Flavor Associations

I’ve been drinking tea again lately, I recently got several different Sencha’s from Japan. One of them gave me the idea of a dish so I went out to buy the ingredients and a few other interesting things at T&T.

The dish was Uni with black garlic custard, shallot and pear salad, wasabi, and bean sprouts.

Black garlic is crazy — at least the one I bought really smells of soy sauce. It wasn’t my original idea, but I fried the bean sprouts in olive oil with black garlic chopped into a paste, salt, and pepper. That was great. It would be great with pineapple and some noodles to stir fry.

I sprinkled a thin layer of wasabi powder over sliced pears and left them for 10 minutes, I was hoping the moisture in the pears would activate the wasabi, but that was not the case. I couldn’t even feel the heat. I will retry this in 2 ways, putting a prepared wasabi paste over the pears, and putting the wasabi powder over the pears in a larger quantity, and misting them with water to activate.

I made a ‘salad’ of thinly sliced raw shallots, pears, and a prepared wasabi mixed in by hand. That was very good too, although the proportion of pear to shallots was poor. It was half an half, or maybe 60% shallot 40% pear, I think the good ratio would be 70% pear and 30% shallot. I felt my pear was too ripe as well, a little more underripe and firm would have been better.

If I was a little more adept at this stuff, I think making a gel out of the shallots and wasabi would be nice.

In the end I found some peeled Jack-Fruit, so I bought that. I’ve never had it knowingly because it always comes in such a big fruit and I wasn’t sure if I would like it. It’s alright — I think it tastes like honeydew candy. Not quite as ‘fresh’ tasting as the melon, but it has its essential flavor — maybe an granny smith apple x honeydew melon cross. The parts of the fruit that were bruised and soft seemed to be the best. There’s a chance that it needs to ripen more, but I don’t think it will continue to ripen without its rind? I’ll try heating it up, that might make it better too.

All for now, today is warm, maybe I can get a cigar in!