Murray’s affinity for “EMP” dates back to 2008, when he dined there. That meal, and a subsequent one in 2010, made enough of an impression on him that he decided, along with Atelier regular Pej Vongpaisal, to host a 10-course meal featuring recipes from the recently released book.

Initially, my plan had been to attend this event strictly as a guest, but as the menu grew from 10 dishes to 16, Murray asked me if I would be interested in helping with prep – and that’s the sort of request I can’t easily turn down! Especially when it means working under professional guidance on recipes as refined as these.

I’m always surprised when I hear of people looking to EMP’s food as an example of “molecular gastronomy,” because I find it to be very heavily rooted in traditional European cuisine, aside from the occasional foam, agar fluid gel or touch of xanthan gum. Witness the fact that my first task when I arrived Sunday morning was to make up a batch of chicken stock, a preparation that isn’t even listed in the Alinea book, for example.

The challenges of a pop-up or one-off event are very different from the challenges of running a regular restaurant: we had only two days, Sunday and Monday, to prepare everything for all 16 courses. Sunday was the most chaotic I have ever seen a professional kitchen, with piles of product scattered throughout the kitchen (and some dry goods even in the dining room). That was the day that I finally grokked the phrase “mountains of prep.”

The gougères that gave me trouble

If I have one complaint about the EMP cookbook, it’s the obstinate adherence to volume-based measurements. For most savoury recipes, this isn’t much of a problem, but when it comes to pastry, it can mean the difference between success and failure. When I was asked to prepare gougères, I thought, This shouldn’t be a problem; I’ve made these before! But somehow everything went wrong, and I had to get chef Luis Calero to bail me out and help me rescue the pâte à choux.

Monday was much calmer, as prep lists quickly filled with checkmarks. Components started the day before had chilled and set and were being portioned, ice cream bases were being churned with liquid nitrogen, and the final garnishes were being carefully picked over. The previous day’s chaos had relaxed into a more typical rhythm.

Finally, everything was ready in the kitchen, and while the cooks sorted their mise en place, I started to make the transition from staff to guest. It was a very strange feeling for me; at Atelier, I’ve both worked and eaten, but never for the same meal. As I said to a friend, this would be the hardest I had ever worked on food I was paying to eat!

Chilled pea soup with buttermilk snow

Once the other guests arrived, though, I quickly lost myself in conversation. I was a little nervous when the gougères came out as the first course; the tone of the meal would be set by a dish I had nearly ruined! As we progressed, though, it became apparent that the discord I had witnessed earlier in the kitchen had resolved itself and, like musical resolution, watching that transition from dissonance to consonance simply added to my experience of the meal. For me personally, the high points were the avocado roulade with shrimp and the chilled pea soup with buttermilk snow, but every dish was enjoyable.

One of the courses that I most enjoyed, and that was most meaningful to Murray, was the chicken velouté, which – to the surprise of one of the guests at my table – is thickened with a classical flour roux. Eleven Madison Park recipes may not be Modernist, but they’re nothing if not solidly modern: using avant-garde technique where useful to enhance, but also drawing on the catalogue of classical technique where it makes sense. I’m looking forward to trying more of these dishes on my own, but more than that, excited for my next trip to NYC, when a trip to Eleven Madison Park itself will be requisite!

There are a few different ingredients that can be used to stabilize foams made in a whipped cream siphon. Gelatin is one of the easiest and most common, but has the drawback that it must be served cold. If you want a warm siphon foam, you have to base it on something else, such as egg whites, which essentially use the siphon to make instant, flavoured meringue. The microwave sponge cake is simply an extension of this, taking that meringue (with a little flour added) and cooking it.

The result is, like aerated chocolate, a “set foam”: when you heat an egg-white foam, the bubbles in it expand, and eventually the egg proteins coagulate, forming a solid matrix and trapping those bubbles forever. That’s more or less how a soufflé works. Only instead of whipping the eggs with a mixer, this cake uses a siphon, and instead of baking it in an oven, you cook it in a microwave.

