I received the following contribution for TGRWT #11 from Alessio Fangano, and since he doesn’t have a blog I post his contribution here in extenso. Enjoy!

Photo: Alessio Fangano

Ginger-Glass bowl of banana mousse with cloves biscuits and lemongrass jelly
All the ingredients are meant for 4 servings.

Cloves Biscuits
1 egg yolk
25g flour
3 tea spoons of groundnut oil
4g whole cloves
Fleur de sel
Groundnut oil to fry

Ground cloves, flour and oil in a mixer. The cloves do not need to be completely pulverized; the little shards will provide sparks of taste when bitten.

In a bowl fold in the flour mixture and the egg yolk (add little bit of water if needed). Knead a bit the dough before rolling it in a thin foil (2-3 mm).

Cut in rectangular strips approximately 7×1 cm, sprinkle on top 3-4 grains of fleur de sel on each strip and let dry for 3h before frying in hot oil.

Ginger Crisp cup
150g egg white
75g fresh ginger peeled
150g water

Peel the ginger, cut it in small pieces and ground very finely in a mixer adding water. Strain the liquid pressing the pulp trough a fine sieve. Add the liquid to the egg white with a teaspoon of the grinded pulp. Mix the whole properly.

Pour some of the mixture on a small no-stick skillet to a thickness of around 2mm. Put on the fire on low heat to let the water evaporate. It does not have to boil.

When the border will be dried out and some part of the interior will start to (ca 30 min), lift the film out of the skillet and place over the back of a bowl you will use as mold. Place a second cup over it to keep the film in shape and put into the oven at 120C for another 30min. After 10-15min take away the upper cup leaving the back of the crisp cup exposed. If at the end of the 30 min the crisp is too clear looking, just unmold it and put it in the oven for another 5-10min keeping an eye on it.

Proceeds this way for the rest of the mixture.

These crisps may be kept for a couple of days in a dry place.

Lemongrass Jelly
40g fresh lemongrass
1 teaspoons lemon zest
170g water
0.17g agar (1%)
Green food color

Put water and the lemongrass thinly chopped in a pot. With the lid on, heat it over low fire to around 70C. Let infuse for 2h away from heat. Filter the liquid with a sieve pressing the liquid out of the lemongrass. Add few drops of the colorant to the infusion to obtain a fresh mint green.

Heat few spoons of the liquid with the lemon zest and add the agar powder. Boil for 2-3 minutes. Away from heat mix in the rest of the liquid and pour in a mould. The resulting jelly will need to be cut in cubes, so use a flat shallow container. Refrigerate until set before cutting.

Chilies Consommé
25g water
2 small green Indian chilies
0.05g agar (0.1%)

Grind the chilies and the water in a blender. Heat up the liquid, add the agar powder and boil for 3 minutes. Put the liquid in a mold (glass for instance) and freeze overnight. Place the resulting iced-gel over a sieve and let the liquid drip on a bowl.

Banana Mousse
150g Ripe Banana
4 teaspoons rose water
1-2 teaspoon(s) chilies consommé
0.7g (0.5%) methylcellulose
1-2 pinch(s) curcuma (optional)

Disperse the methylcellulose in some warm water. Let it hydrate overnight. Purée the banana in a blender. Transfer in a bowl and flavor with the rose water and chilies consommé. If you wish, you can add a bit of curcuma to make the whole looking more yellowish-golden. Mix in the methylcellulose and foam with an immersion blender.

Keep in mind that the banana will darken over time so prepare the mousse shortly before serving.

Presentation
Pour the banana mousse in the ginger crisp bowl. Put over a white serving plate with the cloves biscuits and jelly cubes. Spread over the banana mousse drops of cloves oil made blending cloves with groundnuts oil.

Taste Sensations
The biscuits results fragrant, the salt underlining their consistency. In them cloves appear as a back taste that spikes when biting over a shard releasing a sensation of freshness.

The foam exhales an equilibrated scent of rose water and banana. The sweet banana taste is followed by the rose aroma and the hit of the chili spiciness. The sweetness and sticky consistency of the banana complements quite well the balsamic nature of cloves in the biscuits.

The crisp’s ginger taste fuses very well with the banana foam leaving a whole mouth sensation of light spiciness.

The lemongrass jelly helps cleaning the mouth, leaving a fresh sensation that adds up to the left over spiciness from the crisp.

In the complex, the recipe works quite well though the cloves biscuits need some further development.

I’m a big fan of using bananas in savory dishes, so for TGRWT #11 I decided to make:

Pork tenderloin with banana & clove sauce
450 g pork tenderloin
2 bananas, sliced
10-15 cloves (less if you use ground cloves)
black pepper, ground
cooking oil of choice
1-2 T crème fraîche

Pack meat in plastic bags with a little oil, banana slices, cloves and pepper. Suck out air and seal. Sous vide* for 60 min or more at 60 °C. Leave meat to rest while making sauce: purée bananas with some cloves and crème fraîche using an immersion blender. Add ground pepper and salt to taste (use powdered meat stock if desired). Keep sauce warm in a water bath. Sear the tenderloin slices on both sides. Serve with rice and glaced carrots.

