlour) have salted caramel ice cream as their signature dish. Now, I do own several ice cream cookbooks, but the recipes in this one seemed sufficiently unique to justify it's wishlisting.

At any rate, its interesting for more than a few reasons - and not just the Gorgonzola Dolce Ice cream with Candied Walnuts. One of the things I find very interesting it the absence of eggs.

I am accustomed to ice cream basically being a process of making a form of flavoured custard, with or without stuff mixed through, and then frozen in an ice cream maker. No from-scratch egg custard here though! Instead, she uses cream cheese, corn syrup (aka glucose syrup) and other stuff.

Let's quickly cover the basic process.

1. Prep 4 bowls - milk & cornflour; salt & cream cheese; cream & corn syrup; ice bath
2. Dry burn the sugar into caramel
3. add cream
4. add milk, boil for a little while
5. add cornflour mix, heat for 1 minute til thick
6. add the mix to the cream cheese
7. chill in ice bath until cold (~30 mins)
8. Freeze.

So those of you who've made ice cream before would recognize just how different this is. I was really curious to see if the lack of eggs made it at all icy or affect the flavour otherwise. So let's see..

 

Stuff all ready to go...

 Bowl 1: cornflour and a little bit of milk.

 A bunch of freshly ground sea salt goes into..

 Bowl 2: cream cheese & salt. then  whisked to get the lumps out

 Bowl (well jug) 3: cream and glucose syrup. I had to do some checking before I was able to confirm that many glucose syrup (such as this one) are made from corn. Apparently, in the US because corn is plentiful, glucose syrup is normally made from corn - hence corn syrup. To be honest, I am pretty sure you could substitute a home-made sugar syrup here just fine, but I managed to get corn-derived glucose syrup at the local supermarket and called it a win.

 Sugar in a big saucepan, over high heat. No water, this the version for grown ups.  At this point you wait until there is a melted layer of sugar at the bottom, then push it around until it caramelises. I don't have pictures of that sorry, as I needed my focus (to not burn it) and then needed two hands to add the cream in. At that point it gets rather excitable.

 This is with a little cream/glucose added, once I felt I could pick up my camera again. It's a medium brown colour. I suspect I could have gone darker but I don't like a super-dark caramel - a little too bitter for me.

 Milk's added and it gets to boil for a little while. Then mix in the cornstarch, and cook another minute. There is a photo of that too, but trust me it looks identical to this photo.

 Add in the caramel mix to the cream cheese and salt. It was pretty tasty at this point. But I absolutely did not lick the ladle when I was done. At all.  Or the bowl. Or the saucepan. Or the spatula. Believe no such lies that are told to you, I am too much a lady to consider such things.

 So now it's sitting chilling in the ice bath in tis giant ziplock bag. This felt kind of silly and unncessary (the bag especially). I suspect next time I will follow my usual routine - chill the glass bowl of icecream mix in a larger bowl of ice and a little water to get it cool, then refridgerate overnight. Then put it in the icecream maker.

This method was supposed to get it ice cold in around 30 mins, but I wasn't really convinced it was cold enough. Anyway, it went into the icecream maker.
 In the book, Jeni notes that you shouldn't stop your ice cream maker before the ice cream starts to pull away from the outside. Neither of my ice cream makers do this. I even checked this one. If I wait that long, it starts to visibly melt again. Hence, I will stick to churning until soft serve consistency. Maybe its colder where she is. (shrug) Or maybe I just need to wait until i get one of those huge refrigerated units (ha! yeah right! Law books sadly take precedence in this household).

 But anyway here is the icecream pouring into its freezer container.

 

And the finished product - just a taste before Sunday. To make sure it was ok ... and so I could blog. See the sacrifice I made there?

Things I learned:

• I'd cook the caramel just a tiny bit darker. Now I am familiar with it, I think I would be braver and tempt fate that little more.
• I'd cool the mix like I normally do - over ice till cool, then into the fridge overnight.

Verdict

The recipe is solid and an interesting alternative to using all those eggs (I have some recipes that call for 10 egg yolks!)  It spoons pretty much straight from the freezer, which is a nice change.

The flavour is really very nice. Not too salty, not too sweet. Very very tasty. Should partner well with my chocolate dessert. And I think makes a very nice more 'adult' ice cream flavour.

Next post - Roast chicken, potatoes, glazed carrots. (to be followed by the chocolate dessert) 

....Probably 2 posts at least!

Starting with the base.. brown chicken stock

Well, all good journeys start somewhere. And, for most of us, you forget something, bump your head when putting the suitcases in the car, and all that jazz. But it doesn't matter, because you've started.

