|
I've had pomegranates before, but just on their own, or in the form of juice or grenadine syrup added to a cocktail. I don't have them often though, as the white parts of the seeds tend to get stuck in the pits of my molars and are tough to brush out. I also find pomegranate juice to be too strong to drink on its own, like concentrated cranberry juice; it tends to coat my mouth with a lingering sour tang that affects my palate until I can wash it out. And I don't drink enough to justify keeping a jar of grenadine around; I tend to favor drinks which don't use it, and it crystallizes in the fridge long before I can use it up. So not a lot of experience with pomegranates in general. So this ICSA gave me a chance to experiment with a food I don't use a lot. Due to a combination of my upbringing and current living circumstances, my cooking tends to be a bit basic, but I do try to punch things up a bit where I can. I tend to associate pomegranates with the Mediterranean, and especially Greece, so my first thoughts went towards two dishes I associate with that region: lamb and couscous. Lamb, of course, isn't strictly Mediterranean eating, but it's certainly a thing; as for couscous, I first had it over twenty years ago during a class trip to Spain and Morocco. It was wonderful, and I've loved it ever since. Rounding out the dishes required for this ICSA were a variation on a salad I made for Christmas dinner this past December, and pomegranate ice cream for dessert. I feel it's fair to point out that Scientastic has already posted an entry featuring three of these dishes as well. I brought it up in the ICSA thread and was told to post anyways; and to be fair to myself I did come up with this independently, making my meal near the end of January. And I did do things a bit differently, if in a more basic fashion. I began with the prep work. Again, there were four dishes I was going to make: --Rack of lamb glazed with pomegranate molasses --Couscous with onion, pine nuts, and pomegranate arils --Sweet pecan salad with balsamic aioli dressing --pomegranate ice cream I started things off with making stock for the couscous. We all know how to make a basic chicken stock, right?  Some carrots, onions, celery, a chicken carcass, and some herbs.  Toss them in a pot with water to cover and let the whole mess simmer for a few hours.  I got two quarts out of this batch, though I only needed two cups for the couscous. While the stock was simmering, there were a couple of other things I could do: make my salad dressing and juice my pomegranates.  The salad dressing was by far easier and less time-consuming, so I did that first. Aioli, as we know, is Italian for "fancy mayonnaise" and is easily made in a blender.  Into the blender goes 2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, a tablespoon of lemon juice, a teaspoon of sugar, a quarter cup of olive oil, and an egg.  We start the blender to get the emulsion started.  We turn up the blender speed a bit and while its going, we add another 3/4 cup of olive oil in a slow drizzle.  And it's finished!  Lovely. Into the fridge it goes. I immediately clean the blender out for the next step. Next comes the hard part: getting the seeds out of the pomegranates and juicing most of them. I had to do some figuring first: I need enough juice to make molasses, with enough left over for the ice cream, and enough arils for the salad, the couscous, and the ice cream. I got eight pomegranates.  The interior of pomegranates remind me somewhat of a blastocyst. You're welcome for that imagery.  Anyways, my standard method of seeding them is to cut in half along the fruit's equator as shown above, then hold one of the halves SEED-SIDE DOWN over a bowl, splitting it in half again, then brushing/plucking the seeds out by hand. There are papery dividers between sections of the interior; as you clear one section, you can peel these away and start working at the next section, also tearing away the pith and exterior rind as you go. It's time-consuming and tedious, but it gets the job done and avoids getting pith mixed into the seeds.  I've previously only gotten pomegranate juice out of a bottle; this is my first time extracting it myself. Here's where the blender comes back in.   Separating the juice from the pulp proved trickier for me than I had anticipated. I don't have a food mill. What I DO have, however, is a few tea/spice infusion bags. This is where it gets a bit nuts.  Above is the juice from one pomegranate, about 150 mL. I had to carefully pour a little of the slurry from the blender into a bag, squeeze the juice out of the bag into my measuring cup, dump out the pulp, and repeat the process. I eventually extracted 700 mL of juice from five pomegranates. It got to go in the Costco-size Bonne Maman jar.   