* Can one use “sous vide” as a verb, just as to google has become a verb?

Verdict: I enjoy the combination of sweet and salty tastes in the banana sauce. I goes very well together with the pork. The meat was perfect throughout with a pale pink color (quite difficult to reproduce this color correctly when processing the picture…). The sauce was quite thick and should be served in moderation since it’s quite sweet.

I actually prepared 4 different packs of meat for the sous vide. Meat with and without bananas and/or cloves. What I found out was that the meat didn’t really take up much of the banana flavor, so I could just as well have put the banans and the cloves for the sauce in a separate bag which would have allowed me to leave the meat in the water while I was making the sauce.

I used “freezing” bags which are thicker and sucked out the air with a vacuum cleaner

Brazilian chiles in oil (very nice with Moqueca!)

Oils and fats are long molecules which are mainly non-polar and hence the opposite of water which is a polar molecule. Ethanol which has both a polar and a non-polar end falls in between oil and water. I’ve covered extractions using water and ethanol previously. That water and oil are opposites is easily observed by the fact that they don’t mix, and because of it’s lower density oil floats on top of water. This property allows us to easily separate water and oil.

Volatile molecules - the molecules that we detect by their smell - are mainly non-polar and therefore soluble in oil. This is one reason why foods with fat often have a different and often better flavor compared with their fat-free counterparts (fat of course also influences mouth feel etc.). Everytime you cook with oil it will actually help extract aroma (or smell flavorants) from the food ingredients and deliver these to your nose.

There are several oil extracts used in the kitchen, and the nice thing about them is that the oil extracts aromas and then protects them from the air. This is good as it prevents oxidation of the aroma molecules, but in some extreme cases bad because the anaerobic conditions may promote growth of botulinum spores - more on that in the last paragraph. When the flavored oil is added to a dish you get can immediately perceive the aroma. If the oil is tasted pure it serves as a carrier for the aroma giving a small explosion in the mouth (or nose to be more precise…). Some examples I can think of where the oil plays an important role in extracting and delivering aromas are: pesto, tapenade, mayonaise, aioli, curry paste (and all other spice pastes), chili oil and truffle oil to mention a few. Notice that in most of these the source of the aromas is still present in the oil.

One significant addition to the aroma molecules is capsaicin which gives chiles their pungency. Capsaicin is not particularily volatile so it never reaches your nose, but it certainly does burn your tongue! The funny thing is that the receptor being attacked by capsaicin is a protein which is also sensitive to temperature. So when talking about “hot” food it’s true in a double sense. There is an overlap in how our brain perceives food which has a high temperature and food which is spicy.

The fact that water and oil are non-miscible can be utilized in the kitchen. Oil can be used to extract non-polar compounds from a water phase, and oppositely water can be used to extract polar compounds from an oil phase. In the organic chemistry lab water and oil would be separated with a separatory funnel, but in the kitchen a normal plastic bag will work fine. Check out the pictures and description of how a plastic bag is used to clarify butter over at Cooking for Engineers.

Although most of the aroma molecules will be present in the oil, a tiny amount will remain in the water. It is possible to measure how molecules partition between oil and water, and instead of cooking oil one uses octanol. You can read more about the partition coefficient K_{octanol/water} over at Cumbrian food lab.

To start experimenting with this in the kitchen I suggest you start with some colored foods. Flavor compounds are normally colorless so it’s hard to see where they end up. One can put up a very general list of compunds responsible for the color of foods:

We can start with blueberries. For the experiment I used a blueberry syrup and mixed it vigorously with oil using an immersion blender. However, when the phases separated the oil was colorless and the waterphase was still blue. The reason for this is that anthocyanins which give blueberries their nice color are water soluble. No matter how much you blend the blueberries with oil the blue color will remain in the water phase.

I should have waited longer to allow the phases to separate properly, but notice the oil clinging to the glass wall in the right picture - it’s totally clear without any traces of blue/purple color.

For our next experiment we will use carrots or carrot juice. Add some oil and mix with an immersion blender to extract the carotene. What you observe now is that the oil phase turns orange/yellow. The reason for this is that the carotenes are oil soluble. If desired one can separate the two phases with a plastic bag as mentioned above.

Extraction of carotene from carrots. Pictures: 1) I finely grated carrots, 2) Blended them with water and filtered of the remains - the water phase was then layered with plain cooking oil 3) Water and oil were mixed with an immersion blender and the phases left to separate, 4) A plastic bag serves as a separatory funnel - cut a small hole to let out the liquid. The water phase turned grey, probably because I left it at room temperature to allow the phases to separate (1-2 days).

