The true joy of cooking, for me anyway, is recognizing the amazing results of simple transformation, the inherent nature hidden within a product. In that sense, cooking is often less about manipulation, and more an act of enabling something to be what it ‘wants’ to be, fostering the right conditions for a few basic ingredients to create something way, way more than just the sum of its parts. Bread certainly teaches us that, and cheese, too. And recently, the cacao bean taught me that when we approach our ingredients with respect, of their properties and potential, we appreciate what they express a lot more.
Enter my love of praline. Simple. Hazelnuts and sugar. Roasted, caramelized, and ground. Two ingredients- or three, if you count heat- and enough force to render them into a paste. One of my favorite flavors, it’s a smooth and rich complexity a hazelnut on its own just faintly suggests. Yeah, I could just eat the stuff with a spoon. It never ceases to inspire me.
A few months back I had been playing around with some classic bistro desserts for a consulting project. One of my favorites of the group was a simple mille feuille, an attempt to in some way channel the ethereal lightness of the one I’d had at Arpege several years ago. The filling in my version was a simple praline mousseline- just a matter of loosening up the praline paste just enough to take on the addition of gelatin and whipped cream. I can’t say it flew off the menu, but I sure loved it.
Working on a different project just a couple weeks ago, it hit me that the real inspiration was the classic Paris-Brest- a large choux ring topped with smaller puffs, all filled with a praline cream- strike that- the choux merely becomes a delivery system for it. Done well, it deserves its classic status. I nicked the all-important recipe for the cream from Gilles Renusson, one of those great pastry masters we probably don’t talk enough about. We shrunk it down into an individual quasi-plated dessert…
Download: Praline Choux- Workbook 21.6.2010
But I couldn’t leave it alone. Next we downsized it even further, to petit four scale. We pride ourselves, in a way, in how small we miniaturize these items, but even I was surprised when I realized they make a dime look big in comparison…
