Sunday, November 30, 2008

Experimentation


So after perusing the pages of Alinea the cookbook for the last month or so, it was time to make some of my own concepts and not just work on Grant Achatz food. TO start with I was going to try and come up with a use for some vanilla vodka we had made some time ago. The regular Smirnoff stuff you can get at the liquor just wasn't vanilla enough for us. So we took all the scraped vanilla beans we had on hand and put them into the vodka. 2-3 weeks later.....voila, a nice brown liquid that is overwhelmingly scented by vanilla.
While passing ideas around I was struck by the idea to make a "screwdriver" with this wonder liquor. And wouldn't you know it, it tasted just like one of those orange julips I got as a kid at that big orange thing in Montreal. Only this one had booze. So the only logical thing for us to do was make an orange julip bite.
We started with setting some vanilla vodka spike OJ with agar. We filled a mold only half way and let this set. We also prepared an orange cream, also set with agar to go over the first layer. Once the two layers had fused we removed them from the mold and finshed the dish with Kumquat jam and orange foam.
Wow. It tasted really great. We will deffinitely be amking this again.

Enjoy.

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