Thursday 17 September 2009

English Strawberry Sorbet with compressed melons, yogurt cream, and olive oil biscuit

English Strawberry Sorbet with compressed melons, yogurt cream, and olive oil biscuit
This has to be one of my favourite dishes from Under Pressure. The process of vacuum packing melon produces truly great results, watermelon especially benefits from this process. The melons become firmer and take on a deeper colour, the watermelon looks like raw sushi grade tuna (there is a play on fruit sushi to be developed here)! The original recipe calls for cucumber sorbet, but as we were in strawberry season (and I don't really like cucumber) we altered the dish slightly. We used small square and round cutters for most of the shapes, although some need to be done by hand to save on waste (we used our off-cuts for a melon sorbet). Watermelon is easily cut into rectangles that then yields nice even shapes, the honeydew and cantaloupe melon were slightly more difficult to shape.


The melons change colour as soon as the air is removed during the vacuuming process, I watched the watermelon being compressed through the glass panel of our chamber vacuum machine, incredible!
The black syrup is a mix of balsamic and glucose reduced, the olive oil cake is nice and light and the yogurt is blended with creme fraiche. We plated the sweet as seen below; the only change we made was to quenelle the sorbet. Sir Richard Dearlove, Master of Pembroke College was very impressed with this! We are using this sweet twice next week, once for 25 covers and the second time for 50.




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