Baking in salt-crust is a technique usually applied to fish, meat, potatoes, beets and sometimes celery roots. In fact, a lot more vegetables can be covered in coarse sea salt and baked in the oven, where the salt-crust not only seasons the vegetable, but also keeps all the flavors inside. This time I experimented with salt-baked kohlrabi, which developed into a magnificent result.
In the main course of my meatless menu for the 2011 ZEITmagazin cooking competition I wanted to present the carrot from different perspectives. The base is formed by a clean tasting creamy carrot puree. After cooking the carrots I put them back on the hot stove to dry them out a bit. Afterwards, while blending to a fine puree I adjusted the consistency if the puree by adding some raw carrot juice. Carrots tend to loose a lot of flavor during cooking – by adding carrot juice later I managed to reincorporate the clean carrot flavor into the puree.
I submitted this starter and the following two recipes to the 2011 ZEITmagazin cooking competition. The topic of the call was to create a meatless menu, though not strictly vegetarian, because fish was still allowed. While thinking about what to submit, I had the idea to tighten the limitations and create each dish using only one single color. There are plenty of ingredients available during spring and summer, so I thought, it’s a realistic and solvable task. The dish below was the starter for the competition, consisting only green ingredients.
