The Mind of a Chef (2012) s03e18 Episode Script
Techniques: From the Kitchen of Magnus Nilsson
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In this episode of The Mind of a Chef, Magnus Nilsson shares some of his favorite recipes.
Chicken liver pate I like it to be quite a lot of seasoning in my chicken liver, so quite a lot of shallots.
Almond cake.
One thing that's important with cake to me, is that it has acidity.
Most cake doesn't.
Like, most recipes for cake is just very, very sweet.
And his take on Hawaiian pizza.
Crucial to have a ripe pineapple.
Enter the mind of a chef.
Having some limitations can be very good.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on.
It's properly hot.
You feel when a dish really sings to you.
So I'm going to make a cake.
It's a cake that I like quite a lot.
First of all, of course it's delicious like straight from the oven.
But it stays moist forever.
Mostly because there's so much fat and sugar in it, I think.
I'm gonna start by putting some butter into the food processor.
This is just unsalted, uncultured butter, which is pretty good for cake and other sweet things.
Together with some sugar.
And some almonds And the almonds are very important in cakes like this, because that's one of the things that makes them stay moist for a long time.
Add some salt.
Couple of good pinches, because there's no other sources of salt in the mixture.
Some lemon zest.
One thing that's important with cake to me is that it has acidity.
Most cakes doesn't.
Like, most recipes for cake is just very, very sweet.
And there needs to be a lot of sugar in them for it to work.
But there is not need for a lack of acidity.
So I usually add quite a lot of lemon juice, or vinegar, or sour cream, or things like that to provide acidity.
And now it's time to add the eggs.
And in a recipe like this, I would usually add roughly the same amount of eggs as butter.
But that varies with the size of the eggs obviously.
Just adding them one by one to maintain the emulsion in here, so it doesn't split.
Cake like this with almonds, it doesn't really need that much flour.
So roughly the same amount of flour as the other ingredients we put in already.
The same time as we add the flour, we just add some baking powder.
I kind of sprinkle it over the flour.
We don't wanna mix this for too long.
'Cause it's gonna be a very dense and kind of elastic cake if we do.
So from now, the smallest amount possible of work to incorporate the flour into the batter mixture.
Like that.
Batter is ready to go into buttered and breaded loaf tin, and then to be put in the oven at, I would say, 150 degree Celsius for quite a long time, like 45-50 minutes, or something like that.
So the cake is now ready.
It's time to take it out of the oven.
I'm gonna rest it here for like a couple of minutes, just so that it shrinks a little bit and lets go of the edges of the tin.
So hopefully this now comes away from the mold.
That Yeah, that looks good.
And it's dense, so it's very heavy.
It's gonna last delicious for days.
So you can just basically leave it like this, and people can go and like nibble on it when they pass by.
It smells quite a lot of both the almond and the lemon, actually.
Just nice.
So now we're gonna make some ham and pineapple pizza, Pizza Hawaii.
Each Saturday of our weekend, all the staff and me stay behind after service and have a pizza together.
The most popular recipe is the pineapple pizza.
It's crucial to have a ripe pineapple.
I like to do quite big pieces of pineapple in my pizza.
Big and thin.
The maximum amount of surface to be browned by the heat in the oven.
I'm gonna grate the cheese, which is a mature, hard cheese.
To me, mature cheese is always better on pizza, because it contains less water.
It makes for a more crispy and nice pizza.
So I'm just cutting the ham in pieces.
Actually, I don't know what the original recipe contains.
If it's smoked ham or boiled ham.
But I like smoked ham on mine.
And now it's time to roll out the pizza dough.
And this is I think this is the sort of difficult part with making pizza.
The dough is an ordinary sour bread dough.
I will go to a good baker and buy a little piece of sour dough and just bring it home.
It also needs to be well rested.
Because otherwise, it becomes too elastic and it sort of pulls together while you're working it out like this.
A more seasoned pizza veteran will probably make it thinner, but if I do that, it's gonna be full of holes.
So I'm gonna keep it like that.
So let's just get the topping on the pizza.
Tomato sauce.
Well seasoned, good tomato sauce.
I wouldn't do this myself most of the time.
I would buy canned tomato sauce of good quality.
Good even layer like that.
Next thing to go on is the ham.
And the ham needs to be under the cheese, 'cause otherwise it's gonna be all curly.
