This is a particular favourite of my brothers which we first tried at one of my favourite restaurants. Naturally I tried to recreate it and fortunately allowed me to brush up on some of my food chemistry. The general process here is to juice the fruit, sweeten to taste, thicken with agar and puree to the desired consistency.
Drawing inspiration from a personal favourite desert of mine, I wanted to take a crack at my own chocolate/Sea Buckthorn recipe. I went with a decadent chocolate mouse and tart sea buckthorn puree that came together to make a complex explosion of flavour. Since both components are similar in texture they mixed together fairly well and made for an amazing experience.
An exceedingly decadent desert with a perfectly tart (sweetened) sea buckthorn puree. This was prepared by an amazing restaurant and is a personal favourite.
A lovely classic, tuna poke bowls are both incredibly complex and simple at the same time. Tuna was seasoned in a soy/honey marinade (with a bit of ginger, sake, mirin) that makes it pop in the mouth. Spicy cucumbers, avocado and other basic additions as well as some caviar to fancy up the dish. Timeless classic.
A seemingly impossible feat, building and maintaining a campfire in the middle of a lake is not overly complex (as long as its frozen).
Also it makes for a great picturesque scene.
I got a new Staub baking dish for Christmas and it was finally time to break it in with no other dish than enchiladas.
I made 2 varieties, the first a little bit more authentic with seasoned chicken thighs with queso fresco the other a bit more American with pulled pork. Both gently drizzled with a nice enchilada sauce. May not be the most visually appealing dish but had a phenomenal taste.
A recent addition to my aquarium are 3 new shrimp which just so happen to match with the Pokemon gen1 Pokemon legendary birds.
I have been playing around with more advanced food chemistry and have started to get into spherification. The theory behind it is fairly simple sodium alignate is dissolved in whatever liquid you want to spherify and this is then bubbled into a calcium ion bath (calcium lactate in my case) which causes the alignate to polymerize and make pearls.
For now I am still playing around but I have some plans for the future with actual dishes using this.
A birthday classic, I started 2023 with my classic bacon wrapped Filet mignon with a foie gras toast starter and a espresso chocolate mouse desert.
Amarone wine to match. Definitely the perfect choice to such a meal.
I have noticed that my water appears to run hotter in the morning when I get up vs later on in the day. In truth this is probably due to relative temperature where in the morning I am colder and so things appear warmed but I still wanted to find out how much my water temperature changed throughout the day if at all.
Looking at the temperature profile throughout the day I saw some interesting spikes that occurred like clockwork at 5am. Breaking this into minitab and looking at the temperature intervals vs hour we find that there is indeed a statistically significant difference in the morning at 5-6am vs later on.
The cause is most likely that I have my heating turn on at this time and this is likely heating up the water in the pipes leading to this rise in temperature and thus leading some credence to my theory that the water is warmer in the morning. Of note the temperature sensor is on the outside of the pipe so potentially I am seeing the warm air heat up the sensor rather than the actual water but I used thermal compound to make good contact with the pipe and it is copper after all so thermal conductivity should be good.