I never want to loving do this ever again. Day two: making pomegranate molasses and ice cream.  Pomegranate molasses is easy enough. I only needed about half a cup, so two cups of juice is all I need for it.   Add a quarter cup of sugar and a tablespoon of lemon juice, then stir over heat until the sugar is dissolved.   We'll let that simmer for a while over low heat, until it starts bubbling. At this point, start watching your pan like a hawk to keep it from scorching. Stirring it a bit helps.  Nota bene: If you're making this ahead of time, it solidifies quickly as it begins to cool, so transfer it to your storage container quickly, preferably straight out of the pan. I made the mistake of waiting and had to microwave the molasses in this measuring cup before I could scrape it out with a spatula into a jar.  Next: ice cream. Since this is a fruit-flavored ice cream, I thought a Philadelphia-style base would work better than a custard base: the flavor should "pop" out a bit better. Also, less cooking. My plan was to use most of the remainder of the juice to flavor the ice cream, and mix in arils at or near the end of churning to keep them from settling at the bottom.   Note that I say most of the juice. The ice cream maker I'm using is a manual churn device with a 1-quart capacity. Three of those four cups are going to be taken up by cream and milk, so I can only use about 2/3 cup of juice or I'll risk overflowing the cylinder.  The pomegranate juice and sugar has a little lemon zest added to it for additional flavor.  Next, in goes the two cups of cream and one cup of milk. The mixer keeps going until its nice and frothy. Note that it's not going to have a whipped cream texture; there's too much non-cream in there for that to happen.  The frozen cylinder goes into the housing, the paddle sets in the bottom; we pour in the base, put on the lid and attach the crank, and start churning.  And churning.  And churning.  And churning.  AND CHURNING.  GOOD GOD WHEN DOES IT loving END?  GO FASTER!  I HAD TO SWITCH HANDS!  FINALLY WE'RE GETTING SOME-GODDAMN-WHERE!  After about 45 minutes of churning, the ice cream has approximately the consistency of soft serve, and I feel comfortable adding in the arils. I estimate that I used about half a pomegranate's worth.  At this point, it's about done I think. Additional mixing doesn't seem to be thickening it more, so it goes into a container, and into the freezer to solidify more.  Now for the main course, the rack of lamb.  I had initially planned to grill the lamb, despite it being a freezing January day, because I'm just crazy enough to do it. I've done so before. How I got a charcoal fire going in single-digit weather, don't ask me, but I managed it once about seven years ago. I ended up changing my plan a bit for unrelated reasons, as I will explain. Prep is pretty easy: Just brush with a little olive oil, sprinkle on salt and pepper, and rosemary leaves. Somehow, the rosemary in my garden was still green.   At this point, I figured I'd just brush on the warmed pomegranate molasses, and here's where I hit a snag. Remember above where I said that pomegranate molasses solidifies fast? That rule still applies. As soon as the molasses hit the meat, it turned to jelly. And since I had already applied OIL to the meat, any attempts to smear it evenly over the lamb just caused that jelly to slide around and collect rosemary leaves into a single clump. Not going to work. I had to settle for heating the molasses up still more and drizzling it over the lamb. which turned out okay.  I had planned on having the racks of lamb cook over sprigs of rosemary, using indirect heat. It took me some effort to figure out a good way to situate the lamb in my cooking rack for the grill  And only at this point did I think about how the molasses already had and would continue to behave: If I put them on a grill, the jellied molasses would just soften enough to slide right off the meat into the bottom of the grill where it would make a nasty mess. I had to come up with an alternate plan. Broiler pan to the rescue. Lamb typically is best served on the rarer side, and frenched racks of lamb usually don't have lots of meat on them, so I figured 1 hour at 250 degrees should be adequate.  And it was. In the meantime, an hour is plenty of time to throw together the salad and make the couscous. The salad is simple: Begin with ye olde spring mix, add some pecans, some praline pecans, a good handful of dried cranberries, and about half a pomegranate's worth of arils.     I typically eschew tossing with dressing at this point, preferring to drizzle it over when it is served. Past experience has taught me that doing so now is only going to make all the non-leafy ingredients settle to the bottom of the bowl, which is a drat nuisance.  