Inspired by Ferran Adria in trying out new things with old ideas, I'm going to attempt a recipe at making savoury mini muffins in the style of tako-yaki (Japanese octopus balls). I reckon that since both recipes involve enclosing a strong tasting, chewy savoury meat with a flour mixture, and both are "baked" to some extent, the recipes would only require a slight modification to work.
Here's the recipe I'm going to try:-
Basic Muffin Mixture:
I'll probably end up using the BBC Good Food Guide's Savoury Muffin recipe, but took this recipe as a sample proportion for savoury muffins.
The typical Muffin Mixture reads something like the following (generic muffin recipe):-
10 oz (275 g) plain flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 large eggs
8 fl oz (225 ml) milk
a little butter for greasing
1 teaspoon sea salt
I'm going to make the following modifications:-
Instead of using the whole 225 ml of milk, the batter for the muffin mixture is going to include some cooled dashi stock (which is what goes into the batter for tako-yaki to give the batter that savoury tako taste). I think I'll end up using the following proportions to retain the creaminess of the milk - 125 ml dashi broth (consistency must be similar to milk) + 100 ml milk = 225 ml fluid into the batter. I may also think about melting/dissolving a bit of powdered bonito flakes into water and use it as a substitute of the dashi stock. Draz has also suggested a few drops of balsamic vinegar into the butter before the mix-in.
The BBC Good Food Guide's muffin recipe also called for melted butter to be added to the muffin mix to give that cakey feel - so since butter is savoury and creamy, I'll probably still go with adding butter as well.
The real challenge is actually in what's *inside* the muffin, since you need both tako (the easy part) and a soft center of creamy mayonnaise (the tricky part) which half melts into the batter mixture. Here's how the tako portion is going to look:
Tako (Octopus) Filling with Japanese Mayonnaise
200g boiled octopus (tentacles are better) - cut to little bits and pieces. Several suggestions here, we don't want the tako to sink to the bottom of the muffin, at the same time, we want to retain the bite of the tako.
Suggestions include: A) finely chopped tako (may lose bite); B) thin long strips of tako (has bite but may sink?); C) finely sliced and wide tako (may not have bite, potentially loads of trouble but you know it will definitely float and not sink in the muffin mix); D) the usual chopped up tako (will sink, but may taste good if it's big)
Japanese Mayonnaise. Again, many suggestions for incorporating soft cream Mayonnaise into puffy muffin mixture. Award-winning, Ferran-Adria-ish suggestion is to inject soft mayo into puffy muffin with a syringe. I love this idea, and it will definitely work, except that A) I'm making many mini bite-sized muffins which will disappear in a bite; and B) taking a syringe to it is really just too much trouble. Plus I need to get a syringe.
It will however work, because the muffin is so aerated that you won't notice a needle going in to inject much needed cream into the muffin (kind of like a reverse liposuction exercise). Come to think of it, that would probably qualify in gross-factor as point #C.
Other suggestions for Japanese mayonnaise incorporation include: Freezing (will not work as oil in the mayo will not freeze) and possibly, (much easier too!) just mixing it into the damn batter to have a cheesey layer. I could also think of using parmesan or mozzarella solid cheese in place of the Japanese mayo, but wonder about the shoyu taste required (hmm... maybe I can put a few teaspoons into shoyu into the batter and use light solid cheese.)
Anyway, I will try it out and let you know how it goes. There's also movements to have an experimental cooking workshop this weekend, and/or a 5 course Adria-inspired meal going on this week, so I hope I really have time to do my muffins.
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