Chicken Stock - it all starts here...
I'm a home cook, so getting the amount of ingredients together takes time, occasionally finding a special deal on chickens (BOGO, end of day sales etc.), then when I have enough of the bones ready, I will start my next batch of stock, as you basically cannot move forward with any of these recipes without a decent reserve of this incredibly rich stock as your base for sauces and braising.
The recipe adds about 3kg of chopped up chicken carcasses and wings, which are roasted, caramelised and then lobbed into a pan with 8 litres of water with carrot, onion, celery, a whole bulb of garlic sliced through the equator, a few tinned tomates.
And a calf's foot, split in two. In chicken stock.
If you could have seen the look on my butcher's face when I asked him if he could get me the foot of a cow, he just smiled politely and asked how many, as if this was the most normal thing anyone had asked for that day. I think actually he was just happy to be able to charge me for something that normally does just get thrown away.
I'm not going to lie, the first time i tried to make this, I left the calf's foot out as I thought it was ridiculous. I will not make this mistake twice. It brings a natural gelatin to the stock that makes perfect sense, you drain the stock through multiple strainers lined with muslin, and then I just freeze it in 1-2 litre batches.
When you then reduce the stock further for any of the sauces, it has a natural thickening agent and tastes amazing.
Yes, Chef!
Roast Hog with Gem Lettuce, crispy bacon & apple sauce
This was the first mains dish I tried, and wow, it turned into a multi-day cooking experience as I went through the learning curve of making the Chicken stock without the calf's foot, boning pigs trotters, trying sous-vide for the first time, and cooking a pigs head.
I think about the only thing that I got absolutely right was the salad and the potato sack, but it was a fun meal, dished up with some very appreciative friends for a nice Sunday lunch. I was just a bit surprised when I calculated the cooking times, I realised that I was going to have to start prep on Tuesday in order to be ready...!
There are lots of different stages to this dish, skinning a pork belly, cooking the skin seperately for 24 hours sous vide, and this is just part one of the dish! Next up was to start braising the pigs head, which takes another 8 hours or so. Once cooked, you lift out the head and remove the remaining meat, skin, and brain, mix together with mustard and press into a neat square to get ready to coat in panko before frying. Just leave for another 12 hours to set...
The potato sack is fun, with a few nice spuds wrapped up in a salt crust pastry "sack", which I tied up using some heavy looking garden string which seemed to look authentic enough. This is served with a lovely garlic butter which is a simple recipe I have now taught to my daughter, who loves the taste.
The pigs trotter was a learning experience. I'll be honest, my boning skills were not what I wanted and I admit, after watching several videos about how to do this, I was really none the wiser if I was getting it right or not, but in the end, I managed to remove the majority of the bone from the trotter, while keeping my own fingers intact. It was then stuffed up again with minced shoulder, liver, and bacon, then cooked sous vide for another 9 hours. You start to see how long this is taking...
Apple puree called for a special ingredient Sosa Antioxidant Gel powder, so this was added to the shopping list for next time, but the salad cream was superb. When I later made the Pork Sauce correctly for the Cured Pork Belly and Pork Tenderloin recipe, I realised what the sauce should have tasted like.
As a first effort, I will give myself a 5/10, it was a complex dish to try, with lots of technical elements, but every time I walk past the meat counter at the supermarket, and I see the pig's heads and trotters ready to buy, I am very, very tempted to have another go at this.
Treacle-cured chateaubriand with beef fat brioche & Marmite butter
I had started using my new sous vide immersion heater for a few other recipes in between the Roast Hog and starting the chateaubriand, so I was a bit more confident about this step. It was also the first time I had really asked my butcher for some "special" ingredients, and the results were amazing.
Clockwise from bottom left, Beef cod fat is the stuff that you see wrapped around your roasting joints, the recipe asks for 500g of this to be minced and rendered into a crumb. It is the topping of the beef fat brioche which has incredible flavours of anchovy, marmite and capers with the richness of the beef throughout, it's just yummy.
