From The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook:

I keep creating omelets one after another, like soldiers marching into the sea, but each one seems empty, hollow, like stone. I want to create an omelet that expresses the meaninglessness of existence, and instead they taste like cheese.

(via Memex 1.1)

( Technorati tags: cookbook | cooking | sartre | philosophy)

Knowing my predilection for liquorice, some family members recently brought me box of crushed liquorice root back from Egypt. Rather than drink the infusion, I thought I’d attempt to recreate a Heston Blumenthal dish we ate at the Fat Duck 18 months ago: SALMON POACHED WITH LIQUORICE. I remembered I’d kept Blumenthal’s recipe for liquorice jelly from The Guardian in 2003 for exactly this reason. The dish we ate at the Fat Duck was garnished with chicory (without doubt the best chicory I’ve ever tasted), but The Guardian version (and the version on today’s menu at the Fat Duck) recommends pink grapefruit and asparagus alongside the salmon, as “both liquorice and asparagus contain a compound called asparagine”. I didn’t have the required agar flakes to make the all-encasing, heat-resistant gelling agent, so in the end simply grilled the salmon, but nevertheless it was terrific, even if the asparagus was from Peru and the dish looked absolutely nothing like this. My (vege-gel) jelly looks dark and mysterious in its jar though.

I now also feel like I’m one step closer to my ambition to restarting my career as a sculptor by making a grizzly bear-sized liquorice cat (I once made three life-sized marzipan pigs).

This discussion (”Sourdough puts the art of hacking back into breadmaking”) reminded me that my sourdough starter is currently in hibernation:

Whilst doing some research on Food Science and on Nicholas Kurti in particular, the so-called ‘father of Molecular Gastronomy’, I discovered that Oxford’s Science Area, where Kurti worked and not far from where I live, is renowned for once having been the ‘coldest spot on Earth’: “Using demagnetisation of nuclear alignment, Professor Kurti was able to create temperatures of a millionth of a degree above absolute zero.”

Cool.

Kurti’s interest in what he called ‘gastronomic physics’ also led him to invent an ‘Inverted Baked Alaska‘ which consisted of frozen meringue filled with piping hot apricot puree, described as ’sticking a spoon into Iceland and getting an eyeful of magma’. Here is Heston Blumenthal’s recent update of Kurti’s original recipe in the Guardian: Nicholas Kurti’s stuffed profiteroles.