Serves 4-5
Cooks: Sous-vide 1 hour 85C
Prep 1 hour
With the spookiest time of the year just around the corner, Halloween is a great opportunity to have some fun with family and friends!
Trick or treating may be a bit of a challenge in 2020! So for many of us, enjoying the festivities at home with a small group of family and friends is the way to go. The question is how can we make it really special? Well surely by adding some multisensory fun into the mix!
When most home cooks and chefs think of designing Halloween treats; pumpkin pie, candied apples, eyeball shaped cake pops and of course cupcakes decorated with witches all spring to mind. Our team on the other hand first think of what we want our diners to feel and experience when presented with our treats. For a spooky occasion like this we wanted to break with traditional ideas and find a more interesting way of getting our guests at the chef’s table to really react to the dishes in front of them.
As a sensory design studio and experimental chef’s table our team at Kitchen Theory are always looking for new ways to inspire, intrigue and delight our guests. Our interest and academic research around the psychology of flavour perception gives us insights into our relationship with food, including congruency, enjoyment, expectations and emotions…including fear!
In fairness there are lots of things we humans are afraid of when it comes to food. The shapes, colours, smell and textures of food alone can put us off certain dishes or make us fearful of putting them in our mouth. Our senses are highly attuned to fear, the smell of burning or the sound track to a scary scene in a movie can all alarm us and put us on edge. So when it comes to designing exciting dishes for Halloween taking a more multisensory approach will definitely immerse your diners into the experience that bit more. Think about the textures, sounds and smells, that you can use to make the experience more engaging.
The goal was to design a dish which looks scary and tastes delicious. The result was a palate cleansing; lime granita (gin and lime for adults!), which has been frozen into the shape of an anatomically correct heart (the mould is available here) and coated in a beetroot and cranberry reduction. The hyper-realism of the heart and the blood like syrup are great, however what really brings this course to life is the tableware selected for this dish, the intense red lighting we put on in our dining room and the creepy audio track of a beating heart playing in the background.
Preparing the beetroot and cranberry reduction
500g Raw beetroot (alternatively used pre-cooked beetroot and skip steps 1-5)
200g cranberry juice
Preparing the granita
175g caster sugar
150ml lime juice (lemon juice is suitable alternative)
100ml gin (optional, can be replaced with additional lime juice)
250ml water
Zest of 2 limes
To serve
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At Siemens we are always striving to improve our products and services and value your opinion. Can you help us by answering this brief survey?
It will not take you more than a minute.
If you need any support, please contact us or call us at 0344 892 8999.
Thank you