“Give that man a chocolate fish!”
– popular expression in New Zealand to express thanks
Y’all do love yer chok-o-lit. It seems, amusingly, that each time we’ve offered customers input into the planning of one of our dinners, notably our “Iron Chef” style approach, though others as well, chocolate leaps to mind. I do realize that there are whole restaurants out there devoted to chocolate-based meals, and believe me, I have nothing against the stuff, but hmmm, this makes for our fifth chocolate based weekend based on public request in our five years of being open. I think next time I’m banning chocolate as one of the choices….
Not all of the dishes were going to be new ideas – I brought back the white chocolate and avocado tartlets with king crab salad – they were such a hit last time that I couldn’t leave them off. Oh, I should note, the other key ingredient selected by a customer was “seafood” – and then that customer didn’t even show up for dinner!
Cauliflower and cocoa go together really well. It might not be the first thing you’d think of, but it works. Here, a very simple cauliflower soup (which is amazingly good on its own either hot or chilled) – sweat a thinly sliced large white onion in butter until they’re soft. Add in a broken up head of cauliflower, cover and steam for about 10 minutes. Cover the cauliflower with whey (I had from making the filling for the tartlets above), or a mix of half water and half milk with a splash of vinegar for brightness. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook until cauliflower is soft. Puree, season with salt and white pepper. Done. Into this I put sauteed scallops that were crusted in a mix of bitter cocoa, nutmeg, white pepper, ancho chili powder, sesame seed, cinnamon and smoked paprika. I also thinly sliced some chorizo colorado (cured chorizo) and sauteed it off as well. Some chopped cilantro atop and delicious!
If you’ve not tried chocolate chili prawns, you’re simply a lost soul. The sauce is a simple reduction of tangerine juice and sherry with some bitter chocolate dissolved into it and a little salt, and infused with a cut open jalapeño just to give it a hint of heat. The prawns are butterflied, dusted in flour with salt and pepper. Saute finely chopped garlic and ginger in oil, add the prawns and cook until browned on all sides. Add about half the sauce, just enough to coat the prawns with a nice sheen of chocolate and tangerine. Serve up with more of the sauce.
In the same dinner linked above I’d had an appetizer of pecan and cocoa-husk crusted catfish. This time I decided on it as the main course – so a bigger fillet of a fish from the Paraná Delta, called surubí, the Brazilian Tigerfish. Cooked the same way, served up with creamy polenta and some red cabbage cooked down in red wine. The sauce the same except using brandy instead of bourbon and a nice dash of habanero pepper added to give it some spice.
No seafood in the final dish (I vaguely toyed with the idea of doing something like caramelizing some salmon roe, but decided against it). A gooey, rich, flourless chocolate cake infused with the same spices that go into making Chinese five spice powder (cinnamon, clove, anise, star anise and szechuan peppercorns), a dollop of lightly sweetened whipped cream, and a salted pistachio and cashew brittle on the side.
I think we’ll give ourselves a chocolate fish!
if u have more food on chocolate i will love it.
Well, we’ve had some previous all chocolate dinners as well that you might find fun to look at: here, here, here and the main dish here.
[…] …I swore that if I did another Iron Chef style dinner that I’d ban chocolate as one of the ingredients, given that in all five previous iterations, that was one of the two ingredients selected. Okay, this time they said “cocoa”, but still. I just forgot to say so until it had already been selected. So the requests were “venison” and “cocoa”. The first turned problematic as we’re not in hunting season here, which meant that anything I might find in the venison world was going to be frozen. Not necessarily a problem, but it’s also been a few months since hunting season, and sure enough, it turned out that no one except one supplier had anything left. He told me he had a few kilos of lomo remaining and I ordered it up. Then he called me back to say it wasn’t lomo, but shoulder, so the few kilos included the bone and there was really only about a kilo and a half of meat, not enough for a three-day series of dinners – and, that it was so covered in freezer burn that he wasn’t even sure that it was from this year’s hunt. Needless to say, venison got scrapped. […]