.jpg)
We met this morning at 9 am for the 2nd session of our cooking class. Today we are creating a dessert! We will make Poached Fruit with crème brûlée with thyme (the French name is better…but my spell check is having a hard time dealing with it!).
We started by cutting up the fruit — bananas, pears, apples and pineapples. Chef Franck taught us how to cut the banana so you can use the skin as a garnish (see picture below). It’s pretty straight forward…but you have to think about it before you peel the banana. You can use any fruit you like…but keep in mind the tougher the fruit the more poaching…the softer (like mango or papaya) you don’t need to poach at all. We used 2 slices of pineapple, 2 granny smith apples, 2 pears and 1 banana.
The fruit will be poached individually so keep the sliced fruit in separate bowls. In a large pan we made a syrup by adding equal parts water and sugar and letting it simmer and reduce a bit.
To infuse the cream we added a few springs of thyme to the heavy cream (16 fl oz) and covered it and let it simmer for 10 minutes (make sure it doesn’t boil!). We were told you could also use vanilla bean or other herbs to flavor the cream based on your preference. We also preheated the oven to 200 F.
While this was happening we separated 6 eggs, discarding the whites and started whisking the egg yolks with 2 1/2 oz of sugar. We learned that you have to start whisking right away as the sugar will start to “cook” the egg! It turned out the whisking was a bit more work than we expected. We had to keep whisking until the eggs turned a pale shade of yellow…lots of elbow grease required.
Once the eggs were the “proper” color we added the strained cream (or you can just pick out the thyme pieces if they are still mostly intact…having bits of thyme floating around is fine…just adds more flavor!). Don’t mix this too much as the next step is to remove the air bubbles from the mixture. We did this by scraping the top layer of bubbles with a ladle. Once we had all of the bubbles off we poured the mixture into 6 ramekins (or you can use small porecelin dishes).
We placed parchment paper on the bottom of a shallow roasting pan and placed the ramekins in the pan. Before transfering it to the over we filled the pan up 1/2 way with water (this serves to “poach” the custard!).
While that cooked we worked on poaching the fruit. In the syrup, we placed each of the fruits (separately) in the syrup bath — Chef Franck placed a strainer in the syrup first and then put the fruit in the strainer — this made it much easier to take the fruit out all at once. The fruits didn’t take long (the pineapple took the longest — about 10 minutes because it is more fibrous…). The pears and bananas took about 3 minutes and the apple about 6.
Once the fruit was cooked we focused our attention again on the syrup. In order to keep all of the great fruit flavors we needed to reduce the syrup quite a bit…and you have to do this without burning the syrup (or splattering any of it on yourself or those nearby…). Once the syrup is reduced to…well, a syrupy consistency (you have to keep the pan moving so the syrup won’t burn). Chef Franck instructed us to “push” the pan back and forth regularly — don’t stir (not sure why we couldn’t stir…but he is the Chef so we didn’t question his instructions).
Just when it was done we added some butter (about 3 tbs) to the syrup and then the fruit was added. You mix the fruit with the syrup and then it is done!
Throughout this process we checked the custard to see how it was cooking. You can tell when it is done by gently “wiggling” the bowl to see how much jiggle you get…you want a little jiggle but not too much.
When the custard Chef put it in a “fast chiller” (which none of us have at home) to cool it. So we would put it in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours…when properly chilled, sprinkled some sugar on top and used a blowtorch to caramelize the sugar! Great fun. Finally we stuffed the banana skin with the poached fruit, added some thyme for garnish…decorated the plate with a few drops of the syrup and we were done! Then we got to eat it!! Best part for certain.
Cordon Bleu Picture Gallery: http://travelwithdm.smugmug.com/Travel/South-America/Mariner-Cordon-Bleu-Feb-23/25177872_rH2R4v#!i=2187361350&k=7NQfgXf