Summer is in full bloom and so are our new desserts, we are now using various melons, berries, stone fruits, and herbs. Over the course of the next few days I will be posting how we take a simple ingredient and manipulate it into different forms.
"Strawberries & Rhubarb"
Strawberries are at their peak, they are super red in color and super sweet with their high sugar levels.
We are making a strawberry consomme out of them and using the consomme in different formats.
Our strawberry consomme is combined with jerez vinegar and is used to poach rhubarb. The resulting flavor is sweet & tart, almost like "pickled" rhubarb.
Using a blender we puree strawberries, citric acid and a little simple syrup and then spread it out thin on a silpad to dry in a 175 F low fan convection oven for about 2 hours. What we get is a very thin, chip like texture. The flavor is very strong, sweet and tart.
This is the poached rhubarb combined with 1% agar and gellan. Dried out the same way as the "strawberry chip" but for only half the time. The end result is a texture between leather and a roll up. Very shinny, not sticky and bites really nice.
Here we diluted the consomme with flat mineral water and added a few pieces of strawberry. Then we charged it with Co2. The end result...A freaking great ALL natural strawberry soda!
I experimented using soda water, mineral water and other liquids combined with the consomme and the end results were sodas weak in flavor. The flat mineral water along with a simple carbonation system works the best. This way you control ALL your flavors, sweet, sour, tart, etc
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