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This is my totally not-late-by-20-minutes NICSA 19 post. Inspiration came from Ratio and The Flavor Bible, trying to branch out a little bit and build a better understanding of how different taste profiles can come together with the same ingredients. *** Okay, now that I have a bit more time and I'm no longer delirious with the flu, here's some more detail. I started out this challenge wanting to try some new ideas since I'd never worked with cranberries before. To get started, I checked the cranberries page in The Flavor Bible to get some ideas for good combinations. I wound up going for 1 savory dish with pork, dark chocolate, jalapeno and walnuts, 1 sweet dish with nuts, cream cheese, nutmeg and ginger, and 1 drink with orange and sugar. --- PORK --- I'd never tried a tenderloin roulade before, and it seemed like it might work better than trying to stuff a pork chop with the ingredients.  This was also the first time that I can remember ever actually trying to butterfly something, and I promptly hosed it up by cutting almost completely through one of the thirds. It wasn't totally separate, so I was hoping I could fix it with some creative tying later on.  Fun fact - an empty beer bottle makes a great substitute for a meat tenderizer if you're lacking one.  I roughly chopped everything and decided to add some bread to give it a little more structure and hopefully prevent the filling from leaking. I also forgot the thyme completely at this point.  Give it a nice sear on all sides, then into the oven until temp  Unfortunately, I started with slices from the mangled end of the roulade which kinda fell apart. The sections later on held together a lot better and looked a lot prettier.  Overall this turned out better than I was expecting - the jalapeno/dark chocolate/cranberry mixed well with the pork flavor. I think I'd probably leave out the bread next time - it didn't add much and made rolling more difficult. --- TART --- Next up, I decided to try making a dessert tart. I'd made a lemon and raspberry tart a year or two back, and figured the same basic technique would work fine for cranberries. To mellow out the cranberry/lemon sour and bitter flavors, I thought that a nut crust and a cream cheese layer might mellow things out nicely without becoming too sweet.  I forgot to take pre-food processor pictures, but I used the tart crust ratio in Ratio, replacing 1/4 of the flour with ground walnuts. I also cut back on butter a bit to account for the extra fat in the nuts.  Next up, cranberry sauce - I made this the standard way of cooking cranberries in a bit of water until they burst, then blending and filtering through a cheese cloth to remove the shreds of hull. I then added lemon and sugar to taste. Finally, I tempered and added 3? eggs yolks to make it set up in the oven (also forgot pictures here).  Next, I rolled out the crust (clearly didn't hand-mix the butter in quite well enough, whoops.) and blind baked, then added a layer of cream cheese and then a layer of cranberry. I had intended to add some designs between layers with a toothpick but it was too liquid for that, oh well.    Finally, into the oven at 350 until set.  This was excellent - great mix of tart and a little sweet with a little tang from the cream cheese, backed by the rich nuttiness of the crust. I didn't make the prettiest crust and burned the edges a bit, but it didn't hurt the flavor much. --- SHRUB --- Finally, for a drink I thought a shrub would be fun since I'd never made one before. I looked up a few guides and was surprised how easy it was - pour hot vinegar over fruit, wait a while, add sugar. For the vinegar, I used a white balsamic - it seemed like it would complement the cranberry flavors well without being over powering.  In terms of actually making the shrub, it really was that easy - I re-used some empty jam jars that I added split craberries to and then poured in near-boiling vinegar. Other recipes had you cook the cranberries until bursting, but I found that it wasn't really necessary. After steeping for about a day, I poured off the vinegar (save the cranberries!) and added sugar to it until it hit a good balance.  For the actual drinks, my first idea was gin and sage, making more of a light summer drink instead of a darker fall/winter cocktail.  For proportions, I used 1 shot gin, .5 ounce shrub, 1 rubbed sage leaf and a few of the shrub cranberries. I also tried a few variations with lemon peel/orange peel as well as equal parts champagne, but would up liking the simplest version the best.  The gin cocktail was fun, but didn't feel quite right for the season. So, I also tried a whiskey-based drink with 1 1/2 shots whiskey, .5 ounce shrub, .5 ounce spiced simple syrup and a dash or two of bitters and shrub cranberries for decoration. This turned out really, really tasty - I made a few for some friends a few days post-thanksgiving and it went over great. Just enough of the cranberry comes through to make it taste fairly unique, without being too wacky.  I had a lot of fun coming up with the ideas for this and taking the dishes from concepts to actual food. DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Dec 7, 2015 |
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Dec 6, 2015 07:22
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You slid in there. I was about to go to bed when I remembered that I need to post a voting thread! Good work, fellow Trader Joe's shopper. Love the roulade and pecans in the pie crust. When you get a chance, please come back in with some edits to explain the drink what exactly was happening inside your tart tart!
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Dec 6, 2015 07:30
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I like the idea of dark chocolate and cranberry together there. That sounds good. That's a good looking pie as well!
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Dec 7, 2015 16:08
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My god, a pie pinker then my own.
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Dec 7, 2015 18:58
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