Like, it's gonna curl up into little dried pieces of ham, which is not very nice.
Cheese.
Not too much, 'cause that just makes the pizza very greasy.
But there needs to be enough so it can actually cover all of the ham in a good way when it melts.
And the pineapple always goes on top of the cheese, because otherwise it's gonna be pineapple poached in tomato sauce, instead of a nicely browned pizza.
So pineapple lying on top of the pizza.
So now it's time to put the pizza in the oven.
The temperature is basically as high as your oven can possibly reach.
A pizza stone helps.
If you have no pizza stone, just put the heaviest baking sheet that you have in the oven before putting the pizza in.
You will see when the pizza is done.
That's when it's brown and nice.
I don't know if it should be like in the original recipe, but I usually put a little bit of black pepper on my pineapple pizza.
A little bit of salt.
And no basil or anything like that.
The bready part is nice and crisp.
The ham, which is under the cheese, has not curled, which is important.
The pineapple is nice and caramelized on top, and then just a little bit of black pepper.
I'm pleasantly surprised at how this pizza came out.
It looks good.
Chocolate balls are one of my favorite things to do and to eat.
I often do it at home with the kids.
Butter, sugar, rolled oats, cocoa powder, and a little bit of salt, worked in the stand mixer and then shaped into balls to be coated by a thin coat of coconut.
And I'm gonna do this like quite strong, so I'm gonna use a lot of cocoa powder, and also quite a bit of salt.
I like them that way.
Start with some butter and some sugar.
Just gonna stir this with the mixer so that the, uh that there are no lumps of butter in the batter later, before I add any other ingredients.
I'm gonna put quite a lot of cocoa powder to make it nice and bitter.
Um, salt.
And some rolled oats.
I wanna stir them just long enough to break down the rolled oats a little bit without just making it into a too compact batter.
So now it's time to shape the chocolate balls.
First take some of the mixture up.
Not work it too much, because it's gonna melt.
Just shape them into little balls, and then pop them straight into the coconut flakes.
I like to keep sort of roughly this size, because otherwise, if you make them bigger, there's not gonna be enough coconut to season them in a nice way.
Coat them nicely in coconut flakes.
I don't think these should go into any refrigerator, because if you put them in the refrigerator, they are going to acquire a taste of fridge, which is not very pleasant, even though you wrap them well.
Plus they're more delicious to eat when they're still a little bit warm from the hand.
So I would just eat them straight away now.
So this recipe here is one of my favorite desserts to make at home.
It's very simple.
Kind of a frozen yogurt thing.
It's based on any kind of frozen berry.
In this case, it's blueberries.
A good quality yogurt and sugar.
And the idea is that you use the cold from the berries to freeze the other ingredients by mixing them together in a food processor like this one.
It's important that all these ingredients are nice and cold.
Otherwise it's difficult to get the right texture in the end.
I start with putting the berries in.
One thing when you do this is you have to do, like, a little bit.
It can't be 100 milliliters of berries or anything like that.
Because then, the cold in the berries won't be enough to cool the whole container and the yogurt.
So it needs to be like half a kilo of berries or something for it to work.
Some sugar.
And depending on which kind of berries you use, you need different amounts of sugar.
I like it to be not too sweet, so I just add a little bit.
If this was like a citrus fruit, or a more tart berry, I would add more.
And if this was a very sweet berry, like a black cherry, or a raspberry or something like that, I would add a little less.
So the yogurt you wanna use for this, it shouldn't be too runny.
it shouldn't be like a drinkable yogurt.
It shouldn't be too dry either.
Like a Greek yogurt would be too thick.
It should be an ordinary plain yogurt with three of four percent of fat or something like that.
Like about half the amount of yogurt in relation to the amount of berry should be kind of enough.
Maybe a little more sugar.
Now I will process this on quite high speed.
Just long enough to see to it that there are no too large chunks of frozen berry left, because that's not very pleasant.
But the longer you mix it, the more liquid it's gonna be, because it heats up, basically.
A little bit longer.
Yeah, I think that should be enough Yeah, so now it's done mixing.
It has no too big chunks of berry still in it.
And it's nice and frozen.
I'm just gonna scoop some of it out like this.
You could store this for a while in the freezer.
Take it out like ice cream.
But it's really Like there's no point in doing that, because it's gonna be at it's most delicious when it's just made.
