TGRWT #9 - Well.... this is fun!

Well, this flavour pairing thing is interesting isn't it!

I apologise profusely, before I get started, for the terrible photography in this post. I'm an avid fan of film photography over digital, but since 15 films of photos (of an unrepeatable extended family get together) were lost in the post I've been kind of reluctant to pick up my camera. I think I'll have to give in and get a digital one. Basically, these photos have been taken by the webcam on my eeepc, so absolutely no macro whatsoever. Anyway...

It was pancake day on tuesday. I started making a pancake for breakfast and had just put some saffron in, just to see how it would go (I've yet to be totally convinced by it) and then remembered the parmesan and chocolate/cocoa foodmatch.. so I shoved in some chocolate and then shaved some parmesan onto the finished pancake. Disgusting!... but it made me wonder.

Here's the finished product, and a sort of recipe, after which are musings on what I can improve - as this is by no means a finished recipe, more an idea to expand on.


Chocolate Pancakes/Blinis
1 medium egg
10g chocolate powder
50g plain chocolate -melted
flour
milk
salt
Whisk egg, chocolate and powder. Add flour until a thick paste then add milk until the consistency of chocolate ice cream sauce... if you know what I mean.

Parmesan & White chocolate Sauce
Finely ground parmesan
50g white chocolate
vegetable oil
pepper
Melt chocolate and add parmesan and pepper. Thin with vegetable oil until a "saucy" consistency

The chocolate pancakes worked out pretty well, in fact I will probably use them next time I need an interesting savoury blini thing - would be a great idea for an interesting canapee. The sauce itself demonstrated how well parmesan and chocolate go well together, which was interesting as white chocolate seems sweeter than others so I thought that it would be more difficult to go put together with cheese.

Here are my notes for possible improvement:

I used chicken boiled in apple juice - an idea that, sadly, didn't really have much effect on the chicken - for my meat. I was really looking for something more interesting but just couldn't think of anything. I will of course keep experimenting with this dish idea, as it definitely has promise, I just wanted to get this post out within a crows spit of pancake day (as it was there that the idea occured).

The flavours are very delicate and really I would like a way of beefing them up. I could have used a lot more parmesan than I did and more salt in both the sauce and the pancakes. The big problem is that while I can beef up the sauce by adding more parmesan and pepper this then makes the pancakes almost unnoticeable.


Another problem is that the sauce is grainy. I started by using grated parmesan, which was far to grainy. This time I grated then finely ground the parmesan.. however it was still too grainy. I will have a look around the other blogs and see how they got around this.

Anyway, I've rambled on for far too long. Any suggestions then leave me a comment.

Cheers

Alex
'08