Triple Cooked Chips, which Tom credits Heston Blumenthathal with the process. My first attempt here at this and I was not happy with the result. I love the process of using an apple corer to get neat cylindrical chips, steaming them for 30 mins, chilling them, but then cooking at 140c and 180c with an air fryer was just pointless. With this lesson learned, I invested in a new deep fat fryer for my birthday, and the kids now think daddy's chips taste better than McDonalds. I'll take that as a compliment.
The pure green Herb Emulsion was a good example of me just having to wing it. Tom uses a Thermomix to whizz the oil and herbs together for a few minutes at 70c. I don't have one of these machines as they cost more than my first car, so i just gently heated some vegetable oil then ran them through my blender. Anyway, you get a lovely deep green oil that then gets used with eggs (I used my own free range eggs here, I guess they should have been pasteurised, oh well), and then churned into an emulsion that basically is a herby green mayonnaise.
Marmite butter is a lovely touch that has a nice salty twang and tastes delicious with the brioche. The onion rings were a disaster, I had pickled them as suggested, but the recipe calls for Trisol, which is an interesting wheat starch that has it's roots in molecular gastronomy, as it makes for incredibly crispy batters using a 30/70 ratio of trisol to flour. I was struggling to find a local supplier so I skipped that bit. Don't do that again, I have now invested in a 4kg bucket of Trisol so I will never run out of the perfect batter to make onion rings again.
The Red wine sauce was the first sauce I made using the chicken stock recipe above, then adding a bottle of red, blackberries, redcurrants, etc. Once the stock is reduced from about 4 litres to about 2.5 litres, strain through yet more muslin into 250ml batches, then add an insane amount of butter to get this delicious sauce. I now understand why the chicken stock matters.
Chateaubriand steak is a classic cut of the tenderloin, normally reserved to serve two persons, as this this is a dish for sharing. Tom mentions using transglutaminase (meat glue) if you want to open up the steak to remove any sinew, I didn't have any meat glue to hand at this point, so i skipped this step. The beef is cured in treacle, then cooked sous vide 58/1, before being caramelised and covered in reduced treacle and red wine sauce glaze.
It's the best steak I've ever cooked.
Saving the best to the last, the Ragout stuffed portobello is a thing of beauty. You start by brining a nice chunk of beef brisket (poitrine de boeuf, in French) for 5 days, then I got to use my smoker to cook at a low temperature. You then mix together diced smoked brisket, beer (I think I used Belgian blond) and Chicken stock and slowly braise, before straining and mixing in crispy fried beef mince. This is your stuffing for the mushroom, which is first filled with Stilton, covered in a generous mound of ragout, then cover tightly with a layer of "crepinette" or caul fat. My butcher gives this to me free of charge, so I guess it costs him nothing too. Braised in chicken stock dotted with butter, finished with chopped chives. Absolutely amazing.
For this dish, I am going to award myself a 6/10, as the chips and onion rings were rubbish, the brioche could have been better, and I had to improvise on the emulsion. Everything else was just great, and I will look out for a nice piece of beef to make this again when I have someone I want to share it with!
I served this with a bottle of Chateau Canon Chaigneau 2012. Delicious pairing.
Braised Shin of Beef
I was drawn next to this dish, as it seemed like a relatively low cost dish to make., but with big, rich flavours, it seemed to be a good next dish to try. Tom says that this dish is one that he feels defines this section of the book, the long slow braising of the beef being the key to the dish.
You start with marinating beef shin pieces or "jarret de boeuf", which I was able to secure from my local butcher, Jean-Mi. He's a huge man, not that he's overweight, it's just that he looks like he has had steak for breakfast every day of his life, and he is probably about 6'4" tall, so when I first saw him, I just smiled as I knew he would be a butcher I could trust.
The centre piece of this dish is a bone marrow canoe, which is a vertical slice of marrow bone, which then has the marrow scooped out to create a cavity that the beef shin can be stuffed into. My problem was that I wanted my dish to look like Tom's on the right. Problem is that Jean-Mi doesnt have a bandsaw to trim the bones, so when he ordered them for me, I literally had 4 pieces of bone, almost 30cm long, so they would have been hanging over the edge of the plate!
