Aluminum Chef CIA: Battle Mixed Berry
For the last day of our Plated Desserts course, we had an Aluminum Chef competition, which was like Iron Chef… except that we had 2.5 hours to make one plated dessert with a partner based on a Secret Ingredient assigned for the whole class as well as three other assigned accompanying flavors for each team. We could use any recipes that we brought with us, but there was really no preparation for the event, except for having been in culinary school for 7 months.
So, the Chef Instructor pulled off the table covering, and Battle Mixed Berry was on. Our team also had to incorporate lemon, hazelnut, and phyllo dough into our dessert. After a discussion and playing around with ingredients, we turned in a Mixed Berry Baklava Tart with Lemon Curd and Hazelnut Creme Anglaise.
I think that this day was a valuable culmination of our experience in plated desserts, and something of a marker for how far we’ve come in the program as a whole. Previously, we’d followed some very creative, intricate recipes and we’d also planned our own desserts to make. Both have been met with success and occasional despair, but to just walk into a set of ingredients and have to turn in a complete dessert demands different and interesting things from us. I think our culinary instincts have been honed to a point of being able to come up with logical ideas on the fly and to work within the confines of a situation. And I’m sure that, as culinary graduates, we’ll be asked to make desserts at friends’ houses and will only have access to what’s in their kitchen at the time (this will easily happen at work, too) … so I don’t think that the time and ingredient constraints are really so unusual. Also, unlike, say, our early practicals, it was a rather low-stress day — we just settled on ideas and went to work on making them happen. In this situation, you’re bound to come up with something that reflects your own personal styles, and I think our dessert did just that.
So, anyway, this is how the dessert came together…
My biggest concern going into the competition was just what main form the dessert would have. Although we could use any recipes in our materials that we wanted, it would have been hard to come up with or adapt, say, a cake recipe suited for the secret ingredient… and I didn’t want to resort to something like crepes with *Secret Ingredient* filling.
In that sense, we were lucky to pull the phyllo dough, which provided a logical structure for the dessert, and we ultimately decided that it would be interesting to use it as a tart shell baked in a flan ring. We weren’t completely lucky, though: neither of us had actually worked with phyllo dough before. So, we did the logical thing: we read the box. For a pie recipe, it said to use 9 sheets of phyllo brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with sugar, so that’s what we went with. In retrospect, since a tart is smaller than a pie, we should have used maybe 4 sheets instead to keep things in proportion.
Since we didn’t quite know how the phyllo would act, it didn’t seem safe to bake a filling in it (which was good because it puffed up like crazy, only to be tamed with forks). I’ve long lost my taste for pastry cream, so we decided to go with one of my favorite fillings: ricotta mixed with honey and a little bit of cream… until we discovered that there was no ricotta in the kitchen. No problem. Instead, I whipped up some mascarpone with cream and honey, and engaged in prolonged taste and texture tests until it was just light and sweet enough. I whipped the cream and mascarpone together, and added more cream as needed, but in retrospect, I probably should have whipped the cream separately and folded it in because the cream that was added first was whipped quite a lot.
I’d had the raspberry and pistachio tart from Boulangerie de Monge in my mind that week, and halfway through our time, I thought that it would be interesting to include a chopped hazelnut and honey layer between the crust and the filling (hazelnut paste, on the other hand, would have been way too overwhelming). I consider this some sign of maturity, too, since I hate hazelnuts and yet was willing to enhance their role in the dish because it made sense… Previously, when we had the idea for the hazelnut creme anglaise, my thoughts were along the lines of “yes, yes… off to the side with them.” I almost heated the honey to make it easier to mix the nuts into it, but then I thought that since the honey would be served at room temp or cold, I may as well as add water instead so that it would stay thin. In retrospect, I liked how this element worked into the dish a lot, but I probably should have put more in the tart than I did. I just wasn’t sure if it would work, so I didn’t want it to overwhelm.
And the mixed berries? Well, we just put them on top and sprinkled them with powdered sugar… We wanted to punctuate their natural deliciousness, of couse.
We didn’t win, which is fine, but I was happy with how our dessert tasted and how well the textures played with each other while keeping our assigned ingredients in the spotlight, and that was all the reward that I needed. Plus, I would have felt weird if we had won without actually doing something to the main ingredient, even if not doing something worked for our dish. On the other hand, after the competition, one of the people who tasted our dessert suggested that we could have boiled up some simple syrup infused with lemon verbena, poured that over the berries, drained them 15 minutes later, and then placed them on the tart. I think that would have been brilliant, because not only would it have rhymed with the “lemon” requirement of our dish, but it would have just tasted great. So, I’m way more bummed that I didn’t get to taste that in our dish than anything else, but I’ll give that method a try soon.
