Dessert: Pear and frangipane tarte tartin

I love pear tartin. It's warm and delicious and a perfect winter dessert. I've been wanting to try this recipe for a while, and so what better to try to find my cooking mojo again?

This one adds frangipane - that kind of almond filling - for extra 'almond notes'. Or tastiness. If you're not a chef.

Pear and frangipane tarte tartin

Heston Blumenthal at Home

Process:

1. Make the poaching liquid

2. Poach the pears

3. Prepare the pears

4. Make the frangipane mix

5. Assemble

6. Cook and serve.

The simplest versions of these recipes I've seen are a basic cook some apples in a frypan - add pastry kind of deal. Like a few Heston dishes though, this involves more components then assembled together - so all the flavours are there, but not necessarily cooked together.

 

Make the poaching liquid

Being fairly fond of poached pears, I've poached them a few times before - usually in some kind of wine/sugar mix. Poaching in a caramel sauce? That's new. This is a spiced caramel based. So, gather my ingredients.

Now, make a dry burn caramel. Not for the faint of heart, this is putting a bunch of sugar in a hot pan...

 and carefully waiting until it partially liquefies, and then gently pushing it around until it's all liquid, while simultaneously watching the temperature management so it doesn't burn.

Add some unsalted butter... and mix until dissolved completely.

Then add pear juice.

Then you add in all the flavourings - lemon and orange zest, peppercorns, star anise, cinnamon, vanilla pods and honey. These are simmered without boiling for 20 minutes.

Once cooled and strained, this give us our poaching liquid. (Cooling takes awhile - hence I made the poaching liquid the day before I wanted to cook the pears.)

 

Poach the pears

Now you need to poach the pears. First step, try every saucepan you own to see which one fits all of your who;e pears, with a tall side. This may take some time. (sigh).

Peel and core your pears. I've misplaced my corer, so I used the alternate I had to hand -  which is a pointy peeler kind rather than a circular through-cutter kind. I was worried this would be an issue but it was fine. (I'm only mentioning it in case anyone else worries about not having the exact tool something calls for).

And after all that, find out it was easier than I expected, because pears float. 

Once they are poached (mine took about 20 minutes I think?) they are cooled in the liquid, so they can absorb all those spiced caramel flavours so more. 

Here they are.

Prepare the pears

Once they are cooled, you need to prep them. I found the instructions on this completely perplexing. "Remove the pears from the poaching liquid and place them upright on a board, discarding the liquid." Okay, I can do that. 

"Using a sharp knife, cut across the cored middle of each pear, stopping halfway down. Repeat twice at equal intervals around the pear. Each pear will now have six equal 'petals'. Reserve in the fridge until needed."  Wait, what?!

I read this a bunch of times, and just could not figure out what he meant. And then I decided to just have blind faith, and do exactly what it said and see what happened.

"Using a sharp knife, cut across the cored middle of each pear, stopping halfway down."

I cut directly down, halfway into the height of the pear.

 

"Repeat twice at equal intervals around the pear."

"Each pear will now have six equal 'petals'."

Huh.  So there you go. Not how I imagined, and larger than I expected, but there you are.

Make the frangipane

This is fairly straightforward. Take all your ingredients - butter, icing sugar, eggs, almonds and a little flour and whisk them together.

 

These get placed into a piping bag for later assembly.

Assemble

Now for the bit where the components come together. Butter and sugar is rubbed together to place in the bottom of the dishes.

Store bought puff pastry gets rolled out thinly and then cut to fit the dishes.

Place the pear flowers on the pastry.

 

Pipe in the frangipane mix. Become really annoyed that of course, because it's been refrigerated, its now hard an un-pipable. Let it warm up a bit. Do the suggested center filled with frangipane.  

Decide this is not much (especially after looking at the huge amount left over) and pipe some more around the flowers.

 

With no small amount of awkwardness, flip the pears and pastry into your tartin dishes. Realise that this is a bit silly, because they don't stay together. Pull the pastry off each so you can adjust the pears better.

Realise the dishes, despite being exactly the size called for, are actually a bit small for the pretty pear flowers to fit. Fudge them around into a kind of swirl so they fit the dish, and press the pastry around the sides. 

Cook and serve

Bake in the oven, the let cool slightly.

 

Turn out and serve with cream or icecream.

 

 

Things I learned:

• Next time use larger tartin dishes, so the pretty flowers can stay looking like flowers. Or slice the pears and fit prettily into the dish.
• Halve the amount of frangipane.

 

Guest verdicts:

• “Tasty. A bit rich, but good."
• "Yum!"

Verdict:

•  I really liked this. I ate a leftover one the next day and I think the flavours were even better. You could absolutely assemble everything ready to go and just prep the morning of your dinner party and have it come out great. I think next time I've try slicing the pears up and make one large one also.
• You could definitely taste the spices in the caramel poaching liquid. It was, as one guest noted, much richer than a standard poached pear - so small servings definitely a good idea here.

Dessert: Banana Eton Mess

Hello all the people reading this. This week I had an influx of readers from Russia! Who would of thought the love of Heston Blumenthal would be so far! It could be my sparkling wit and joie de vivre but let's not kid ourselves, hey?

Banana Eton Mess

Heston Blumenthal at Home
This was a back up dessert. I was pretty worried about how the previous Pain Perdu with Bacon and Egg Ice cream would go, so made this as well.

'Traditional' Eton mess uses strawberries, but Heston says bananas are also authentic. You know what bananas were? In season. So - banana Eton mess it is.

This recipe has a few components:

• Meringues
• Hazelnut brittle
• Banana puree
• Lime cream

Meringues

Since this was a second, back up dessert... I cheated an bought some. 

Hazelnut brittle

Roast the hazelnuts in the oven.

Or be lazy and toast them in a frypan.

Now to make the caramel. This is a wet caramel - that is, one that starts out with water in it, that gets heated off. So it goes from this...

To this...

Then we add the hazelnuts...

 

 And coat them....

 

 And leave them to cool on baking paper.

Now all you have to do is avoid eating them all before you need them.... Tasty... tasty...

Banana puree time!

After making those hazelnuts, you are probably thinking... you know what this needs? More caramel!

Unrefined caster sugar...

Into a dry burn caramel ...

Drop in some bananas...

Then de-glaze the pan with rum.

Put the caramel-coated bananas into the food processor...

 And whiz until a smooth puree. Pop it into the fridge to chill completely.

Lime cream

Whip cream and lime juice together.

Assemble

Make piles of meringue, hazelnut brittle, lime cream, extra chopped banana, and banana puree. Top with extra brittle and lime zest! Done!

Lessons learned:

• Lime juice can be a tad overpowering. Add to taste, rather than believing things boldly like "juice of 4 limes"
• Bananas should be very ripe. Mine were just ripe, but needed a bit more banana flavour oomph.

Verdict:

• I liked it, but thought the strawberry sort-of-Eton-mess - Diamond Jubilee Strawberry Crumble Crunch was nicer. 
• It was easy to make.
• Lime was a bit overpowering, taking over from the banana which was disappointing.

Guest opinions:

In a case of damned with faint praise, the guests thought it was nice... but just nice.
Super taster husband noted the bananas had a faint 'green banana' flavour that carried through the dish.
The hazelnut brittle was the most well liked component. I'd probably consider making just that on its own. Yum.

Next: French Onion Soup. The laziest version ever.

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.