I had asked him for the bones to be sliced, not trimmed. My fault.
OK, I have a workshop here at Chateau Edwards with a good selection of powertools, so there is no reason why not to use them to trim a few bones?
Thanks to my friends for capturing the moment.
Anyway, with this step completed, and a few food safety gods offended, the beef is cooked, over about 2-3 hours, in the marinade and chicken stock with a mirepoix., then removed, flaked and mixed with Lyonnaise onions, bone marrow fat, and stock into this incredible combination of flavours, then filled into the bone marrow cavities. I used my new fondant cutters to copy the 3cm cylinders of potato that covers the top of the beef mixture on the canoe, then wrapped in caul fat to secure.
There are three accompanying sides, two of which went really well, and I messed up the third.
The Hand and Flowers signature carrots are basically butter, sugar, and carrots with star anise. I will make these carrots whenever I can, they are just delicious. the parsnip puree is also deliciously rich and creamy, passed through a chinois so it is super smooth and luxurious. The parsely emulsion for some reason refused to emulsify, so I guess this was a step too far.
The sauce for the dish is the reduced beef braising stock, reduced to a sticky glaze. I wish I had spent a bit more time on the final plating as I could have made it look a bit better, but I was really happy with the result.
I've still got a few portions of this tucked away in the freezer. Waiting for a cold autumnal day to light the fire and enjoy.
This was a fun adventure, I mean, who doesn't want to cook with power tools?
I give myself a 6.5/10 for this, as the presentation is a bit rubbish and the emulsion didn't work, but it's still a great learning experience.
Cured belly of pork, with cauliflower puree and pickled cockle dressing
There are so many amazing flavours here. I'm blessed to be surrounded by local pork producers who specialise in a native breed of Belgian pig from the village of Pietrain, so all of the pork I buy from my butcher is all locally raised and slaughtered.
The key to this dish is to get the pork absolutely right, so with 8 portions I was able to have a few goes at getting the skin crispy. I love the slow cooking of the pork in duck fat, it really is incredible to slowly let the flavours build as you cook it as low as possible (my oven said 85c on the fan setting) for about 8 hours, then using my training weights, it pressed the pork into a perfect rectangle.
The final preparation of this dish included 8 tablespoons of "Pork Sauce". It's just one casual line at the end of the recipe, but this involved roasting about 3kg of pork bones (the butcher gave these to me for free), then adding these to 5 litres of already reduced chicken stock, to make 500ml of thick, rich pork sauce, which Is what I should have made when I was making the Roast Hog earlier. It does make all the difference, I'm glad i did this as I got to use the same batch to make the next pork tenderloin dish.
Here is a quick video explaining Pork Sauce
The dish also uses a slice of fried home made boudin noir which I got fresh from my local butcher, cockles from the fishmonger at the local weekly market, and puree cauliflower combination, which all worked really well together. I loved the apples and cockles together, and I had never tried Lemon Thyme before, which was a revelation to my taste buds. I now have some growing in my Potager which I'm looking forward to using with other recipes, it tastes amazing.
Essex Lamb Bun with Salsa Verde
This dish was a real challenge to make - my butcher gave me a complete rack of lamb, which I French trimmed myself to remove both racks, then to remove alternate bones so that you end up with 4 bones per rack, so 8 portions in total. I had a few friends over for dinner on a nice Friday night and the end result was amazing, it's just a shame as my oven blew up in the middle of cooking so I had to blast it in the microwave to get it up to serving temperature, so I think that the end result was a bit so-so in terms of presentation.
This was another dish that I went into as much detail as possible in the preparation. The lamb farce that you build around the lamb cutlet is delicious, combining slow cooked sous vide lamb breast that cooks for 8 hours, veal bone marrow, stock and lamb sauce with lamb sweetbreads. This is then wrapped in blanched savoy cabbage leaves and crepinette, before being wrapped in a polenta pastry.