As preparation for my Meal 1, I decided to make some chicken stock. Heston waxes lyrical at just about any opportunity to tell you just how important a great stock is.

Now, I've made stocks before. It basically involves cooking onion, carrot, celery and the like a bit. Adding some form of meat / bones combination. Boiling it a lot. Scrapping off all the icky stuff. Throw away everything except the liquid. Tada!

This process is a little (lot) more involved. But then I watch Heston make his chicken stock in a pressure cooker and thought - "Hey! I have one of them!" And so chicken stock I made.

It's a simple, yet time consuming process.

1. Roast chicken wings
2. Slooooowly cook onion, then add carrot for another long slow cook, then mushrooms and garlic for more of the same.
3. Add cooked chicken, plus pan deglazing, plus 2L of cold water.
4. bring to simmer
5. cook in pressure cooker for 2 hours
6. turn off heat, wait until cold (many many hours)
7. drain, filter and refrigerate
8. remove fat, and store.

So let's see how that panned out.

Roasting the chicken wings. You're supposed to roast 2.5 kilos of these suckers. Heston must have a much bigger roasting pan than me, because that quantity took 2 pans. I also did a chicken carcass, which I got from the butchers cheap.

So they get roasted for an hour.

Mmmmm... roasted chicken bits.

While they are cooking you get started slow cooking the onion. That cooks on very low heat, for about 45 mins. I've done this before, no biggie. You then add the carrot, another (20 mins). and then 10 mins for mushrooms and garlic. It's all sliced very finely to maximise the surface area.

 What you don't do is walk away from the stove during this process. Not even for literally 2 minutes to explain a finer point of Roman mythology as depicted in Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief to your daughter.  This will result in burned onions and carrots, and you dumping them and starting over.

So don't. leave. that. stove. Stir that sucker until its ready.

Then comes the put it all in the pot stage. It looks kind ordinary here.

You heat it, up and steam cooker that sucker for 2 hours, checking on it periodically to make sure it doesnt trip the valve - this means its boiling inside and will make your stock cloudy. (I did not know this about steam cookers).

Then you take it off the heat and the let whole thing cool down completely. It was about midnight by this time, so, I went to bed, and when I got up in the morning it was still warm. So it takes a while to cool.

Then comes the fun double filtering thing. First colander,  then wet muslin over a finer sieve.

So into the colander and much swishing of meat to get the juice out. Don't press too hard or you too will break your cheap slotted spoon. (sigh)

Ah, the blurry action shot from the high quality child/photographer who was helping.

After first filtering. The colour is pretty good, much darker than other stocks I've made before.

So on to the second filtering - wet muslin (newly bought from textile traders for the purpose. Pretty cheap, $4 a meter for double layer.) This works really well! I was actually kind of surprised what a difference it made.

All the stuff it filtered out. (It was kind of goo-like).

And so here's the stock, before chilling to get rid of the fat. It looks pretty good. Tastes like proper roast chicken, not chicken stock.

This threw me, and left me giggling. After chilling in the fridge for several hours ....

The fat just scraps off really, really easily.. because the stock itself is a total jelly! It even wobbled. After hearing all my giggles from the kitchen, husband even made me show him to prove it.

 Heston wrote (in the book) and spoke (on TV) a lot about using wings becase they are full of gelatine to thicken your stock, give it body etc but I wasnt expecting it to be a wobbly solid! It won't stay that way once heated of course, but it did give no small amusement when scooping it into containers for storage..

 All set for freezing, with a zip lock bag of 2 cups, and one of 300 ml also set aside for freezing.

Things I learned from this recipe:

• I pull weird 'concentrating' faces when I am cooking.
• I think my chicken wings could have stood to be a bit more brown. I think my oven is on the cool side. (Damn I miss my old oven.)
• You cannot ignore the slow cooking vegetables for any length of time. Focus young one, and stir.... do not get distracted by Roman mythology.

 Verdict:

I'll feedback more on this once I've tried it in cooking but at this stage I'm unsure. It tastes good, but it really is a whole evening of cooking (roughly 8-12pm) -and then another hour or so to filter and pack up for storage.

Decent (though not amazing) stock can be bought so cheaply and conveniently, that this might become one of those 'just for special occasions' things, since I am rarely going to have a spare evening on a weekend to make stock and achieve little else.

Will see once I've tasted it in situ though.

Edited to add (after trying it in a dish): Yes, the flavour in the sauce made from this was really exceptional (compared to anything I've done similar in the past). It gave real oomph to the flavour. Not an everyday addition, but certainly something I'd plan on including where possible in future.

Next post - salted caramel icecream!