Saturday 2nd June 2007

Pungent. Yes. If nothing else the First Dinner we held, show-casing garlic, proved beyond a doubt that food effects your body. Sometimes violently.
Tribute must be paid to the wonderful Max Lake for the idea of creating a dinner of garlic for every course. Eyebrows were raised almost collectively and we would like to honour the brave friends that embraced the concept with us because it proved that only our imaginations limit application, but that there are also rules...




Menu
Dirty Frenchman
cocktail of gin and vermouth, shaken over ice, poured into a chilled martini glass rimmed with crushed salt and deep-fried garlic, garnished with green olives stuffed with pickled garlic

Aioli garni with vegetables
House garlic and extra virgin olive oil mayonnaise served with boiled kipfler potatoes, radishes, fennel, boiled eggs and spring onions

Garlic custard with green sauce and parmesan tuille
Roasted garlic baked custards with parsley and anchovy sauce and parmesan biscuit

Roasted garlic, bread and almond soup
Spanish-style soup of soft roasted garlic thickened with sourdough breadcrumbs and ground almonds

Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic
Traditional Provincal dish of whole chicken baked in a sealed dish with a few heads of garlic

Roasted garlic, honey and olive oil ice cream (two versions)
One version made with Russian garlic, slow braised then finely pureed and churned with a creme anglaise, another made with roasted whole garlic cloves churned with honey and olive oil

Garlic bomb
Final item on the menu was a whole clove each of raw Russian garlic

General consensus was that the '50s must have been a lot more debauched than the wholesome picture would suggest, as a traditionally poured martini, similar to this one, would have had some of the more slender women rolling drunk on only one. Now we know why Frankie was such a fan. The advantage of such a potent cocktail to kick things off, of course, is that it certainly fuels conversation between diners that may not know each other. Of course, many of the guests may know each other, but there should always be some invitees that are not familiar to everyone: this makes for much more interesting conversation at the dinner table than otherwise, and ensures diners don't fall into routine patterns of conversation such as many good and familar friends tend to do.

But back to the cocktail. Aside from its alcohol strength we'd suggest it was a success. The pickled garlic inside the green olives had been cooked down long enough to have lost its pungency to vinegar, sugar and salt, but provided unmistakable garlic flavour. The salt and fried garlic rim may or may not have made it more of a margarita, however it was actually delicious. We'd like to try it again with a fruit cocktail base, or even as the rim of a classic lime margarita. It's certainly more pleasant than a straight salt rim (which, incidently was most likely only contrived to obscure the 'orrible taste of cheap tequila).

Alors, le aioli. Such a simply perfect dish as this merely proves once again that simplicity can be sublime. Raw and cooked vegetables of the season, made pungent and creamy with garlic mayonnaise - what a wonderful sharing meal. Certainly the aioli was powerful enough with garlic to make us feel like we were diving in the deep end of the pool. There was really no going back now. We had been Garlicked. From memory, and to be honest, our memories are very vague as a result of the Dirty Frenchm(e)n, this was matched with a sauvignon-blanc.

Next, the custards. Now, this had been supposed to be a fairly original dish, however Stephanie Alexander has a recipe for garlic and goat's cheese custards (she also recommends making very little ones to serve with baked lamb), in her Cook's Companion. So poaching from Stephanie by adding cheese (however in this case the soft inner of a ripe brie), the custards for this dinner were born. It was felt that parsley, being a natural breath freshener, would work very well with the garlic, keeping the dish from becoming cloying, however for mid-notes the addition of anchovy to the sauce kept it savoury rather than too astringent. A simple peppered parmesan tuille was added at the last moment to lend crispy texture to the otherwise very smooth and silky custard. This was paired with a Milton-Thorne 2004 Riesling that worked well, we thought; a little austere, a little pebble-like, but this matched the earthiness of the parsley/anchovy sauce very well.

