Food Wars Recipes - Shinomiya's Chou Farci (Part 1)

This time we have Shinomiya's chou farci, or stuffed cabbage! This dish is by far the hardest dish for me to get right, because I had to find substitute ingredients for this dish and I had no idea how much to use said ingredients.

Mmmmm.....

I'll be posting my 3 attempts at making this dish, with the first two attempts in this blog post and the third (and successful) attempt in another blog post.

As per usual, here are the anime screenshots showing how the dish is prepared:

 

So... you may see how this is a problem to recreate. For one, the ingredients that Shinomiya uses are super expensive high class ingredients, so it's impossible to recreate the dish exactly without having to spend a fortune trying to source those ingredients. For another, I'm not experienced enough to come up with substitute ingredients that would invoke the same eating experience. In the end, I decided to make a somewhat Chinese version of Shinomiya's chou farci, using some chinese ingredients.

Ingredients for chicken mousse:

• Chicken breast
• Egg
• Milk & melted butter (because I had no cream)
• Butter
• Salt & pepper

Ingredients to fry in a pan:

• Asparagus
• Dried shiitake mushrooms (rehydrated)
• Chicken liver (I tried foie gras in my first attempt)
• Butter for frying

Other ingredients:

• Chinese (Napa) cabbage leaves
• Bacon strips

The reason I chose chinese cabbage was because it's sweeter than normal cabbage. And dried shiitake mushrooms have a stronger flavour due to the drying process.

Now comes the first two attempts of cooking it, none of which were satisfactory. (Which was also the reason I never posted this blog post earlier.)

First Attempt

So this here was my first try at making this dish.

Ok, so I've got my chicken breast, butter, egg and milk. Time to blend it!

... (ohshit it's too watery!) Too much milk!!!

Frying the rehydrated mushrooms and asparagus (and foie gras)

I had to fry the shitty watery chicken mousse because it was too watery to

stuff into the cabbage. DX;;;;

Blanched cabbage leaves and butterflied breast is ready for stuffing!

Ohshit there's too much stuffing! Use toothpicks to contain them!

Uhh...

The result was... disappointing. The butterflied chicken breast was too dry and I didn't put enough salt. (There also wasn't any bacon!) The foie gras was lost in this mess and I couldn't find any trace of its taste. It was a long time before I attempted to make this dish again.


Second Attempt (7 months later)


A year passed...

At least the chicken mousse looks more like mousse.

Frying round two! (With chicken liver this time!)

Looking better than the first attempt!

Steaming...

Steamed

Looks better than last time!

The second attempt was better than the first, but it was still not perfect. I used chicken fillet because I was worried chicken breast would be too dry, but it turned out to be a bad idea because the tendons got caught in the blender blades when I was making the mousse. (I'm still a newb when it comes to cooking.) The chicken liver gave an extra dimension of taste, so that's a plus, but I don't know how many people would appreciate the taste of chicken liver.

The third attempt shall be detailed in the next blog post.