And it's so quick to produce, so there's really no point in doing it the What's quite special with using this technique is that, like, it's very fast, of course, but because you add the sugar straight into the mixture and it's frozen, it has no time to really dissolve.
So you have kind of a little almost crunchy, sugary feeling into it, and it's gonna be nice and tart from the blueberries as well.
So this recipe here is for chicken liver.
A chicken liver pate or parfait, or something like that.
It's basically the livers sauteed together with some shallots and garlic, lemon, black pepper and salt, and then mixed together with cold butter to produce basically a spread for a toast to be served in some corner shop.
Just a little bit of butter in the pan I like it to be quite a lot of seasoning in my chicken liver, so quite a lot of shallots.
And like starting on quite low heat.
So it's gonna take a little while.
And the garlic, I will just grate one clove straight into the pan like this.
It's gonna also cook together with the shallot on medium heat for a little while, so it becomes nice and sweet.
There's also a little bit of bread.
I coarsely cut slices of bread.
And it doesn't need to be in there.
It's just really to improve the texture a little bit of the final sort of spread.
It's time to put the liver in.
The chicken liver shouldn't cook for too long.
They should be nicely browned on one side, and kind of medium rare.
And I think there should be quite a lot of seasoning on this dish This is something you would put on a sandwich or something like that, so quite a lot of salt.
Plenty of black pepper.
I'm gonna take a lemon.
And the lemon, I'm not gonna use any any of the zest, because I don't want that very perfumed lemon aroma.
I want just a nice juicy acidity.
Just gonna let them have a little bit of color on the other side as well.
But not too much.
We don't want to overcook them.
So right now, this is beginning to be ready to mix, and it smells like a browning bird's liver, cooking lemon, quite a lot of the shallot and garlic as well of course.
So I'm just gonna put these into the food processor.
So I'm just gonna start mixing these without the batter until all the bread crumb and liver is kind of nicely pureed.
So I'm just gonna add the cold butter to this mixture now little by little, with the food processor running, to stop the cooking of the liver and to make it nice and smooth, to make an emulsion So this is This is now done.
I'm just gonna plate the chicken liver with some toast.
A few cornichons and some pearl onions.
So this is a very nice kind of a little snack in the afternoon or something.
Some chicken liver spread along with the cornichon and some toast.
So this is a recipe for a cocktail.
It's a very refreshing, strangely refreshing cocktail, considering what it contains.
Which is barley, almonds, and Pernod or ice.
And the thing, like to me, which makes this drink very special is the barley.
Because cooked and cooled down grains, they have a very sort of refreshing taste.
Strangely enough, nothing like warm grains, which is very rich and kind of starchy tasting.
We're gonna take these whole barley kernels and boil them for a little while in water, and then mix the barley tasting water with the almonds to produce kind of an almond milk thing.
And then finish by straining also the almond pulp away.
So we have a liquid which is gonna look quite a lot like milk.
It's gonna be opaque.
And that's gonna be cooled down, mixed with Pernod and served over ice.
So now the water is boiling, and it's time to put some hulled barley into it.
And the reason why we put the barley into boiling water instead of cold water is that we don't want to create too much of a porridge.
Like, it should be whole kernels of barley floating around in water and sort of seasoning the water.
The barley has boiled for a couple of minutes now, and it's beginning to be a little bit tender.
And you can also begin to feel kind of a smell of cooked grains.
I'm just gonna strain them straight into this mixture.
So I'm just really gonna use the cooking liquid.
So you can see it's like a little bit cloudy, and it has a little bit of texture from the starch that has kind of been cooked now.
So the almonds go in there.
Mixed together with the cooking liquid from the barley.
And in almonds, there's quite a lot of fat, so when this is now mixed, it's gonna be a little bit like creating kind of an artificial milk.
There's gonna be little droplets of almond oil dispersed in the cooking liquid from the barley.
Something like that.
I'm gonna strain it away, what's left of the almond pulp.
We'll be left with a little liquid that tastes intensely of almond and that smells quite a lot of both almond and grains.
It almost looks like a slightly beige warm milk.
I'm just waiting for this to cool down now, before we mix it with the Pernod.
Pernod is a French spirit seasoned with star anise.
That should be enough.
Start with a little bit of ice.
