Best meal eaten in the UK so far this year?

[cabrales]

Bapi -- It sounds like the bird shape was formed from the salt crust itself, and not from a pastry exterior for a more "normally" shaped salt crust, no? From the picture I have access to, the color of the exterior bird shape resembled the golden/yellowish tones one might find in pastry and not in certain forms of sea salt necessarily. Do you recollect what type of salt with such a color might have been used? Could the salt have been artificially tainted to the required color? The dish sounds interesting.

[Jon Tseng]

Not sure if I understand you C, but I think you're asking if there's a seperate salt crust beneath the pastry - no there normally isn't. The "salt crust" is a highly salted (as to be inedible) pastry which encloses the meat.

Have also seen this suggested with roast beef fillet (eg the patricia wells/joel robuchon book). sometimes this is served with the crust at the table, sometimes the crust is chucked in the kitchen and just the meat served. there are also english meat recipes where a rough pastry is used to enclose the goodies and then discarded

Having said that I have seen recipes for salt-baked chicken/duck where the meat is, literally, covered in a couple of kilos of rock salt and put in the oven.

cheerio

j

[cabrales]

The "salt crust" is a highly salted (as to be inedible) pastry which encloses the meat.

Jon -- Agreed, or the "salt crust" is sea salt-only (e.g., turbot in salt at Meneau's L'Esperance, Vezelay/St-Pere). However, the picture I saw of the R Blanc salt crust dish showed a very cute-looking, yellowish-colored (as in pastry-like), smooth exterior that was itself shaped to look like a pigeon. I wondered whether the pigeon look was just for show (i.e, pastry with no sea salt), with an interior sea salt case surrounding the "real" meat.

[Jon Tseng]

nah, think that is the crust - nothing underneath

think the recipe is in the original rb 1988 book

cheerio

j

[Winot]

Having said that I have seen recipes for salt-baked chicken/duck where the meat is, literally, covered in a couple of kilos of rock salt and put in the oven.

There are also of course recipes for fish (eg sea bass) like this.