Smoked Trout & Crab Cake, Sour Corn
As seen on TV
Which Show?
Who made this dish?
Jonathan built his dish around sour corn, the lacto-fermented Appalachian ingredient he remembered eating as a child. He smoked trout himself, combined it with crab into a cake mixture, and seared roughly 200 cakes to order. He topped them with a relish of diced peach, sour corn and green tomato, finished with a sourwood honey aioli and a touch of local honey. His aim was a dish fueled by preserved items, reflecting the make-do spirit of Appalachian cooking, while leaning deliberately to the acidic side.
{Judge}: "That trout cake, I think, was well executed. You got a nice sear on it. It had texture." The judges praised his handling of browning 200 crab cakes to order. However they found the dish out of balance: there was a lot of acidity from the sour corn that needed more fat to balance it, and they felt there was not enough of the aioli, which was itself quite acidic.
{Judge}: "No amount of honey was necessarily gonna balance out Jonathan's dish."
The acidity, described as one-note, placed it among the two least favorite dishes.