I'll be honest, the pastry is something I need to work on to make it look better, I think I should have cut away some of the excess to make it look a bit neater, but it's a learning curve for me. The glaze of the lamb bun asked for egg yolks and dextrose which is an ingredient I was missing, so add that to the shopping list for next time!
The Salsa Verde was a delicious accompaniment to the dish, loads of capers, anchovy and garlic combining really well with the lamb. Tom's recipe calls for a Pacojet beaker to make this as smooth as possibe, but as I don't have nearly 5 grand to spend on that particular bit of kit, I'll save the money and take it as good as it was going to get.
First time I made this, I gave myself a 6/10 for this, the lamb sauce follows the same path as the other sauces based on the chicken stock, where 5 litres of finished stock is condensed into 500ml with 3kg of roasted lamb bones adding the additional flavour.
This photo is of my second effort at making the dish - I had some of the lamb farce leftover, and this time around I had added the dextrose to the egg glaze which just made the pastry look so much better. This one was cooked to perfection, I still need to work on the pastry to make it look a bit neater, but was still delicious. 7.5/10 second time around.
Tenderloin of Pork with pommes dauphine, pickled cabbage and mustard mayonnaise
OK, so this one was fantastic. I did a nice job on the presentation, and I really loved all of the component parts of the dish. Believe it or not, Tom's inspiration for this is a hot dog! The lead time for this was actually quite a long one - you have to pickle the Chinese cabbage for 3 weeks before serving, so I had a bit of time to wait to get everything together. Luckily it was the Belgian summer and it pissed it down with rain for most of the three weeks I was waiting for the cabbage to be ready.
There's loads of things going on with this plate, I really enjoyed bringing the different components together, making the tangy mustard mayo, the garlic sausage, the roasted caramelised onions, the pork tenderloin, they were all really good and came out really well, bathed in the delicious pork sauce that I made before with the pork belly, so that was a good use of the same sauce again.
My favourite part of the dish was the malted pork cheek fritters, which takes a whole pork jowl that has been slow cooked for 8 hours sous vide, then you combine the cooked flaked meat with honey, soy sauce, chicken stock and malt extract. I love these type of things to cook, the slow braising flavours of the pigs cheek was an amazing flavour. This was then wrapped up in daupine dough, a 50/50 blend of mashed potato and flour, then deep-fried. This was the point where I decided that I needed a deep fryer, as the pork fritters were amazing but could have been a lot better if they had been cooked a bit differently.
There is one ingredient missing from the final plating which is the Sosa Airbag Granet dehydrated pork skins - not something you find on your local supermarket shelves. I found a supplier in the UK and had them shipped to me in Belgium, but at a cost of import duties that was more than the cost of the ingredient! They were held up in customs so I didn't get them until after I had served the dish.
Oh well, next time.
Blanquette of Veal with Beetroot Linguini and Caramelised red onion
The overriding flavour in this dish is cardamon. It's such an amazing aroma, it is carried through this dish in the veal, the sauce, and even in the pasta as it is seasoned with cardamon salt to finish, as well as a nice confit of lemon zest.
This dish was another new skill set where I had to build the ballotines, trimmed from a large piece of veal breast. The veal is brined for 12 hours first, then I trimmed as much of the meat as possible to end up with five ballotines, so there is still a lot of leftovers kicking around the freezer! You wrap them in clingfilm, then caul fat, then they are browned and sealed, before being braised in chicken stock, also scented with cardamon.
The pasta was a fun project to do during the school holidays with the kids to help out too, so we were busy running sheets of hand turned pasta through the pasta machine, loads of fun! The caramelised onions are a very simple but equally delicious addendum to the dish.
I really liked the blanquette sauce, it was flavoured with lemon, egg yolks, and more cardamon. I was a bit annoyed that the pasta wasn't quite as red as I wanted it to be, but I'll take it. After a few tries, I eventually got the plating right, so I was happy with serving the pasta in this little cocotte.