Although I’d never used this technique before, I decided to try developing my own recipe with it. I made up a spreadsheet of the ingredients in a handful of other recipes I had, and decided the basic ratio of ingredients is about 20 grams of flour, 100g of egg whites, 80g of sugar, anywhere from 0g to 80g of egg yolk, and 120g of your chosen flavour, preferably something that has about 50% fat. I’ve seen recipes using pistachio, chocolate, yogurt and black sesame. There are, of course, outliers to this, but that seemed like a good starting point.

For flavour, I wanted red velvet cake. I’ve had this popular cake only once or twice, but I’m well versed in its distinguishing characteristics: bright red colour, buttermilk, and a hint of chocolate. I devised a recipe that I thought reflected this and would work with this technique. After mixing all the ingredients, straining them, and charging the siphon, I dispensed some into a paper cup with holes punched in the bottom, and microwaved it on high for 40 seconds. Success!

To round out the dessert, I made a beet fluid gel (since beets are sometimes used in the original cake instead of artificial food colouring, and beet pairs nicely with chocolate), cream cheese icing, and candied pecans. I really wanted a green element on the plate, but I couldn’t find any traditional garnish for red velvet cake that was green. And I’m not a fan of the token mint leaf found on so many different desserts.

The one drawback I found to my recipe is that the cakes, left for more than a few minutes, will harden somewhat. I don’t have enough experience with pastry to know what causes this, though it would be nice to be able to refine the recipe so it doesn’t happen. Now that I’m past my “running before you walk” phase, it may be time to take a step back and make one of the professional recipes as a basis of comparison. In the meantime, here’s what I did.

How to make red velvet microwave cake

This recipe should easily serve 6-8 people

100g egg whites
70g egg yolk
80g sugar
20g all-purpose flour
5g cocoa powder
Pinch salt
60g butter, melted
60g buttermilk
Red food colouring, in paste form, as desired

Combine the egg whites, egg yolks and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer. Whisk for 1 minute on medium speed to combine. Sift the flour and cocoa powder over top, and add the salt. Whisk again until just combined. While whisking, drizzle in the butter and buttermilk, and add the red food colouring until you get the colour you want.

Strain the mixture, and transfer it into a half-litre whipped cream siphon. Charge the siphon with two nitrous oxide cartridges, shaking well after each one. Keep refrigerated.

How to make beet fluid gel

140g beet juice
55g 1:1 simple syrup
1.95g agar

Combine the beet juice and syrup. You can adjust the syrup to taste; just make sure you adjust the agar to be 1% of the total combined weight of the two. Bring to a low simmer, and sprinkle the agar over top, whisking to combine. Bring to a full boil and boil for 1 minute to hydrate the agar. Strain into a heatproof container and allow to set at room temperature.

Once set, cut the gel into cubes, and puree with a blender until the mixture forms a smooth gel. Transfer to a squeeze bottle and reserve in the fridge.

How to make cream cheese icing

150g cream cheese
75g icing sugar
60 ml whipping cream

Beat the cream cheese in an electric mixer until very soft. Sift the icing sugar over top, and beat again until combined, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Add the whipping cream and beat again until combine. Transfer to a pastry bag fitted with a large plain tip, and reserve in the fridge.

How to make candied pecans
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 Tbsp. white corn syrup
1 Tbsp. water
25 pecan halves

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spread the pecan halves on a baking sheet, and place in the oven. While they cook, combine the sugar, corn syrup and water in a saucepan. Heat over medium heat until the sugar caramelizes. Immediately remove the warmed pecans from the oven, add to the caramel, and stir to cook. Spread on a parchment-lined baking sheet, keeping each pecan half separate, and allow to cool. Break off any extra caramel, transfer to an airtight container, and reserve.