This is barley grass, and it's just there to make it look pretty and to give the drink kind of a nice, fresh, green cucumber kind of taste and smell.
That there is cocktail based on Pernod mixed with the cooking liquid from barley and almonds, served over crushed ice with some barley grass.
This is a really simple recipe.
It's a toasted barley tea.
And it's kind of inspired a little bit by the Japanese teas that contain toasted grains of different kinds.
But what I like to do is to toast them just before actually brewing them.
'Cause then you have much, much more of the freshly caramelized starch and all that all those flavors, which is nice.
So I'm gonna take this barley, it's just whole barley grains.
So I'm just gonna pour the barley into this pan, and then spread it out into one even layer like this.
So it toasts really nicely in the oven.
This is gonna take a while.
I'm gonna put them in the oven at like 180 degree Celsius or something like that, for probably about 20 minutes.
It should have like a deep golden amber kind of a color, without smelling or tasting of burnt starch, of course.
And they need to be caramelized, like, all the way through the barley kernel.
So these are now ready.
And they smell, like, quite dark from toasting grains.
Almost like Kind of almost chocolaty.
Very aromatic.
I'm just gonna pour them into this.
It's gonna be so much easier to pour them into the tea brew afterwards.
This could be any kind of brewing device for tea.
And this is gonna take a few minutes now for the water to heat up, and then a little basket of barley is gonna be lowered into the water and steeped for like five minutes or something like that, depending on how strong you want it to be.
So this is now done.
Tea of toasted barley.
Steeped for about five minutes.
And it smells like so good right now.
Like toasty, caramelized starch.
Almost kind of like chocolate.
This is very fascinating, because it's very light, and it's quite round.
It's almost like it was made of cocoa powder or something.
It has that round, chocolaty kind of bitterness, as opposed to the more vegetal, tannic tea bitterness.
Toasted barley tea.
So this is gonna be an open faced sandwich, with some smoked ham and quick pickled cucumber.
Basically you slice off this bread here, with a little bit of butter, add mustard, some of the slices of smoked ham, and then quite a lot of quick pickled cucumber, which is a very typical thing to eat in the summer in Sweden.
Thin slices of cucumber first salted to draw some water out, and then put into pickling syrup.
And the pickling syrup will go very quickly into the cucumber.
So the pickling takes like three minutes.
And it's not really pickling for preserving the cucumber.
It's more of a seasoning, almost like a pickled cucumber salad.
So first some white vinegar.
Sugar.
And water.
And it's roughly one part sugar, two parts vinegar, and three parts water.
So I'm just gonna stir this so that the sugar dissolves well.
Now I'm gonna slice the cucumber.
Transfer the cucumber into the strainer here.
I'm gonna add quite a lot of salt to it.
There's a lot of salt to not that much cucumber.
And what's gonna happen is that the salt is gonna draw out a lot of liquid from the cucumber.
This is gonna allow the pickling syrup to penetrate into the cucumber very quickly.
I'm just gonna leave this for a few minutes for the salt to do its thing.
So the cucumber have now been sitting in the salt for a couple of minutes, and they lost quite a bit of liquid.
So all this liquid here, it's come out of the cucumber.
That basically means that the same amount of liquid could go into the cucumber, 'cause there's space for it in the cell structure.
So when they go into the pickling syrup, they're gonna re-inflate and be pickled really quickly.
And you can see they're quite soft and floppy now.
And there's still a little bit of salt on the surface.
But that's gonna be not more than enough to season the final preparation.
And while this is kind of marinating or pickling, I'm gonna prepare the actual sandwich.
And by the time that's done, these are also gonna be done.
This is a sour dough bread with a good crust on it.
I'm gonna start with a little bit of butter.
Dijon mustard.
You can use any kind of mustard, but I like this because it's nice and strong.
And some of this really nice smoked ham with a good layer of fat on the outside.
This is kind of a light lunch, or like a big snack or something like that.
I like there to be a little ham on my sandwiches.
Now the cucumbers are done.
They've kind of re-inflated a little bit.
Like really nice and crispy.
I'm gonna put quite a lot of this as well.
These pickles, they aren't strong, since they aren't meant to be kept.
It's not the way of preserving cucumbers.
It's more like a kind of salad.
I think this is pretty much it.
Open faced sandwich with a good smoked ham, some quick pickled cucumber.
