Roasted Corn Enrobed in Chocolate
I always love to tinker in the kitchen (when my dad does so in his workshop, we call it “puttering”), but lately, I’ve been even more inspired to see if the sometimes-odd-sounding culinary combinations I come up with in my head actually taste as good as I’m hoping they will. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes that’s due to a-not-so-fortuitous ingredient pairing and sometimes things flop because the technique doesn’t work the way I thought it would. (Which is why you will not be reading about my pumpkin-cream pasta idea. Not yet, anyway — I found out that trying to make a roux with sweet rice flour results in a glue, and while my pumpkin-glue pasta tasted okay, I would only serve it to myself. When I’m really hungry.)
But I digress…the reason for my recent propelled inspiration is the book A Day at elBulli: an insight into the ideas, methods and creativity of Ferran Adriá. A friend gave me this remarkable tome for my birthday, and ever since I drooled over artistic photography and read the precisely-written explanations of how the world’s best restaurant creates, flows, and serves, I’ve been getting more experimental with my pairings. (Ferran Adriá is the chef and owner of elBulli, a restaurant in Spain that receives 2 MILLION reservation requests each year when the restaurant only has the capacity to serve 8,000 diners each year. That means you have a 1% shot at getting at a reservation. And the requests generally go something like, “I’d like a table for two any time in 2011.”)
Hence, the roasted corn enrobed in dark chocolate! I’d roasted the corn (along with a bunch of other veggies) the previous night for dinner and used the leftovers to make these chocolates the next day. While using a proper chocolate/candy mold would have been the best way to make them, I didn’t have that, so I used what I did find in my cupboard: a 1960’s-era hard plastic ravioli maker. It had smooth little cups dented into a tray, and I thought, “Well, shoot, better than anything else I’ve got.” And it worked! So you, too, can use whatever in your kitchen is nice and small and rounded and smooth — just grease each individual cup first. The resulting confection is a little bit chewy, a little bit salty, a little bit corny…and a lot bit chocolatey, especially if you do what I did and use 90% dark Swiss chocolate. (Not for the faint of tooth!)
Roasted Corn Enrobed in Chocolate
Place a few kernels of roasted corn (I roasted mine with unrefined peanut oil and sea salt) into each greased cup. Set aside.
In a small saucepan, melt chocolate* and coconut oil* over very low heat, stirring constantly, until melted. Carefully pour over each mound of kernels, using a spatula to scrape all of the chocolate out of the pan. Freeze chocolates for one hour or refrigerate for three hours to harden them, then use a butter knife or stiff, small spatula to pop each chocolate free from the tray. After they’ve hardened, store in a cool, dark place…or eat them right away. Enjoy!
Next up: mango and pink peppercorns enrobed in chocolate!
* The proportion of chocolate to oil should be 20 grams per 1 1/2 tsp. oil. The reason I used coconut oil was to enable the chocolate to be solid at room temperature, to enable it to pop out of the mold better, and to give it a little bit more creaminess. (And because I used very dark chocolate, this also means that the chocolates were dairy-free.) I also used 90% dark chocolate; lower percentages will yield a bit softer chocolate, although anything 70% and above should be fine. I would not, however, attempt this with milk chocolate, not unless you greatly increase the amount of oil to compensate for the softer chocolate.
If you have a sweet tooth, I would use 85% dark and add 1 tsp. of sucanat or honey for every 20 g of chocolate. (If you’re using Lindt bars, 20 g equals 2 squares.) Also note that 20 g of chocolate will yield 4 smallish chocolate creations, so make as much as you want for as many as you need.
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