To plate the dessert

Pipe random dots of cream cheese icing and beet gel onto a plate. Take a 9-oz paper cup, poke four holes in the bottom, then dispense the microwave red velvet cake batter into the cup, filling halfway. Microwave on high for about 40 seconds (you may have to adjust the time, depending on the power of your microwave). Allow to cool briefly, then run a thin-bladed knife around the inside of the cup to loosen the cake. Tear in half and place on the plate. (I cooked 6 microwave cakes for 4 servings, allowing one and a half per person.) Lean candied pecans against the cream cheese icing.

Surely I could do better.

In typical modernist home-cook style, I’ve got at least four different recipes for aerated chocolate: one in The Fat Duck Cookbook, one in In Search of Total Perfection, one in Chocolates and Confections, and one in Modernist Cuisine. (Of course.) They all differ slightly, but the fundamentals are the same: temper chocolate (Callebaut milk chocolate, in my case), add some pure fat (oil or cocoa butter) for additional fluidity, charge in a whipped cream siphon, and dispense. This creates a chocolate foam that sets, trapping all the bubbles in a network of crystallized cocoa butter. (Ideas in Food also offers an aerated chocolate dessert, but it’s based on a different principle, being more of an aerated ganache gel than a pure aerated chocolate. I’m looking forward to trying it, too.)

An optional step in these recipes is to make what Modernist Cuisine calls a “vacuum-set foam” by placing the freshly foamed chocolate in a vacuum container, pulling a vacuum on it, and leaving it under vacuum until it has set. This causes the bubbles to expand, creating a much lighter texture in the finished chocolate. I’ve tried this technique before with the aerated mango sorbet recipe in Modernist Cuisine, which is “set” through freezing, but the vacuum pump on my FoodSaver isn’t strong enough for that recipe.

Fortunately, it is strong enough to work with chocolate, and the results were impressive. As you can see in the photo above, the vacuum-set chocolate has much bigger bubbles than the one set at ambient pressure. The only mistake I made was that I forgot to line the ramekins I used to mold the chocolate, which made it hard to get the finished product out in one piece! It would be cool to be able to enrobe this kind of aerated chocolate, or use it in a layer cake like the recipe in In Search of Total Perfection, but for that, I think I would need a square vacuum container…

Plating "Melón con jamón 2005" with Chef Murray Wilson

(Part 1 is here.)

I have never eaten at el Bulli. My request for a table during the 2009 season was met with a response of, “The demand that we have received at the first moment has again surpassed our limited possibilities for one season and we regret not to be able to full fill more reservation requests.”

I do not own the el Bulli cookbooks. The only el Bulli book I have is an autographed copy of A Day at el Bulli, from Adrià’s appearance in Toronto in October 2008. It contains 30 recipes, representing a typical menu at the restaurant. When Chef Marc Lepine invited me to propose a course that I would be in charge of for his el Bulli tribute dinner, this was the book I turned to.

I knew I wanted something that was small and within my abilities to produce reliably in a restaurant setting. I also knew I wanted something that reflected the spirit of el Bulli, as well as showing off one of their more well-known techniques. I decided on “Melón con jamón 2005” (melon with ham) partly because it demonstrated the restaurant’s playful side, with a common flavour combination whose texture has been completely reconfigured, and partly because it showcases spherification, which is perhaps el Bulli’s second most famous technique, right after foam.

"Spherical Ravioli of Peas," an early spherification dish.

“Normal” or “direct” spherification has to be done à la minute; otherwise, the ingredients will continue to gel, and the bursting effect will be lost. The labour involved in doing this in a restaurant setting is enormous. Fortunately, there’s a workaround: for “reverse” spherification, you mix a calcium salt into the base, and place it in a sodium alginate bath, which forms a skin around the product. The resulting spheres can be stored without continuing to gel. This was one of the few changes Marc made to the recipes, which he otherwise tried to reproduce as faithfully as possible, up to the point of ordering genuine ibérico ham for the dish I had chosen.