Couscous is also easy.  Dice up an onion. Start sauteeing your onion. Add in your pine nuts.  Remove these from the heat; they'll be going in at the end with the pomegranate arils. Rinse out the pan, and bring two cups of stock to a boil.  Did I remember to add saffron to the stock? You bet your rear end I did.  Once the stock comes to a boil, pour in your couscous and stir it in immediately. It'll soak up all of that stock in an instant.  Stir in the other ingredients and you're ready to serve.  So it all comes together. The lamb turned out great: most of the molasses stayed on, melted and covered the lamb; the remainder was drizzled out of the pan as a sauce. Lamb has a strong flavor, and can hold up to the sweetness of the molasses without being overpowered by it, so its' still quite savory. The couscous was honestly a bit unimpressive; I found it somewhat dry and bland. I had expected the arils to give it a bit of extra zing and added moisture, instead they just got a bit lost in it all. The salad quickly became a favorite when I made it for my family this past Christmas; the tartness of the pomegranate and the balsamic dressing go a long way to offset the extreme sweetness of the praline pecans, which I've always worried were too much sweetness for a salad. And they are, if you get a whole bunch of them together, so go easy when assembling the salad. But the dressing turned out absolutely perfect: creamy and smooth, just sweet and tart enough to not be over powered by the olive oil flavor--a problem the last time I made it, using extra virgin olive oil which tasted way too heavy. Using a less robust-flavored olive oil was definitely the way to go. I also tossed the little remaining juice in a glass with some Lillet Blanc and called it a cocktail. Pleasant, but unremarkable.  And the ice cream? Quite nice. I think it was still a little grainy, and I needed to ease back or eliminate altogether the lemon zest, but pomegranate is in my opinion a really good flavor for ice cream. I'm glad I added the arils; they freeze up and add a nice little bit of extra-tart crunchiness to the ice cream as well. I'd definitely make this again.
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2022 15:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 4, 2024 18:47 |
|
|
Well done! I'm really glad you posted this!
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2022 18:18
|
|
|
Meaty Ore posted:I never want to loving do this ever again. If you don’t feel this way at least once during an ICSA, you’re not doing it right. Love the idea of using the pomegranate molasses directly, almost like a barbecue sauce, I wish I’d thought of that.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2022 18:56
|
|
|
Scientastic posted:If you don’t feel this way at least once during an ICSA, you’re not doing it right. Oh, believe me, it only applied to extracting the juice in that particular manner. In future I'd want to use a food mill, or at the very least a nut milk bag. The thing I was using was tiny; the spout of the blender is wider than the opening of the infusion bag I used. Better tools would have drastically reduced the time and frustration involved, and my hands would not have gotten so pruned and stained as they did. Another thing I learned from the process which I think is fair to mention: pomegranate juice stains. Almost as bad as beet juice, I think, unless you can clean it up right away. Also, I hope it's clear enough that I was exaggerating the frustration of hand-churning the ice cream. Yes, it took forty five minutes, but the crank was easy to turn throughout the process, and I actually found it interesting watching it gradually go from a pure liquid base into more solid ice cream. It was a more zen-like experience than I made it seem in the post and not actually all that tedious. Meaty Ore fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Feb 10, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2022 19:27
|
|
|
Looks great! For straining the juice, I used a large tea strainer and a spoon, it worked pretty well. One of these days (hopefully before my tomatoes get ripe this summer) I'll get a food mill.
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2022 14:39
|
|
|
Lab and couscous, two of the finest things to pair...well done.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 16:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 4, 2024 18:47 |
|
|
I'm really glad you posted this, you shouldn't worry about the fact that more than one person had the idea that lamb and pomegranate are good friends, I'm pretty sure that was everyone's first thought, I know it was mine
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 10:19
|
|