Good for like a light lunch, or a pretty big snack, or something like that.
Please give to your PBS station.
In this episode of The Mind of a Chef, Magnus Nilsson shares some of his favorite recipes.
Chicken liver pate I like it to be quite a lot of seasoning in my chicken liver, so quite a lot of shallots.
Almond cake.
One thing that's important with cake to me, is that it has acidity.
Most cake doesn't.
Like, most recipes for cake is just very, very sweet.
And his take on Hawaiian pizza.
Crucial to have a ripe pineapple.
Enter the mind of a chef.
Having some limitations can be very good.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on.
It's properly hot.
You feel when a dish really sings to you.
So I'm going to make a cake.
It's a cake that I like quite a lot.
First of all, of course it's delicious like straight from the oven.
But it stays moist forever.
Mostly because there's so much fat and sugar in it, I think.
I'm gonna start by putting some butter into the food processor.
This is just unsalted, uncultured butter, which is pretty good for cake and other sweet things.
Together with some sugar.
And some almonds And the almonds are very important in cakes like this, because that's one of the things that makes them stay moist for a long time.
Add some salt.
Couple of good pinches, because there's no other sources of salt in the mixture.
Some lemon zest.
One thing that's important with cake to me is that it has acidity.
Most cakes doesn't.
Like, most recipes for cake is just very, very sweet.
And there needs to be a lot of sugar in them for it to work.
But there is not need for a lack of acidity.
So I usually add quite a lot of lemon juice, or vinegar, or sour cream, or things like that to provide acidity.
And now it's time to add the eggs.
And in a recipe like this, I would usually add roughly the same amount of eggs as butter.
But that varies with the size of the eggs obviously.
Just adding them one by one to maintain the emulsion in here, so it doesn't split.
Cake like this with almonds, it doesn't really need that much flour.
So roughly the same amount of flour as the other ingredients we put in already.
The same time as we add the flour, we just add some baking powder.
I kind of sprinkle it over the flour.
We don't wanna mix this for too long.
'Cause it's gonna be a very dense and kind of elastic cake if we do.
So from now, the smallest amount possible of work to incorporate the flour into the batter mixture.
Like that.
Batter is ready to go into buttered and breaded loaf tin, and then to be put in the oven at, I would say, 150 degree Celsius for quite a long time, like 45-50 minutes, or something like that.
So the cake is now ready.
It's time to take it out of the oven.
I'm gonna rest it here for like a couple of minutes, just so that it shrinks a little bit and lets go of the edges of the tin.
So hopefully this now comes away from the mold.
That Yeah, that looks good.
And it's dense, so it's very heavy.
It's gonna last delicious for days.
So you can just basically leave it like this, and people can go and like nibble on it when they pass by.
It smells quite a lot of both the almond and the lemon, actually.
Just nice.
So now we're gonna make some ham and pineapple pizza, Pizza Hawaii.
Each Saturday of our weekend, all the staff and me stay behind after service and have a pizza together.
The most popular recipe is the pineapple pizza.
It's crucial to have a ripe pineapple.
I like to do quite big pieces of pineapple in my pizza.
Big and thin.
The maximum amount of surface to be browned by the heat in the oven.
I'm gonna grate the cheese, which is a mature, hard cheese.
To me, mature cheese is always better on pizza, because it contains less water.
It makes for a more crispy and nice pizza.
So I'm just cutting the ham in pieces.
Actually, I don't know what the original recipe contains.
If it's smoked ham or boiled ham.
But I like smoked ham on mine.
And now it's time to roll out the pizza dough.
And this is I think this is the sort of difficult part with making pizza.
The dough is an ordinary sour bread dough.
I will go to a good baker and buy a little piece of sour dough and just bring it home.
It also needs to be well rested.
Because otherwise, it becomes too elastic and it sort of pulls together while you're working it out like this.
A more seasoned pizza veteran will probably make it thinner, but if I do that, it's gonna be full of holes.
So I'm gonna keep it like that.
So let's just get the topping on the pizza.
Tomato sauce.
Well seasoned, good tomato sauce.
I wouldn't do this myself most of the time.
I would buy canned tomato sauce of good quality.
Good even layer like that.
Next thing to go on is the ham.
And the ham needs to be under the cheese, 'cause otherwise it's gonna be all curly.