“Melón con jamón 2005” consists of a small glass of ibérico ham consommé with beads of melon “caviar” suspended in it. Like many el Bulli dishes, the recipe is simple, without being easy: simmer ibérico ham for 15 minutes, chill and thicken with xanthan gum. Juice some cantaloupe, mix with sodium alginate, drip into a calcium chloride bath to form beads. Combine the melon beads with the thickened consommé, and sprinkle black pepper on top.

While I was there, Atelier’s cooks commented several times that the el Bulli recipes were “so different” from what they usually do. There was a repeated joke that the preparations consisted of nothing but the main ingredient and water. Sometimes this purity was almost austere: the “Hazelnut Shots” were nothing but skinned hazelnuts, blended with water and frozen as drops in liquid nitrogen, then tossed with the powdered hazelnut skins. Tasting them, we all agreed that, while the taste was pure hazelnut, they would be better with a little sugar.

Seasoning was another running joke, since few of the recipes called for salt. This led to some amusing game-time moments. While mixing soy lecithin into the black pepper air base for the “Snails with Hazelnut Soup and Black Pepper Air,” Chef Murray Wilson tasted it and remarked that it needed salt. Marc replied that the recipe didn’t call for it: “It’s black pepper air, not salt and pepper air. But if you think it needs salt, add salt.” Murray tasted it again, added a pinch of salt. Tasted it again, and added another, bigger pinch of salt. Then he looked at me and said, “Is this going to show up on your blog?”

"Thaw," complete with "frozen water powder" (i.e., ice).

Sometimes, the simplicity of the preparations led to hilarity. One of the components for “Thaw” is referred to as “frozen water powder,” essentially a weak sugar syrup that is frozen and then blended into snow. Every time Marc mentioned the “frozen water powder,” Murray cheekily replied, “You mean ice, Chef?”

Because I knew how technically demanding such simplicity could be, I did a dry run of my chosen dish at home. (Not with genuine Spanish ibérico, but with Canadian prosciutto. The ibérico, unsurprisingly, tasted far better.) I also used direct spherification, rather than reverse. It went well, and I was confident that I could make the necessary adjustments to execute the dish at Atelier.

When I arrived, I started with the consommé, simmering the ham in water, then straining it through a Superbag and chilling it. I suspect I let it simmer a little too vigorously, as the clarity wasn’t great, even after passing it through the Superbag. (If I’d had time, I would have used the ice filtration technique, but that can take several days. Interestingly, the dish also appears in Modernist Cuisine, and the pictured consommé is similarly cloudy.)

To disperse the xanthan, I was told to mix it in the Thermomix on high speed. Naturally, this incorporated a lot of air, which then had to be sucked out in the vacuum sealer, an effective but tedious process, because it expanded so much I could only do about two portions at a time. But if I didn’t want a chamber vacuum sealer before, I sure do now!

Ibérico ham consommé, post-Thermomix. Consommé clarity this is not.

Reverse-spherifying the melon beads was a little more complicated. Chef Luis David Calero recommended freezing the juice, drop by drop, in liquid nitrogen, then dropping the frozen spheres into a warm sodium alginate bath. My first few attempts resulted in gelled clumps, but I eventually got the hang of it, and there was plenty of “melon caviar” for service.

When the time came, with Murray’s help, plating was quick and efficient: a spoonful of melon beads, a pour of consommé, a sprinkle of black pepper. Next! Once it went out, I moved right on to helping with the next course, and didn’t even notice when the guests had finished my dish. Reactions on Twitter were positive, though. And at the end of the meal, I chatted with my friend Don from foodiePrints, who enjoyed the el Bulli take on melon with ham. Success!

