Workbook: November 2009

Concord grapes always tend to sneak up on us. A first signal of autumn, it’s not uncommon to begin seeing them as early as late August. I love them, but for some reason I usually get stuck for ideas. Because of their seeds, they have to processed, and in the end, they just seem to lose a little something along the way. And simply turning them into coulis or sorbet seems boring.

Undeterred, we've set about blending and straining several cases since their arrival, incorporating them into a few different applications this season.

We're still exploring complimentary flavors via pate de fruit. Here, concord grape is teamed up with pear:

Though we haven't ever introduced gelatin clarification into a regular production or menu item, we play around with the method from time to time. It's a great way to transform a muddy-looking grape puree into a more refined end result. A dosage of 0.5% gelatin is dissolved into the puree, and then its frozen. The solid block is then allowed to slowly thaw through a chinois, producing a translucent to clear juice; the nasty bits get caught up in the protein network provided by the gelatin. Knowing that tannins can sometimes affect certain hydrocolloids, we haven't played around with this enough to notice.

Cheese has found its way back into some of our pre-dessert work; most recently, chevre has been given the spherification treatment. We using the 'reverse' method, of course, and a 0.8% alginate/water bath The natural calcium present in the goat cheese mixture is sufficient for the skin to form. Heavy production of this and a couple other spheres has taught us how a holding bath can help us control the end result. Storing the finished orbs in syrup make sense in a sweet application. A weak syrup actually helps to nicely 'tighten' their shape, though we learned the hard way that the syrup itself can suck away too much internal moisture, shrinking the spheres down to half their original size.

The grapes enter the dish in the form of cold oil/agar agar pearls, and the whole is finished with candied walnut and a half-grind of black pepper.

Concord season has also afforded us the perfect opportunity to work on a technique that's been on my to-do list for months. Borrowing a concept from the El Bulli camp, the goal is to create a stable liquid that can be baked into the center of a cake. I've seen a few minor variations, but the basic idea is to gel a fruit mixture with aglinate and calcium gluconate, followed by blending, molding, and freezing. The frozen center is then inserted into a batter. I've seen a similar effect achieved by Stupak, using gellan to give his carameilzed brioche pudding a liquid caramel interior.