MOTO: Dessert begins
Oct. 28th, 2006 08:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quisletI apologize that this meal is taking so long! The lovely food_porn regaling dear ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
juno_magic's birthday has shamed me into writing again. I needs must press on!
It is now time for the seventh course:
The plate before you is divided into two rectangles, each holding a separate interpretation of an American classic: macaroni and cheese beckon from the far side of the plate, blueberry pie lays deconstructed before you.
The first dessert stands like a tiny city skyline, a study in beige and cream. Three tubular towers stand in a cluster, just right of center. Trailing about them and to the left is a miniature lake of pale gold, its shores curving and re-curving like the edges of a cloud. The lines of the presentation are oversimplified, perfectly straight pipes with a hint of translucence standing in a buttery puddle that looks of liquid sugar cookie.
The macaroni in this dish are made of lychee juice, softly brittle tubes, made like the passionfruit pasta in the crab course. In the mouth, their flavor is more aroma than taste. They have a fruity perfume, the touch of musky, tropical sweetness that lychee carries to your tongue from the shores of the South China Sea. If you've never had a lychee, you simply must! They are easy to find when canned in Asian markets and often as a desert in Southeast Asian restaurants. They look delightfully like eyeballs when canned and like a beholder straight out of D&D when fresh.
The lake is a delicious sabayon whose ingredients I failed to overhear. Sabayon (or, in Italian, zabaglione) is the cream that makes a tiramisu work. It is the liquid, Continental version of American cheesecake, a sweetened cream cheese cut with egg yolks and spiked with liquor or fortified wine. They are wonderful for dipping fruit in or pouring sloppily over baked goods, silken luxury on the tongue. I've been playing a lot lately with the Italian version in my flourless chocolate tiramisu, thick with imported mascarpone. The version on the plate is more liquid, literally a puddle of rich creamy sweetness that clings lazily to the fruit pasta both inside and out.
The second dessert, directly before you, has been deconstructed into its component parts. A compote of blueberries and diced sugar beet is strewn across the plate as if the pie crust vanished just before your slice of pie landed on the white porcelain. The cold blueberries are still whole, overfull with their slightly sugared juices, the natural spiciness of cooked blueberry complemented with hints of clove and lemon. The sugar beet nestles between the berries, adding a pleasing earthy note to the melange, a strong but natural sweetness that sets this dish apart from the high-fructose narcotic found in the purplish goo most often served under this name.
Shading this delicious compote like a fantasy pavilion is vaguely wedge-shaped slice of rice paper, bubbled and buckled from deep-frying, dusted with the finest powdered sugar. The rice paper crunches nicely in the mouth, but with a slight give. More accurately, it is a crisp layer of foam to break with fork and tooth, sweeping and scooping the berry compote in different combinations of succulent autumn-spiced fruit bursting against cracker-crisp crunch in the mouth. Carefully understated, this piece is truly a work of art.
juno_magic's birthday has shamed me into writing again. I needs must press on!It is now time for the seventh course:
The plate before you is divided into two rectangles, each holding a separate interpretation of an American classic: macaroni and cheese beckon from the far side of the plate, blueberry pie lays deconstructed before you.
The first dessert stands like a tiny city skyline, a study in beige and cream. Three tubular towers stand in a cluster, just right of center. Trailing about them and to the left is a miniature lake of pale gold, its shores curving and re-curving like the edges of a cloud. The lines of the presentation are oversimplified, perfectly straight pipes with a hint of translucence standing in a buttery puddle that looks of liquid sugar cookie.
The macaroni in this dish are made of lychee juice, softly brittle tubes, made like the passionfruit pasta in the crab course. In the mouth, their flavor is more aroma than taste. They have a fruity perfume, the touch of musky, tropical sweetness that lychee carries to your tongue from the shores of the South China Sea. If you've never had a lychee, you simply must! They are easy to find when canned in Asian markets and often as a desert in Southeast Asian restaurants. They look delightfully like eyeballs when canned and like a beholder straight out of D&D when fresh.
The lake is a delicious sabayon whose ingredients I failed to overhear. Sabayon (or, in Italian, zabaglione) is the cream that makes a tiramisu work. It is the liquid, Continental version of American cheesecake, a sweetened cream cheese cut with egg yolks and spiked with liquor or fortified wine. They are wonderful for dipping fruit in or pouring sloppily over baked goods, silken luxury on the tongue. I've been playing a lot lately with the Italian version in my flourless chocolate tiramisu, thick with imported mascarpone. The version on the plate is more liquid, literally a puddle of rich creamy sweetness that clings lazily to the fruit pasta both inside and out.
The second dessert, directly before you, has been deconstructed into its component parts. A compote of blueberries and diced sugar beet is strewn across the plate as if the pie crust vanished just before your slice of pie landed on the white porcelain. The cold blueberries are still whole, overfull with their slightly sugared juices, the natural spiciness of cooked blueberry complemented with hints of clove and lemon. The sugar beet nestles between the berries, adding a pleasing earthy note to the melange, a strong but natural sweetness that sets this dish apart from the high-fructose narcotic found in the purplish goo most often served under this name.
Shading this delicious compote like a fantasy pavilion is vaguely wedge-shaped slice of rice paper, bubbled and buckled from deep-frying, dusted with the finest powdered sugar. The rice paper crunches nicely in the mouth, but with a slight give. More accurately, it is a crisp layer of foam to break with fork and tooth, sweeping and scooping the berry compote in different combinations of succulent autumn-spiced fruit bursting against cracker-crisp crunch in the mouth. Carefully understated, this piece is truly a work of art.
