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?

Winter Feast, Dessert: Lardy cake

So I am recounting my Winter Feast adventures. We had:

·     Pumpkin soup

·     Fish pie with Sand and Sea topping

·     Lardy cake

Dessert. Ever since I saw the picture in Heston Blumenthal at Home, I realised that this would be perfect for a winter’s dinner. Butterscotch paired with warm fruit and sweet bread. Heston claims that this is a highly traditional dish, but it seems not one that really made it to the colonies (unlike many others, like Plum Pudding for Christmas, or trifle.) So, prior to this, I’d not ever eaten a Lardy cake. Or, as my daughter kept thinking it was called, a la-di-dah cake. Which is kind of funny, since that really is everything this dessert isn’t.

The ‘cake’ (though I think of more as a sweet bread) had three components – the bread, the filling and the butterscotch sauce. I feel that making this is very similar to making a combination of cinnamon scrolls, fruit mince pies and Christmas pudding. Nothing super challenging.

 

Steps:

1. Make the bread
2. Make the filling
3. Assemble and bake
4. Make the sauce
5. Pan fry and Serve

Really, its fairly straightforward. But then, in comparison to that fish pie, maybe everything is straight forward.

 

Make the bread

You mix up the flour and water, then let it rest for 30 minutes. Given there is no yeast in it here, I have no idea what this step does beyond making wet flour. (I regularly make pizza dough, which doesn’t need this, so if you know why you do this, please leave a comment. Is it a bread-making thing?)

Then the yeast, salt and a tiny bit of lard get added in and mixed well. It gets popped into a bowl, and left to rise. This give you… puffy dough.

 

Make the filling

This step reminds me rather a lot of making fruit mince pies. (Which I do every year. Bought ones are always too sweet, and mealy). Lots of fruit gets cooked with cognac until all the cognac is pretty much gone.

Then you cream butter and sugar, add in the lard and golden syrup. Once that’s all mixed up the fruit goes in. (Now it really reminds me of Christmas pudding mix. Speaking of which I need to make them for Christmas!)

 

Assemble and bake

Roll out your dough as if you’re making cinnamon scrolls (i.e. a nice even rectangular shape.)

Spread over the fruit mix, leaving an end bit to stick.

 

Roll it up into a nicely perfect tube of fattening soused fruit. Or, as in my case, struggle to get it to roll nicely due to the filling being a natural lubricant, and realise your rectangle was more a trapezoid. Apparently. More simply put, you are supposed to tightly roll it. I found this very difficult, because the dough is very soft, and the fruit mix very slippery, and thereby resists you doing anything “tightly” with it. This means it was more flattened than nicely circular, and I can’t see how it would stay nicely rounded like in the picture anyway. Not having made this dish before, I don’t know how soft or hard the dough should have been  but was concerned about adding more flour in case it became tough. It wasn’t sticky or anything, just.. well, doughy.

So that gets put on a tray and left to puff up and get fatter. Which it did.

 

Then it goes into the oven while you make the sauce. Periodically, you ladle over the melted lard/fruit mix.

 

Making the sauce

So it’s butterscotch. Which is kind of what happens when you make caramel and add butter to it. That is, its sugar plus butter, rather than just the molten sugar. This one also has cream and golden syrup. 

You whisk it…

 

Then heat it up to soft crack stage. (i.e. Before it becomes toffee).

Finishing the cake

So the cake comes out of the oven. 

And get placed upside down to cool. Disappointingly, because the top of the cake was quite hard/firm and the bottom quite soft (but cooked) it cracked, thereby removing any elegance possibly promised. Cooking also seemed to make it even more likely to fall apart than it was before I cooked it. Messy.

Pan fry and serve.

So when you are ready to serve it, you cut slices, then pan fry these in butter to heat them up and serve with the warmed butterscotch sauce. I was so busy getting them sliced and pan fried, I totally forgot to take a picture til quite a bit later…

As you might be able to see under the pile of ice cream, the shape didn’t hold, instead of nice rounds they were more like a flattened shape.

But more importantly, taste:  the lardy cake was okay, but not really anything more than that. The butterscotch sauce was nice and I’d make again, but the cake was pretty disappointing. It’s possible that the fault was the not-tightly rolled shape, but I’m not convinced.

 

Lessons learned:

• Butterscotch sauce is a winter popularity winner.

 Guest opinions:

Guests enjoyed it, but nowhere near as much as other dishes. It was nice, fruity, and good for winter and they loved the butterscotch sauce.

 

Verdict:

Disappointing, but not bad. To be honest, there are many other desserts with equal or less effort I’d make again before bothering with this. Perhaps its just that I wasn’t aware of what it should be like and so was underwhelmed.

Next: Mustard sauce, courtesy of Heston’s recent appearances on Masterchef Australia.

Mains: Salmon with Bois Boudran Sauce, crushed potatoes and salad

Which should be subtitled to: The sauce with the unpronounceable name makes its way onto my dinner party roster.

To recap, this is the main course dish from my mother's special birthday lunch.
There were six courses...

1. Beetroot lollies (*)
2. Red cabbage gazpacho with mustard ice cream (*)
3. Goat cheese tarts
4. Salmon with Bois Boudran Sauce (*), green salad
5. Tiramisu (*)
6. Chocolate biscuits (*), tea and coffee

So I made the salmon, only without the sous vide - but really for me, the sauce in this dish was the star of the show.

