When things go wrong

Up until last week, there was a dish on the menu that took three days to make. This, in itself, isn’t unusual. Many of the processes required to turn plants into a surprising, multi-course tasting menu, take a great deal of time. That’s not to say they are wildly complicated or require an unusual amount of skill: rather that they are processes that can’t be hurried, no matter how short on time we might be. 

One dish we’ve been working on for several months, refining and tweaking, trying to make incremental improvements to, is a playful tromp l'oeil where a daikon radish is teased into a form resembling a scallop both visually and texturally as well as in flavour.

In order to make this transformation, the daikon is first peeled and steamed sous-vide at 85 degrees with various seaweeds, salt and a touch of sugar. It takes about three hours for the vegetable to reach the point at which it is just cooked, yielding to the touch but with no hint of mushiness. The temperature is important: . 85 degrees is when the starch in plants that contributes to their rigidity (or rawness) begins to gelatinise. The molecules swell and the result is something we would recognise as being cooked - the veg softens and sweetens and becomes more easily digestible. 

From this point the daikon is portioned into rounds of roughly 120g before being dehydrated for several hours until around a third of their original size and shape. Dehydration is a process that is used a great deal in the kitchen at Vanderlyle: vegetables are comprised predominantly of water - and water, whilst it performs a fairly important role, has very little flavour. Removing this water or replacing it with something more delicious is part of a suite of techniques we employ for concentrating flavour or making something tastier. 

Once they’ve been dehydrated, the daikon nuggets are then rehydrated for several hours in a concentrated konbu dashi made with seaweed and various mushrooms. Before service, they are air-dried for a few hours to ensure that when they are seared they caramelise well on the outside, before being basted and finished with a squeeze of lemon juice. 

Although we’ve come up with various accompaniments for them, most recently, the daikon have been served with cannellini beans and a seaweed and saffron sauce reminiscent of a classic lobster or crab bisque. A generous spoon of seaweed caviar completes the illusion of a fish dish on a completely plant-based menu. 

Because of the time involved, a batch usually consists of preparing a full box of daikon radishes which is enough for just over 100 portions (around a week’s worth). Knowing that I was going to be a little short on time the following week, I ordered two boxes and filled the steam oven with enough to see us through. I followed the usual recipe, portioned them after they’d steamed for a few hours,  and set them to dehydrate on holed trays to speed up the process. 

Instinct can be a strange feeling, especially when coupled with hindsight. It was soon patently clear something wasn’t quite right. Usually there is a sweet, albeit slightly cruciferous, smell that emanates from the oven during the dehydration process but in this case the sweetness was disturbingly absent, replaced with an unpleasant sweatiness - redolent of hot trainers. And rather than being dry to the touch, the pieces of daikon felt tacky, an unpleasant slimy film covering the exterior.

I should have abandoned the whole project at that point, accepting the sunk cost with enough time to prep a replacement dish 

Instead, I left the daikon pieces in the oven for another couple of hours, hoping that the smell would dissipate and the gummy residue would dry or at the very least wash off when they went into the dashi. Neither of these happened and it was half past three, just a couple of hours until service, by the time I was able to taste a piece that had been put through the complete process. The result was inedible. Bitter and texturally unpleasant. Defiantly unservable, destined only for the compost bin. 

There was no time to establish what had gone awry in the process:  a short period of worrying creative paralysis followed, after which I put together a list of all possible solutions. These ideas ranged from the unacceptable (serve an incomplete dish with no main element) to the unachievable (create an entirely new dish from scratch). The solution lay somewhere between these two extremes, but I find it important to assess all potential scenarios before narrowing in on a route through a problem - this helps focus thoughts and feels like an early, easy win, one that kickstarts the creative process. 

A replacement single element to act as an understudy for the daikon was the most sensible solution, but it had to be something that slotted neatly into the dish in terms of flavour and texture to avoid creating a domino effect of alterations to the rest of the dishes. Whilst working with a fixed menu presents a whole host of benefits, it doesn’t necessarily assist when trying to swiftly find a substitute for an item. An a la carte menu provides a cook with a glorious carousel of possibilities, and many a new dish has made it onto the menu in haste thanks to some careful shuffling of elements. A single tasting menu restricts those possibilities: surplus items or ingredients simply don’t exist. 

But what did exist in the restaurant were two glorious squashes from CoFarm, our fantastic supplier just down the road. They had been overwintered which meant the bright orange flesh was denser and sweeter than when they are freshly harvested. I’d ordered the pair with the intention of making a soup, but hadn’t got round to it and they’d sat in the dark for a week. The simplest solution - certainly a passable one - was to break them down into neat dice, roast them and dot them over the beans, the sweetness imitating that of the freshest shellfish. Better still though, was the next idea: transform them into gnocchi and pan fry them to order. Several extra processes, but effort that I believed to be necessary for the menu. 

Transforming raw squashes into neat little dumplings requires a significant amount of work. Time pressures meant a practice run wasn’t possible, and without a plan C it was essential they worked first time. The process is identical to making gnocchi with potato, but the higher water content makes for a wetter dough, far harder to handle without adding a quantity of flour that renders the gnocchi dense and unpleasant. It’s a balancing act. Usually I’m contemplative and methodical cook, occasionally a gear-shift is required. I was pleased to see I can still up the pace, even several years out from the frenetic speed required at the Hole in the Wall.  

A chaotic hour later and a hundred or so gnocchi lay in a tray, a ragtag bunch of little pillows that had, just sixty minutes ago, been untouched by anything other than the gardener’s hand. A trio sat perfectly on the daikon’s vacated bed of warm beans, dressed in the saffron-heavy sauce, scented with seaweed and fennel seeds: a happy army of understudies more than willing to take the star's place on stage. 

It’s always a humbling experience when things don’t go to plan, perhaps even more so now a decade and a half has passed since I first stepped into a kitchen. But what those years have taught me is that there is always an answer to a problem, even if it isn’t immediately obvious. 

(coda: the emergency squash gnocchi received rave reviews and are still on thes menu as part of the amuse-bouche. They’re paired with the soup I finally got round to making, topped with toasted pumpkin seeds and dressed with pumpkin seed oil. Proof, if it were needed, that necessity truly is the mother of invention).