I’ve had my eye on the Alinea cookbook for quite a while (long before this previous post). It’s a gigantic book–heavy, wide, and full of beautiful pictures. It’s inspiring in its use of traditional and modern techniques in imaginative ways to make food that is not only beautiful, but delicious. The book tries to give the world a view into how the food is made and served at the restaurant named the tenth best restaurant in the world.

Some of the recipes seem to be more science experiment than recipe, relying on chemicals or equipment that one would expect to see in a lab, not a kitchen. Some, however, really rely on very traditional ingredients and techniques. No matter what the components are made of or what machine is required to prepare them, the dishes presented in this book are original and innovative in their pairing of flavors, textures, and visual elements.

The first recipe I’ve made from the book is YUBA, shrimp, orange, miso. This may seem like an odd title for a recipe, but it tells the reader (or diner) the main focus of the dish and the major contributing players. I’ve also seen this dish (presumably the same preparation) labeled as YUBA, shrimp, miso, togarashi.

Now, I know some of you out there may not know what yuba or miso, or togarashi are. I’ll start with the easiest, togarashi. It’s pretty much just Japanese chili powder. Miso is a fermented product made (usually) with rice and/or soybeans. It comes in many varieties, but white (shiro) and red (aka) miso are the most common. I almost always keep some miso in the house, as we love many Japanese dishes that use it. Yuba is made from the skin that forms when you heat soy milk. It’s apparently available dried or fresh, but this recipe leads you through making some yourself.

Like many recipes in the Alinea book, you make various components and then assemble them at the end. Some dishes may have dozens of components, some have very few. This one was pretty straight-forward, only 4 major components.

Following the precedent by the (much more famous than I) Carol Blymire (Alinea at Home) and Martin Lindsay (Alineaphile), I won’t share exact measurements for any component. In fact, since I was a bad blogger, I didn’t take photos of the whole process. Unfortunately neither Carol nor Martin, known for their diligent photo-documentation of these recipes, have done this one yet. Go buy the book… even just to look at it. Worst case, go look at it at the library (like I did).

First you make yuba. Simple enough, since it’s been made in China and Japan for hundreds of years, right? Well, it is pretty easy. This recipe calls for you to make soy milk (soak soybeans, blend with water, boil, strain) first. Then you simply heat it, wait 12-15 minutes until a skin forms, and take it off. This is somewhat easier said than done, since this stuff is slippery when fresh. The traditional way is to use chopsticks to gently lift it out, so that’s what I did. Lay it out, roll it up (if it wasn’t already all smushed together), and dehydrate it.

Orange in this recipe comes from candied zest. Peel off the zest, cut into strips “as thin as possible”, and blanch in some simple syrup. This component was pretty easy.

The miso goes into the sauce–a mayonnaise. If you’ve never made mayo before… go do it now. It’s one of the culinary wonders of the world. An egg yolk offers up its lecithin to emulsify oil and citrus juice, producing a creamy, tangy, clingy sauce perfect for just about anything fried (and sandwiches, and spoons). This mayo is flavored mainly with miso and lime juice. The recipe made way more than I needed for the (more than called for) yuba I made, so I’m looking to find something to pour this on soon. The only bad thing about homemade mayo is that it’s quite perishable.

The shrimp are supposed to be cut in a manner that I can only assume is easy on very large shrimp, producing an even strip of shrimp meat that gets wrapped around the yuba. Mine were not pretty, as I used what I had–frozen shrimp. I think they were a little too small.

Fry the yuba sticks, wrap them with shrimp, bake to cook the shrimp, sprinkle with salt and togarashi, and dress with the orange strips and some small chives.
Compare mine with pictures taken by Alinea diners on Google Image Search. I think I did pretty well. I definitely impressed my wife and our 6-year-old daughter. They both really liked how it looked and tasted. Our chives were not very potent, so their flavor didn’t come across very much, but all the other components played together so nicely. The soft shrimp contrasted with the crunchy yuba and the sweet orange complemented the flavors in the miso mayo.

You could probably “cheat” on this recipe with store-bought breadsticks or pretzel rods. Get some cocktail shrimp, cut them in half, lengthwise, and drape them around the breadsticks. Mix some miso and lime juice (and a little sugar and cayenne) into some store-bought mayo. Not sure how to cheat on the orange zest and togarashi… maybe just mix some into the mayo?

