Dessert meets Breakfast: Pain perdu with bacon and egg ice cream

So I had a dinner party. I decided to try a truly iconic Heston dish - Bacon and egg ice cream. A Fat Duck speciality.

I was quite taken by it's treatment in Heston Blumenthal at Home, with Pain perdu (which my Google-fu tells me is what we call 'French toast' and the Brits call 'eggy bread') and caramelised bacon. I love pancakes with maple syrup and bacon, so was keen to give it a try. I felt like it was time... I didn't make the caramelised bacon, as one of the guests was making some (completely by coincidence) for a small-goods class and so bought some.

Bacon and Egg Ice Cream

I've made savoury-sweet ice cream before - that mustard ice cream for the red cabbage gazpacho. It was nice. So we are on reasonably familiar territory here.

First, you need to make a flavoured milk for the base.

Take some really excellent sweet-cured smoked bacon - this is maple based.

 Bake in the oven to crispy.

Chop the crispy bacon bits (I could just break it up with my fingers) and cover the crispy bacon with milk to infuse overnight

After 12 or more hours, add some powdered milk, reheat to a simmer to allow the powdered milk to dissolve.

Take some eggs. Actually, a lot of eggs - two dozen.

 You just want the yolks though. This can take a while.

 Blitz your yolks with the unrefined caster sugar.

Add a spoonful of warm bacon milk to the egg yolks so they don't scramble (prematurely in this case).

Add your yolk/sugar mix to the rest of the milk and warm it up...

until the temperature hits...

eighty five (85) degrees Celsius. It looks like scrambled eggs, it was scrambled eggs.. but smelled sweet. Like overdone custard. This is not something I normally want to happen. But we bravely continue on.

The ice cream based gets pushed through a fine sieve to remove large lumps and the bacon bits.

Then chilled.

It looks like this...

Then gets pureed smooth. I was surprised that it picked up a hint of bacon colour there, in addition to the egg yellow. That's it until time to serve.

Well technically it would be, except I wasn't able at the last to get the required dry ice, so mine was churned in a friends refrigerated ice cream maker. (Which worked perfectly.)

Now onto the rest of the dish....

Pain Perdu

This dish is a variation of the normal French toast - being entirely encased in caramel.

Cut thick  slices of bread and refrigerate them for 12 hours so they are the right amount of stale.

Make your egg/milk mix with milk, sugar, eggs.

Whisk it up...

Add vanilla seeds and keep mixing until the sugar is dissolved.

Cut the crusts off your bread, and cut into nice triangles. Pour over the eggy milk mix. Leave to absorb for 20 minutes, then drain on a rack for a couple of minutes (while you get the next step ready).

Take large lumps of clarified butter...

And nicely brown the pain perdu.

Look pretty good, don't they.

Now we're going to make a dry-burn caramel to coat the pain perdu. Interestingly, Heston specifies a non-stick pan for all this. Take some unrefined caster sugar...

And heat into caramel.

 Coat the pain perdu..

 yeah... its kind of sticking ok....

Then try to flip it, and realise it's really not sticking to the pain perdu very well. This is deeply frustrating because I am doing exactly what it says, but it's just not working.

Eventually, my ex-chef guest took pity on my frustrations and finished the batch off. I'm normally able to cope, but damn, this just would not work properly.... I can make caramel dammit!!

Time to serve...

Two pieces of pain perdu, a nice lump of ice cream ....

and a slice of caramelised bacon.

It kind of looked like the picture in the book, except for the the pain perdu being unevenly coated. Grr.

Things I learned:

Even if I am frustrated with how a recipe is (not) going, don't let other people help. It just drives me nuts and makes me feel more incompetent than is necessary. Sorry kind and helping people, not your fault.

 

Verdict:

This is kind of awkward to write. 

...


I didn't like it. The ice cream just tasted wrong. Not spit-it-out-horrible or anything, but... not to my tastes. The ice cream was well made, good mouth feel etc. but ... no. It tasted like overcooked savoury custard.

The pain perdu would have been better without the caramel coating, which made it achingly sweet. Even eating them all together didn't work. I had so looked forward to trying this, not enjoying it was a bitter disappointment that I'm still getting over. (First world problems, I know). I don't think I would even try it at the Fat Duck as I am confident that the dish was 'right' in terms of prep and flavour balance... I just didn't like the flavour.

 

Guest opinions:

These varied from pushing it away after one mouthful with polite shake of head, to an interesting discussion with a fellow foodie who wanted to like it but couldn't get past the sense it was custard taken to far.

Out of seven of us, none of us liked it. A few didn't mind the french toast, but that was about it.

The nicest comment was a "Well, you have to try these things to see if you like them... now you know you don't."

Final thoughts:

I now have a lot of unwanted bacon and egg ice cream. Anyone want to try it, or should I just ditch it to free up the freezer space?

Next time: Another dessert - Banana Eton mess.

High Tea vol 3: Florentine biscuits, plus Chocolate sauce (to serve with Madeleines)

So... remember how I was posting about that High tea?

This is the third instalment.

So far we've had :

• Rosemary and Bay Truffles
  
• Passionfruit Pastilles

Which  means I have left the Chocolate sauce for the Madeleines, and the Florentine biscuits.

That'd be this post. (Which I'd like to subtitle the Good and the Ugly).

If you want the recap of the full menu see the first post here.

Chocolate Sauce (as recommended for madeleines)

Heston Blumenthal at Home
I made Heston's madeleines once before, and was under-whelmed with the effort-to-result ratio. This time I used Stephanie Alexander's recipe from the Cook's Companion, 2nd ed. (For those international people reading along, this would be arguably be the most authoritative and well regarded Australian cookbook.) These were lovely. But, I still wanted to try that Heston chocolate sauce. And I'm so glad I did.

