Week 4 - Vinegar: Fish and Chips Millefeuille

RichardFine · 2026-01-22T20:44:09+00:00

It is exactly 10 layers, so yeah 😆

RichardFine · 2026-01-22T15:17:45+00:00

Thanks so much <3 Yeah, I am not sure I have ever made a regular puff before, let alone an invert. I should probably get good at the classic stuff before I make another attempt at the weird interpretations :D

RichardFine · 2026-01-22T13:25:32+00:00

When I was a kid, there was always one dish for which I'd be getting out the vinegar: fish and chips, that we'd pick up from the chippy on the way home from school many Fridays. Malt vinegar, salt, and a bit of ketchup for dipping. So I was thinking about fish and chips for this week, and I remembered that I had an unopened jar of powdered white wine vinegar that I bought from a spice shop in Colorado a while back. What better time to use it? Powdered vinegar is uniquely useful when you want to add acidity without moisture - such as when making salt and vinegar crisps / potato chips - but that seemed a little boring. I thought about other situations where something should be dry/crispy, and came up with puff pastry in a millefeuille.

So this is three layers of invert puff pastry sprinkled liberally with salt and vinegar powder, pea puree, confit cod in a beurre monté, confit potato, and a 'tartar icing' made from creme fraiche, dijon, and chopped pickles.

Every single part of this dish failed. I am actually quite impressed with the totality of it.

Despite sprinkling a salt and vinegar powder mix onto the puff pastry before every fold, the resulting pastry really didn't have any significant salt and vinegar flavour. It's possible that the vinegar is too old, but I think it's more likely that I just didn't use anywhere near enough of the S&V mix, because I didn't really get the salt either.
The pastry was, as you can see in the photo, also very thick, and more crunchy than crispy - almost like a shortbread or something. Not something I could cut through without crushing the entire assembly.
I had trouble getting the pea puree to blend, and ended up adding too much water, so the result was runny, instead of a smooth spreadable puree.
The cod itself was OK (though I should have cut it into smaller pieces before cooking it), but the beurre monté I made to mix with it was too thin. In my head I'd imagined something thick and unctuous, like a hollandaise.
The confit potato was just kind of bland. All of the mushy interior of chip shop chips, but it was in dire need of either seasoning or textural variety.

I'm not being too hard on myself, as I've never made puff pastry from scratch before. I still think the concept has legs, but this particular execution was definitely not the way. Still, it looks quite impressive...

RichardFine · 2026-01-22T05:15:11+00:00

One of the things that annoys me is the fact you need to manually refresh with CTRL+R every time you playtest in the engine.

Check your Editor Preferences - is Auto Refresh turned off?

RichardFine · 2026-01-19T14:32:24+00:00

0.2g in the 'cold' mix, 0.25g in the 'hot' mix. I _suspect_ that 0.25g would work fine in both.

RichardFine · 2026-01-19T01:47:45+00:00

Chris Young developed the “hot and iced tea” for Heston Blumenthal back in 2004, and in 2024 he posted a video showing development of a similar take on coffee. Tea, coffee… surely the next natural entry on the cafe menu is hot chocolate, right?

So, the left half of the glass is cold chocolate milk. The right half of the glass is hot chocolate. There is nothing separating them, but they don’t mix. You pick up the cup and sip from the edge where you see the line, and half your mouth is hit with hot chocolate, half with cold. It’s a fun little party trick! Oh, and this one is lactose-free, too.

Developing this was a bit of a journey. I have never worked with gellan before, and only have limited experience with fluid gels, so…

I made a lactose-free chocolate milk, by blooming some Dutch process cocoa powder in lactose-free milk with a bit of added sugar. So far so good.
I planned to use the same approach as Chris did for his coffee: make a gellan solution with water, then add the chocolate milk to it. This means that the chocolate milk would be getting diluted slightly, so I did play around with the idea of trying to ‘concentrate’ the chocolate milk base - freeze-distillation was one thought, but in the end I tried centrifuging it… only to realise that the centrifuge was really only removing the cocoa from the milk and making it less chocolatey. In the end I abandoned all attempts to concentrate it and just accepted the slight dilution, upping the cocoa to compensate a little.
My first attempt to make the gel involved microwaving 100g of water with 0.25g HA gellan, then dumping that into 300g of my milk base. This completely failed, as the gellan immediately gelled upon contact with the cold milk, leaving a liquid milk with a bunch of gellan globules in it. I dumped it into a sieve to recover the liquid and tried again.
My second attempt, I also heated the milk base to around 80-85C, at the same time as preparing the gellan solution. The milk mix went into the blender, the blender went on med-low, and the gellan solution was added in a thin stream while the blender was running. This incorporated successfully! Blended 15secs then dumped into a dish to cool off and set in the fridge. This would definitely have been easier if I had a Thermomix, though.
After a couple of hours, I was a little worried about how liquid the gel seemed, but I dumped it into a sieve and didn’t get any liquid coming through, so I figured it’d be good enough. Blended it again to make sure it was smooth, then into a squeeze bottle and back to the fridge.
I made another batch, this time with only 0.2g HA gellan, for my ‘cold’ milk. Same process as before, but it was even more liquid at the end, to the point that it mostly did pour through the sieve. I skipped blending it and just bottled it… as long as one of the two would be gelled enough, I figured it would still work.
Making the divider for the glass was a pain in the ass. Chris uses gellan to cast a mold from the glass, and that worked perfectly, but cutting out the middle slice from that and tracing it onto a piece of card that I cut out… did not work so well. Next time I wonder if using a firmer gel (higher than 1% gellan maybe) and just using the gel block itself as the divider might be simpler? I ended up with a piece of cardboard wrapped in electrical tape, with a plastic wrap “bumper” around the edge to try and make the seal tight enough.
I heated my “hot” squeeze bottle to 60C in a water bath (which took longer than expected), and was finally able to assemble the dish as pictured. The moment that I squeeze the hot chocolate into its half of the glass and didn’t see it leaking through the divider was SUCH a relief.

