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February 26, 2009

The first time fennel in my kitchen

Become aware of the overfishing problem!


Pacific cod caught by trawl or Atlantic cod



Pacific cod caught by longline



Florence fennel: does not already its name sounds beautiful? For the very first time I met fennel in a restaurant but we did not quite like each other.


Okay, that time I was not into cooking like I am now and I also did not give it a fair chance. I realize that more and more I use ingredients that I hated before: e.g. garlic. Meanwhile I use
it quite often and I can not imagine why I left it away for such a long time. What a pity! Therefore I love to experiment with vegetables that I either did not eat before or did not like and quite often I am surprised about the result and I must say afterwards: it was delicious!


Yesterday I had fennel first time in my kitchen and I decided to prepare it in different ways. I wanted to try to make a fennel espuma (=foam: that is a culinary technique invented by Spanish chef Ferran Adrià and consist of natural flavors mixed with a gelling agent such as
agar, and extruded through a whipped cream canister equipped with N2O cartridges) however my fear became real, because I knew that my equipment may not be the right one, as I did not have the right cartridges, so as I expected it did not work out. But of course I did not want to throw it away so I simply warmed the whole thing and added some milk and foamed it that way. It was pretty delicious. I served it among an almond crusted cod (for the crust I mixed ground almond, orange juice, some fresh ginger, a shallot and a bit of dijon mustard), caramelized fennel with oranges and polenta with fennel chips.

2 comments:

Rosa's Yummy Yums said...

I love fennel as it has sucha refined flavor and can be prepared in so many way! This dish looks delicious!

Cheers,

Rosa

Cherie said...

I love fennel. It's one of those veggies that grows on you:)

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