The Daring Cooks: cod, with traditional flavors powdered

I joined the daring cooks to expand my cooking range and creativity, and this dish definitely helped with that!  The idea?  Basically take the seasonings that would generally be in the sauce for a dish (in this case, fish), dehydrate them, and grind them.  Then arrange the powers on the plate in a pretty fashion.

I stuck pretty closely to the recipe, except that I used cod instead of skate and added sweet paprika (from the store…didn’t grind that one) as a powder.  I love paprika and think it gives a nice contrast in color for the dish.  So the powders you see on the side consist of a citrusy powder, a cilantro and parsley powder, and a caper and red onion powder.  In the middle you have green beans (in butter), a banana, and cod (in butter) topped with a plantain and brown butter powder.  (I used plantain chips instead of dried bananas…slightly salted…yum!)  All that butter yielded a dish that never made me think about the fact that all my powders were…well…powdered.  In other words, it wasn’t dry-tasting.

In all, the meal was not terribly difficult to make, just quite time consuming.  I would probably even think it was easy if I had a dehydrator and a coffee grinder.  As it stands, it made a wonderfully tasty and fancy meal, but I probably won’t make it again until after I invest in a coffee grinder.  A mortar and a pestle only get you so far before you get terribly frustrated and mad at the world.  And while I’m on the subject of tools, I realized when I was making this how completely independent I have become from my measuring devices.  After going without for basically a month, now that I have a fully stocked kitchen with measuring cups and a scale, I find myself just approximating everywhere I think I can get away with it.  So my ratios maybe weren’t exactly to the recipe, but the result was delish!

The thing I loved best about this though was assembling the dish.  This was my first time dabbling in molecular cuisine, and rather than serving it pre-assembled, I lined up all the powders and other ingredients n the table, and the boy and I had lots of fun making our plates.  As scientists/engineers I think it is important to have some sort of artsy/creative outlet, and this was it for the day!  My plate is the one above, but he put this lovely plate together:

All in all, it was a great experience and quite a tasty dinner!