Green Almonds in Cucumber Gelée

Jude — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 06:42:19 +0000

In this relatively easy recipe from Alinea, green almonds are embedded in cucumber gelée and topped with sweet, spicy, sour, and salty elements. The crisp almonds, soft jelly, and four contrasting ingredients fully engage the senses and palate like nothing else.

Green almonds have an edible crunchy shell with a pronounced sourness, so add a pinch of salt and you can make a light snack out of it. It has a fuzzy exterior that feels and looks like the surface of a tennis ball. Try your luck finding green almonds in Middle Eastern groceries around springtime.

We’ll need the young almonds found within. The nuts, at this point in its prepubescent life, will have a thin outer layer encapsulating a semi-liquid center. It has a grassy taste and refreshing quality to it.

I made the following substitutions for the sweet, spicy, sour, and salty elements (this should give you an idea of how confused eclectic my pantry is):

Sweet: Thai coconut sugar instead of crushed sugar cubes
Spicy: Basque espelette pepper instead of cayenne pepper
Sour: Indian amchur powder (from unripe mangoes) instead of citric acid
Salty: Filipino rock salt instead of Bali sea salt

recipe adapted from Grant Achatz’s Alinea
Food in Colors: Red and Green hosted by Neha

Green Almonds in Cucumber Gelée
Sweet, Hot, Sour, Salt

makes 8 small bites

Green almond cross section.

Ingredients:

5 gelatin sheets
2 English cucumbers, quartered lengthwise and seeded
8 grams / 0.3 oz granulated sugar
5 grams / 0.2 oz kosher salt
8 green almonds, shelled

Notes:

I used 2 packets of Knox powdered gelatin (14 grams / 0.5 oz) instead of the gelatin sheets.
To shell the green almonds, use a paring knife. Cut a shallow slit on the seam that runs down the length of the almonds. The shell can be easily pried open with your fingertips.

Directions:

Line a 9- x 13-inch pan with plastic wrap. Reduce the area of the pan to 9 x 4 inches by lifting up one end of the plastic wrap. Place some sort of straight-edged object adjacent to the plastic wrap to make a barrier (I used an 8-inch springform cake pan lined with plastic wrap).
Juice the cucumbers in a juicer and strain using a fine mesh strainer (I used a blender and strained the resulting puree several times). Weigh 70 grams / 1.8 oz of juice and reserve the rest in a small bowl.
If using the gelatin sheets, immerse in iced water for about 5 minutes or until pliable. Squeeze excess water out of the sheets. Heat the measure of cucumber juice over the lowest heat setting and whisk in the gelatin sheets until fully dissolved.
If using the powdered gelatin, add to the measure of cucumber juice and stir until moistened to bloom. Heat the bloomed gelatin over low heat until liquefied.
Whisk the sugar, salt, and gelatin into the reserved cucumber juice until fully dissolved. Pour into the container lined with plastic wrap.
Evenly set the shelled green almonds in the gelatin.
Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, or until the gelatin is completely set.
Cut the cucumber gelée into 1-inch squares, centering the almonds (I used a 1.25-inch round cookie cutter). Chill until ready to serve.

To Assemble and Serve:

Gather the sweet, spicy, sour and salty elements of your choice. See the list above for the original ingredients. Add a pinch of the ingredients to each of the opposing corners and serve immediately.

Curiously addictive.

This is a post from Apple Pie, Patis, and Pate
Green Almonds in Cucumber Gelée

Butternut Squash Soup – Recipe from Alinea

Jude — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:08:20 +0000

So you pick up a new cookbook and inhale that addictive new book smell. While eagerly perusing photographs and ingredient lists, you may be thinking, “I can make that,” or, “Time to pay Chinatown a visit.”

And then you somehow convince yourself that owning the Alinea cookbook is a good idea, fully intending to actually cook from it. How hard can it possibly be?

The package arrives and the familiar scent creeps up your nostrils as you flip the opening pages. You chuckle as you see “How to use this book” in the table of contents, and against your better judgment, skip to the recipes anyway.

Silence. The techniques require surgical precision. The equipment needed won’t be on sale at Sur la Table. You suddenly find yourself Googling improbable search terms such as “food-safe syringe.” Most of the ingredients are not available at Whole Foods. All of the ingredients are measured in weights, some as accurate to one-half of a gram. You can’t make anything even if everything is delineated in excruciating detail.

Until page 225, that is. Granted, this butternut squash soup is merely one component in a dish of 9 sub-recipes. In case you were wondering, the other elements are duck, curry, pumpkin seeds, peanuts, limes, and bananas. I don’t know how that works either but hopefully I’ll find out soon enough. If only I had some citric acid and soy lecithin.

recipe adapted from Grant Achatz’s Alinea
Weekend Herb Blogging hosted by We Are Never Full

Butternut Squash Soup

makes approximately 1115 grams of soup

1 butternut squash
60g (4 tablespoons) butter
300g (1 1/4 cups) heavy cream
200g (3/4 cup + 2 tablespoons) water
40g (3 tablespoons) sugar
15g (1 1/2 tablespoons) kosher salt

Equipment:

a weighing scale
a blender
a fine-mesh strainer

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350ºF/177ºC.

Cut the butternut squash in half lengthwise. Remove the pulp and the seeds. Divide the butter into two 30-gram pieces and place in the butternut squash cavity.

Buttered butternut squash. Music to my ears.

Roast for about 1 hour, or until tender.

Good enough to eat as is, but since there’s cream involved in the next step…

Scoop out 500 grams of butternut squash flesh (about 2 1/2 to 3 cups) and place in a saucepan. Add the heavy cream, water, sugar, and salt. Bring to a simmer while stirring.

Pour into a blender and blend until smooth. Strain using a fine-mesh strainer or chinois.

This is a post from Apple Pie, Patis, and Pate
Butternut Squash Soup – Recipe from Alinea

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