Great food creates memory. I was lucky enough to dine at The Fat Duck in Bray years and years ago, back when it was the no. 3 restaurant in the world, back before cooking shows with celebrity chefs became a global phenomenon, and back when I had just arrived in London for work and was surviving on cheap frozen pizza while I looked for a job. I remember thinking the meal costed the same as a brand new TV I had just purchased, but what a meal it was. Every single moment of that experience still remained so vividly in my brain, from walking into the door getting warmly welcomed by front of the house, the setting, the sensation of being in awe of every single element that was presented in front of me and the exact taste profile of each of the dish. They were imprinted in my memory when social media was not yet a thing, and seeing Heston himself was the completion of that perfection.
This dish came about as I managed to get my hands on some sea succulents, something that I always wanted to try to use in my cooking, and I thought the Sound of the Sea was the perfect way to show case them. My version below is simplified (aka I winged it) for a home cook as I did it fairly last minute on a weeknight after work. It might be not the perfect replica, but nonetheless it brought back some of those happy memories from my visit. The original version was served with an iPod hidden in a large sea shell playing the sound of the sea to complete the experience. I've upgrade this to wireless AirPods, :P. Happy cooking all.
The full original recipe for those keen can be found here.
Difficulty: Medium
Time: 1 hour
Serves: 4
Ingredients
Edible Sand
- 2 cup Panko crumb
- 8 dried anchovies
- 2 tsp dry shaved bonito
- 1 tsp edible silver glitter
- 2 tbsp grapeseed oil
Seafood
- 4 fresh oysters
- 8 fresh whelk shells
- 8 fresh razor clams
- 12 slices kingfish sashimi
- 1 small bunch karkalla (also known as beach banana or piggy face)
- 1 small bunch sea brite (also known as sea spray)
- 1 tbsp dried wakame seaweed
- 1 tbsp dried dulse seaweed
Seafood Foam
- 1/2 onion diced
- 1 garlic clove sliced
- 1/4 cup fennel sliced
- 1/2 cup dry white wine
- 2 cup fish stock
- 2 tbsp kombu dashi
- 1 tbsp bonito dashi
- 1 tbsp mirin
- salt
- 1g lecithin
Method
1. Add oil, Panko crumb and dried anchovies in a pan. Cook over medium heat until the Panko crumb is golden. Transfer it to a food processor, add the dry shaved bonito and blitz it into a fine sand like powder, add the silver glitter and set aside.
2. Make the seafood foam by heating oil in a small saucepan, lightly cook the onion, garlic, fennel until fragrant and softened. Add the white wine and reduce until approximately 2 tbsp of liquid. Add the fish stock and bring to boil. Add the razor clams and take it out 30 seconds after it's boiling. Add the whelk shells and cook it for 1 minute in the boiling water. Take it out and set aside. Cook the stock for a further 30 minutes over low to medium heat. Season with kombu dashi, bonito dashi, mirin and salt and pass it through a sieve. Return the stock back into the pot, add the dried wakame and dulse seaweed to the seafood stock and let it rehydrate. Pass the stock through a sieve again and retain the rehydrated seaweed for plating later. Transfer 1 cup of the stock to a bowl or a tall narrow container for blending later. Add the lecithin and set aside.
3. Remove the razor clam out of the shell and slice it into halves. Remove the whelk shell out of the shell. In individual bowls, dress the seafood generously with ponzu dressing.
4. Spoon some sand onto the plate, place the some seaweed on top of the sand followed by the seafood dressed in ponzu dressing. Garnish with sea blite and karkall. Blend the stock with lecithin with a stick blender to generate the foam. Spoon the foam over the seafood to dress it.
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