Quail in Rose Petal Sauce (Translation)

TGRWT #16 is about chicken and roses. I had mentioned a recipe from "Like Water for Chocolate". I looked up the recipe and here’s the translation. The recipe came from here.

Ingredients
6 Quails
12 Roses (Red, preferrably)
12 Almonds, toasted
Butter
2 Tablespoons Cornstarch
2 Drops Rose Esence
2 Tablespoons anise
2 Tablespoons Honey
2 Cloves of Garlic
Salt and Pepper

Carefully separate the rose petals. Grind them in a mortar with the anise. Cook the almonds in water and purée them. Mince the garlic and sweat them in butter. Add the almond purée, honey, rose petal mixture and salt. If necesary, add the cornstarch to adjust thickness. Add the rose esence.

Place the quails in the sauce and simmer them for a maximum of ten minutes so they'll take the flavor.

According to the book, they're to be served in a platter with a whole rose in the center and petals scattered around.

 Might be worth a try…

TGRWT #16: Chicken and Rose

Markus from Supernova Condensate is the host for round #16 of TGRWT. As you all probably know by now, TGRWT is a blogging event where we're challenged to come up with dishes that combine ingredients that may not seem like a good match, but should match according to their OAV's. 

It may sound a little complicated, but once you get past the previous ideas you may have about ingredients going together with others, it can be quite fun. 

For this round, Markus is inviting us to combine Chicken and Rose.  As he states, rose is an ingredient that is used fairly often in Middle Eastern and Oriental cuisines. Mexican cuisine also has a few recipes using roses. Some of them made famous by Laura Esquivel's Book: Like Water for Chocolate. 

So there you go, stop by Markus' blog to get the details on how to join in this time. Deadline is April 1st!

TGRWT #15 - Dark Chocolate and Smoked Salmon

As usual, I'm a bit late with my posting. However, this time it's really because we've been very busy as of lately. Deadlines for the restaurant's opening are approaching and we're all on fifth gear to get things ready on time. 

Off the bat, I had thought of making something involving mole. However this idea quickly got scratched because one of the contributions had mole in it, so back to the drawing board. I felt that this combination really called for the ingredients to be left pretty much alone. But some of us can't really do that. So I had to go and complicate things a little bit. 

One of my favorite pastry blogs, Cannelle et Vanille just posted a recipe to the latest daring bakers challenge. Funny, it was just what I had been thinking about. Flourless cake and Ice cream. You could say that this post would fit both TGRWT and Daring Bakers...

So here it is: Smoked Salmon and Chocolate Ice Cream Sandwiches. 

First up: The flourless cake. 

I had been thinking about flourless cake for the restaurant. We have a mousse dessert that needed something texturally different. For this idea, I initially considered the double chocolate cookie from demolition desserts. But when I saw Aran's recipe, I decided to try it. It is good. The valentino's texture is really nice and dense and the taste is quite intense (we used dark chocolate of unspecified percentage).

The Ice Cream:

For the ice cream, we used a pretty straightforward custard recipe. We infused the smoked salmon in milk. Cooked it like a Creme Anglaise, then while churning we added bits of extra salmon. I ended up piping the Ice Cream into cilinders with a valentino bottom, topped it with another piece of valentino. Overall, there was about 75g of salmon in 500ml of liquid (50g in the infusion and the rest folded into the ice cream).

While it was hardening, we tested the ice cream on it's own. It was quite good. Tasting really sweet and creamy at first then yielding to the smoked salmon taste. A bit later, when it was colder. We tasted it again. The flavors were a bit more integrated, and the feeling of it was strangely reminiscent of the sensation of eating smoked salmon and cream cheese, only sweet. I could eat a lot of this. I believe it'd be a hard sell because of the psychological block that the idea would propose. 

Tasting them together, the combination was very GOOD! The only problem is that the valentino was a bit too thin for the amount of Ice Cream. The cooks, one of the owners tasted it and they were all captivated. I don't know if the'yd order it from a menu.

I'll save one for my wife to taste tomorrow when she gets back...

TGRWT #15 Round-up

The fifteenth round of TGRWT invited us to pair dark chocolate and smoked salmon. While it may have initially come off as a completely weird match, it seems to have given good results along the contributions. Hopefully, some of the participants will like to add this combination into their repertoires.

Here are the contributions:

Travis used some Tim Tam biscuits to give this combination an Australian twist on his Black Forest Salmon skewers. Apparently, the flavor and texture of his creation was a success since he barely managed to snap a picture of the last two.  You can read his post here.

Grant, from Charlie Weis and the Chocolate Factory created Smoked Salmon Cigars with Dark Chocolate Mole. Again, the flavors combined in a very pleasing manner. Grant's recipe can be found here.

Erik from Fooducation  joined this TGRWT with his Smoked salmon-goat's cheese-chocolate ganache-tortilla roll-ups .  Read his post here.

Markus, from Supernova Condensate also joined the cooking with his Hot Chocolate Salmon Pancakes, which seem to have left him thinking about adding chocolate to his salmon breakfast toast. Apparently, they were so good, that the pictures couldn't be taken.

Josh, from Silk Experience decided to put the flavor combination to the test on his Oscars Party and he created a black sesame cracker topped with a sriracha ricotta, smoked salmon, ginger syrup and shaved chocolate.  Sounds quite good and it looks good too. Click here for the post.

Alex, from Cooking Sideways also put the flavor combination to the test creating a Spinach and Aubergine Salad with Dark Chocolate and Smoked Salmon Dressing for a romantic dinner. He highly recommends it. Picture will come later. 

Daniel, from What's Cookin', Good Lookin' also took advantage of a social event to play with the Dark Chocolate and Smoked Salmon Combo. Daniel approached the ingredients just as they are in making his Chocolox. These bites were all eaten by his collaborators, so again, the flavor combination was good, albeit a bit too strong on the chocolate. The story's here.

Yannik and his friend Robert created two dishes for TGRWT. Robert made an Salmon Praline with Sauce à L'Orange for appetizer and Yannik made a dessert: Dark Chocolate Brownie with Smoked Salmon Honey Topping and Mango Dill Sauce. Check their dishes out at Yannick's Blog.

From Portugal, Ana sent her recipe for a Smoked Salmon Millefeuille with Chocolate Sauce and Pepper Caviar. The recipe's at Céu da Boca, her blog and it's worth a look. The dish is beautiful.

Rob, from The Curious Blogquat, and host to the previous round of TGRWT decided to try both sweet and savory versions of Hot Chocolate with Salmon Marshmallow. Rob's customers seem to have enjoyed samplings of this, and it appears that enjoy they did. Read about it.

Papin, from Flavor Alchemy, and host to round #7 created a Smoked Salmon Salad with Chocolate Dressing that looks quite interesting. It's over at his blog.

Martin, who practically needs no introduction to TGRWT people, also contributed to this round with his Smoked Salmon in Cocoa Gel with Lime. 

Finally, I would be a terrible host if I didn't join into the fray. So I made Ice Cream Sandwiches... I'll put the pictures up sometime later because, quite frankly, they were awful... But they did taste nice. 

Thanks everyone who participated in this edition of TGRWT, to Martin for allowing me to be the host and, well, if anyone's still reading after this long post... thank you too.

Stay tuned for Round 16!

Addendum (23/03/09)

I casually found this Entry from Aitorevolution. It's all in Spanish, but it's worth a look.