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!

Beetroot and Chocolate Coulant, Blood Orange and Walnut, Candied Baby Fennel and Beetroot; The Evolution of a Dish

The following dish started as an idea about a year ago. I had this idea of making a savoury fondant in the style of Michel Bra's Chocolate coulant. The flavour I wanted to use was Beetroot. As I thought about it more the natural thing to use for the liquid centre seemed to be goats cheese. I tried a few different types and finally decided on a lovely fresh goats cheese from the Caparis farm in central New South Wales. I added a little cream and finally came up with a lovely runny centre when hot. At the time we were making a beautiful beetroot puree for another dish. I took some of this puree and reduced it a little more to thicken it up. I used this puree to replace the chocolate from Bras original recipe and reduced the sugar slightly. The result was a really nice biscuit for the fondant. I did a few trials but the dish never made it on to the menu and went back to the drawing board. The idea didn't return to me until recently when I started to play with beetroot as a dessert item. (see my post for Beetroot, Walnut, Blood Orange a dessert?) After a while the idea of mixing the beetroot biscuit with a chocolate liquid centre seemed like a good idea and mixing it with the blood orange element and the walnuts, from the previous dessert all seemed to make good sense. So the flavours we're all there all I needed was a dish to bring them all together. I thought I would add an element of caramel to the dish and decided to make a caramel gel which had caramelized walnuts scattered through it. on top of this I started to assemble the other elements of the dish. I took another element from the other desert in the shape of the candied baby fennel, and baby beetroots. I dressed the sweet salad with some fresh walnuts and a little walnut oil. I then added a some leaves of Bulls Blood micro cress.

I was really happy with the look of the dish but when we ate it the caramel gel just didn't fit in with the other flavours, especially the beautiful blood orange sorbet. So I scrapped that idea and cut the dish back to the key flavours I started with. Everything ate so well together that the only thing to decide on now was the presentation.

We tried a few different plates as you can see but decided on a flat rectangle. Every element separate but brought together as soon as the customer breaks the biscuit and the liquid ganache comes flooding out.

For me this is one of the highlights of being a chef. You start with an idea, or two, or even three and through trial and error you fashion it into the final dish. Sometimes you come up with nothing , or it seems that way at the time, but sometimes you end with something your really happy with. A year from conception right up to the finished dish today. The dish is now very balanced. I used a 66% chocolate and this goes very well with the beetroot which is earthy but very luxurious at the same time. the candied vegetable salad with the walnuts adds a different nuance with each bite and the sorbet balances all the rich oils and fats. Today I'm happy with this dish but who knows how it will look this time next year.

Beetroot, Fennel, Blood Orange, Walnut- A dessert???

This is something I've been playing with for the last few weeks as a dessert. Its still not the final dish but I'm pretty happy with this version. The fine line between sweet and savoury really interests me and this was the inspiration for this dish. All the components I have used in a salad previously, a savoury salad. If you add some goats cheese the flavour combination is pretty classic. I didn't, but how about a nice goats cheese sorbet??? The base is a beetroot sponge,(and this is the element I'm not happy with, I'm thinking more beetroot financier), I've dressed this with two citrus 'sponges', one blood orange and the other mandarin. These add a freshness to the rich and buttery cake and ice cream. You've also got fresh blood orange segments. Next the walnuts which we have in 3 different textures; ice-cream, emulsion and fresh from the shell. The ice-cream is finished with buttermilk and is so rich, the emulsion with its oil and a little caramelized red wine vinegar is rich and sharp at the same time and the wet walnuts are just in there fine natural state, soft and buttery. The fennel is candied, a process that takes a week to accomplish, but well worth the wait. The process really intensifies the flavour without loosing the fresh, clean taste of the vegetable. The edible flowers help with the Strong bouquet of the other ingredients; Heartsease, Native Violets and Nasturtiums, sweet ,peppery and floral all help with the savoury element. I really like the dish so far but am looking forward to the next version. It looks great but if you get 10 on order your right in the shit. Ah well you can't have everything. Later