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A selection of Summer dishes from La Plie, Southerndown.
FIRST WE EAT WITH OUR EYES
Matt Powell, head chef and owner of La Plie restaurant, is fast gaining a reputation as one of Wales’ finest chefs. Matt tells City Life about three of his creations for Summer.
All the following dishes have their roots in classical French cuisine but we just use the best ingredients and treat them with as much respect as possible and do not detract from their natural flavours. People talk about molecular gastronomy as a new thing but the scientific process starts as soon as we boil water or start to cook.
TOMATO SOUP
Tomato essence
This dish is all about the tomato and taking its elements, pulling them apart and then putting them back together again. This is the French way and in classical training you must try to use everything! It’s about the fifth taste and we would like to dedicate it to the Japanese chemist, Kikunae Ikeda who discovered the component which produces the flavour of meat. It can be found in ingredients like seaweed and tomatoes, which creates the sensation of ‘umami’.
Tomato Umami
Umami is a Japanese word that means yummy, meaty or just delicious! It was discovered by Kikunae Ikeda and in my view is just as important as Monsieur Escoffier inventing veal jus. They were basically discovering the same thing but in different forms. This is the fifth taste sensation. It is found in ingredients like Japanese dashi, parmesan, asparagus and in meats and reacts with the Lglutamate receptors on the tongue.
What we do here at La Plie, is basically take the tomato essence and reduce it down to a complete glaze. The edible flowers in the dish are present because of their enzymes and to add beauty. To the clear soup, we add pansies (the pansy is the flower of Osaka), some marigolds, nasturtium flowers and leaves.
Tomato essence
The first part of the dish is the essence itself where we take tomatoes and pulp them very finely, season them with herbs and a little garlic and then put them through a very fine filter. In essence, it is a consommé that has no cooking process at all.
Tomato tartar
The tomato tartar is a mixture of tomato concasse - just blanched tomatoes, skinned and dried a little and then finely diced. Also, we make a candied tomato, which we season with olive oil, fine slivers of garlic, and then dry in a de-hydrator, which really brings out the flavour of the tomato. To finish the tartar we mix them both together and season with sea salt and umami.
Tomato powder
We simply take the trimmings from all our tomatoes and de-hydrate them for a few days and then blitz them up with a hand blender. We then push it through a fine sieve and collect the dust.
SEA BASS
Wild sea bass, artichoke barigoule, crab tortelinni and crab sauce We pan fry the skin, turn it over and then finish gently under the grill. Artichokes are probably my favourite vegetable and are great from early spring. We use small violets at the start of the season and then use Camus artichokes which come from Brittany. We get our wild bass from Jonathan at Ashtons fishmongers in Cardiff market. The bass is landed in the Gower and the large crabs come from Salcombe harbour in South Devon.
We have recently teamed up with Tythegston walled garden, and Greg Nuttgens there has given us the best artichokes we have seen all year. We then make an artichoke barigoule with finely diced fennel, shallots and carrot, with a little white wine and olive oil. This is simple French cuisine in its purest form.
DESSERT
Assiette framboise We like to pick our raspberries at Hendrewennol in the Vale when they are in season. Again, we use the entire raspberry in a soufflé. In the glass we have jelly with a simple set cream accompanied by a very light iced mousse. To finish off the dish, we create a tuile made of raspberry reduction which we dry overnight. The flavour from this process is unbelievably concentrated.
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