Restaurant Inspiration - Marque and salted chocolate caramels

We had an interesting dinner at Marque in Sydney in January.  I have had a number of meals there over the years, in various states: once when pregnant, once for our 10 year wedding anniversary and on other miscellaneous ocassions.

I have always loved chef Mark Best's food.   I have always disliked the verging on obsequious service.  And sometimes I wonder if perhaps the flavours are almost too refined.  For example - see below from the menu we ate in January 2010 - earl gray ash which came with the wagyu - maybe my palate is wrecked but the grey sprinkle which came with the beef was imperceptible, to me, at least.    

So you have a restaurant with wonderful and interesting local Sydney ingredients (scampi, white asparagus, crab, enoki), clever cooking techniques and combinations (fish floss, almond gazpacho, scampi anglaise) but to me, often the food is just too subtle.  Maybe my tastes now require something more robust, less elegant? Less Armani, more Vivienne Westwood. 

Having said that, the degustation is reasonable value and very thorough.   Each dish is jewellike and just the right size.    You leave feeling satiated and not overfed.  And you will always eat something you have never had before.  

At the end come salted caramel chocolates and bitter campari jellies:

                                           

I am not the only one who loves the combination of sweet and salty.   So do the Thais, with their fish sauce and palm sugar flavourings.  And so of course do many in the US (eg salted peanut butter cookies).  

I thought I might try these caramels myself.  There are a few recipes around for this type of caramel, mostly on US websites.  I used the one from Smitten Kitchen which is here.    This is much more like a fudge than a stand alone chocolate confection, but still has the critical combination of salt and caramel.

I am not really a candy cook.   This is a scary recipe because it required the use of a candy thermometer in boiling sugary water.  I always end up with burns when I do something like this.  Only little burns of course but I am always impatient to taste the toffee!  The one tip I read which seemed important was to use a very heavy bottomed dish so that the heat woudl spread evenly and slowly.  So I pulled a Le Creuset out of the cupboard.

There is a picture gap after this step (just imagine cooking the sugar and water intil it is a deep golden brown, adding the chocolate cream mixture and cooking for 15 minutes until 255 degrees).   I was too panicked to take photos.

Here is the caramel fudge in its tin.  

Sprinkled with Maldon salt. 

And ready for eating. 

Any downsides?  Just a little one.    I didn't cook the fudge for long enough and it never really set at room temperature.  It set in the fridge and then became runny quite quickly.  It didn't stop us eating them all but next time I will have to get that temperature just right.

(Image (2) from Eating WA)

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Smoked Eel Parfait and other amazing things to eat

Some things I have eaten so far in 2010:

• potato paper (this is potato shaved on thinnest possible mandoline setting and baked - so thin it melts in your mouth).

• earl grey tea ash (I only noticed this on the menu afterwards - it was a kind of grey dusty ash - tasted nicer than it sounds!)

• olive oil cubes (olive oil emulsified, mixed with setting agent like agar, frozen and then brought to a cool temperature in the fridge. You eat it with bread as it softens slowly at the table).

• almond jelly (with almond gazpacho and blue swimmer crab).

• pea crumbs (I think this is peas cooked, laid out to dry then crushed. These crunchy crumbs still kept their pea-ey integrity however)

• fish floss (I can't remember this that well, it was flossy and fishy).

• white carrot puree (self explanatory).

• mint, vanilla and buttermilk granita.

• campari and turnip (this appeared as small blood red squares on the plate, the turnip cubes had been soaking happily in Campari. As a contrast to steamed scampi it worked well but it was pretty out there, as they say).

And the above dish, consumed in a bar - restaurant in grimy down at heel Surry Hills in Sydney where the incredible kitchen produced a 7 course meal (for 50$ !!!) in an hour (the speedy timing was to kindly address the fact that we had two small hot curly haired impatient children dining with us).

It is smoked eel parfait, white soy, and seaweed salad. And I don't even like smoked things. Or eel. If you live in Sydney, you must go there. Thank you to the Bentley.

I am waiting for more hot weather so I can do an obsessive granita run and possibly a sorbet one too. The buttermilk and mint granita was an amazing and refreshing combination.

Oh how I love those Sydney restaurants.

Tell me - what is the most unusual thing you have eaten in the last year?

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