Monday, March 30, 2009

Royal Foodie Joust: Asparagus, Almond & Lemongrass

Chilled Almond Soup with Asparagus Cream & Lemongrass Churros

Over at Foodie BlogRoll, this month's Joust challenged us to create a dish with asparagus, almond and lemongrass. My mind immediately jumped to an almond horchata, but morphed into a cold almond soup. As with all of my recipes, I rely on super top quality ingredients:

For the soup, I took 1 C. of blanched almonds. I put them in the microwave for 2 minutes, stirred, 1 more minute, stirred, and continued on 30 second blasts until browned and fragrant. I put them into a blender with about 3/4 C. of filtered water (adjust to get a consistency that you like). To counter the mealiness of the soup, I added 2 T. of citrus infused Spanish olive oil, and then a hint of French grey salt (the earthiness of grey salt was perfect in this dish), and 1 T. of lemongrass drinking vinegar. A few minutes of blending and I had a really tasty soup - done in minutes!

Next I blanched asparagus tips and processed them into a mush using some of the blanching water to create a paste. I whipped 1/2 C. of cream until stiff, and folded in the asparagus paste. I did not season this at all since the other two components would be a bit salty.

Finally, I cut a lemongrass stalk into 1 inch lengths, threw them in boiling water for 15 minutes of hard boiling. I put them in my mini-prep along with a bit of the boiling water and blitzed until it became a rough paste. In bowl, I combined the lemongrass paste, 1 egg, 1 T. of melted butter, 1/4 C. of almond meal, white pepper and salt, and just enough AP flour to create a pipeable batter. Mine was the consistency of cornbread. I put the batter into a piping bag and piped into hot oil to make my churros. Once browned, I removed them from the oil and salted with Spanish sea salt. You can see in the pics that I did both sticks and croutons. I preferred the croutons, but the sticks made for a better pic.

The whole dish took less than 20 minutes to complete and was quite good.

5 comments:

Janet_Gourmet Traveller88 said...

Hi there, nice entry of yours. Can you see your picture after posting in the forum. I have problem uploading my picture.

Gfron1 said...

At first I couldn't but it works now. The problem seems to be that if you copy the url of your pic from the browser address bar, it doesn't show up in Foodblogroll. But, if you click on your pic in the browser, then right click and copy the path, that link seems to work. Its a goofy forum technology - shouldn't be that difficult.

Joy the Baker said...

I've never seen a recipe quite like this! Sounds totally amazing!

RachelD said...

Tres creatif!!


Ahhh, the patience of the young!!

Tri2Cook said...

Cool dish Rob! Sounds tasty.