But let's back up a bit. Observant readers might complain I'm skipping ahead, missing out the actual entree that came after the soup. It's not a Heston dish, so I'll give it only a little coverage .

So the salmon main was preceded by a dish I have made so many times I've lost count: Goat's cheese tarts.

This is not a Heston dish, as it predates my awareness of him by about a decade or so. I was actually embarrassed when I realised just how old this recipe is, and just how long I've been making it... Vogue Entertaining and Travel, August 1999 (Australian edition, naturally). It is a seriously good-but-easy dish of slow cooked onion and handfuls of thyme, on excellent puff pastry, topped with fresh goat's cheese, a scattering of hazelnuts and a wave of hazelnut oil. Oh, and served with a few green leaves which give them impression of freshness and make the dish look healthy without actually getting in the way or anything.

It's a dish that is good enough that I can forgive myself for making it .. now for nearly a decade and a half. Ah.. the young new-to-dinner-parties me, all keen as mustard to make proper adult swanky dishes, and wanting to impress while still surviving on minimum part-time wage as a poor student...

but now on to the real deal..

Salmon with Bois Boudran sauce and crushed potatoes

*there was also a green salad, but let's not pretend you don't know what a green salad looks like. On second thoughts, if your green salad has tomatoes in it, you are doing it wrong. Nevermind.

Process (the way I did it anyway)

1. Mix up the sauce and chill it
2. Make the potatoes.
3. Ignore the stuff about sous vide and pan fry your salmon as usual
4. Assemble & serve

Step one: Make Bois Boudran sauce.

So this is the kind of sneaky Heston Blumenthal dish, that turns out not to be a Heston dish at all. It's by some other guy entirely. You might have heard of him - he used to cook for rich people. His name was Michel Roux (Senior). What gets me his how the uber rich Rothschilds ended up being such a fan of something made from such pedestrian ingredients. Most of this stuff I have in my cupboard at home, except the tarragon. But then I tasted it and it all makes sense. 

Also, despite listening to Michel Roux talk about it online, I still can't pronounce it properly, despite repeated attempts. Yes, this bugs me. You want a go? Try this.

There's not a a whole lot to this in truth beyond - soften some shallots, then mix in with a bunch of bottled sauces, and add a pile of tarragon and parsley and leave it sit for a few hours.  Don't believe me?

Assemble your bottles.

Chop all your shallots in a food processor.

Soften them in oil, and then realise they are mushy and no good. Be sad, put them to one side.

Then, chop the extra shallots your mum bought (yay!) by hand, cook them and be much happier.

Then mix this sauce...

 to this one...

 and this one...

 

whisk it...

chop up your herb mountain...

...to add in (the tarragon, parsley) and the finely hand-diced, softened shallots.

Stir and let it sit for a couple of hours.

 Truly that's it.. oh then plate it up.

Crushed potatoes

Really, another easy one.

Cook your potatoes with a few hunks of garlic.

Remember that really-too-fine-and-slightly mushy shallot? Use that because it is conveniently quite close to what you needed for this dish anyway.  I was glad, I don't like wasting stuff.

Drain your potatoes, discard the garlic, mix in the shallots plus some mustard and vinegar.

Realise, again, that Heston has no good idea of quantities and this is way more than you need.

Salmon

Heston has this lovely write up and very impressive picture of how he cooks salmon sous vide. (Helpful tip: Sous vide: That's food cooked slow in warm water while ensconced in little plastic baggies. Not an endorsed definition)

I disregarded all of Heston's lovely notes. Mostly because I don't have a sous vide machine (or realistically, space to store one) and after the scrambled egg sous vide issues, I wasn't willing to gamble on my mother's birthday lunch.

Thusly, I did what I normally do, which is to pan fry, ensuring the skin gets nice and crisp.

Assembly

Uh... so I'd like to claim it's especially fancy but really..

Sauce, then potatoes then salmon.

(*Sunglasses not required as side dish)


Done!

Things I learned.

• Really, some things just don't need to be complicated.
• Heston really can't be trusted on any line that starts "Serves.."
• I need more excuses to make this, and a source of cheap, good-quality tarragon.

Verdict:

Working our way down... salmon was nice, slightly underdone (the way my mother likes it) which was too underdone for some guests. (I actually recooked one for one guest who was very apologetic but couldn't cope with it even slightly undercooked).

Crushed potatoes were ok, but rather ordinary. In hindsight, I'd say you need to only just cook the poatoes - they really need to hold their shape well for "crushing". Also, go easy on the oil and vinegar - it was a little too wet for my tastes.

The Bois Boudran Sauce was wonderful. Flavour was amazing, complex yet simple in a savoury tomato-y kind of way. I thought it might overwhelm the salmon, but I felt it didn't at all. Maybe it was too delicious for me to care. Either way.

Guest opinions

Other than some variability (which I tried to account for, but didn't quite match) in preferred levels of doneness on the salmon, this was very well received. Several guest commented on how much they enjoyed it.

I'd say I woudl add this to my dinner party standards, though it will need to fight off my husbands preferred Buerre blanc with salmon!


Next time -  a brief analysis of tiramisu, mark 2.