Dinner at The Russet - The Pictures

We cooked a dinner at The Russet, a recently opened venue in Hackney Downs Studios, renovated and run by our friend and frequent gun-for-hire, Steve Wilson (Passing Clouds, The People's Kitchen). Though days away from Christmas, we were not keen on reinventing or deconstructing traditional fare, but on cooking as delicious a dinner as we could from ingredients at their best in December. We prepped dinner on overturned apple crates, helped by David Boycott (@birdfoodblog) and rewarded at the end of our prep day with Steve's rum barrel-aged scrumpy.

The snacks. We served Hackney Wild sourdough bread made by Ben Mackinnon at e5 Bakery, along with our freshly churned, lightly salted butter.

Chopped beef fillet, lightly cured in salt and pepper, egg yolk and capers in raw brussel sprout leaves.

Raw baby turnips and their tops with fried grey mullet skin, lemon gel and lemon thyme.

Yellow carrot 'custard' with fried jerusalem artichokes, purple carrots, chervil and rye streusel.

Steve and Josh

Mussels poached in mussel stock. Roasted cauliflower with mussel powder, watercress juice and charcoal oil.

Mike plating his pork belly main course.

Slowly cooked pork belly with spleen paté, medlars, chestnuts, parsley root and cavolo nero.

Slow-cooked hen's egg, wild mushrooms, cavolo nero, fried broccoli and beet,  for our vegetarian guest.

For the final course, we set up a station in front of the guests with a Kitchenaid and a dewar of Liquid Nitrogen. The dish started with Russet apples, poached and then frozen in nitrogen before being shattered and thawed and golden raisins rehydrated in cider vinegar.

Mike removing raisin meringues from the dehydrator trays and Josh beginning to churn apple ice cream with nitrogen.

David and Mike plating.

Russet apples,  russet ice cream,  raw chervil root,  raisins and apple peel powder.

We served two little sweets with coffee - a mace sponge with caramelised butter and a piece of butternut squash with burnt sugar and membrillo.

An origami frog left for us by a guest

The Lido Cafe Takeover III

Heritage English Tomatoes

Toasted Almond Milk, early Blackberries, Mint and Hampshire Rose Cheese

Monkfish Cheeks,

Twice-cooked, with Marsh Samphire, Pickled Lemons, Chicken Skin and Parsley Sauce

Oxtail 'Tartare'

Cooked for 48 hours and aserved medium-rare with anAlderwood-smoked 62° Egg Yolk,Ruby Chard, Fried Garlic and Rye Bread

Suffolk Large White Pork

16hr Belly with Muscat Grapes, String Potatoes, Wild Fennel, and Chard Leaves

24hr (Sous Vide) Malt and Seaweed- glazed Pork Spare Rib with Plum Sauce

Nitro Aerated Dark Chocolate Parfait
Genoise Sponge, Kentish Cherries and Marsala

Coffee and Snacks

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Crayfish Bob's at Two Degrees Festival

We will be serving crayfish caught by Crayfish Bob at Art Admin's Two Degrees Festival, taking place at Toynbee Studios between Monday 13th and Friday 17th June. It is both a chance for us to serve an ingredient we haven't cooked before, and a chance for Bob to explain his quest to eradicate the American Signal Crayfish, an introduced and highly invasive species which has decimated stocks of our native White-Clawed Crayfish. We shall be dressing the crays with foraged and sustainably-sourced garnishes.

The dinner will be served in the courtyard of Toynbee Studios (Map)

The price is 5 pounds per head. More is revealed, and bookings can be made at the
Two Degrees website.

Twitter
Arts Admin - @artsadm

Two Degrees Festival - @two_degrees, #twodegs2011

Crayfish Bob in action

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Images © Crayfish Bob 2011

'Not For Sale' Exhibition Dinners, March

The retina of a Zebrafish' by Dr. Steve Wilson, 2011

As part of 'Not for Sale', an exhibition curated by Dr. Crystal Bennes (writer, critic and founder of SALON) we cooked a series of three dinners in the offices of Spoonfed in Angel Islington over the course of ten days in March. The menu evolved over the course of the project - we wanted to develop dishes that would feature repetitions of certain ingredients throughout the meal, and some replacements had to be made as the seasons were changing.

Chris at Buntings Butchers in Peckham taking the skin off a Middle White Pork Belly.

Brining Pork Belly, Cheeks and Ribs

Dehydrating Apple Peels to make a sweet/sour powder

Red Apple Peel after being dehydrated and ground with sour Malic Acid (derived from Apples)

Using our Polyscience Smoking Gun and Alderwood chips to smoke a reduction of Chicken Stock, Barley Malt Extract, Thyme and Mustard for the pork belly sandwich.

The last of the season's forced Champagne Rhubarb from Yorkshire, procured for us by Tim Sheehan at Franklins Farm Shop in Dulwich. We cooked the stalks en sous vide with honey, parsley stems and sugar to garnish the pork. We prepared more rhubarb in the same way to extract the juice for the Rhubarb 'Custard' Dessert.

Cornish Mackerel fillets, curing in Sicilian Lemon-infused Salt and Sugar

Brioche buns rising. We have recently been attempting to make our own bread rather than buy it as we used to. We have been experimenting with various recipes from chefs we admire, and have almost reached our perfect method.

