{"id":2628,"date":"2015-07-11T20:31:54","date_gmt":"2015-07-11T10:31:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/?p=2628"},"modified":"2015-07-11T20:31:54","modified_gmt":"2015-07-11T10:31:54","slug":"pretending-to-be-a-chef-reserve-banquet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/2015\/07\/11\/pretending-to-be-a-chef-reserve-banquet\/","title":{"rendered":"Pretending to be a chef: Reserve banquet"},"content":{"rendered":"

The markets yielded a very rare opportunity: Port Lincoln sashimi grade blue fin tuna. It was placed right next to the standard tuna I buy – a yellowfin tuna, and the blue fin was paler, indicating it was fattier. I decided I’d fork out the $80\/kg and give it a go, since I had a knife that was keen to cut. There happened to be Port Lincoln sashimi grade kingfish too, so I had an idea forming. There wasn’t any black caviar, so instead of choosing red, I went for the Huon Reserve hand milked salmon caviar, just because I could. It resulted in a four course meal!<\/p>\n

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Curvature: blue fin tuna, kingfish, salmon caviar<\/em><\/p>\n

Out came the knife, and ahead of me was 2.5 days worth of prep and “cooking” because I am disorganised and untrained. For all my dishes, I made the following elements:<\/p>\n

Soy, ginger, garlic, mirin sauce<\/p>\n

Sushi rice seasoning: rice vinegar, mirin, salt, sugar<\/p>\n

Dashi: kombu, time<\/p>\n

Tamagoyaki: egg, mirin, salt, dashi<\/p>\n

Pandan infusion: pandan, water, time<\/p>\n

Pandan coconut rice pudding: milk, cream, coconut milk, pandan infusion<\/p>\n

Matcha panna cotta: matcha, gelatin, milk, cream, sugar<\/p>\n

Houjicha panna cotta: houjicha tea, gelatin, milk, cream, sugar<\/p>\n

Azuki smash: azuki beans, time, dark agave syrup, salt<\/p>\n

Green tea jelly: Iron goddess of mercy\/tie guan yin tea, gelatin, time<\/p>\n

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Coffin Bay oysters<\/em><\/p>\n

Ok. So. First things first. Eating. I made this as my pre-cooking meal! Six all up, three for the photoshoot. I used some of the caviar, cut up some chives. Easy.<\/p>\n

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Look at the marbling on this tuna! A gorgeous glistening piece of fish waiting to be made into something beautiful.<\/p>\n

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My first attempt at tamagoyaki! It was rather difficult because even though I had high heat, my egg was still sticking and breaking up between layers, even though I was oiling the pan between each layer as well. Yes, I did taste the mixture when it was raw, and even though it was okay at the time, I found it a tad sweet once I was done making it. But I like it sweet, so it wasn’t an issue. Plus it offset the saltiness of the caviar very nicely!<\/p>\n

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Here are the rest of my ingredients patiently waiting to be arranged.<\/p>\n

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And here’s the plate up! Originally I envisioned this to be a gradient of dark to light fish as a line of cubes, on a rectangular plate. But I was sick of my rectangular plate, so I went for a round plate instead. As I was prepping looking top-down, the curve was about right, but horizontally, it was a disaster! So next time I’ll have to keep in mind what it looks like at plate-level too.<\/p>\n

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The leftovers then went into a chirashi! I had originally wanted to plate this up so that it was standing, so that the rice would also be visible, however I couldn’t get it to look good, so in a bowl it went! It was also my first time cooking rice to be rice (rather than rice pudding, which I’ve only cooked twice before) – it was a little undercooked (chalky!) but edible.<\/p>\n

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And now for dessert. I had no idea how to put the flavour of pandan leaf into rice pudding. Considering how disastrous my “horseradish creme fraiche” was, I wasn’t sure doing a similar thing was a good idea. But I went for it anyway. Finely chopped pandan, soaked overnight in water, then boiled for a while the next day. The aroma was amazing! And yes, the infusion did work. I could add the pandan water to anything I wanted after getting rid of the solids.<\/p>\n

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The azuki beans went for an overnight soak, before being boiled off. Salt and agave syrup was added to taste, then coarsely mashed.<\/p>\n

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I had no idea how much matcha powder to add, so I was doing it to taste and colour. I don’t actually like matcha but I knew that this dish needed the green colour. I batch made some panna cotta as this was a “dessert for breakfast” that had to last me five days and I didn’t have that much matcha, so I whipped up a massive batch of houjicha panna cotta instead. I had to let half the matcha panna cotta set before scooping in some azuki smash, before covering it all with more matcha mix. As you can see, this set a bit too far, but it still melded well enough that it came out in one piece.<\/p>\n

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I wanted an aromatic jelly, so I chose tie guan yin because it would stay relatively clear, yet smell wonderful. I actually wanted to make this with agar agar, but I really couldn’t be bothered as I would have to weigh that out and then boil it up. It was too much effort, so I stuck with gelatin. And this is the closest I’ll get to making a water mochi cake!<\/p>\n

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Zen Garden<\/em><\/p>\n

And this was the end result. A super wobbly panna cotta lined with a cloud of pandan rice pudding. I underestimated the size of the glass I put the panna cotta in; I wanted it to me smaller so that it looked like it belonged on the wooden board. It was too large and hadn’t actually set properly, so cutting it resulted in a fantastic explosion.<\/p>\n

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And this is what it looked like on the inside:<\/p>\n

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Had it set more I would have gotten a clean cut for a photoshoot, but that’s essentially how it was all layered up and how I wanted it to look. That pandan coconut rice was unbelievably tasty and was my favourite component, followed by the azuki smash. I also liked my houjicha panna cotta much more than matcha panna cotta.<\/p>\n

Overall I was so tired by the end of this that I felt like I hadn’t had a weekend. But I’m so glad I made it because I love proving to myself I can cook! I just take a long time doing it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The markets yielded a very rare opportunity: Port Lincoln sashimi grade blue fin tuna. It was placed right next to the standard tuna I buy – a yellowfin tuna, and the blue fin was paler, indicating it was fattier. I decided I’d fork out the $80\/kg and give it a go, since I had a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[112,253,302,729,806,1268,1473,1474,1614,1624,1634,1696,2119],"class_list":["post-2628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","tag-azuki-beans","tag-chirashi","tag-cooking","tag-i-can-cook","tag-i-hate-matcha","tag-making-red-bean-paste-is-fun","tag-pandan-is-so-fragrant","tag-panna-cotta","tag-red-bean-paste","tag-reines-kitchen","tag-rice-pudding","tag-sashimi","tag-wibbly-wobbly-panna-cotta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}