Onion comb happened by accident. Actually, there were several accidents involved in making onion comb. Onion water has become a new staple in our kitchen. We take onions, some salt, some water and a touch of agave and pressure cook them for five minutes. We then separate the onions from the water. The onions we cook down into a marmalade. The water is used like stock. It brought a nice sweet vegetal note to our pea soup and it would be great for poaching chicken. I also thought about making it into a jelly and also wondered if I could whip it and make it crispy like the yogurt crisps. I set about the process of making onion crisps, except I was short one ingredient from my base recipe. Oh well, I'm sure one ingredient does not make that much of a difference. Turns out it does. I made the base and began whipping it. I was working on this side project while Aki was getting many of the dishes together for the days meals. I continued to whip, Aki continued to cook and low and behold, my hand mixer went flying across the kitchen.
I knew Aki wanted to get the projects on hand taken care of, yet I really wanted to see if I could make puffed onions. Turns out, she was not that interested in puffed onions at the time and while the mixer convulsed on high power on the floor I glared at her and said "you did that on purpose" and she said "no I didn't, you are just projecting." In any case, I realized that my onion project was taking a bit more time than it should and that no matter how much I whipped I was not going to get the result I was looking for from my onion base. So, in an act of defeat, I took the semi whipped onion mixture and placed it in metal frames in the dehydrator and hoped for the best. Besides, I had some actual cooking to do.
I opened the dehydrator this morning to a pleasurable surprise. No, my crisps did not magically appear. 
However, I had a new result. The onion mixture did dry and retain some of its lightness. The result is very comb like. Quite similar to whipped nougat, though savory. And now begins the fun part. What else can we make into a comb: strawberry, coffee, truffle, cherry, almond, foie gras, oyster? Now is where we get to take our mistakes and grow from them. As a side note, if a hand blender starts convulsing on the floor turn it off quickly it creates a horrible mess.
Recent Comments