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| 21st Century Sous Vide Chicken with an Old School Pesto. Andrew |
Like our Hunter Gatherer ancestors, I still live in the Stone
Age. Wot I'm saying is, I’m a technophobe. Anything digital has me pushing beads (thatz
sweating by the way). Give me things with dials and I might start to relax. I
consider, been able to post this blog as a serious technical achievement.
Yeah
for me…
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| The Sous Vide kit Me |
My foodie friend and associate from ‘The Urban Feasts’,
Harry Melck, is a part owner of two successful London restaurant’s (www.steakandwinecafe.co.uk). Anyhoo, he used a sous vide technique to cook a pigs' heart for our terrine at
our ‘Pigs Can Fly’ event. The heart was ridiculously yummy, so against every
fiber in my being, I decided to give this contemporary technique a go. Harry
suggested that I should try some skinless chicken breasts, so using his fancy
kit, that’s just what Stef and I did.
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| Foraged pine nuts Me |
Basically, Sous Vide is a technique of cooking, where you
put your ‘chompables’, (chicken breasts in this case) into a vacuum-sealed bag
and then cook it in a temperature controlled water bath. We kept our chicken breasts in
60°C water for 1-½ hours.
Then we slapped them onto a scorching griddle just to give them some color. They
tasted tender, succulent and delicious.
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| Stefs' hourly rate is huge, thatz why pine nuts cost so much Ha ha. Me |
Coz we were going all high tech, I thought to balance
things out, we should go ‘Old School’ with some part of our dish. A basil pesto
seemed the obvious choice, coz I had plenty of basil in the garden and a jar of
foraged pine nuts, given to me by my friend Gill, but wot excited me the most
was that I could at last use my traditional stone grinder that I pilfered from Mums’ garden. Andrew Cole a no nonsense bloke and a no nonsense chef was taking the pics
for the blog. When I started to clean out the neglected grindstone that was
lying in a forlorn part of the garden, he rolled his eyes in frustration at how
I always chose to complicate things, non the less he humored me. When Andrew
took a pic of the pated dish, he was unhappy with the color of the yummy pesto
that Stef had made, so he dressed another plate and took further pics. I
agree that the pics of the pestoless plate looked better, but then without the
pesto, how could I balance the 'new' with the 'old', or ‘The Urban’ with ‘The
Hunter Gatherer’. Also, I wouldn’t have been able to use any the pesto pics for
this blog.
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| Stone-age Basil Pest on the way Andrew |
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| The dish without the pesto Andrew |
So sorry Andrew, you’ll just have to humor me once again.
Shot for the pics though…
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| Just so you get an idea of wot shenanigans go down to get these blogs out. I'm using my longest surf board as a reflector, while Stef, who is showing plenty of leg skin makes the pesto. In the background is Ingrid (Prague) cracking open pine nuts. Thanks all. Andrew |
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