Second Alinea Meal

After the success of the first meal (and a delay of about 8 months), I started preparation for a second meal cooked from the Alinea book. This entailed purchasing various special powders (soy lecthin, NZorbit Tapioca Maltodextrin, Isomalt, Ultra-Tex 3 and Perfect Sorbet are used in this menu), scouring the book for feasible dishes and performing trial runs for each one. The final menu was

Tuna, candied and dried (p.306)
Sea Spoon (original)
Pork Belly, pickled vegetables, BBQ sugar, polenta (p.328)
Prosciutto, passionfruit, zuta levana (p.144)
Lamb, mastic, date, rosemary fragrance (p.324)
Pineapple, bacon powder, black pepper (p.182)
Tube of powders and textures (modified recipe)
Chocolate, warmed to 94°F (p.294)

At this dinner, I had both the benefit of a cooking partner to help in prep and service, and the foresight to take photos.

Dehydrated tuna with a candied glaze

Tuna, candied and dried -Strips of tuna loin are marinated in classic south east Asian flavours of lime, sugar, soy sauce, fish sauce, ginger, coriander and chilli. The tuna is then dehydrated until "dry by pliable" and the marinade is reduced to a glaze. The tuna is then brushed with the glaze and rolled in toasted chilli flakes and sesame seeds. It is served with lemongrass strips, candied grapefruit zest (the flavedo, come on, a much better word) and thin slices of ginger.

In the Alinea book, this is presented as an appealing stick of tuna standing up in a glass, rather than a crumpled sausage in a bowl. A good example is here. I think the issue either came from the small quantities being used, or the quality of the fishmonger. To get a long piece of tuna that stands up after dehydration, it must be cut from along the length of the fish, such that the muscle is continuous. If you take lateral cuts of the fish (round, cross sections), there is only connective tissue between the each muscle segment. If you take strips from a lateral cut, these different segments provide failure points which prevent the strip from standing on one end.

This isn't a problem if you use or order a large amount of a single fish, however the fishmonger I visited wasn't willing to sell cuts from along the length of the fish, as this would ruin subsequent customers nicely shaped tuna steaks. To get enough tuna for 15cm strips would be the equivalent of ordering 15cm thick tuna steaks.. far more than I could afford of sushi grade tuna. Thus, this presentation.

Also, a fair warning to anyone attempting this dish. The marinate recipe produces several litres, as much as the restaurant would need for one night I image. It could easily be decimated (divide by ten) and still be sufficient for the 500g of tuna that corresponds to eight servings. 

Caramel sand, salmon roe and stout foam

Sea spoon - This is my own invention, inspired during the experimentation for the Tube of powders and textures dish. The caramel sand follows the Alinea recipe for the Dry Caramel, but rather than adding maltodextrin to form a powder through molecular interactions, it is ground into to a powder in a blender. This doesn't give the same melt in the mouth effect, but provided a sandy texture (although more appetising than it sounds). The foam is made from an oyster stout with a small amount of dissolved soy lethicin. A half submerged stick blender aerates the mixture and the soy lethicin helps to stabilise the resulting foam. Matching these with the salmon roe provides for a nice, salty element that pops in the mouth.

Pork belly with a BBQ tuile and polenta

Pork Belly, pickled vegetables, BBQ sugar, polenta - Flat out one of the best dishes I have made. This has caused me to speculate opening a restaurant serving this and deserts. I think it would do well.
A pork belly (no skin) is cured for two days in a smoked paprika and chilli cure of 50/50 salt and sugar. It is then cooked for four hours at 88°C sous vide.

Tuiles before melting. An exercise in balancing

A combination of various sugars (fondant, glucose and isomalt) were melted together and then ground to a fine powder. This is combined sweet smoked paprika and cayenne pepper and sprinkled over a square stencil. Putting the stencilled shape into an oven briefly fuses the sugar grains to make a rigid, heavily spiced tuile. A seared serve of pork belly is topped with small pieces of red capsicum  cucumber and carrot and covered with the tuile. Exposing the sugar square to heat briefly via the broiler encases the pork belly in a hard candy shell. It is served on top of a very rich dollop of polenta, made with more butter and mascarpone cheese than polenta.

