Scott (click) , Jeth (click), and I are working on a pretty big dinner for some pretty amazing people in April. It’s a multi-course sit down dinner that will happen at Scott’s house and we’ve been planning it for quite some time now. You’ve seen the edible zen (click) garden so far and now I’m going to show you the fish course.
Scott is currently building a presentation platter for the fish and basically what we’re going to do is suspend it. The head is going to be first then body pieces and finally tail.
(Like this but suspended)
The pieces of fish will be ground then a bit of meat glue will be tossed in to bind it when it’s cooked. Tranglutaminase is a protein binder and you can read more about it here (click). It has all sorts of practical applications in a kitchen and I’m just now starting to work with it. After experimenting with this fish and seeing the results I’m f’ing hooked on this stuff.
Once the fish balls were made cooked them. I tried lightly sautéing one of them but that didn’t make me happy. I took another one and deep-fried it and I loved it but I still have to try roasting one. When I dropped the first one in the deep fryer the skin exploded off and made a crazy looking shape that at first I wasn’t really happy about but on further review it looked pretty bad ass…..the only problem with it is that I want them to look uniform on the presentation platter so that’s not going to work but as a plated item this is the way to go.
This is the plated exploded fish ball with a marudaizu sauce made with dashi and triple beef stock….fried carrots, leeks, and nori.
Skin glazed this time and not exploded. I’m going to roast the next version in hopes that I can see the skin and I’m going to try the skin on deep-fry again but next time I’m going to freeze the ball so I can cook it a little bit longer in order to make the skin that much more crispy and hopefully the skin won’t explode off…..we’ll see.
Side note: This dish tastes great!
That’s it for now. More experiments coming very soon!
Eric
Interesting!!!