Like, it's gonna curl up into little dried pieces of ham, which is not very nice.
Cheese.
Not too much, 'cause that just makes the pizza very greasy.
But there needs to be enough so it can actually cover all of the ham in a good way when it melts.
And the pineapple always goes on top of the cheese, because otherwise it's gonna be pineapple poached in tomato sauce, instead of a nicely browned pizza.
So pineapple lying on top of the pizza.
So now it's time to put the pizza in the oven.
The temperature is basically as high as your oven can possibly reach.
A pizza stone helps.
If you have no pizza stone, just put the heaviest baking sheet that you have in the oven before putting the pizza in.
You will see when the pizza is done.
That's when it's brown and nice.
I don't know if it should be like in the original recipe, but I usually put a little bit of black pepper on my pineapple pizza.
A little bit of salt.
And no basil or anything like that.
The bready part is nice and crisp.
The ham, which is under the cheese, has not curled, which is important.
The pineapple is nice and caramelized on top, and then just a little bit of black pepper.
I'm pleasantly surprised at how this pizza came out.
It looks good.
Chocolate balls are one of my favorite things to do and to eat.
I often do it at home with the kids.
Butter, sugar, rolled oats, cocoa powder, and a little bit of salt, worked in the stand mixer and then shaped into balls to be coated by a thin coat of coconut.
And I'm gonna do this like quite strong, so I'm gonna use a lot of cocoa powder, and also quite a bit of salt.
I like them that way.
Start with some butter and some sugar.
Just gonna stir this with the mixer so that the, uh that there are no lumps of butter in the batter later, before I add any other ingredients.
I'm gonna put quite a lot of cocoa powder to make it nice and bitter.
Um, salt.
And some rolled oats.
I wanna stir them just long enough to break down the rolled oats a little bit without just making it into a too compact batter.
So now it's time to shape the chocolate balls.
First take some of the mixture up.
Not work it too much, because it's gonna melt.
Just shape them into little balls, and then pop them straight into the coconut flakes.
I like to keep sort of roughly this size, because otherwise, if you make them bigger, there's not gonna be enough coconut to season them in a nice way.
Coat them nicely in coconut flakes.
I don't think these should go into any refrigerator, because if you put them in the refrigerator, they are going to acquire a taste of fridge, which is not very pleasant, even though you wrap them well.
Plus they're more delicious to eat when they're still a little bit warm from the hand.
So I would just eat them straight away now.
So this recipe here is one of my favorite desserts to make at home.
It's very simple.
Kind of a frozen yogurt thing.
It's based on any kind of frozen berry.
In this case, it's blueberries.
A good quality yogurt and sugar.
And the idea is that you use the cold from the berries to freeze the other ingredients by mixing them together in a food processor like this one.
It's important that all these ingredients are nice and cold.
Otherwise it's difficult to get the right texture in the end.
I start with putting the berries in.
One thing when you do this is you have to do, like, a little bit.
It can't be 100 milliliters of berries or anything like that.
Because then, the cold in the berries won't be enough to cool the whole container and the yogurt.
So it needs to be like half a kilo of berries or something for it to work.
Some sugar.
And depending on which kind of berries you use, you need different amounts of sugar.
I like it to be not too sweet, so I just add a little bit.
If this was like a citrus fruit, or a more tart berry, I would add more.
And if this was a very sweet berry, like a black cherry, or a raspberry or something like that, I would add a little less.
So the yogurt you wanna use for this, it shouldn't be too runny.
it shouldn't be like a drinkable yogurt.
It shouldn't be too dry either.
Like a Greek yogurt would be too thick.
It should be an ordinary plain yogurt with three of four percent of fat or something like that.
Like about half the amount of yogurt in relation to the amount of berry should be kind of enough.
Maybe a little more sugar.
Now I will process this on quite high speed.
Just long enough to see to it that there are no too large chunks of frozen berry left, because that's not very pleasant.
But the longer you mix it, the more liquid it's gonna be, because it heats up, basically.
A little bit longer.
Yeah, I think that should be enough Yeah, so now it's done mixing.
It has no too big chunks of berry still in it.
And it's nice and frozen.
I'm just gonna scoop some of it out like this.
You could store this for a while in the freezer.
Take it out like ice cream.
But it's really Like there's no point in doing that, because it's gonna be at it's most delicious when it's just made.
