Texture & Sculpture

Appears in

Organum

By Peter Gilmore

Published 2014

About

THE THREEDIMENSIONAL STRUCTURE OF THE ART THAT IS CUISINE LENDS ITSELF TO NUMEROUS POSSIBILITIES OF PRESENTATION.

WALNUTS / JUGLANS REGIA

HARVEST / AUTUMN

Texture has long played a major role in my cuisine. There are many elements that make dish work—flavour marriages, temperature, visual structure, cultural influences and aroma—but of all of these the most direct and intimate part of the experience is texture.

When a single texture is wrong—rubbery eggs, overcooked pasta or a tough steak—you notice immediately and it can completely spoil the eating experience. When a texture is perfect, it is sublime. When textures are combined and play off and complement each other you really have something special; for example, the smoked and confit pig jowl, shiitake mushrooms, shaved scallops and Jerusalem artichoke leaves in this chapter is a dish that plays with texture on many different levels. The pig jowl itself is from a Berkshire pig with great intramuscular fat throughout the meat. The texture that is achieved by long slow cooking gives the pork an incredible mouth feel. Soft and yielding yet structurally sound, this—combined with silky, slippery shiitake mushrooms cut horizontally to maximise the external surface area of the mushroom, sautéed quickly in jamon, juniper and bay-infused butter—makes a great juxtaposition to the almost raw scallops. Both the scallops and the shiitake mushrooms mimic a different aspect of the fat from the pork. This dish is only completed by the texture of the crisp Jerusalem artichoke skins that play the role of the associated crackling that you enjoy when eating a roasted suckling pig.