Liquorice or Licorice Powder

[iainpb]

I bought a bag of liquorice powder for making ice-cream but now have a large amount left over, does anyone have any suggestions for other dishes it can be used for?

[Mjx]

Dessert topping/sirup? I've never tried the one by Johan Bülow (towards the bottom of the page), but it looks rather good, and I imagine it would be fairly easy to make something of this sort. In Denmark, it's used over ice cream, among other things.

[cteavin]

There's a liquorice cake in the Alinea cookbook. Actually, I've been wanting to try that myself.

[Jenni]

Stupid question, but are we talking the powder from the actual liquorice root, or the sweet that is also called liquorice even though it often has little or no liquorice in it?

Liquorice tea is a popular use of the actualy root, but I have only ever started off with whole sticks so I'm not sure about using a powder. And also, I really hate liquorice tea and was making it as an emetic for an Ayurvedic proceedure...I bet that's really sold it to you right?! But joking apart, it is used in a lot of herbal teas and I don't mind it as a background component.

[skavoovie]

A local restaurant here in liquorice candy country (Finland) makes a liquorice creme brulée. It also works well with chocolate and raspberries. Add some to a ganache tart or strawberry muffins? I believe I've also seen the suggestion to add some to a gin & tonic, but I'm not sure how good that sounds to you.

[Terrasanct]

If it's actual licorice root powder, it's not a bad idea to be careful how much you use. Teas use licorice as a muscle relaxant, but too much of it can cause muscle weakness or heart problems.

[Jenni]

Yes...liquorice is not reccomended for those with high blood pressure.

[iainpb]

It is actual powdered root from a Chinese store. Some great suggestions so far, will certainly hunt down that liquorice cake recipe and the idea of a liquorice creme brûlée is quite appealing.

[tarko]

lemon and liquorice makes a very nice ganacheflavor, filled in a dark chocolate shell...

[teonzo]

If you are looking for dessert recipes, an easy solution is to take a recipe for a coffee dessert (ice-cream, mousse, bavarian, parfait, etc.), and replace the coffee with licorice: if the recipe asks for normal coffee, then you just have to dilute the licorice powder in water; if the recipe asks for "soluble coffee" (don't know is this product is on sale in the USA), then you just have to substitute the soluble coffee powder with licorice powder. Beware that licorice has a strong flavour, so if these are the first times you use it then it's better to start with few powder and then add more until you reach your desired strongness.

About pairings, the most used here in Italy are mint, lemon and anise. You can try to surf this website for other pairings:

http://www.foodpairing.be/

but they are compiling it, so maybe licorice is still to be added.

Licorice powder can be used even for savory dishes. For example one of the signature dishes of Le Calandre (a 3 michelin star restaurant in Padua) is a risotto with saffron and licorice. You can find the recipe on their book "In.Gredienti".

Teo

[iainpb]

Liquorice and lemon sounds like an unusual combination, I'm going to have to try that as I can't begin to imagine what it tastes like, but I can see similarities in the flavours of mint and liquorice and how that might work. The liquorice risotto is making it to my list too!

thanks for all the replies!

[skavoovie]

I found one more flipping through some magazines: a liquorice sauce for salmon. Fat Duck inspired but simple. Sorry, this is in the original measurement units:

2 shallots

2 tablespoon veg. oil

0.1 liter soy sauce

2 tablespoon sherry

2.5 tablespoon muscovado sugar

0.25 liter water

2 tablespoon liquorice root chips (know idea how this would convert to powder)

1 tablespoon butter

I suppose instructions are quite straightforward from the list.

Haven't tried it but could be interesting.

[bethesdabakers]

Here's an odd one (to my mind) - Pear & Liquorice Fougasse:

Came from “Les Meilleures Fougasses” by Benoit Molin. Basically it's a sweet bread dough (which I converted to sourdough for my purposes) which contains liquorice, rolled out. One half of the dough is spread with lemon curd, covered with a layer of a pear jam (pear, cider, sugar, liquorice). The uncovered half is folded over the pear jam, and the slashes just go through the top layer.

M. Molin called for liquorice powder + a commercial product made by Haribo, the large european sweet manufacturer. I just use powdered liquorice from a Chinese supermarket.

More photos here.

Mick

[Mjx]

You're probably fully aware of this, but just in case: liquorice is naturally quite sweet, so if you don't like sweet notes in your savoury dishes, you'll want to keep that in mind.

[mgaretz]

I think it would be good instead of the star anise in this bread recipe: