We've finished the Alaska section of the AtWCC (although, of course, I haven't written any of it here yet, since we still have to post all of Afghanistan and Alabama), but this was not the post I wanted to write to kick off the series. This dish was technically the last thing I made for the Alaska part of the AtWCC and also the last thing we tried from the 2021 cooking challenge, but it was a bit of a disastrous experiment and did not end either on a high note!
One of the things that I was most intrigued by for our Alaska exploration was a dish called akutaq, sort of like a Native Alaskan ice cream. In Alaskan tradition (more on Wikipedia), it seems like this was made with whipped fat (like from moose or walruses) mixed with meat (like dried fish) and berries, making it a very hearty meal, and was also sometimes made with fresh snow. These days, the fat is often substituted with vegetable shortening or Crisco, making it more accessible for those of us not in Alaska and also those of us who might not want to work with actual animal fat. Even with that change, I'll admit that I was a little nervous about making this and just ingesting that much pure fat, which is probably why I kept procrastinating and it ended up being the last thing we made for Alaska.
I followed the recipe from Spoon University, and it sounded so easy. Liquify the shortening (but don't let it get too hot), dissolve the sugar, add water to thicken it up, fold in the berries, and then put it into a container to freeze. I didn't think any of the steps would take too long, so the first thing I did was to take out a bag of frozen berries and chop them up a little bit. I didn't want whole frozen berries in case they were too hard for B to eat, so I thought that smaller pieces would work better and still contribute the same flavors.
Next up was taking out the shortening and then dissolving the sugar. Except... the sugar didn't dissolve, and the internet seems divided on whether it actually should dissolve in pure fat if you're doing something other than creaming it (which this was too liquid to do). I don't know all the science behind it, but what I do know is that ours did not dissolve whatsoever. I resigned myself to having crunchier sugar parts, which wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, and moved on to the water step, which didn't really thicken up anything.
I kept trying and trying to make it act the way the recipe said it should, but it didn't, so I eventually gave up and decided to fold in the berries and hoped it would just freeze in some form or another. Except... the berries by that point, since it had taken so long to try to dissolve the sugar and thicken up the mixture, were all melted and full of fruit juice, and then for some reason, adding the cold berries into the mixture took it from somewhat creamy and smooth to weird and curdle-like. I just threw the whole thing into a container hoping the freezer would sort it out, knowing it could be more icy than creamy with the higher liquid content. Even though it looked like berry quinoa once I got it into the container, I thought maybe, just maybe, it would be fine.
We put it in the freezer, and we were supposed to eat it later that day, but we were full. Then we were supposed to eat it the next day, but never got around to it. Were we just afraid of how it might taste and subconsciously finding every excuse possible? Maybe. We finally tried it the next day, and let's just say the freezer did not fix it. Those clumps that looked like quinoa? They were like little lumps of fat sweetened by berries, and although the overall taste wasn't awful, the texture was just too hard for us to get past to eat more than a few bites. Even A, who pretty much eats everything and has far less textural aversions than I do, just couldn't do it, and while I hate throwing food out, this was just not going to work.
We'd had a pretty great experience on our Alaska journey to that point, so it was kind of disappointing to end on such a low note, but I had to remind myself that not all cooking experiments work. I think lately I've just been going into it expecting to add everything to our family cookbook, forgetting that we do encounter quite a few failures. Often, I'll try again (my attempt to bake mozzarella sticks over and over again, for example), but I think we might just let this one go this time.
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