If I had to make it again, I would probably have another go at trying to make the ballotines a bit tighter, as one of them fell apart a bit which I guess is the learning curve. I'm going to award myself a generous 6.5/10, just becasue I would have liked this to be a bit better, but lots of fun new techniques to practice and learn from.
Braised leg of Rabbit
OK, this is the dish I have absolutely nailed, I was so happy with this dish, the presentation, the combination of flavours, absolutely amazing. OK, I will be honest, the recipe calls for dandelion and summer savory leaves to be used. I looked all over Belgium for these but nothing was available, and considering how late it was in the season, I wasnt about to start using the dandelions that are so prolific in the garden at Chateau Edwards this time of year (August).
Eventually, I went for wilted rocket (arugula) with my homecured smoked bacon lardons which was a winner, served alongside perfectly cooked calamari rings, tossed with slow cooked lyonnaise onions...Yummy!
So, on a quiet Friday, I firstly boned, and then brined the rabbit legs, then on the Saturday I stuffed them back up with a delicate truffled chicken mousse, before you seal them up and put them into a sous vide, and cook gently for a few hours.
I was so excited that this dish was going so well, I forgot to take a picture of the plate with the Coffee and Lime filo pastry crisp that accompanies the dish! I think it is a superb addition to the plate.
I'm also very concious of the food cost of some of these dishes, as I'm the one cooking, preparing and sourcing the ingredients, I appreciate that this dish is a very economical use of relatively cheap ingredients. Farmed Rabbit is something that is available in every Belgian supermarket, so the sum total cost of the dish is very favourable.
The best part of this dish is the herb sauce. Take a base of chicken stock, add a bunch of fennel, rosemary, thyme, balsamic vinegar, herbes de provence, butter, and garlic, then you are left with this beautiful reduction that was just amazing.
I will give myself an 7/10 on this dish, as I forgot to put the pastry crisp on the plate before serving, and as my friend Matt observed, I need a better blowtorch.
Pigeon & foie gras en croute
There is a long way to go before this dish could ever be considered as a success. Don't get me wrong, I loved the taste, texture, and the process to create the dish, I guess I just didnt put enough care into making the final steps and finessing the details of making this work 100%. Let me explain.
You start off with making a chicken mousse, so blitzing chicken, cream, seasoning and an egg, which then gets passed through a drum sieve to make it nice and smooth. Now, I dont have a drum sieve with varied thickness sieves, i have a simple sieve that I was able to work the mousse through eventually, but I've put a drum sieve on my shopping list for another day.
Next is the Portobello duxelles that I really liked, so these two preparation steps are combined to provide the layer that will surround the central part of the dish, a perfectly cooked pigeon breast and a slice of sauteed foie gras. I was able to successfully remove the legs, wings, wishbone, and backbone from the pigeons to make two crowns, which were then cooked sousvide 45 mins, so far so good. I got the birds out of the waterbath, removed the skins, the breast bone, and then let them rest.
The gem lettuce parcels are stuffed with pickled girolles and Lyonnaise onions, with some really nice flavours, you blanch the lettuce leaves quickly, refresh them, then you build up the parcels like a ball in your hand. I really liked this component of the dish, it's the type of thing you can easily add to another dish as a really good side.
The foie gras componen of this dish was where I think that I screwed it up. I have been able to find pre-sliced frozen foie gras at one of my local supermarkets in the past, and at Christmas time, there is foie gras on sale literally everywhere, it's a huge part of the Belgian Christmas celebratory feast. In September, there isn't as much chance to find this ingredient, so the few shops I tried i came up with nothing. I had a large block of foie gras in the freezer, so I had to defrost this big lump of foie gras to get the slices I needed. The recipe asks for frozen foie gras for a reason, so that when you caramelise the slices before building the pie, they are no way near cooked yet, so the foie gras I was using was already starting to disentigrate.
I made the pastry which I really liked, built up the parcels after wrapping the duxelles, pigeon and foie grase in caul fat. My mistake, I then put the pastry directly on the caul fat, I think this was too wet, so it had a knock on to the consistency of the pastry when it was cooking. The egg glaze has 5g of dextrose powder which should give it a real shine too, but as the pastry was wet, it stuck to the tray during the cooking process. I also didnt get the sauce to the right consistency on the first plating either which was a bit annoying, but manged to get it right when I was reheating the next portions on second plating.