Once all the guests had been served the final course, “Frozen Chocolate Air,” there was one portion of it left. Boldly, I asked Marc if I could have it – because this was a one-night-only event, I knew he wouldn’t be serving it the next night – and he indulged me. In fact, over the course of my time at Atelier, I’d gotten to sample components of several of the dishes, including the “Raviolo/Mozzarella Chewing Gum,” “Frozen Charcoal of Duck Foie Gras,” “Nitro-Meringue of Strawberries and Cream,” and the iconic “Spherical Raviolo of Peas.”

I’ve never eaten at el Bulli, and now that it’s closed, I never will. If I’d wanted to, I could have sat in the dining room at Atelier and enjoyed all 20 courses in their entirety. But the experience I had instead was significantly more rewarding. Now I can say that I’ve both eaten, and cooked, el Bulli dishes.

I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to Chef Marc Lepine and his kitchen staff, Luis David Calero, Jason Sawision and Murray Wilson, for giving me the opportunity to participate in this tribute dinner. It was a wonderful experience, and I learned a lot! Thanks also to Lynne, the Twisted Chef, for allowing me to use several of her incredible photos in these posts.

At first glance, the simplicity of “Rhubarb with Light Brown Sugar and Black Pepper” seems downright absurd. Here’s a dish from a restaurant renowned – or infamous, depending on your point of view – for taking ingredients and subjecting them to processes more typically associated with industrial food preparation, and all it is is rhubarb, sliced into strips, and dusted with sugar and pepper. This is an el Bulli dish?

My favourite quote from Ferran Adrià, one I refer to often for inspiration and for argument, as a mantra and as a defence, is, “Remember that a very good sardine is always preferable to a not that good lobster.” Once you peer behind the veil, remove the sodium alginate, the calcium salts, the methylcellulose and tapioca maltodextrin and xanthan gum from the equation, what you are left with, what el Bulli was about, was celebrating ingredients. Not just the traditional luxury ingredients of French three-star dining, but all ingredients: tubers both truffle and potato.

The rhubarb we were suddenly short on had come from Atelier’s own garden, behind the restaurant, which is one way of celebrating an ingredient. (The flowers I helped pick for the dish “Thaw” were also from the garden.) Chef Marc Lepine explained to me that the rhubarb dish should evoke childhood memories of eating raw rhubarb dipped in sugar. I never had a rhubarb plant growing up, but I still thought the taste I had of the finished dish was surprisingly good: the texture was crunchy, the brightness of the oxalic acid was offset by the sugar, and the black pepper kept it all grounded in the savoury realm. This was an el Bulli dish that anyone could get behind.

* * *

On July 29, el Bulli the restaurant served its last regular meal, closing its doors to prepare for its transformation into the el Bulli Foundation, slated to open in 2014. That night, Marc tweeted: “Atelier and Navarra: The El Bulli Tribute Dinners. Sept. 7th and 8th.”

Marc plating "Corn Nitro-Foam with Black Truffle Jus Jelly and Duck Foie Gras Air."

Four days later, Atelier’s el Bulli tribute dinner was sold out. That one tweet was the only advertising that took place, although a mention did go on the website after all the seats had been filled. There were inquiries until at least the day before the event, giving Atelier a small taste of what el Bulli went through every year, when it would field more than 2 million requests for a mere 8,000 places.

Upon seeing the tweet, I immediately sent Marc a private message asking if he’d be willing to let me play stagiaire that night. He has always been gracious in welcoming me into his kitchen, from the very first time I half-jokingly asked to come in and try out his Antigriddle. Since then, I have both staged and dined there several times, making it the location in Ottawa where I have probably spent the second-most time in the past three years.

And yet, I still feel a little out of place every time I put on a chef’s jacket, and every time I ask if I can come in and log some hours behind the proverbial pass, I worry that I’m imposing on his goodwill. But this time, not only did Marc say yes, he did me one better: he asked if I would feel confident in putting together one of the courses myself. I considered it carefully, then accepted. I would officially be cooking for paying guests.