 

Process:

1. Bring water, coffee beans, cocoa powder and salt to a simmer. Take off the heat to infuse.
2. Heat the sugar in a pan into a dry burn caramel.
3. Pour in the water mix, stir.
4. Add chocolate.
5. Sieve, cover and cool.

So, a few steps we are well familiar with by now.

 

Assemble your ingredients

I'm sure I've mentioned before, but do use the best quality, dark dutch cocoa. It makes the world of difference over the dodgy light-brown chocolatish-flavouring cocoa.

Bring water, coffee beans, cocoa powder and salt to a simmer, then take it off the heat and let it infuse.

Yup.

 

Heat the sugar in a pan into a dry burn caramel

We've made this a few times now. It's barely scary now.
Put unrefined caster sugar in a pan.

Heat until it starts to melt. Don't touch it before you have a nice layer of caramel under the sugar.

Shake the pan, to move the dry sugar onto the molten caramel parts.

Use a silicone spatula to push any remaining lumps around until melted. Heat until desired colour. Caramel is done.

 

Pour in the water mix, stir.

It will bubble like crazy due to the molten caramel - don't scald yourself!

Add the chocolate lumps.

They will melt nicely..

 

Sieve, cover and cool

Sorry, I didn't take a picture of it served. It looked prettier than this, or at least was in a nicer jug.

Things I learned:

I think I might have found my go-to chocolate sauce recipe. Pretty painless (if you can manage dry burn caramel) and a great outcome.

 

Verdict:

So, basically this is a chocolate flavoured caramel sauce. Sort of. What it is.. is..  delicious.  Really tasty chocolate sauce. One of my best ever. Just the right consistency, the right amount of bitterness. Loved it.

In addition, I have it on excellent authority that the left overs made a kick-ass chocolate ice cream! So win-win! Which is good, because as usual, it made a LOT of sauce. I'd estimate almost a litre. Which is a lot, even if you really, really like chocolate sauce. On the bonus side, it does keep well. 

Guest opinions:

Very popular. In all forms used - for madeleines, for topping on ice cream, and for the making into ice cream.

Florentine Biscuits

Heston Blumenthal at Home
I'm very partial to Florentine biscuits. Chocolate+caramel+glace cherries = win in my book. But.. well, it was an interesting experience.

 

Process:

1. Heat creme fraiche, caster sugar, glucose syrup and honey in a saucepan until melted.
2. Mix the dried fruit and nuts
3. Pour the molten stuff over the fruit and nut mix. 
4. Refrigerate for an hour.
5. Pour the cold mix into a lined baking tray
6. Bake.
7. Take it out of the oven and cut out circles, allow to cool.
8. Melt the chocolate and use it to coat the backs of the biscuits.

So, a few steps we are well familiar with by now.

 

Assemble your ingredients

Lots of components too this one. Good thing its mostly melt and pour!

 

Heat creme fraiche, caster sugar, glucose syrup and honey in a saucepan until melted

Three kinds of sugar, one dairy. So that's a balanced meal right?

 So that's easy enough.

 

Mix the dried fruit and nuts

Gather all the dried fruit, nuts and a touch of plain flour.

 And mix it up.

 

Pour the molten stuff over the fruit and nut mix

So far, so good. Easy really.

 Mixed through, looking good.

 

Refrigerate for an hour

And now on to the apparently pointless. I don't get this bit. Pouring it onto the sheet and then cooling it would make more sense. But no, you leave it in a bowl and refrigerate it.

 

Pour the cold mix into a lined baking tray

Or rather, since it is now a cold solid mass, scoop it out and spread on the tray awkwardly. Why, oh why, did we not do this when it was warm and molten and easy to work??

 

Bake

Okay all spread out, now into the oven.

Urgh. Because it is one mass, it doesn't heat evenly, since it is caramel/sugar/fruit. So you lose a lot to the uneven heating. I know my oven may be partly at fault, but it just seems a foolish way to cook them. But this isn't even the most annoying difficult part.

 

Cut out biscuit circles from the warm biscuit mix.

Please excuse the bad photo, but... oh what a pain.

This is what it looked like as I attempted this. Molten-rapidly-cooling stuff, still attached and making dubiously lumpy shapes due to the nuts and fruit not cutting cleanly.

I like my food, particularly for a High Tea, to look pretty. This was the best I could do with cutting neat circles. I cannot express effectively just how annoyed I was at this point. They were taunting my with their lumpy ugliness.

And see that big lump of unusable stuff on the back left. Grrr. More waste.

Only solution? Wait until they are cold, and trim them to better shapes.

Better. But even more wasteful and time consuming.

 

Melt the chocolate and use it to coat the backs of the biscuits

I did half in milk and half in dark chocolate to cater to more tastes.

Serve.

And here they are, barely visible on the top row.

Verdict:

They tasted fine. A little thin for my tastes. But too much trouble.

Guest opinions:

Tasty, though not wildly popular.

Things I learned:

Urgh. Painful and so not worth the trouble (as written, anyway).
If I was to make them again, I would take the hot molten stuff, use a thin spatula to spread it into individual biscuit discs. Then refrigerate and bake - while turning the tray in the oven periodically and watching like a hawk.

Making a sheet of biscuit just gave such a terrible outcome, I would not do it again. Plus making individual discs would not waste so much mix! It didn't seem to spread at all during baking - which I suspect was a function of the refrigeration before baking - so no need for the mass lump and associated painful biscuit cutting after the fact.

At least the sauce made up for it.

Next time: I had another high tea, and this time there was Heston lemon tart!