Posted on
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
6:46 PM
| By:
Kitchen Roulette
Category: Posted by Jason
I hate green grapes. So of all the ingredients, this was going to be the most challenging. The other three ingredients were ones that I have used and enjoyed before. But the grapes...it took me a day or two to come up with anything at all. My preliminary ideas were:
-Grape and White Wine Reduction
This turned out way too sweet. Granted, I used terrible wine. But all in all, pretty awful.
-Grape and Balsamic Reduction
This seemed like it would be a little more promising. I thought the sourness of the balsamic would cut through the sweetness of the grapes. But alas, it ended up tasting strange. It was very rich but left a bad taste in my mouth.
After these failures, I decided to focus on a different ingredient. When I think savory chocolate dishes, a mole stands out. I had never had a mole before. But after doing a little research, I found that it often has raisins in it. Substituting grapes for raisins didn't seem like to big of a stretch. I roasted tomatoes and grapes to remove some of the moisture and pureed them with cooked down ancho and chipolte chilies, some pecans and sesame seeds, and the bitter chocolate.
I melted the smoked gouda into the polenta and cooled it down. Once it set, I cut it into strips and made polenta fries. Topped with portobella mushrooms roasted in olive oil and garlic and spicy shrimp, it came out like this:
Being presented with the dish, after guessing and prying at what it was going to be all night long, everyone was thrilled. The stacked presentation was simple and pleasing. Not to mention that shrimp had found their way on top of it all. Most elements were creative and intuitive (we all agreed the mushrooms were just kinda thrown on there) and were for the most part well executed. There were in fact only three notable criticisms for the entire meal.
First and most notable was the failure of the polenta fries to fry. The gouda polenta was really very good, but assumed a rather unpalatable texture when put into the under-temped oil. They became very soggy and lost some of their appeal. For me that was the biggest hiccup.
Second was the lack of presence of two of the ingredients. The mole, while ingeniously incorporating the two perhaps most difficult ingredients, all but masked them entirely. I wouldn't have been able to taste the chocolate if I hadn't been looking for it and the grapes had just vanished.
And third, as was already mentioned, was the mushroom bit: kinda just tossed on there.
All that aside, we had a great dinner and stayed up way too late talking about how awesome this whole thing was going to be. The next day I got my ingredients.
-Joe
Looking back on it, I think the polenta fries needed to be breaded. I think that would have helped to keep them from sticking to the pan and would have added a crispy element that I was going for.
-Jason