And it's so quick to produce, so there's really no point in doing it the What's quite special with using this technique is that, like, it's very fast, of course, but because you add the sugar straight into the mixture and it's frozen, it has no time to really dissolve.
So you have kind of a little almost crunchy, sugary feeling into it, and it's gonna be nice and tart from the blueberries as well.
So this recipe here is for chicken liver.
A chicken liver pate or parfait, or something like that.
It's basically the livers sauteed together with some shallots and garlic, lemon, black pepper and salt, and then mixed together with cold butter to produce basically a spread for a toast to be served in some corner shop.
Just a little bit of butter in the pan I like it to be quite a lot of seasoning in my chicken liver, so quite a lot of shallots.
And like starting on quite low heat.
So it's gonna take a little while.
And the garlic, I will just grate one clove straight into the pan like this.
It's gonna also cook together with the shallot on medium heat for a little while, so it becomes nice and sweet.
There's also a little bit of bread.
I coarsely cut slices of bread.
And it doesn't need to be in there.
It's just really to improve the texture a little bit of the final sort of spread.
It's time to put the liver in.
The chicken liver shouldn't cook for too long.
They should be nicely browned on one side, and kind of medium rare.
And I think there should be quite a lot of seasoning on this dish This is something you would put on a sandwich or something like that, so quite a lot of salt.
Plenty of black pepper.
I'm gonna take a lemon.
And the lemon, I'm not gonna use any any of the zest, because I don't want that very perfumed lemon aroma.
I want just a nice juicy acidity.
Just gonna let them have a little bit of color on the other side as well.
But not too much.
We don't want to overcook them.
So right now, this is beginning to be ready to mix, and it smells like a browning bird's liver, cooking lemon, quite a lot of the shallot and garlic as well of course.
So I'm just gonna put these into the food processor.
So I'm just gonna start mixing these without the batter until all the bread crumb and liver is kind of nicely pureed.
So I'm just gonna add the cold butter to this mixture now little by little, with the food processor running, to stop the cooking of the liver and to make it nice and smooth, to make an emulsion So this is This is now done.
I'm just gonna plate the chicken liver with some toast.
A few cornichons and some pearl onions.
So this is a very nice kind of a little snack in the afternoon or something.
Some chicken liver spread along with the cornichon and some toast.
So this is a recipe for a cocktail.
It's a very refreshing, strangely refreshing cocktail, considering what it contains.
Which is barley, almonds, and Pernod or ice.
And the thing, like to me, which makes this drink very special is the barley.
Because cooked and cooled down grains, they have a very sort of refreshing taste.
Strangely enough, nothing like warm grains, which is very rich and kind of starchy tasting.
We're gonna take these whole barley kernels and boil them for a little while in water, and then mix the barley tasting water with the almonds to produce kind of an almond milk thing.
And then finish by straining also the almond pulp away.
So we have a liquid which is gonna look quite a lot like milk.
It's gonna be opaque.
And that's gonna be cooled down, mixed with Pernod and served over ice.
So now the water is boiling, and it's time to put some hulled barley into it.
And the reason why we put the barley into boiling water instead of cold water is that we don't want to create too much of a porridge.
Like, it should be whole kernels of barley floating around in water and sort of seasoning the water.
The barley has boiled for a couple of minutes now, and it's beginning to be a little bit tender.
And you can also begin to feel kind of a smell of cooked grains.
I'm just gonna strain them straight into this mixture.
So I'm just really gonna use the cooking liquid.
So you can see it's like a little bit cloudy, and it has a little bit of texture from the starch that has kind of been cooked now.
So the almonds go in there.
Mixed together with the cooking liquid from the barley.
And in almonds, there's quite a lot of fat, so when this is now mixed, it's gonna be a little bit like creating kind of an artificial milk.
There's gonna be little droplets of almond oil dispersed in the cooking liquid from the barley.
Something like that.
I'm gonna strain it away, what's left of the almond pulp.
We'll be left with a little liquid that tastes intensely of almond and that smells quite a lot of both almond and grains.
It almost looks like a slightly beige warm milk.
I'm just waiting for this to cool down now, before we mix it with the Pernod.
Pernod is a French spirit seasoned with star anise.
That should be enough.
Start with a little bit of ice.
This is barley grass, and it's just there to make it look pretty and to give the drink kind of a nice, fresh, green cucumber kind of taste and smell.
