Strawberry Gazpacho with Tomato Water Jelly, Basil Ice and Crab Salad - Page 34

Ox and I both agreed that this felt like our first real foray into Chef Brock's mind.  We were making Jellies, Ices and Tomato Water.  The recipe is over 24 hours from start to finish, with multiple steps along the way, but the results were spectacular.  I think there's a good chance that Ox and I may be the only non professionals to make this recipe.

Our first trouble came when we couldn't find sheet gelatin.  No problem, Ox says, there must be a conversion available online.  Very first search result had this gem of a quote: "Substituting sheet gelatin for powdered gelatin is perhaps the most controversial ratio known to the baking world.  I’ve seen everything from 1 envelope equals 3, up to 5 sheets."  Here's the SOURCE.  We ended up melting the gelatin powder directly into the cold tomato water for 10 minutes and then microwaving for one minute.  Worked like a charm.  I have to say, making tomato puree with gelatin, freezing it, and then straining it in a crazy contraption seemed a bit insane, but one taste of the crystal clear tomato water revealed the genius.  Turns out the gelatin in the melting ice cubes holds all the colored solids and allows pure tomato flavor to escape.

As we've started to notice fairly consistently, the scale of the recipe is a bit too big.  We cut the basil ice recipe to 1/3, and still had way more basil ice than we needed.  The Basil Ice was a bit hard to scrape, I think next time we'll scrape it before it's thoroughly solid.  It looks a lot better as a garnish than it does in that picture.

The rest of the recipe aligned well, though we had a lot of Tomato Jelly leftover, but that turned out to be a good thing.  A REALLY good thing.  Check THIS out.

So, now we had Jelly, Basil Ice, Crab Salad, Gazpacho and garnishes.  Assembling in a way to match the picture, and we had a beautiful, delicious soup.  This recipe will cost you some money, will take a long time, and will tax your kitchen skills, but the end result is SOOOO worth it.



Advice: Make 1/8 the basil ice and 1/2 the tomato jelly (unless you what the bloodless bloody mary's).  Try hard to find sheet jelly - my brother the chef swears by it.  Scrape the basil ice before it is fully frozen.  Get good basil.  Not the crap crammed into the tiny containers.