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.