This is a straightforward recipe, although humidity plays havoc on the dusting of the ground sugar mixture over the stencils. It works as a finger food, using the pork belly piece to scoop up polenta  Worth the price of admission by itself.

Passionfruit sponge and prosciutto chips

Prosciutto, passionfruit, zuta levana - A savoury ice-cream sandwich. The centre is a gelatin sponge flavoured with passionfruit puree and a syrup made from the passionfruit rinds. Bookending a round of the sponge are dehydrated chips made from prosciutto. Several strips of prosciutto are layered and then rolled into a log. Freezing the log and slicing across the length produces tightly coiled rings, which dehydrated into a crispy chip... theoretically (see below). The dish is surprising but not exciting. It is to be served on sprouting thyme, which I substituted with mustard greens sprouted on a saturated piece of balsa wood. In the trial run, the mustard green seeds sprouted within four days to a lovely thicket. When it came to the crunch time, only a few meagre leaves and stalks were produced. Of course!

The recipe called for a meat slicer to slice the prosciutto chips. My hand cut attempts delivered more of a jerky-like bite, than any chip-like shatter in the mouth when dehydrated  Increasing the four hour dehydration time gave similar results. The suspected reason for this is that on thick slices, as the outside layers dehydrate, the fibres contract. This slows the rate at which moisture from the interior can migrate to the exterior to be removed. This is the reason that most of the moisture loss during dry ageing meat is in the first few days (see here).

If the dehydration occurs at too high a temperature, moisture from the interior will be very difficult to remove, and a jerky texture will result. Slices which are thinner than the size of the dessicated outer layer will be fully dehydrated and this could be how the "crisp and chiplike" texture mentioned in the book is achieved. A lower dehydration temperature, with correspondingly longer times could provide this same effect on thicker slices.

Lambs loin with date compote, braised cabbage and mastic cream

Lamb, mastic, date, rosemary fragrance - Traditional middle eastern flavour pairings with nice portions of lamb. Nothing much to go wrong, but nothing much surprising either. Lamb's loin is cooked briefly sous vide and then seared on a hot brick, which provides the service piece. A sprig of rosemary is laid onto the hot stone to fill the air with rosemary aroma. From left to right, the sections of lamb are paired with red wine braised cabbage, date compote and mastic cream. Mastic is a heavily flavoured tree sap from Greece, used in chewing gums. Beyond the mastic cream being made with agar agar and the brief (20 minute) low temperature/sous vide, this is a classically prepared dish and an easy way to get some substance into a tasting menu.

Pineapple glass with bacon powder

Pineapple, bacon powder, black pepper - A package of bacon fat powder is surrounded by a crisp package of pinapple 'glass', a transparent fruit leather. Smoked bacon fat is rendered out and formed into a powder using maltodextrin. This is seasoned with pepper and compressed by hand into a rough block. Meanwhile fresh pineapple juice is steeped in a lot of saffron and mixed with Pure Cote B790. Poured out onto sheets of plastic and left overnight, this forms a transparent, thin film of fruit juice; a classier fruit rollup, described as 'glass'. The bacon block is wrapped in this film and dehydrated until the package is crisp.

The pineapple glass provides an initial flavour hit and a bite, before the bacon powder dissolves in your mouth, coating it with a delicious layer of fat.Without the black pepper, the bacon fat powder provides more mouth feel (sorry, there is no other word for it) than flavour, but paired together with the pineapple, this is delicious.