Now that the effect has been demonstrated with food colors it’s time to move on to tastes and aromas. The four basic tastes are all soluble in water, whereas the pungency found in chiles for instance is soluble in oil. Aromas or smell flavorants however are primarily soluble in oil. To test this one can take some clear meat stock, add oil and taste the water and the oil phases separately. The water phase will be salty, and also have a little meaty flavor (our nose detects the tiny amounts of oil which remain in the water water phase, even if no oil droplets can be seen - and of course there are also umami flavorants in the water phase). The oil phase will not be salt at all and have a strong meaty aroma.

Even though you seldom will go to the extremes of separating oil and water phases, it can be good to think about where your aromas goes when you cook. And so you won’t forget I rewrote the first few lines of the Shoop Shoop song:

/ D7 - C7 - / D7 - - - /
Can you tell me where the aroma goes
and how it enters into my nose?

/ Am7 D7 Am7 D7 / / G Em7 Am7 D7 / G C D - /
It’s through the oily phase - Oh yeah, into the nose
In the water phase? - Oh, no, that’s just the salts
If you wanna know where the aroma goes
It’s in the grease, that’s where it is

(aroma should be pronounced more like ‘roma when singing)

–

Somes words about safety: When infusing spices, herbs or garlic - think about the fact that you create anaerobic conditions. If pH is above 4.6, the oil is kept at room temperature, and Clostridium botulinum spores are present you might be bad off (botulinum toxin causes botulism). There are sites that cover this in greater detail. Perhaps the easiest way of preventing the growth of botulimum spores is by adjusting the pH with an acid such as phosphoric or citric acid (that would be the pH of any water phase present as they are not soluble in the oil).

There’s a new weekly cooking show you shouldn’t miss. It’s about cooking and science, or “Kamikaze cookery” to be more precise. And there’s a good dash of humor as well which doesn’t hurt. The first episode out is on how to cook that perfect steak (it’s embedded below, but on their site you can watch it at a better resolution). I’ve covered the topic before in my post on DIY sous-vide, but their video is much more entertaining They use a vacuum cleaner to suck out the air and a blow torch for the Maillard reaction! There is also a blog accompanying the videos. Hereby recommended!

It’s a pleasure for me to announce a new round of “They go really well together” or TGRWT for short. For those not familiar with the concept of flavor pairing: the idea is that if two foods have one or more volatile compounds in common, chances are good that they might taste well together. In TGRWT #11 the foods to pair are banana and cloves. This is a pairing that (once again I should say) can be taken both in a sweet and a savory direction.

This is how you can participate in TGRWT #11:

1. Prepare a dish that combines banana and cloves. You can either use an existing recipe or come up with your own.
2. Take a picture of the dish and write an entry in your blog by November 1st with TGRWT #11 in the title. Readers will be particularily interested in how the flavour pairing worked out, so make an attempt at describing the taste and aroma and whether you liked it or not.
3. A round-up will be posted here (with pictures). Please send an email to webmaster_at_khymos_dot_org with the following details: Your name, URL of blog, URL of the TGRWT #11 post and a picture for your entry in the round-up. If you don’t have a blog, email me your name, location, recipe and a brief description of how it worked out and I’ll be glad to include it in the final round-up.

Looking back at the first 10 rounds of TGRWT a quick count shows that more than 100 dishes have been prepared and documented in numerous food blogs. This is quite impressive considering that all of them are “new” dishes and that many have required a substantial amount of preparation and testing. You can find links to the round-ups of all the previous TGRWT events in the right sidebar on the main page of the Khymos blog. Admittedly, not all concoctions worked out very well, but there are many exciting recipes where even the cooks themselves were surprised by the flavor pairing.

I certainly hope this food blogging event can continue to inspire new creations in the kitchen and look forward to receiving your contributions. As usual - since different blogs have different groups of readers - I’m grateful if you help me spread the word of TGRWT #11.

Now this is yet another book I’m looking forward to this fall - I’ve got quite a list now!. Shirley O’Corriher, best known for her book CookWise (not to mention her video “Shirley O. Corriher’s Kitchen Secrets Revealed” and TV appearance in case you live in the US), has been working on this book for a while (NYT article from 2004, free registration requried). Finally it is due to appear in October! The title BakeWise suggests it has the same structure as CookWise. The good thing about CookWise is that the food science theory is applied directly to recipes. In addition it has nice tables on what-went-wrong and what-to-do-about-it. In fact it’s a problem solving manual for the kitchen.

According to the publisher BakeWise “reads like a mystery novel as we follow sleuth Shirley while she solves everything from why cakes and muffins can be dry to génoise deflation and why the cookie crumbles”. And they continue:

Restaurant chefs and culinary students know her from their grease-splattered copies of CookWise, an encyclopedic work that has saved them from many a cooking disaster. With numerous “At-a-Glance” charts, BakeWise gives busy people information for quick problem solving. BakeWise also includes Shirley’s “What This Recipe Shows” in every recipe. This section is science and culinary information that can apply to hundreds of recipes, not just the one in which it appears.