A multisensory fun Halloween treat to die for

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.

Inspirational, intriguing, delightful - from Kitchen Theory

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.

Ingredients

Preparing the beetroot and cranberry reduction:

500 g Raw beetroot (alternatively used pre-cooked beetroot and skip steps 1-5)

200 g Cranberry juice

Preparing the granita:

175 g caster sugar

150 ml lime juice (lemon juice is suitable alternative)

100 ml gin (optional, can be replaced with additional lime juice)

250 ml water

Zest of 2 limes

Instructions

Preparing the beetroot and cranberry reduction

Wash, peel and chop the beetroot in to cubes (roughly 3cm)
Place the beetroot in a Siemens vacuum bag and seal.

Cook the beetroot on the Siemens oven Sous-vide setting for 1 hour at 85°C
Remove the beetroot from the oven, open the bag and allow to cool.
Once the beetroot has cooled, juice and strain (discard the pulp)
Combine the beetroot juice and cranberry juice in a pan. Heat over the Siemens induction hob on a medium setting until a syrupy consistency is achieved (approx. 20mins).
Cool and store in the fridge

Preparing the granita

Put the sugar, zest and 150ml water into a pan and stir over a gentle heat on the Siemens induction hob. Allow to simmer until the sugar dissolves. Remove from the heat and cool.
Pour the lime juice, gin and remaining water into the mixture above, stir well.
Strain the mixture into a shallow freezer-proof container with a lid, cover, and freeze until the mixture begins to freeze at the edges – about 1-2 hours.
Scrape the ice from the sides of the container, breaking them up into smaller crystals with a fork. Cover again and return to the freezer.
Repeat the above step every 30-40 minutes, scraping the ice with a fork until you have a frozen but grainy and fluffy ice mixture.
Once the right texture has been achieved, fill the heart shaped silicon moulds, pressing the ice gently into the mould to ensure it is tightly packed. Place in the freezer for 2 hours and serve.

To serve

Bring the beetroot & cranberry syrup to room temperature.
Gently remove the granita from the heart shaped mould, place in a bowl and immediately pour over a generous helping of the beetroot and cranberry reduction, serve.