The soupe du jour, a roast garlic, almond and bread number, was an adaptation of the Spanish classic ajo blanco, which sports similar ingredients and is traditionally served cold and garnished with green grapes (a kind of white gazpacho, say). But given that we were in the throes of a chilly Sydney winter, it was decided a warm version would be attempted with some tweaking of the ingredients. Two heads of garlic were slowly roasted until sweet and jammy and added to a homemade chicken stock (with a ham bone thrown in for good measure), plenty of caramelised onion, some bacon and simmered before adding toasted ground almonds and chunks of sourdough bread. The bread gave the soup a wonderful thick consistency and the mixture was blended, though not to a point that it lost its texture. The resulting dish was rich and sweet, with lovely porky salty notes and a subtle, slightly perfumed garlic flavour. It was finished with parsley and matched with a zesty pinot gris.

There was little debate about what should constitute the main course: the French provincial dish of chicken with 40 cloves of garlic. This particular version is based on Richard Olney’s recipe from Simple French Food and was absolutely remarkable in its simplicity. A jointed chicken went into the pot with little more than 4 heads of garlic, olive oil and a bouquet garni. The lid was sealed with dough around the edge of the casserole and baked in the oven for almost 2 hours. After ceremoniously cracking open the dough seal, the dish revealed itself to be wonderfully moist with plenty of juices in the pan despite no addition of stock or liquid whatsoever. The garlic was squeezed from its skins into the juices and then served with potatoes sautéed in walnut oil and garlic and a simple green salad. It was matched with a buttery Chardonnay.

Dessert was always going to be tricky. While garlic does become sweet, its pungency still doesn’t lend itself that well to dessert course. After extensive research, a garlic ice-cream was decided on, though none of the recipes found were particularly appealing nor did their ingredients seem to counter garlic’s pungency quite enough. So we started from scratch. What flavours compliment garlic and could counter its odour? We thought honey. We thought extra-virgin olive oil. And we thought vanilla. We also needed to get the garlic as sweet as could be by slow roasting. To a base recipe of olive oil ice-cream, we added three cloves of pureed slow-roasted garlic, half a cup thick, bushy Australian honey from Nelligen (Pooh’s Goo), a vanilla bean and cinnamon. We tested the ice-cream a week before the dinner. Initially it was beautiful; honey and vanilla notes with slight garlic undertones, though not too pungent by any means. However, by the night of the dinner, the garlic flavour had developed and was far more pungent. It was still countered quite well by the robust honey. Perhaps by the time we had consumed so much garlic, we didn’t notice it in the dessert quite so much. Probably a blessing. This was paired with a botrytis semillon.

Carlo: Not to be outdone, and feeling a tad naked arriving at a dinner this aspirational, I arrived at the idea of also making a garlic ice cream almost independently after a morning spent at the Orange Grove Organic Market. Here, at a stall with produce grown around Windsor, we found massive heads of Russian garlic which would become our centrepiece and, for three of them at least, another experiment in making ice cream.

At least this was the intention. Happily, it also included a visit to the Breville factory outlet for an ice cream maker (with needed assistance from their hunky Oz-like salesman) and so with three days to go, I decided to braise them slowly in honey, white wine and cinnamon. Once nearly translucent, and with the braising liquor threatening to become molasses, I pushed the lot through a tamis then added it to a creme anglais made on the rich side with eggs, fresh cream, cane sugar, vanilla bean and milk. We churned this for what seemed like forever - it refused to 'stick' - then, in frustration, left it to set overnight.

What a punch! I sampled a touch before going to the gym before this dinner (believe me, it was needed!) and the taste of garlic lingered with us until the afternoon. In fact, it was so pungent that it took a swirl of Pooh's Goo (kindly provided by Mel) before becoming palatable - and wwith that ripple its smoothness and richness further took flight. Not an ice cream I'll be making any time soon - but also not a recipe to discard, never to be made again.

By this stage of the evening the table's dish of huge, Russian (or Elephant) Garlic cloves proved irressistable. How else to finish the meal than by eating a whole clove (each the size of a crabapple) each? Suffice to say the pungency is unbelievable, to the degree that a few round the table gagged and went faint. It's also hot and gives a burning sensation to the mouth.

No vampires on our tails the next day... we proved the point that sulphur (of which there is plenty in raw garlic), is aromatic even after digestion. Apparently each and every one of us will pass wind on average 25 times a day, which is normal and largely unnoticed. We discovered, however, that sometimes it's noticed, in a big way...