First outdoor dinner of the year. Chicken stock with simple chasu/tare seasoning. Dried wheat noodles (commercial), thawed pork belly chasu pan fried, micro-poached egg, grilled leek and tenderstem broccoli, chili oil and black garlic oil. Looks like a lot but almost everything was prepped beforehand.
This year I'm fermenting my wild garlic. I won't do a long ferment, just enough to stop it going bad in the fridge too quickly, which has been a concern in the past. I used to make pesto with cheese and pumpkin seeds, then just added salt and oil to finely ground wild garlic and froze. Making this for a ferment is a very simple process. Wash, squeeze dry, shred (I used a mixer, but it won't take long by hand), weigh.
Wild garlic time! Gonna play around a bit with gentle fermentation for these, but for now, steamed on top of rice with some beef bits from a recent stock, micro-teamed then grilled leeks, broccoli, parsley on top of rice. Sauce is chicken stock, tare (ramen seasoning with soy, msg, salt?), chili oil and some pork chasu drippings. Yum.
Dumpling weekend. Pork shoulder chasu filled yeast/baking powder leavened dumplings on Saturday night. Lazy Sunday and gyoza with pork and veg fillings: minced shoulder, ginger, soy, garlic, chives, chard. Wrappers were all done from scratch through an Imperia Restaurant pasta machine with the help of my lovely assistant. I don't have all-purpose flour (my usual caputo rosso), so I'm blending low protein Italian 00 and some strong bread to get the same effect.
Bit of a broth blitz the other day. Beef and chicken. Ramen results. Made a base stock of roughly one part each of homemade (frozen) dashi, chicken and beef broth. Tare (seasoning) was soy, salt, water and msg, I went at about 3/4 usual strength.
Fermented butter. Forgot to take pics of the process, so sorry about that, this is the final result! Super simple, and about the same price as normal butter, and takes a few minutes if you're using a stand mixer. 1. Grab some high fat cream.