The Essential Flourless Mustard Sauce (recipe from Masterchef Australia)

So this recipe comes courtesy of Heston Blumenthal’s relatively recent appearance on Masterchef Australia. I don’t usually watch MasterChef. I find the competitive-but-not-seemingly-fair reality TV nature of it all bugs me. But then they had “Heston week” so I (of course) watched that.

The recipe is available here.

Heston talks in various places about using agar agar as a thickening agent rather than flour, so that you get a “cleaner” flavour. This recipe is one he demonstrated on the show, so I thought I’d give it a try with our roast chicken dinner this week.

Steps:

1.       Reduce wine
2.       Cook in the other liquids
3.       Add the agar agar and cook
4.       Mix through the mustards & herbs, blend
5.       Heat & serve

(Very simple as far as these things go).

Reduce the wine

Now previously, I’ve commented on not finding it easy to tell when you have reduced your liquid sufficiently – like in this case, to reduce it to one third. This time I came up with a good solution. (And if anyone is thinking “well, obviously…” I apologise, but I can’t be the only person who didn’t think of this straight off). Once you pour in the liquid, measure the depth with something – I used a fork. Take note of the depth. 

Then, once you reduce it, you now have something to compare it against by dipping it in again. Easy. (Note the slightly more yellow colour of the reduced liquid. Because otherwise, you see, these photos look identical. They aren't. You'll have to just trust me.)

 

Cook in the other liquids

In goes the chicken stock…

And the milk and cream.

That gets boiled for 10 minutes.

Add the agar agar

Then the agar agar gets added, and whisked in.

Then simmered for 4 minutes, and left to cool slightly.

Then, blended with a stick blender to ensure there aren’t any lumps of agar agar in the sauce. Even though mine didn’t seem to have any lumps, it did still seem to improve the silkiness. 

Add the mustard & herbs

In goes the mustards, and the herbs. Smells pretty good. But seems fairly thick. White sauce thick, so probably OK, I think...

Then, heat and serve!

 

Opinions:

So the taste was fine. And when the sauce was piping hot, it was OK, if a little thick.

But. Once the sauce hit anything cool (like say, the dinner plate) or when it cooled off (like when you were half way through eating) it turned to jelly.

Cold, creamy mustard flavoured jelly. It didn’t taste bad, it was just too odd – off putting to eat and too thick.

I leaves me wondering if either :

a) my agar agar is unusually strong? (I’ve looked online, and there is nothing to suggest that agar agar varies in strength), or

b) Heston simply includes way too much agar agar in his dishes.

This is the second time I’ve felt that the agar agar thickening was too strong – I found the same issue with the beetroot lollies. (insert link).

Verdict

The flavour was nice enough, but the very thick & jellied result on cooling was off putting – unpleasantly so. I am considering trying this again with ¼ the recommended agar agar. Or, possibly, borrowing some agar agar off a friend (different brand) and then doing a test with equivalent amounts in liquid to check the result.

Has anyone else had issues with using agar agar as specified in a Heston dish? I’d love to know if you have used it either way.

Next: Not sure! Don't have any plans for once... Suggestions?

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!