* * *

Faced with a shortage of the rhubarb dish, the servers shifted uncomfortably, and the cooks all stared with furrowed brows at the remaining plates, trying to make them magically multiply through sheer force of will. Finally, Marc shrugged, and made the only decision possible: “Divide up the rest and re-plate it, one plate per two people.” Everyone sprang into action and the meal went on.

"Raviolo/Mozzarella Chewing Gum." Photo courtesy of the Twisted Chef: thetwistedchef.wordpress.com.

Surprisingly, with a total of 20 courses – all but one of which the kitchen had never prepared before – this was the only significant hiccup during service. There were other minor missteps during prep: an absent rosemary/caramelized honey syrup that had to be made at the last minute; an attempt to tweak the Doritos croquant polvorón with lime pearls that resulted in them having to be dried out in the oven nearly right until service; and me spilling the bulk of the liquid exuded by mozzarella when you gently warm it, needed for the “Raviolo/Mozzarella Chewing Gum.”

The mozzarella dish was a weird one, even to me. It involved heating chunks of mozzarella, collecting the liquid that runs off, then rolling the softened cheese into a sheet. Then, you gel the whey the mozzarella was packaged in, and wrap squares of this gel in squares of the sheet. These are brushed with the runoff liquid, heated under a broiler (a role fulfilled in Atelier’s kitchen by a heat gun), and dressed with hazelnut oil and black pepper. From the name, the final effect was presumably supposed to resemble chewing gum, but I didn’t really get it. After it had been served, though, there were a few extra pieces, which Marc passed around to the staff. I popped one into my mouth, bit down, and immediately started to laugh: it was exactly like chewing gum, but with the flavour of mozzarella.

Initially, this was to be one of 10 courses, but the number grew as Marc realized that 10 courses of el Bulli food really didn’t constitute a full meal. Even on the day itself, the final number of courses was in flux. Curious about the economics of this, I asked if Marc was somehow keeping a running total of food cost in his head. Sous-Chef Jason Sawision looked at me with a sparkle in his eye and said, grinning, “Food cost? What’s that?”

You could look at this type of meal as a loss leader, except that every single guest in the dining room that night had eaten at Atelier before. I was curious to hear what they, as experienced Atelier diners, would think about the dish I had made. After the rhubarb went out to the rest of the guests, I still had to wait for 7 more courses to find out…

(Continues in Part 2.)

Rhubarb photo courtesy of the Twisted Chef.

I’m just back from Ottawa, where I was lucky enough to be able to take part in Atelier Restaurant’s el Bulli tribute dinner, where 20 courses of food prepared using Ferran Adrià’s recipes were served to 20 lucky guests.

I wasn’t one of those guests, though; this time, I had hands-on involvement in the kitchen. I’m still collecting my thoughts on the experience, but in the meantime, you can whet your appetite by reading the Globe’s piece on the event.

Photo courtesy of the twisted chef.

This year, the torch passed from Adrià to elBulli alumnus René Redzepi, as his Noma was honoured with the title of best restaurant in the world for 2010. With his emphasis on hyper-local – often foraged – ingredients, Redzepi is in his own way redefining what is possible in the kitchen today. In this video, you can see an example of how Redzepi draws on his environment to design a dish.

Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine is available from Phaidon.com.

I’ve made pâte de fruit a few times before, with varying degrees of success. The key to them seems to be getting the concentration of soluble solids (mostly in the form of sugar) just right for the pectin to set the gel with the right texture. Lacking a refractometer, I can’t check the solids concentration directly, so I just use the temperature guidelines, which can give you a rough approximation of the same information, because the boiling point of a sugar solution goes up as the sugar concentration increases.