Portobello mushroom 'steaks' curing in Thyme Salt for the vegetarian alternative to the pork. they were served with Samphire and Seaweed Powder.

Pork Cheek, cooked en sous vide for 8 hours and deep fried until crispy, to be served with 63°C poached Hen Eggs. Later in the week, the meat garnish changed to Oxtail, slow-cooked in veal jus en sous vide for 24 hours and garnished with Leeks.

The Belly Pork Skin roasted and subsequently crushed into crumbs for the sandwich.

We didn't have time to photograph all of the plates, and so some images of different iteration of each dish will have to be imagined, but here are some we managed to get...

Lemon-cured Cornish Mackerel
Marsh Samphire, Apple Gel, Channel Wrack Kelp Powder

63°C  Poached Hen's Egg
Slow-cooked and fried Pork Cheeks

Middle White Pork Belly Sandwich
Brioche, Malt Sauce, Dried Wild Garlic, Poached Rhubarb and Crackling

Pears
Pecorino, Rocket Sauce, Quince Gel, Hemp Oil

Lemon Polenta CakeRhubarb "Custard", Applemint

Apple Balsamic Vinegar Caramel
Maldon Salt

Guests were invited to fish out their poached eggs from the circulating water bath which was installed and cooking the eggs thoughout the exhibition and first courses. We gave instructions on how to break open the eggs, and the diners plated the first component of the course. We then plated the garnishes at the table.

Mike explaining the plating of the egg course.

The Lido Cafe Takeover - Menu

Writing the menu for our dinner at The Lido Café has involved the recent splendid weather enticing some of our favourite vegetables to the surface, and, trusting that nothing catastrophic befalls usgetting hold of them this week, we propose to serve the following:

 Scallop

Samphire, Leek, Radish

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Mackerel

Hay, Yoghurt, Seaweed, Apple

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Hen Egg

Asparagus, Wild Garlic, Toast, Goats' Butter,

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Beef

Oxtail, Bone Marrow, Yellow Carrot, Wild Leek

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Beetroot

Strawberry, Mascarpone, Mint

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Coffee and Petits Fours

Food Shopping in Berlin

The first international job for Blanch & Shock has come in the shape of an invitation to Berlin from Light Collective, with whom we had the pleasure to work last year on a dinner inspired by the spectrum of colours. The dinner was served at Castle Gibson - where the entrepreneurial BBC reality show Dragon's Den is shot, and for this version, we are to take over a disused power substation in western Berlin. We build our kitchen on Thursday, supplemented with a staggering amount of equipment which Amy and Mike bravely drove over from London in our new van. For now though, we have been trawling the city for hard-to-find ingredients and esoteric cooking equipment (a spätzle maker...) and planning the menu as we unearth its content. We are used to knowing what we can get hold of and where when we are in London and we are faced with the possibility that the menu may change significantly at the last moment if the food seasons differ drastically to our own or we fail to break the language barrier..

Armed with technology, GCSE German and a diverse catalogue of abstract food-related hand gestures and noises, we set about translating what we thought we wanted into a new menu.

A dry-aging cabinet in FILETSTÜCK, an elegant brasserie and butchery in Prenzlauer Berg, where delicious looking Irish beef was lined up on perfect slate slabs and the air was perfumed with the smell of caramelizing meat, coming from the tiny kitchen in the back of the shop. It was 11 o'clock in the morning, which went some way towards dismissing our hunch that good food was going to be hard to find.

At LPG Biomarkt,  also in Prenzlauer Berg, we found locally grown organic vegetables, including the famed Teltow Turnip, foraged wild garlic leaves, sea buckthorn in many guises (including Gummi Bear) and chunks of Beef Belly, which we hadn't encountered before in London.

At FrischeParadies, a smart food emporium to the east, we found fresh fish, Samphire, and an array of colourful varieties of fish roes. We lost our trains of thought in the meat department, transfixed by huge, vacuum-packed slabs of beef from around the world. Mike lovingly held an entire fillet of Australian Wagyu, and for the briefest of moments we considered blowing our entire food budget on it and serving it on its own, with a pot of mustard. Or taking it home and eating it ourselves.

In spite of the warnings from people concerned about our finances and state of mind, we headed to KaDeWe in the west of the south west of the city. KaDeWe is the biggest department store in Europe. it has been since 1925. The food hall on the top floor is a massive collection of 'stalls' and departments groaning with food - fish from around the world, a condiment section that could be measured in acres, and once again, a meat department at which the rest of the world seemed suddenly insignificant. Apart from beef from Argentina, Australia and USA, and more amazing-looking Wagyu 'Entrecôtes' (at €280. Per kilo) there is an offal department with such delights as Sheep Lung and Veal Oesophagus (for stock) and a whole game stand, with Boar, Venison, Antelope, Rabbits and poultry hearts and stomachs.

We tasted smoked Freshwater and Sea Eels, admired the colour clash of tropical fish amongst those we recognised, drank expensive coffee and made a mental note to become staggeringly wealthy and spend the rest of our lives shopping in the great food halls of the world.

Next: The Dinner