This is a dish that Tom said they often used to make two pies every time they cooked it as they could never be sure it was going to work. I know where I went wrong on this dish, but it is also a good example of why he has two Michelin stars, and I dont! I give myself 5/10 for the duxelles, mousse, lettuce and the pigeon. Lose points for overcooked foie gras, wet pastry, and not getting the sauce right on the first go.
Chicken in Beer and Malt
This dish seemed to be a relatively simple one at first glance. I mean, how complicated can cooking a chicken be? Well, this is the Hand and Flowers approach, so be prepared to be amazed.
There are a lot of incremental components to this dish, so you start with your chicken stock, reduced from 8 litres to 500ml of chicken sauce, then flavoured with toasted oak chips. This was a an awesome flavour, I loved it.
Salt baked celeriac, cooked for 2 hours, then cut into wedges and caramelised for plating was another amazing flavour, the celeriac royale called for a kilo of celeriac to be cooked in cream and truffle oil, which was delicious, but I will admit, I balked at adding all 7 of the egg yolks that the recipe called for, so it just got 2 instead and still tasted great, topped with a nice celery jam, and celery leaves to garnish. There is a nice vanilla mayonnaise that works really well, and a confit garlic that accompanies the whole dish.
The chicken, I correctly split and removed the backbone, tied up the knuckle and leg as instructed, brined for 6 hours, then cooked sous-vide 70/2 in beer. For my dish, I used Tynt Meadow, a British Trappist beer, whereas Tom uses Abbott Ale, it's not widely available here in Belgium, so I used the best British beer I could think of. and added the malt extract. Finished up to glaze the chicken skin with a blowtorch, it looked great, but wasnt cooked all the way through which really annoyed me.
Click here to learn about Tynt Meadow
The crispy chicken skins didnt work very well, and the mushroom tuille wasn't that good either. I didn't have any mushroom powder to make the tuile (I did have the isomalt, which was a fun new ingredient to try, Isomalt is a sugar based from beetroot, which apparently is very good for diabetics). The topping of the tuile includes a sourdough crumb, thyme leaves, and Sosa Airbag Granet dehydrated pork skin pieces, which become almost like a popcorn texture when you put them in the fryer.
I'm going to give myself a 6/10 for this, as the component parts were mostly OK, but minus points for not being properly cooked, even though I followed all the instructions. Live and learn.
Slow Cooked Duck
I abaolutely loved this dish, duck is one of my alltime favourite ingredients to eat, cook and enjoy. this dish had four really nice duck components, all of which I was able to make from one bird. I had sourced the ducks from my local butcher, Jean-Mi, and he played an absolute blinder. Three of the biggest ducks I have ever hd a chance to work with, just exceptional quality and well worth the effort.
First step was to butcher the ducks, by removing wings, legs, wishbone, and backbone to leave the crown attached to the breastbone. This was then scored, rubbed with ground mace, seared, and then sealed in a vacuum pack before cooking sous-vide. The duck breast came out from the water bath perfectly, I removed the breastbone, then you add to a hot pan to sear and then roast to temperature before serving.
The legs went into making a delicious confit with all of the rich flaky textures of perfectly cooked duck, that has been gently cooking in fat for a few hours, then mixed through with fresh peas, mint, and lettuce, and a splash of chicken stock. The meat which I had trimmed from the upper knuckle of the wings was enough to make the duck faggots, which were a delicious accompaniment to the duck breast and duck confit, I love when I get to wrap the meatballs in crepinette.
Once again, the star of the plate was the sauce. It's an amazing testament to what effort goes into these dishes. Taking the chopped leg, wing, and backbones I had trimmed from the carcass, roasting them to a perfect caramelisation, 2 litres of chicken stock, plus the saltiness of soy sauce and the sweetness of honey, this sauce was rich, dark and glossy and complemeted the dish as a whole.
