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| “A red-based orange, Flame, is gregarious and fun loving. Flamboyant and vivacious, this wonderfully theatrical shade adds fiery heat to the spring 2017 palette.” – Pantone 17-1462 |
This week we are beginning our 10 week theme of the Pantone top Spring
colours of 2017. We love doing the colour of the year post so much that we
thought that we would take advantage of Pantone’s list of colours for Spring to
inspire the upcoming blog posts. For week number one we chose the colour Flame
which is a reddy-orange shade of orange. When thinking about “flame” our first
thought was that of food. We thought of spicy food and flames right away, so
this week we are going to focus our blog on the art of Flambé.
We won’t attempt to flambé anything for you right now, but we will give
you some cool facts about the technique and find some yummy sounding flambé
recipes that you can try and we can try one day in the future when we are well prepared
to be flambéing around the kitchen.
Flambé means flamed in French and what you are doing when you flambé
something is adding alcohol to a hot pan which causes flames to erupt. When I
think about flambe, I think about what I see on TV and in movies when the waiter
comes to the table with a flaming pan of dessert, but it can also be used to create
savoury dishes as well. The main purpose of the flames is to burn off the
alcohol but to keep the flavours to enhance the dish you are making.
The most famous flambé dish is the Crepe Suzette that was created by
accident in the 19th century.
It’s recommended that you use a flavourful liquid that’s at least 40%
alcohol when you flambé your dish. Apparently wine and beer do not work as they
don’t have enough alcohol content in them so something like rum or cognac is a
good idea and adding cinnamon will add to the flavours but will also help with
the flames. Another thing to keep in mind is to warm your alcohol first because
that also aids with starting the fire.
It is advised for beginners that you take the pan off of the stove top
before you add the alcohol and that you use a long handled match so that you
are safe from injuries and setting things on fire!
Popular flambé foods:
Bananas Foster
Crepes Suzette
Cherries Jubilee
Steak Diane
Coq Au Vin
Christmas Pudding
Omelette au Rhum
Here is a recipe for bananas foster by Alton Brown that looks good if
you’re brave enough to try it at home, if not, next time you’re out try and
find a flambéed food on the menu and get a professional to do it for you.
Click this link to see a video of Alton making this creation on GMA...
And for something savoury, a recipe for Steak Diane which I found on
Epicurious.
Here is a good website that I found which explains the safety
procedures while doing flambé and it also provides some good flambé recipes
ell.
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