Beetroot 'Fregola', Basil Infused Snails, Baby Squid, Glazed Radishes and Beets

As anyone who's been following this blog will know, I love beetroot. Whether it be in a sweet or a savoury medium. This week was the turn of the savoury side and a new dish for the spring menu. I wanted to use fresh snails on the menu again and was looking for a garnish that would make the dish a little more accessible to our customers. After all theres no point having beautiful local products if the diners aren't going to taste them. So I set about thinking of the dish. At first I thought we would serve the snails with a potato risotto, (a technique I first saw ten years ago while I was working at Aureole in New York. For one of the lunch specials we would serve sauteed halibut cheeks with potato risotto and red wind sauce. There was no rice in the risotto, this was replaced with a brunoise of a waxy potato cooked in the same manner).I was going to add jamon into the dish to add a bit of richness. We tried a few takes on the dish but it wasn't what I was looking for...back to the drawing board. Then, as sometimes happened I stumbled across a bag of fregola that I had left from another dish. The pasta is made from 100% durum wheat and has a fantastic nuttiness to it. So the dish was kind of on the same lines but instead of potato replacing the rice I now had this fantastic pasta. Now I began to think of the flavours I wanted to add to the pasta.
A few days earlier I had been reading an article on flavour compounds and at the end of the article there was a short list of unusual ingredients that went together because they shared some of the same flavour compounds. One of these matches was snails and beetroot. So that was the start snails and beetroot and an added bonus was the fact that here in Australia they luv beetroot. So I began to expand the idea happy that the fact there was beetroot on the plate would mean that people would maybe get to try fresh snails.

It was immediately clear that to get the most beetroot flavour into the dish I would cook the pasta in beetroot juice. After a few trials we decided that a mix of 50% juice and 50% vegetable stock would be better as 100% juice turned out a little too earthy once the pasta was cooked. Once this was locked in we began on the rest of the garnish. Its beetroot season here and we've been getting beautiful baby beets, golden and red, and they we're and instant addition. Once they we're cooked and peeled we glazed them in a little butter and aged white and normal balsamic. I find the earthiness of beets means you need something sharp to cut through it and the sweet vinegar did just that. To accompany the beets we added some tiny red radishes which we glazed in a little verjus.
So that was the garnish, now lets get back to the star of the dish the fresh snail. I buy my snails from a company called Snails Bon Apetite. Its owned by Rob and Helen Dyball and is based in the beautiful Hunter Valley Wine region here in New South Wales. Its so good to have such a great product on our doorstep. Helen does a great job of purgeing the snails for us and couriers them down to us the next day. I think snails go well with most herbs, especially parsley, but I chose to coat them in a fragrant basil puree once we sauteed them nice and crisp. I like squid with snails I think its a nice contrast in texture and they complement each other well in this dish of bold flavours. As I said before to really get the most out of beetroot you need some type of acid, bef0re we used vinegar, which is quite usual, However for the fregola element I used a different type of acid for this job, Passion fruit. A few dots of passion puree dotted around the dish do the job of the vinegar but with a great new flavour. I think this idea must have come from a squid dish I used to do with a passion fruit dressing a few years ago. So that was the dish all that was needed was a few discs of raw radish and some fantastic Hearts ease flowers form my balcony garden. Enjoy!

Spanner Crab Salad, King Crab Fingers, Avocado Tile, Piquillos Wafer

...and so finally spring is upon us. The evenings begin to grow lighter and so to, after the cold months of winter, does the food. I always look forward to spring, the promise of warm weather and the day when I lock away my shoes and bring out the thongs draws nearer. We've started with the spring changes on the entre menu and this is the first dish to arrive. It started when I read a post over at "IDEAS IN FOOD . After reading it I set about coming up with the dish. The flavours are nothing new (crab,avocado, tomato) but I wanted to create some new textures while retaining the integrity of the ingredients. I started with the crab. I'd heard about this great fresh spanner crab meat that's been coming down from Queensland. The company is called Ceas and the spanner crabs the produce was the first to become a sustainable catch in Australia.http://www.ceascrabpak.com/page/about_us.html. I got a few samples in from my supplier and the product was very good with great flavour. To bind the meat I decided an a yuzu/mandarin mayonnaise to balance out the richness of the crab meat. Next I thought we'd have a bit of fun with the 'crab fingers'. Really the idea came from a childhood favourite of mine, fish fingers but instead of regular breadcrumbs I used squid ink bread crumbs. The contrast in colour looks great.
Next the avocado was chopped and seasoned with some Espellete pepper and again yuzu juice to connect it with the crab salad. A quick freeze and I had a workable sheet to cut to the shape I wanted. Eventually I decided on a strip after trying a few different shapes. We had some beautiful piquillos peppers that i made into a puree and dehydrated to get the wafers.
The plate is dressed with a beautiful gel made from tomato syrup and another gel made from coriander. The fingers are pan fried and served warm and the salad cold for a contrast in temperatures as well as textures. We finished the dish with some micro coriander. The dish looks very bright and cheerful and the colours just shine out spring, spring, spring.