The dish was finished off with the Hand and Flowers triple cooked chips, I was supposed to fry them in duck fat, but that would have been a cost too much to bear on this step, so they just went in the fryer as normal and tasted delicious.
I am going to award myself 8/10 for this dish. It's the dish that Tom prepared for the Great British Menu main course banquet that he won in 2011. He says it is the dish that defined his restaurant and made him as a successful chef. I understand why.
Venison & maple roast squash
I love game season here in Belgium. We are so lucky to have the amazing Ardennes forest here where meats such as venison, boar, and hare are readily available in the supermarkets at a very good price. This dish has a lot of the spices that make up a curry, so it's a subtle mix across the different modules.
There are loads of really nice components here - I started off making the lime pickle, which has a nice hit of cumin in the taste, and there are loads leftover too, so I will use this with some cold cuts later. There is a fantastic venison sausage that is made with a blend of pork belly, a hit of cumin and toasted mustard seeds, it gives a really nice crunch to the sausage which is cooked in the waterbath first, then fried to make a great crispy sausage, topped with baked chickpeas and deep fried Sosa Airbag granet dehydrated pork skin, which the kids love! They told me it tastes like a "porky popcorn".
There are two types of squash on the plate, a swipe of butternut squash puree is the base of the dish, then a caramelised wedge of Crown Prince squash which is basted in maple syrup, it's just delicious.
A new flavour to try was "prickly ash", made with ground Szechuan peppercorns, which was to season the venison, which was cooked really well, first in the sous vide, and then in a lot of butter, it came out really well. The recipe called for a special venison sauce, taking the standard of the base chicken stock reduced witth venison bones. I couldn't get hold of venison bones, so used up a lot of lamb and beef bones I was saving up for an occasion such as this.
Not my best presentation, but the components all worked together really well, so I will give myself an 8/10 for the dish, as it tastes great, but I could have made it look a little bit better with a bit of patience.
Spiced Duck breast with Dukka
This dish was a superb combination of flavours, spices, and textures. The main spice used is a classic Baharat blend of black pepper, coriander, paprika, cardamom, nutmeg, cumin, cloves, and cinnamon which gives the duck an amazing flavour, before finishing off with a honey glaze to make it sweet and caramelised. The main component, the duck breast is firstly brined in the spices, then cooked sous vide, then rested until finished in the pan.
There is a very good second duck component to this dish which is a spiced confit of curried duck legs, marinated for 10 hours in a blend of cumin, fennel, corainder, cardamon, cloves, and curry powder, which is then slowly cooked sous vide for 8 hours, before flaking the meat away from the bones and mixing with dried diced apricots. You then use a portion of this duck and apricot confit to mix with some duck mince, Tom's "pork sauce" which I had in the freezer left over from making the pork tenderloin recipe beforehand. Mixed with red wine, maderia and a carrot / shallot brunoise, it was a delicious accompaniement to the dish. The ragout is served on a disc of the duck confit, on a chiffonade of wilted raddichio, in a "brick" pastry case that has been made from 4 sheets of pastry, brushed with duck fat, and then pressed together before being cut into discs to make these fluted cases. ITt's all topped off with the dukka mix of toasted split pistachio, hazlenut, black sesame, corainder, fennel, caraway, and cracked black pepper. This is the standout part on the plate, the blend of crunch, taste, sweetness of the apricots, the spices, and the tang of the pickled wilted raddichio is quite delicious.
Last two components are the apricot gel and the duck sauce. I liked the apricot gel, but if I'm honest I felt it was a bit grainy, even though I had bltzed it as much as I could. The recipe calls for a Thermomix, to make this element work, but as this is out of my budget right now, I'm going to keep myself happy with the end result for now. The dish is finished up with the same duck sauce that is used in the previous duck recipe, so this came out really well too.
I'm giving myself a respectable 7.5/10 for this, as the pastry cases could have been cooked a bit longer, the fat could have been rendered a few minutes more on the duck breasts before serving, and the apricot gel wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but I'm happy with the end result.