The point is that the flavors work so well together. The hardest part of this recipe is the time commitment. Soak the soybeans overnight. Cook up the milk. Each sheet of yuba takes 12-15 minutes. I made a dozen. Then you dry them for 3 hours. We’re already talking around 24 hours for one (albeit major) component of the dish. It was fun, but if I did it again, I’d buy soy milk, get bigger shrimp, and make more and bigger yuba sticks. They were good.

I love to try new things. In this small town, I usually find myself in the situation of having recipes calling for ingredients I can’t get. Sometimes, though, I find new ingredients that need to be explored. Sometimes they aren’t so exotic, like smoked paprika or smoked salt. Sometimes they seem a little more exotic, but are still comparable to other familiar products, as is the case with pomegranate molasses or wasabi. I recently walked into our newest Indian grocery store, Mirsung, and was excited by the fresh vegetables they had that I’d never used before.

One of them was roughly the shape of a pointy cucumber, slightly ridged, and covered with bumps. Having seen pictures before, I knew this was a bitter gourd (also known as bitter melon or karela). Having seen Lisa’s post on Champaign Taste, I knew I would have to try it out and report back. They are in the same botanical family as gourds, and as such, have some seeds and a little pulp that needs to be removed before cooking them. They are, as the name suggests, bitter, but in a pleasing appetite-inducing kind of way, like a Campari aperitif.

Being an Indian vegetable, I looked a little online, but eventually I knew I wanted to use some recipes from my go-to vegetarian recipe source, The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking. It had a handful of recipes listed under karela in the index under bitter melon. The first one I tried was called “Potato Patties with Crunchy Bitter Melon Chips” or Aloo Karela Tikki. Think crunchy potato blini, studded with fried vegetables. You boil some potatoes and peel them. Then you trim (the ends), clean (the seeds/pulp), and chop the karela. Fry it in some oil until it’s GBD. I tried the karela at this point, and it was good–crunchy, chewy, a flavor similar to properly-fried okra with a little bit of bitterness. The rest of the dough comes together with some salt, cayenne pepper, whole wheat flour, horseradish, coconut, and lime juice. Shape into patties and fry it up. Some people garnish a blini with sour cream and caviar. I spooned on some plain yogurt, and added some chives from our garden.

They were great. The karela was there, but in the background. This dish is more about texture and the balance of some simple flavors instead of showcasing the karela. I was pleased with the result, but wanted a more bitter melon focused dish, so I chose one called “Pan-Fried Whole Bitter Melons with Cashew Stuffing” or Kaju Bhara Karela (from the same book).

In this recipe, the karela were handled as a hardy vegetable. They are cut open, cleaned, sprinkled inside-and-out with salt and a little sugar to draw out some moisture and bitterness, then par-boiled for 10 minutes. Then I stuffed them. The mixture was ground cashews, coconut, brown sugar, turmeric, cayenne pepper, whole fennel, cumin, and coriander, moistened with a little yogurt. The recipe has you tie them up with (cotton) sewing thread, but I didn’t have that so I used my kitchen twine in the classic method (used previously on chicken). I did try just wrapping it around and tying, like they mention in the recipe, but I think my method worked much better.

This was definitely a showcase of the bitter gourd. It had a distinct bitterness that takes some getting used to, but I thought it was great. It was so different from other things I’ve had. The creamy, nutty filling balanced out the bitterness quite well, and adding the suggested squeeze of lime juice brought out more of the flavors of the filling. The recipe says that you should use baby karela, which would probably cut the bitterness somewhat (mine were almost twice the size they call for). I’ll definitely make something like this again, but maybe tweak the filling. The filling as-is would also be great with green bell peppers.

Part of what I like about trying new things is the new experience I have. Whether it’s new flavors or new techniques, whether it works or not, trying something new is exciting. The way new experiences can open my mind to new ideas building and improvising from that point. What new things have you tried? If you want to try one of these new recipes, I strongly recommend buying the book (it’s like 800 pages with a lot of information), but I’ll share if you leave a comment or email me.

This was a collection of finds from the market (Urbana’s Market at the Square) a couple weeks ago. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, our farmers’ market is wonderful. There are so many great products to be found in one place. Here’s a quick breakfast or any-time-of-day snack, with nearly no work involved:

It’s the last few bites of one of Stewart Pequignot’s egg bagels, slathered with some of the creamy fresh herbs de provence chevre from Prairie Fruits Farm, topped with spring mix sprouts from Tiny Greens. If I remember right, they are all in rows 4 and 5 of the market. What great combinations have you found at the market this year?