Modernist Cuisine’s Guinness “pâte de fruit” is made with HM pectin, sugar, isomalt, glucose, Guinness and tartaric acid. I made a couple of (I hope minor) substitutions: I used the apple pectin I normally use for fruit jellies; I assume it’s an HM variety. The recipe specifies DE 40 glucose, and I’ve been unable to confirm the dextrose equivalence of my glucose syrup, but I used it anyway. Finally, the tartaric acid I bought from a local brewing supply store is labelled “acid blend,” although the store employee assured me it was pure tartaric.

My past attempts at pâte de fruit have generally come out slightly too firm, but this one came out just a bit softer than I would have liked, making it hard to cut and dust them. At least they’ve held their shape, and certainly they’re very tender to eat; on the whole I prefer tender to rubbery. The flavour is distinctly Guinness, though there’s perhaps a little too much tartaric acid in it, because it comes across as a bit tart for my palate.

Playfulness is one of the hallmarks of modernist cuisine, and this is certainly a playful take on beer and pretzels!

Many chemical reactions speed up as you raise the temperature. For example, when you mix baking powder into a room-temperature batter, you might get a slight fizz, but once you put that batter in the oven, the bubbling increases dramatically, and produces the lift that makes your muffins light and airy. So it goes with many culinary preparations, such as the browning reactions, both caramelization and Maillard reactions, involved in making French onion soup.

Traditionally for onion soup, you cook the onions slowly and gently to make sure they don’t burn. For Modernist Cuisine onion soup, you throw all the ingredients into jars, put the jars into a pressure cooker, bring it up to high pressure, and hold it there for 40 minutes. (If you happen to have an autoclave handy, it takes only 20 minutes.) Because the Maillard reactions are involved, and because their rate is limited by acidic environments, the ingredient list includes a small amount of baking soda to speed them up. Of course, I’ve been browning onions with baking soda for a while, ever since reading about it on Khymos.

As I was packing the sliced sweet onions into the jars, I wasn’t quite sure they were all going to fit, but they did. Barely. A few peppercorns, some butter, sugar, ruby port, thyme, onion juice, made in my handy juicer, and the aforementioned baking soda filled in the gaps. After nervously pacing for 40 minutes – hey, I’m still getting used to cooking in a pressure cooker! – I let the pressure come down, and removed the jars, whose contents had gone from bright white to a rich brown.

The resulting soup, seasoned with salt and sherry vinegar, was good, with satisfying meaty flavours from the browning reactions, and a little richness from the butter. The original recipe calls for a cheese foam to layered on the surface, but I’m missing some of the stabilizers in the recipe, so I omitted it. I also omitted the more traditional cheese croutons – a mistake that I won’t make again. If I had one complaint about the soup, it would be that it was slightly too sweet. This could be easily corrected by using a heavier hand with the sherry vinegar, but I’d also be curious to see what it the results of using a mix of sweet onions and regular cooking onions.

In any case, I will happily make this soup again. The bonus is that the leftovers are already nicely packaged in a jar to go in the fridge!

This time, I had a better idea of what was essential to the process and what could be tweaked. I peeled and sliced the potatoes, then vacuum-sealed them in an even layer and cooked them in a 66°C water bath for an hour: a lower temperature than last time, but at the top end of the gelation range for potato starch, according to Ideas in Food. Then I chilled them completely in an ice bath and stored them in the fridge overnight, to allow the starch to fully retrograde. Meanwhile, I sautéed the peels in copious amounts of butter, which I strained and stored in the fridge, too.

The next night, I removed the potatoes from their bag, covered them with fresh water, and boiled them hard for 25 minutes, to make sure they were fully hydrated. Instead of a food mill, I put them in a food processor this time, buzzing them until they were a smooth puree and drizzling in the re-melted, potato-infused butter.

I couldn’t have been happier with the outcome: it was exactly what I was looking for from potato puree, with none of the problems I experienced in my first attempt, and none of the problems of a more traditional approach to potato puree. The texture was note-perfect, and the potato-infused butter also added loads of flavour. While it may sound like a big time investment, this method really adds a level of refinement to the dish that really makes it worthwhile.