Friday 22 January 2010

Wednesday Night's Formal Hall



Wednesday hailed the return of 'business as usual' for Formal Hall with 50 (hopefully) happy customers.
We started wednesdays dinner with an amuse bouche of 'Green Pea and Mint Sorbet served in a Parmesan cornet. The idea for this came from a useful website full of nice recipes for these small and colourful appetizers. The savoury pea sorbet was made in our new Pacojet ice cream/sorbet machine.

The Pacojet machine works by Pacotizing soup, sauces, ice cream and sorbet bases. “Pacotizing” … denotes the revolutionary process, which mixes and purees deep frozen food stuff directly in it’s frozen state, without thawing it, to produce a frozen and intensely natural tasting mousse of extremely fine consistency to ideal serving temperature. Basically it's the best ice cream/sorbet machine that money can buy and produces great results!
The Parmesan cornets are a labour of love and require the chefs to mold very hot, melted cheese around small stainless steel cornet rings. Once the cheese cools it hardens into the little cornets as shown above; lots of burned fingers!
We followed the amuse bouche with Butternut Squash Soup garnished with brown butter, sage, and nutmeg creme fraiche.

After the soup came the main event!
 Parma Ham wrapped Pork Tenderloin with a cassoulet of white beans, brunois, pancetta and sage roasted potatoes. Finished with pesto cream sauce.

I have to admit being very impressed when I first saw this photo, I thought Nick our Head Chef did a great job of presenting this lovely dish.
Savino, our Italian Butler confessed that it reminded him of his Mothers cooking and made him homesick;))
To finish the dinner we served a lavender flavoured creme brulee with lime sorbet (Pacotized!) and lemon shortbread, very refreshing!




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