That there is cocktail based on Pernod mixed with the cooking liquid from barley and almonds, served over crushed ice with some barley grass.
This is a really simple recipe.
It's a toasted barley tea.
And it's kind of inspired a little bit by the Japanese teas that contain toasted grains of different kinds.
But what I like to do is to toast them just before actually brewing them.
'Cause then you have much, much more of the freshly caramelized starch and all that all those flavors, which is nice.
So I'm gonna take this barley, it's just whole barley grains.
So I'm just gonna pour the barley into this pan, and then spread it out into one even layer like this.
So it toasts really nicely in the oven.
This is gonna take a while.
I'm gonna put them in the oven at like 180 degree Celsius or something like that, for probably about 20 minutes.
It should have like a deep golden amber kind of a color, without smelling or tasting of burnt starch, of course.
And they need to be caramelized, like, all the way through the barley kernel.
So these are now ready.
And they smell, like, quite dark from toasting grains.
Almost like Kind of almost chocolaty.
Very aromatic.
I'm just gonna pour them into this.
It's gonna be so much easier to pour them into the tea brew afterwards.
This could be any kind of brewing device for tea.
And this is gonna take a few minutes now for the water to heat up, and then a little basket of barley is gonna be lowered into the water and steeped for like five minutes or something like that, depending on how strong you want it to be.
So this is now done.
Tea of toasted barley.
Steeped for about five minutes.
And it smells like so good right now.
Like toasty, caramelized starch.
Almost kind of like chocolate.
This is very fascinating, because it's very light, and it's quite round.
It's almost like it was made of cocoa powder or something.
It has that round, chocolaty kind of bitterness, as opposed to the more vegetal, tannic tea bitterness.
Toasted barley tea.
So this is gonna be an open faced sandwich, with some smoked ham and quick pickled cucumber.
Basically you slice off this bread here, with a little bit of butter, add mustard, some of the slices of smoked ham, and then quite a lot of quick pickled cucumber, which is a very typical thing to eat in the summer in Sweden.
Thin slices of cucumber first salted to draw some water out, and then put into pickling syrup.
And the pickling syrup will go very quickly into the cucumber.
So the pickling takes like three minutes.
And it's not really pickling for preserving the cucumber.
It's more of a seasoning, almost like a pickled cucumber salad.
So first some white vinegar.
Sugar.
And water.
And it's roughly one part sugar, two parts vinegar, and three parts water.
So I'm just gonna stir this so that the sugar dissolves well.
Now I'm gonna slice the cucumber.
Transfer the cucumber into the strainer here.
I'm gonna add quite a lot of salt to it.
There's a lot of salt to not that much cucumber.
And what's gonna happen is that the salt is gonna draw out a lot of liquid from the cucumber.
This is gonna allow the pickling syrup to penetrate into the cucumber very quickly.
I'm just gonna leave this for a few minutes for the salt to do its thing.
So the cucumber have now been sitting in the salt for a couple of minutes, and they lost quite a bit of liquid.
So all this liquid here, it's come out of the cucumber.
That basically means that the same amount of liquid could go into the cucumber, 'cause there's space for it in the cell structure.
So when they go into the pickling syrup, they're gonna re-inflate and be pickled really quickly.
And you can see they're quite soft and floppy now.
And there's still a little bit of salt on the surface.
But that's gonna be not more than enough to season the final preparation.
And while this is kind of marinating or pickling, I'm gonna prepare the actual sandwich.
And by the time that's done, these are also gonna be done.
This is a sour dough bread with a good crust on it.
I'm gonna start with a little bit of butter.
Dijon mustard.
You can use any kind of mustard, but I like this because it's nice and strong.
And some of this really nice smoked ham with a good layer of fat on the outside.
This is kind of a light lunch, or like a big snack or something like that.
I like there to be a little ham on my sandwiches.
Now the cucumbers are done.
They've kind of re-inflated a little bit.
Like really nice and crispy.
I'm gonna put quite a lot of this as well.
These pickles, they aren't strong, since they aren't meant to be kept.
It's not the way of preserving cucumbers.
It's more like a kind of salad.
I think this is pretty much it.
Open faced sandwich with a good smoked ham, some quick pickled cucumber.
Good for like a light lunch, or a pretty big snack, or something like that.