My most recent amuse-bouche demo generated a little bit of buzz among the participants and the basic “recipes” I handed out afterwards were not deemed to be satisfactory. Ergo, an expansion on the original post with all the information required to transform a decidedly simple French country snack and an American after-school treat into something a bit different.

The Background: It really was a demo, and I had been searching for ideas for a transportable tiny sandwich which wouldn’t take up too much time and wouldn’t be overly offensive. It’s not everyone who wants to sit down to a squid sandwich or who thinks that anchovy mayo is a great condiment. The idea for a radish sandwich ultimately came from Linda, who had spent part of her year smoking cream to make variations of butter used to accompany radishes. After doing a little bit of research on radishes and butter, which by the way simply reconfirmed my abject lack of knowledge of this French springtime staple, I went to work. Classic pairing…

… of “radishes and butter” begat “radish pintxo” which begat “radish pintxo with banana and Nutella” which transformed and reinvented into an extended exercise with tapioca maltodextrin.

This is an interesting ingredient which arose from the food and pharma industries but which has been used by Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal, Wylie Dufresne and others and transformed into an ingredient common to modern haute cuisine. The maltodextrin nuggets and powder are derived from the work of others, and the techniques can be found in an online collection of hydrocolloid recipes that Martin Lersch maintains on his Khymos blog. The full collection is available here as downloadable PDFs. The radish jell-o? Also not an original idea but one borne out of necessity, so read on.

Radish Jell-o

• 3.5 g Knox gelatin powder
• 10 radishes
• 250 mL water

Why jell-o? Well, there’s always room for jell-o.

Actually, this became a necessity after I decided to add Nutella powder to the demo. The original premise was to serve a radish pintxo with bread, slices of radish, fleur du sel and butter powder, but with the Nutella powder I elected to change the butter powder to butter nuggets. To tone down the crispiness of the bite, something soft was called for and adding a radish extract seemed like a good idea to boost the radish taste since winter radishes are generally watery and mild-tasting. So, radish jell-o.

Grate the radishes with a microplane or a daikon grater. Add 250 mL water and let radish mixture sit 24 hours in refrigerator. Sieve radish mixture through a fine mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth. Push grated radish to extract as much liquid as possible. Transfer radish water into a tall container and let stand for one hour (this will allow some of the finer particles to fall to the bottom). Draw 200 mL radish water from top of container. Bloom gelatin powder in 50 mL radish water. Heat another 50 mL radish water to boiling point and add to gelatin. Mix solution with a spoon to ensure that gelatin has completely dissolved and add remain 100 mL radish water. Sieve gelatin through another cheesecloth-lined strainer into rectangular mold. Let set in refrigerator until ready for use.

Though I do have leaves of gelatin, I elected for Knox gelatin powder because I was running out of time and didn’t have any to spare to work out the ideal formula with leaf gelatin. The little Knox sachets are actually quite variable, as my trusty Tanita fine balance showed that they varied in fill weight by as much as a gram. 7 g appeared to be the amount proposed for 500 mL liquid so to ensure that my radish water would set I went higher and used 3.5 g for 200 mL liquid. This by the way still resulted in a very delicate gelatin, so going up a bit more may be required depending on how firm a gelatin is needed.

This jello provides a very ephemeral taste of radish. It can be added to the assembled pintxo as I did in the original demo to provide an additional boost of radish to the pintxo, or it can stand on its own with the butter nuggets and salt to reinterpret the pintxo. I have also just served it with radishes to have a very clean radish-on-radish bite.

Butter nuggets

• clarified salted butter
• tapioca maltodextrin

Butter nuggets started off as butter powder since I didn’t want to waste too much time in prep. However, when I decided to expand to include a sweet item, the butter powder had to be replaced since butter powder and Nutella powder repeated the same application. I thought about serving straight butter with the radish slices but then there would be no demonstration and the creaminess of butter would not work with radish jell-o. So, another type of “crunch” was required, hence the butter nuggets.

el Bulli has already developed bitter almond oil crumbs as a textural and flavor component and offered up the recipe as an example of how to use their Texturas-brand maltodextrin. The nuggets were developed out of this recipe: 22 g clarified butter was slowly added to 40 g maltodextrin and mixed until the appearance of crumbs.

At least that was about the only part of the Texturas recipe that stayed the same. Because of the physicochemical differences between butter fat and almond oil, some adaptation was required, and the end result wasn’t quite the same.

1. A hand (immersion) blender didn’t work because it kicked up the maltodextrin in spite of the presence of butterfat.
2. A whisk did a better job of incorporating the two but resulted in nuggets and not granules.
3. Heating the nuggets did not make them round; the different melting point of butter caused it to flatten and required a bit of stir-fry technique to keep the mass separated.
4. The resulting material was grainy and did not have an initial crunchy texture until after it had cooled down (at this point, I had nuggets).
5. It tastes more like milk or popcorn topping than it does butter.

Anyway, I think butter nuggets turned out to be a better result than butter crumbs because the larger pieces gave more visual contrast and really did not give away that it was indeed butter in spite of the butter yellow color.

This is also evidence that in many cases people do not listen to me: after I had finished describing the nuggets and what they were made of (butter), my pal Butter Boy started snacking on the nuggets strewn on the board and then said that he thought the skim milk nuggets were rather tasty. As I reminded him that they were butter nuggets, he blurted “oh merde! je suis en train de les manger!”

Nutella powder

• Nutella
• tapioca maltodextrin

This recipe was originally developed and described by Rob and Rachel of the Hungry in Hogtown blog (Torontonians! who’d have thunk?). They’ve been inactive for quite a while though there have been some recent posts regarding food poisoning after experimenting with street food in India. I think their best post was the one where they described cooking a rabbit dish from Ferran Adria’s el Bulli 2003-2004 reference text but you can find the original Nutella powder post here.

The basic “recipe” is a 3:2 proportion between Nutella and maltodextrin but I wound up closer to a 3:1 ratio (75% Nutella, 25% maltodextrin) for the application, possibly due to changes in the manufacture of Nutella since there’s been a whole lot of backlash about its relative nutritive value and fat content. Still, start with the 3:2 ratio and work from there. The only other modification I made to this recipe was to add some Piment d’Espelette to give the powder a hidden kick.

The use of a small food processor is warranted since hand mixing would take too long and the machine will also “fluff” the powder. Rob and Rachel made banana chips to sprinkle onto their Nutella powder, but I didn’t do this because I don’t care for the taste of cooked/processed banana and wanted to have the powder sweeten a slightly underripe banana.

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