Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Lemgrass scented curried cos cheeks, rice & split peas salad, papaya & passionfruit yoghurt, powdered coriander & mango














Wrote the recipe and lost it to a crashed computer!... will post later!!! DOH!

GIGA Synergy of Meat & Two Veg, & Tasteful Marriage of Flavours or Flavourful Marriage of Tastes 24th Feb 2010


http://iodnorfolk.com/2010/03/experimental-asian-cooking-with-howard-lee/

God, nature, natural selection depending on your religiosity or spiritual belief has equipped us with the necessary tools and organs to perceive the five senses.

gestation, olfaction, vision, audition, tactition.

To go further and deeper, one can even look at the senses of

proprioception and kineastheis, thermoception, magnetoception, and equilibrioception.

With this vast array of tools, powered by the CPU that is the brain, we are able to receive, process, interpret, analyse and enjoy the experiences that we get bombarded with on a mililisecond by millisecond basis that this world has to throw at us. During this meal and lecture, I will endeavour to explore all of the five sense and maybe even touching on some of the deeper ones, but through the looking glass of a chef using stimuli that can be ingested………

Through this lecture and the food tonight, I’d like to achieve the following:

• Give you a sneak preview into the way a chef’s mind work when composing a menu, when the sole purpose of the exercise is to provide a multisensory experience led by the gustatory and olfactorial sense.


• To demonstrate the employment of perception; conventional and unconventional combination of ingredient to achieve tastes and aromas; and consequentially the combination of those factors, to achieve flavours.


• Outline to you, the joys and pains of a chef’s search for Glutamate, Inosonate, Guanylate Associative Synergy… or how to make things taste good!!

• What good is all of the above to YOU!

Andrea is the lovely but naive new editorial assistant at Runway, the Vogue-like fashion magazine edited by the steely Miranda. In the movie, the word "naive" is tossed at Andy by coworkers as a way of belittling her fashion sense. But there is a deep and more interestingly naiveté that surfaces when she fails to stifle a chuckle about the intense debate about belts and other items of fashion during a designer-preview. Specifically, Andrea harbors a naive assumption about her own power of choice in the face of what she considers to be overblown "stuff" filling the offices of this fashion magazine.
Miranda hears Andrea's chuckle and catches her ill-advised description of the racks of clothes as "stuff." She jumps on Andrea's words with catlike speed and precision. In a blue streak, she cuts Andrea's assumption to ribbons:
Stuff? Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet, and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002 Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was St. Laurent, wasn't it, who showed a selection of cerulean military jackets. And then cerulean quickly showed up in collections of eight different designers. It filtered down through the department stores, and then trickled down into some tragic Casual Corner where you undoubtedly fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. It's sort of comical how you think you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room... from "a pile of stuff."
Though not always so, through the ages, ideas and products and in the case of the gastronomic world; flavour combinations and preparation techniques were ‘selected’ and found to be ‘favoured’ by the elite, or trendsetters (royalty and gentry, foreign dignitaries, celebrated chefs, public figures). Said favoured trends, ingredients and combinations have more often than not ‘trickled down through the filter that is society, and inadvertently finding their ways on to the dinner tables of people from all sector of society… admittedly more often than not a lesser (bastardised) incarnations of the original. They may not be objectively what we enjoy but have inadvertently learnt to accept, or not to repel.
The point of this clip is neither to patronize folk about your fashion sense, or in my case lack of; neither is it an elaborate way of me saying everyone should embrace the en-vogue most current, upto date food trend of the three Michelin star establishments… beacsue it will eventually become the norm. The point that I’m trying to encourage folk to consider, is that each and every single one of us in this room have a memory bank of flavours, tastes, food memories and things of the like within us that either restricts us in someway, or heightens us in other, the way we enjoy certain ingredient combination and food preparations.
By asking the question how would you fancy curried anchovies with coconut and pandan steamed rice with a biltong-esque curried buffalo……

















or

A dried shrimp and pork rib infused rice porridge, frog ovarian fat, potash and smoked salt cured sea urchin and sea cucumber, thousand year egg, pork intestine crisps and deep fried 24 day open air fermented bean curd….


Some of you may find the above almost acceptable and would not immediately hide behind a screen when these are announced to you to be on your menu…. But your reactions would be rightfully reluctant (or worse) if these were presented to you for breakfast….
By freeing our minds of certain pre-conceptions and loosening certain associations, and hence lowering certain guards against some counter intuitive prospective food experience, (eg pork loin and sweetcorn purée…)… or indeed the traditional Malay Breakfast of Nasi Lemak dan Rendang Kerbau breakfast . The associations we form of food experiences are also heavily associated with occasions and emotional states.

Pre conceived ideas and pre-indoctrinated cultural/flavour association.
Consider

crisps, nan’s casserole; mums roast dinners; sandwich fillings, pizza toppings

Beef: Carrots, Onion, Beetroot, Cabbage
Chicken: Mushroom, Sweetcorn, Ginger, Parmesan
Turkey: Coriander, Cranberry, curry, Cornichon
Duck Tomato, Aubergine, Orange, Apple

Lock and Key mechanism:
Goats cheese, Picalili Parmesan, Shropshire Blue, Red Onion Marmalade




Pearl Barley Risotto of Shiitake Mushroom & Anchovy paste