{"id":1414,"date":"2011-07-04T21:57:10","date_gmt":"2011-07-05T04:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/?p=1414"},"modified":"2016-06-27T11:14:19","modified_gmt":"2016-06-27T18:14:19","slug":"cape-gooseberry-rosemary-rum-peppers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/2011\/07\/cape-gooseberry-rosemary-rum-peppers\/","title":{"rendered":"Cape Gooseberry, Rosemary, Rum, Peppers"},"content":{"rendered":"

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You guys, I’m a little bit excited about this recipe: it’s not in the book. I made it up.<\/p>\n

So, last week at Berkeley Bowl, while shopping for ingredients for the oyster dish<\/a>, I came across some very odd punnets of berries in the produce section:<\/p>\n

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The signs were mixed up on the display, so I had no idea what they were. They were so interesting and pretty, though, that I had to buy them. A woman checking out at the cashier’s\u00a0line in front of me eyed them curiously and asked me “What are<\/em> those?”<\/p>\n

“I have no idea!” I said excitedly.<\/p>\n

She asked what one was supposed to do<\/em> with them. “I dunno!” I said. “Something! I’m gonna take them home and try to figure them out!”<\/p>\n

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When I got home, a bit of intertubez searching helped me figure out what they were; the berries were cape gooseberries<\/a>, and were still inside their papery calyx husks (in which, amazingly, they’re able to stay fresh at room temperature for up to 45 days apparently!). I carefully cut one open; on the inside it looks a lot like a tomatillo. It has small yellow seeds inside, and the outer skin is somewhat strong, like that of a tomato. The berries are tart; Sarah immediately said they tasted a lot like crab apples, or maybe like a blend of pineapple and strawberry. The flavor is potent; not quite as acidic as something like a candy Lemonhead or something like that, but not as gentle as a strawberry. A mouthful of these would make you pucker a little.<\/p>\n

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Since I’ve been on a little sorbet kick lately, I figured I would try to make a sorbet from this–maybe I’d build a pre-dessert palette cleanser. I didn’t really know the best way to go about cooking down the berries; I figured if I boiled them in water, the flavor would get leeched out and diluted. I didn’t want that, so I opted to cook them sous vide at 75c for about 2 hours. I combined them with some sugar before vacuum-sealing them:<\/p>\n

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I expected the cooked berries to be quite mushy and pulpy when I took them out of the water bath. I put them in my tamis and tried to push them through:<\/p>\n

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What came through, though, was mostly just juice. It was very tasty and potent, but didn’t have a lot of body.<\/p>\n

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I forged ahead, though, and chucked the juice into my ice cream maker. Half an hour later, I had a nice soft sorbet…that melted almost immediately when I scooped it out with a metal spoon. Even after freezing it overnight, the sorbet was very unstable (either it was very hard and overfrozen, or liquid). Since I’m learning a bit about stabilizers, I decided to try some in this. I reheated the sorbet and mixed in a bit of Stabi-Sorbet; about 1g for 250g sorbet. I erred on the lighter side, not wanting to turn my sorbet into a block of gel. The stabilizer did kick in a bit and firmed up the sorbet when it cooled, but when I refroze it it was still rather unstable and melty. I didn’t want to reheat it a third time to add more stabilizer for fear it’d start to taste bad.<\/p>\n

In trying to visualize flavors to pair with these things, I asked myself what paired with strawberries and also with pineapple. The Flavor Bible mentioned rosemary pairs with both, which immediately sounded great. I decided to make a simple rosemary whipped cream. I heated some cream and sugar in a pot, with 4 sprigs of rosemary. Brought to a simmer, then removed from heat and let steep for a half hour. I strained the cream, chilled it, then pressurized it in a cream whipper.<\/p>\n

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(side note: while I was doing this, I was drinking this beer, an IPA by Mikeller. If you like floral hop notes, this beer is completely awesome.)<\/p>\n

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Pineapple and strawberries both also pair well with brown sugar\/molasses, so I turned back to the idea of the rum sphere from the Guava<\/a> dish, with a few modifications: both fruits also pair with orange, and I had some Cointreau, so I decided to just make a little cocktail sphere of rum and Cointreau. I mixed together water, brown sugar, rum, calcium lactate, and orange peel, brought to boil, and let steep for 30 minutes again.<\/p>\n

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From the resulting mixture, I filled some hemispheric molds then froze them.<\/p>\n

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The rum\/orange ice cubes I then dropped in a mixture of hot water and sodium alginate to spherify them.<\/p>\n

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Finally, I wanted to incorporate a peppery note. After tasting a handful of various pepper types, I decided on a mixture of long peppercorns and pink peppercorns. The long pepper has a sort of smoky note, and the pink peppercorns are sweet; both peppers are quite distinctive. I wanted a cool way of presenting them, so I decided to try playing with making a ‘candy wrapper’ out of molten-then-hardened sugar, with encased pepper inside. I’ve never done this before, so I thought it’d be fun to try. I used isomalt because it doesn’t caramelize and remelts easily. After melting a half cupful or so, I poured a tiny bit into a small circular cookie cutter tube.<\/p>\n

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After waiting a few moments for the sugar to cool a bit, I dropped in a spoonful of peppers then did a little lift-and-twist move to form a hollow chocolate kiss-like shape.<\/p>\n

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The molten sugar caused the metal tube to heat up enough that I couldn’t hold it for very long. I was moving fast so I grabbed the first thing I could find that would let me hold onto things longer, which happened to be some white duct tape. Working with the sugar was pretty\u00a0temperamental, and after an hour of playing I only had a few shapes that were reasonably interesting. Still, kinda neat and fun.<\/p>\n

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After making all this, I took a crack at plating it. It’s nowhere near where I’d like it to be; the sorbet is shapeless and clearly melts easily, the whipped cream has a ‘rip-y’ quality that makes it not conducive for forming smooth plops of it, and my spheres are a little jagged because I froze them sloppily. So my photos of it are under my bar.<\/p>\n

But.<\/p>\n

It tastes fully great. Like, I seriously feel proud; it tastes interesting and atomic; I can pick apart all the flavors and they all work really nicely together. The dish is sweet but not cloyingly so, and has a refreshing quality that I like (it’s not ‘heavy’ like a chocolate dessert would be). The spheres play nicely with the rosemary and the sorbet, and I really love the bite of the two peppers when mixed in with everything. The candy wrapper offers a nice textural contrasty crunch. Best of all, I still have two gooseberries left, which I think I’m going to plant so I can hopefully play with these fun things again in the future.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You guys, I’m a little bit excited about this recipe: it’s not in the book. I made it up. So, last week at Berkeley Bowl, while shopping for ingredients for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1432,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1414","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/20110704_alinea_0016.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwfL0-mO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1414"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5267,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414\/revisions\/5267"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}