On black olive soil......

    Here's a quick and simple recipe for an edible savory soil which I'm currently using on our new fall menu at the restaurant. I've read and tested a good amount of edible soil recipes in the past. Many of which involve lengthy periods of time, and too many ingredients. The last recipe I was testing out you can find in one of the modernist cuisine  cook books. It revolves around 10+ ingredients and about an hour and a half to prepare. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that recipe, the finished product is actually quite nice but I only have two cooks for service with very limited prep time. The recipe I'm currently using has only three ingredients; five if you want to count salt and pepper. Basically what you want to do is to take some slices of pumpernickel bread and toast them in the oven until they become hard and feel like stale bread.  Next, take some kalamata olives and pulse them in a food processor until they resemble a chunky puree. Take the pumpernickel bread and break them into smaller pieces into the food processor, at this point you want to add 1 teaspoon of squid ink or more depending on how much product you want to produce. Pulse the bread, olives, and ink mixture for 1 minute until it resembles soil. If you feel that the mixture is to moist and starts clumping up together just add more toasted pumpernickel bread until you achieve a desired consistency. I know thats not an exact recipe to follow but basically what your doing is using the bread to soak up the moisture from the kalamata olives and the squid ink to give it color. Here are some pictures of the finished product......