Unfortunately  while the glass worked fine in the test stage, using the plastic page sleeve/binder inserts for the coating, the scale up for the full dinner failed. Lacking sufficient plastic sheets, I turned to metal sheet trays, a poor choice for extended exposure to acidic pineapple juice. The mixture turned green and would not set. This had exhausted by supply for Pure Cote B790, so we resorted to buying tropical fruit roll-ups and slicing out the pineapple (or 'yellow' flavoured) section. These strips then formed the package for the bacon powder. It was an acceptable while not ideal substitute. The rollups were thicker than intended, so didn't get as crunchy and opaque rather than transparent. By sprinkling some salvaged sections of the failed glass over the served packages, some of the intended burst of flavour was retained. The final verdict on this workaround was good in a pinch, but not ideal. Also, remember to buy the cheap acetate sheets a recipe calls for, rather than waste expensive ingredients due to last minute bumbling.

Sugar tube, encapsulating chocolate, caramel and hazelnut in two forms, with mint gel

Tube of powders and textures - Producing the dry caramel recipe in Alinea requires making a cream caramel, allowing it to cool and adding pieces of it to a blender along with NZorbit M Tapioca Maltodextrin. The photos in the book indicate this caramel should be of a chewy consistency, however I must have overshot the temperature mark, as mine was solid and broke into large shards. To avoid difficulties in weighing and storing these large shards, I ground the "failed" caramel into a powder and used only a small fraction for combination with the maltodextrin. This left me with a caramel powder made from chemical means, and a caramel powder made from physical means (hereafter "sand"). The caramel sand could be made almost as fine as the powder through repeated runs through a fine mesh filter, however the texture and effect in the mouth of the two samples were quite distinct.

Repeating the effect with chocolate gave me four textures from two flavours. To round out the group, a homemade nutella was turned into a powder with the maltrodextrin, to be paired with a roasted hazelnut. Now only for a presentation method more elegant than piles on a plate. Somewhere I read about blown sugar designs and speculated about a sphere made from blown sugar, filled with layers of the powders.This was unsuccessful  but I was able to produce clear sugar cylinders with a reasonable yield by following the method below.

Heat sugar dissolved in a small amount of water to the soft crack stage. Have prepared an unturned metal sheet tray, covered with baking paper and pre-heated in an oven. Also have prepared lengths of wooden dowel of the desired diameter, wrapped tightly in baking paper and sprayed with oil. Once the sugar reaches the desired temperature, pour it onto the upturned tray. One at a time, gently roll the prepared dowels in the sugar and then upend them to cool. Once mostly set, the sugar cylinders can be gently prised off the dowel and baking paper. Generally only a middle section of each cylinder is usable and either end must be cut off using a heated knife. One end is sealed using gentle heating and pressure to crimp the sugar. The peak temperature of the sugar affects how brittle the tubes are, the temperature and technique when rolling the dowels affects the thickness of the tube walls.

The tubes are then slowly filled with the powders, in order, chocolate powder, caramel powder, nutella powder, chocolate sand and caramel sand. The top is capped with a roasted hazelnut  with the tube slightly melted to ensure a seal. It is served with a mint gel and salt flakes

Earl grey tea, dehydrated chocolate mousse and semi-melted chocolate
(Hidden: cassia icecream and braised figs) 

Chocolate, warmed to 94°F- The dish in which it was learned the purpose of micro-flowers in plating, to provide a contrast to all of these delicious but unappetising browns. Working up from the base of this dish, the bottom layer are port braised figs with a scoop of cassia ice-cream (a cinnamon variant). Visible in the picture is a biscuit made from rich chocolate mouse dehydrated until crisp. This is topped by pieces of dark chocolate which are warmed until nearly melting, to 94°F (34°C). Held at this temperature, the pieces develop a sheen and be almost liquid but will hold their shape. Just before service, a sauce made from Earl Grey tea, steeped in dried figs and thickened with Ultra-Tex 3, is poured in.

This dish is very chocolatey and decadent and none too difficult to prepare. The book uses cassia buds, rather than cassia bark, as these have a more complex flavour, however I was unable to source these.


Well to cap off this very long post, this dinner was made with no more complicated devices than a dehydrator and a thermometer, and with less than $25 of modernist powders. While there was a lot of work involved for myself and my parter in crime, the guests enjoyed it immensely, which is all that can be asked.
A future post will detail the scheduling, planning and prep involved for this meal.