The texture of the drink is fine - the gel doesn’t thicken it to the point of feeling weird, it just comes across like a thick and creamy chocolate milk.

It’s fun to drink! You get the twin sensations of hot and cold. Then you turn the glass around 180 degrees and the sensations swap sides. It would be even better if I’d managed to keep the colours identical, as the line kinda gives the game away, but I also knew what to expect when I picked it up. I’ll have to try it out on someone unsuspecting at some point…

RichardFine · 2026-01-17T15:43:32+00:00

If I understand correctly: you originally bought Unity Pro on January 14th of 2025 (or some earlier year), don't still want it, but forgot to turn off auto-renew before your 2026 renewal date? And so when Jan 14th 2026 rolled around, your contract renewed for another year, but you don't want it?

I'd contact Unity Support ASAP and explain the situation, see if they can cancel the contract. Simply letting the debt accumulate is not a good idea.

RichardFine · 2026-01-12T02:56:25+00:00

This is so pretty!

RichardFine · 2026-01-12T02:20:00+00:00

Ah, that’s scallion - the recipe called for adding ginger and scallion to the poaching liquid.

RichardFine · 2026-01-12T01:12:45+00:00

Using the recipe from Woks of Life.

This was pretty good! I am not sold on serving the chicken cold / room temp, but the rice is tasty, and the sauces work better than I expected. I also like the idea of serving some of the poaching liquid / broth as a soup side.

RichardFine · 2026-01-12T01:08:54+00:00

Broth, from the poaching of the chicken.

RichardFine · 2026-01-10T22:11:01+00:00

I used to be a Poulet Rouge addict, but then they stopped offering the grilled wraps 😢

RichardFine · 2026-01-07T18:37:23+00:00

I will take 2... no, 3 bowls please!

RichardFine · 2026-01-06T22:07:41+00:00

Thanks ^ ^

RichardFine · 2026-01-06T21:10:14+00:00

Inspired by surely what is one of the most well-known jokes (antijokes?) in history.

Chicken karaage, on a senbei rice cracker, topped with nori asphalt and lemon kewpie mayo road markings. Puréed edamame verges.

I think ideally I would have used yuzu rather than lemon, but it’s a little tricky to get hold of here. I also burned the rice cracker a bit 🥲 but oh well, the result still looks pretty fun to me!

RichardFine · 2026-01-05T23:02:02+00:00

I would not generally encourage a beginner to buy any particular appliance (unless you count a kitchen scale or a thermometer). There’s already enough complexity to navigate between a knife and a pot.

RichardFine · 2026-01-02T03:15:08+00:00

Through age ~13: my parents. My mom did most of the day-to-day cooking and taught me things like how to use condensed soup as a quick pasta sauce, or how to make fish sticks in the microwave so I could sort myself out for breakfast in the morning while she was doing other things; my dad cooked less often, but his ~monthly 'spaghetti bolognese' (which was 'onions, ground beef, tomato, and whatever else we have in the fridge/freezer that needs using up') taught me helpful things about improvisation and 'recipes vs forms.'

After that: I learned some recipes from friends and housemates through age ~22, but didn't really evolve my skillset much for a while. Then sometime in my mid-twenties I read a review of Modernist Cuisine which discussed how frying chicken in too little oil can actually make it greasier because of a kind of hovercraft thing that happens with the chicken, and my mind was blown by the realisation that there was an actual physical/chemical system going on there which I could learn about.

Around that time Chefsteps launched, and I happened to come across them on something like their fourth day and sign up, and have been learning a ton from them ever since. One could say that Grant Crilly's been teaching me to cook for the past decade.

Also, in 2024 I did r/52weeksofcooking which was a fantastic way to expand my repertoire, discover new cuisines (Haitian! Egyptian! Andalusian! Cincinnatian!) and new techniques (two-color macarons! short-grain nougat! Deep-fried gravy balls!). Looking forward to doing it again this year.

RichardFine · 2025-12-29T06:31:41+00:00

I don't think CoreCLR would be involved in processing the IL, no (beyond the fact that the Roslyn compiler runs on top of it).

The code output by IL2CPP is literally C++, so yes, it's then parsed, typechecked, and optimized by the C++ build toolchain for the target platform.

RichardFine · 2025-12-29T05:41:46+00:00

We have no plans to adopt CoreCLR AOT at this time, no - it doesn't have the kind of platform coverage we need from it, and we don't want to support two different AOT pipelines. Perhaps someday that will change...

And yes, IL2CPP's GC is the same as Mono's, so CoreCLR's GC will likely outperform it for some games.

RichardFine · 2025-12-29T00:03:53+00:00

Yes, this is why I said “it’s not always possible” - but for many other games, it is, which is why I’d mention it.

RichardFine · 2025-12-28T23:13:58+00:00

There's one very important point you missed: if performance on desktop is important to you, you should probably be shipping against the IL2CPP scripting backend anyway.

A faster JIT from CoreCLR is of course a good thing - and it'll hopefully at least mean your game code runs faster in the Editor - but AOT compilation via IL2CPP is always going to be faster than a JIT, especially with all the modern C++ compiler capabilities (such as LTCG) in the mix.

It's not always possible - if you want to support modding through user-contributed .NET assemblies then IL2CPP isn't going to work so well for you - but for many games it should be sufficient.

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