The TGRWT #15 challenge was to pair smoked salmon with dark chocolate. I decided to encase a piece of hot-smoked salmon in a cocoa gel and serve it with sugared slices of lime. But as you can see from the pictures quite a lot went wrong… But it tasted quite nice!
(more…)

This month’s round of “They go really well together” (TGRWT #15) is hosted by Mexmix and foods to pair this time are dark chocolate and smoked salmon. As usual you can find instructions on how to participate in the announcement post. Don’t forget to check out Rob’s summary of the malt and soy sauce round.

As malt was one of the foods to pair for this month’s TGRWT I decided to do something with beer. I first considered making a beer gel since the Alinea book has a nice recipe (with potassium citrate and kappa carrageenan – I included the recipe in the hydrocolloid recipe collection), but since I didn’t have carrageenan at hand I decided to try a sorbet. A quick search gave me 4 recipes (links in the table below) and in order to compare these I decided to calculate sugar/beer and sugar/liquid ratios as these are quite crucial in order to obtain the desired consistency of a sorbet. The results are shown in the table below. (more…)

Heston Blumenthal welcomed on stage by Gene Bervoets

To the music of Queen’s “We will rock you” Heston Blumenthal (HB) entered the stage, welcomed by Gene Bervoets (GB) and Bernard Lahousse (BL). Heston started of by telling about his childhood and how Britain in the 60′s was not the place to go for food. You could only get olive oil at the chemist’s because it was not used for consumption! Heston basically grew up without experiencing anything related to gastronomy. However this all changed at the age of 15 when he went to France for a holiday with his familiy. A visit to a Michelin restaurant was to become a decisive moment for Heston. He described it as if it were yeasterday – the sound of the waiters walking on gravels, the lavender smell, how they carved legs of lamb – the whole atmosphere. It was also the first time ever he tasted oysters. He felt a little like Alice in wonderland.
(more…)

Chocolatier by profession, Shock-o-Latier by reputation! I bought this box the next day at Dominique’s shop “The Chocolate Line” to bring back home.

As I mentioned in part 1 of the travel report from Brugge, the highlight (for me at least) of The Flemish Primitives seminar was the surprise box presented to us by Dominique Persoone (owner of The Chocolate Line) and his team which included James Petrie (pastry chef at The Fat Duck), Tony Conigliaro (mixologist, bartender at Roka, blogger) and Bruce Bryan (medical doctor and inventor). As the box was distributed in the auditorium (more than 1000 present, mostly chefs) the instructions were kept very simple: DO NOT OPEN THE BOX! Makes you wonder of course what is inside.
(more…)

I had a wonderful trip to Brugge/Bruges to attend the foodpairing seminar The Flemish Primitives. I got to meet many interesting people including Heston Blumenthal, Peter Barham, Andrew Dornenburg, Karen Page, Ben Roche and Tony Conigliaro to mention a few. I also finally had the opportunity to talk to my fellow Swedish food bloggers Lisa Förare Winbladh (Matälskaren, Swedish only but Google can translate) and Malin Sandström (Matmolekyler, Swedish only but Google can translate) who’ve recently been awarded money to write a Swedish book about molecular gastronomy for home cooks. I even talked to several people who read Khymos! It’s always nice when I can attach some faces to the crowd out there in the big, unpersonal blogosphere.

As you see from this long post the day was packed and believe it or not – there will be a couple more posts in the next few days. One on the surprise “chocolate box” (for me this was the highlight), a summary of the interview with Heston Blumenthal and some info on the chemistry behind the glowing lollipops! I’ll also try do dig up the recipe for the chocolate dip that came with our lunch fries.
(more…)

This month’s round of the food blogging event They go really well together (TGRWT) will be hosted by Rob over at The Curious Blogquat. We’ve now come to TGRWT #14 and the foods to pair this time are malt and soy sauce (soya sauce). Regarding the malt you are free to choose whatever form you like – you can use malt extract, powdered malt, grains or even beer if you like. As usual you can cook from an existing recipe or come up with your own. The deadline for submissions is February 1st and you can find more information on how to participate in the announcement post.

And do not forget to check out the roundup of the delicious cocoa and caraway recipes from TGRWT #13.

BTW: Tomorrow I’m heading of for the flavor pairing seminar “The Flemish Primitives” in Bruges, Belgium. I’m really excited about that and I promise I’ll return with an extensive report! From the homepage I see that Sang-Hoon Degeimbre has chosen Leffe (a Belgian beer) and who knows – maybe he’ll combine it with soy sauce

I thought I’d do a twist on some chocolate cookies my Mom always makes for Christmas for TGRWT #13. I tried two versions with added caraway (and a litte bitter orange peel) – one where I omitted all the spices except cocoa and one where they were added together with all the spices in the original recipes.

Chocolate cookies with caraway (more…)

According to Google trends searches for chocolate peak every December (plus that special day in February), and I assume that consumption of chocolate follows the same pattern. For this month’s They go really well together event (TGRWT #13) Erik Fooladi over at Fooducation has chosen to pair chocolate with caraway. So if you plan to cook or bake with chocolate (or cocoa) in December – why not add some caraway and see how it turns out? It’s time to spice up your Christmas desserts! Surprise your guests and let us all know how it worked out.

If you can’t figure out what to make, try the chocolate sauerkraut cake I blogged about last year. It was quite successful and I figured out that one possible reason for the success was the fact that sauerkraut contains caraway which goes well with chocolate (and cognac).

More information about how to participate can be found in Erik’s announcement post of TGRWT #13.

In the end I was able to find fresh chanterelles and therefore ready for TGRWT #12 with a last minute preparation and blogpost (the round-up of TGRWT #12 has already been posted). The chanterelles were imported from Poland and quite expensive and I was eager to smell them and see if I could recognize the smell reminiscent of apricots (as a commenter pointed out to my announcement: even wikipedia states this fact). But to be honest I was quite disappointed – there were no traces of apricot aroma in my batch. But there was an earthy note. I tasted the chanterelles throughout the preparation, but at no point were they close to what I had tasted earlier and hoped for. But once I’d added some butter and pepper they where much better! Regarding the apricots I didn’t even try to find fresh ones and got the canned variety from the start. They were quite OK and I rinsed them with water a couple of times to wash away the syrup they came in. I imagined I would like to make a pie so I googled for chanterelle pies and quiches and found some inspiration there. And

Chanterelle pie with apricots
(more…)