Hola, people! The follow up for our pasta project is here! I just realised I haven't been updating on the pasta project since week 7.. oops, there actually weren't much progress since then.. Anyway, we've finalised all our products and we're about ready to present our hard work to Group E next week. Woah, where have the time passed?
RL140610: Last try out
So basically after the 2nd try-out, we had another try-out last week. I modified my Asian Paste again, with less peanuts this time, and added sourness with lime powder. I tasted closer to the first trial, but the paste was still fibrous nonetheless. The recipes for opor ayam and beef rendang were kept the same, except we fine tuned the taste and consistency by standardising the cooking time and temperature.
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We also simulated the production process that would be carried out in the central kitchen in the R&D kitchen, from cooking to storage to testing the product stability. The product were prepared as usual, but we added some technical ingredients to the product and see it improved the quality of the product. Since we were planning to keep our meat products in the freezer (with vacuum pack), shelf stability in terms of microbiological quality wasn't the biggest concern. What we worried was the potential splitting in our opor, and also the loss of crispiness of our fried chicken. So, we tested on the both products. Opor was vacuum packed and stored in the freezer, and checked one week later for the homogeneity of the gravy. Crisp film was added to the fried chicken batter to check if the crispiness is retained.
At the end of the day, we also had external panels to taste our food. I was glad that all our food actually suits the panel's taste bud, our cheesy rendang was a hit! But there's something with my Asian pasta.. hmm, how to put this in words? It definitely tastes like something from this region, but we just can't come out with a description. It doesn't seem to resemble any of the dishes out there, except it's presented pretty much like nasi lemak. Bizarre, much? LOL! Anyway, I still have to improve my paste as it is still very fibrous.
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The session ended with the end of food tasting, and fingers crossed for the product to turn out good.
RL140617: For the D-day
We had our final touch up, fine tuning the dishes according to the comments in the previous food tasting session. Great news here, I finally got my Asian paste right!! =D It's no longer fibrous as I didn't blend the galangal together with the other ingredients. The taste is also very balanced this time around.
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We also checked on our product, after keeping it for one solid week. It turned out that everything was still in good condition. Even for the fried stuffs I kept in the cabinet! The fried chicken was also not bad, as in the it was still crunchy on the outside, and juicy on the inside, after I reheated in the oven. There's actually not much difference between the gold standard and crisp film version, so we decided to keep to the gold standard.
Yeah, another thing, we also had a trial presentation that morning. The overall presentation was so long that I lost my concentration already halfway through group 2's presentation. *sorry bow* Basically, I think all of our presentations lack the wow factor. Imho, it was way too boring and I doubt if anyone can follow the presentation. In addition to that, I found that most of us are also not confident in our own product. How are we suppose to convince the others to accept our dish when we ourselves sounded so timid. Haha, guess everyone has to brush up their presentation skills.
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As for our group's presentation, we generally performed slightly better than the other two groups, because we were the last to present. So, we had time to modify our presentation according to the comments given to the previous groups. But then again, our presentation was not perfect too, and that's partly because of the introduction, it was all over the place and Dr Chong said she can understand better just reading at the slides. Not to blame anyone, but Wilbert, please get over your stage fright!! It's not like you're not prepared, just speak like how you usually do!
Oops, I think I wrote a bit too long.. I'll be right back with the results of the project!
Till then,
Dong
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