Steemit Iron Chef 2017 #11 : Bell pepper and beet hash with a fried egg, riccota salata, and three sauces

I'm going to begin this story by whining! See, I took four more pictures of the final plate, but they are miraculously not on my phone. Grrrr! So as a favor, pretend that this image is properly centered like the one I took right after it is. There's no way for me to show you the three creative close-ups I took at different angles, but at least this one picture decided to stay put...

So, let's start with the three sauces. I made a one sauce for each of the three common colors of bell pepper sold where I live. (I guess I could have technically done an orange too, but whatever.) And they're in the arrangement of a traffic light, so that's kind of fun. The red harissa was pretty spicy, though not too spicy by harissa standards. The yellow was quite savory and tasted of onion. The green was cooling and a nice accompaniment for a bite after my tongue was heating up from too much red. :-) See the links in the paragraph above -- I detailed each sauce with its own post. Here they are in a sample of me trying to learn how to do that spoon-swoosh-spread thing that real chefs do when plating:

I forgot this week to take a pic of my starting ingredients, so I tried to make up for it with this (of course I left out the two jalapenos and the cheese and the eggs, so it was maybe not that useful:

I sauteed three beets in butter with four cloves of garlic for quite a while to get them some outer crisp and inner tender and then added the jalapeno slices to continue combining flavors and managing texture.

After a couple of minutes I added the two bell peppers and left it to cook a bit while I started frying eggs on the next burner.

I eventually made a puck of the hash and topped it with a cut circle of sunny-side-up egg and a wedge of cheese . It's my first time using circle-molds so there was some learning curve, but I think I figured out some good techniques, that I can continue to build on.

One thing more worth talking about is the cheese!

I made this from a gallon of whole milk instead of from whey, hung it and pressed it in a home-made mold, and then spent a week keeping it on a cloth and rubbing it with salt each day to firm it up. So, no bell pepper involved, but it was a genuine home-made experience, so that was neat. It also turned out really well.

My family reports that the dish was good, but needed more egg and it would be nice if the cheese had melted. I'm not sure how to get more egg on the plate given the "fancy" plating techniques I'm trying to learn, but maybe a bigger, flatter disc of hash and two eggs on top. I also thought about spreading the cheese on the plate first, and laying the hash down on that to help things be melty. But I'd want a dark plate. Anyway, things for me to keep in mind.