And it was that the four Velveteers were born

Who are we? A new secret gastronomical order equivalent to the Illuminati? Can’t really answer that, unless you pass your initiation ordeal. What's our purpose apart from messing up our kitchens? Work together around a theme, a recipe; explore its different sides shone by our different cultures and life stories. Who are we? Aren’t you curious! Oh well, since secrecy doesn’t really exist in the virtual world (let alone the real one) here we go: Aparna, Asha, Pamela and me.
The first challenge was to create a Red Velvet Cake preferably using only natural colorings; that is why Pam came up with the Velveteers nickname.
Recipes for this cake often call for the use of two entire bottles of artificial coloring (that might indeed produce such a red cake that will be worth serving to Santa Claus). There aren`t really many vegetarian ingredients characterized by a bright red, enough intense and stable to heat to act as coloring in baking.
The first to come to mind are indeed red beets. Who hasn't had his/her fingers or tablecloth stained by these roots? Other red things are actually fruits; namely strawberries, raspberries, peppers, tomatoes, pomegranate etc. My job was that of trying the raspberries. Easy job you might think, until you realize how sour they are. Yes we use sugar to cover it up; exactly COVER it up. Sugar doesn't make raspberry puree any less acid (in other words more alkaline); our gustatory papillae simply don't perceive the sourness that much under the great sweetness. My task was then to balance this acidity with the alkaline ingredients already present in the recipe.
Here we go hands at my old chemistry book to look for pH definition and example of use; Google from its side provided me with the relative pH for each of the aforementioned ingredient. So hands at pencil and papers or rather keyboard and Notepad document to try and solving the riddle.


Few ingredients found commonly in baking along with their pH values.

Ingredient	pH
Baking Soda	8.2
Buttermilk	4.41-4.83 (4.62)
Dutch Cocoa	7.0
Milk	6.6
Normal Cocoa	5.8
Raspberry Purée	3.3
Vinegar	2.4

Fresh, zingy richness in a clear glass

The four Velveteers are back! After our Red-Velvet cakes we come back to you with a new adventure into our fridges, grocery stores and creative minds.
This time it took us quite a few emails before we could agree on what to propose you. At the end we settled for a Verrine.
What is that?? You might say; that is simply a layered dish prepared into a transparent glass so to admire the alternation of its colors and textures and entice our tasting experience. To make the challenge more interesting we decided to propose each an ingredient to keep secret till the day when they were disclosed all together to the others. Aparna required us to include a cheese of any kind, Asha went for zucchini or squash, Pam chose salmon and I threw in chocolate (yeah I know, I like to make things difficult).

So, let’s see what we have on hands. Zucchini have two major qualities to them: they have a lovely crunchy bite when raw and they get sweet when cooked long enough. To make the things even, I decided to use them two ways: creamy and crunchy.
As salmon I chose to use the smoked one and it is mainly salty, rich and meaty.
The flavors did work for me from the starting; the tricky part was in choosing a proper cheese that will stand out balancing the saltiness of the salmon and the sweetness of the zucchini. At the end, I chose to use Gorgonzola with its saltiness and slight bitterness.
Chocolate was naturally to be dark for me but… when pondering on the juxtaposition of the different layers, the possibility to use milk chocolate came around.

To link the various components I had my spice rack on hand.
All this thinking and pondering brought to life my:

Smoked salmon verrine with zucchini-duo, a Gorgonzola mornay sauce and peppery chocolate shards.