While reading El Bulli 2003/2004 I noted a bit of visual gimmickry in a dish which used diced cuttlefish as
rice to which a slice of cuttlefish was laid on top and the entire assemblage resembled a perfect bite of cuttlefish sushi. Bingo. Instead of dicing the cuttlefish we could make a puree bound with activa. The resulting puree could then be extruded into a hot water bath to set a long noodle. The long noodles could then be cut on a bias to resemble in appearance and texture cooked rice. From the initial idea of cuttlefish rice, I jumped to scallop rice since we have scallops on hand. This morning I set about seeing if the idea was sound. I made the puree, extruded it and cut it into rice shaped pieces. The cut scallop really does resemble rice. In the future I may use a slightly smaller pastry tip so that we can make a basmati style rice instead of the thicker short grained rice of scallops we made today.
With the scallop rice on hand, now we need to figure out what the heck we are going to do with it. Some initial ideas are: scallop rice and peas, scallop paella, dirty scallop rice, fried scallop rice, scallop risotto.
Back to the kitchen.
