Rescued Recipes: Strawberry Shortcake in the style of the Woodlands

 

Jesse Sutton: Hi everyone, it's time for another episode of Rescued Recipes, the ongoing series wherein I recreate dishes from restaurants I've either worked at or hung out at, but are now, sadly, closed.  In this case, I took it back to 2010, and had a stab at recreating my single favorite dessert from Sheree McDowell, the stone cold badass in charge of desserts at the Woodlands Inn, which was, for a time, the best restaurant in the Carolinas.  She wasn't crazy about it.  She thought it was a little 'pedestrian.'  What-the-hell-ever.  

A disk of chiffon cake and a disk of strawberry bavarian sit inside a tempered white chocolate collar, topped with sugared strawberries and a scoop of strawberry sorbet.  Seems pretty innocent, right?  Holy sweet goddamn, am I not a real pastry chef.  If Sheree could have seen me struggle with this monster, she would have been laughing her fool ass off.  

Five components.  Bavarian, berries, cake, sorbet, and chocolate thingie.  Let's go through this point by point.  I will be introducing the components in reverse order of how much trouble they gave me.

The Berries: No big deal.  I diced strawberries (procured from Stono Farm and Boone Hall, strawberries are in high season around here), tossed them with sugar, and called it a day.  Total ass pain, 0.5/5.

The Chiffon Cake: I used the recipe in Bo Friberg's brilliant The Professional Pastry Chef, which, as you know, if you haven't got a copy, is not my problem.  Like all of his basic recipes, it worked perfectly, and entirely without incident.  Total ass pain, 1/5.

The Bavarian: Friberg's recipe for this had egg yolks in it, and I was looking for something lighter, so I ended up on Joe Pastry, a blog of which I was hitherto unaware.  Joe is a really interesting guy.  Based out of Kentucky, he's originally from Chicago, having grown up working line cook jobs.  He turned to baking and pastry to center his life while fighting lymphoma.  That was like 20 years ago, so I guess things worked out.  Anyway, his blog is a fun read, and had a great Bavarian ratio.  Bavarian, at its most elemental, is sweetened fruit puree, whipped cream, and gelatin.  You gel the fruit puree, and right before it sets, fold it into the whipped cream.  It's a great technique to get a pretty stable mousse, and the flavor options are virtually limitless.  

His ratio is as follows: 20oz fruit, pureed
                                        3 oz. sugar
                                        2 T lemon juice (+/-, depending on acidity of the fruit
                                        2 C cream, whipped
                                        3.5 t. gelatin

Okay, hold up, quick tirade.  Why do grocery stores refuse to carry leaf gelatin?  Powdered gelatin is SUCH A PAIN TO WORK WITH!!!  I hate it!  Every cookbook should list gelatin by gram, and then every grocery store should sell leaf gelatin!  It stays good forever!  What could the issue POSSIBLY BE???  I want to clarify that I don't blame Joe Pastry for using powdered gelatin.  He obviously wanted his blog to be useful for home cooks, so he used products they could find.  That's fair enough.  My quarrel isn't with him, it's with every grocery store in the country.  Arg.  Okay, off my soapbox.

The results were good!  A great, stable mousse.  However, it was a little soft to punch circles out of.  Maybe up the gelatin if you want to do a punchable mousse.  It wasn't an issue in this case, because I was only making six, but if you were trying to bang out 50 of these little bastards, you'd want something more sturdy.   Maybe I'm misremembering!  Maybe she used panna cotta, and not bavarian!  (The main difference being that the cream in a bavarian is whipped, whereas in panna cotta, it's not.)  Could that have been the issue?  Well, anyway, it got done, and it was delicious, just a little soft.  Total ass pain, 2/5.  It would have been a one, if it had just set a little firmer.  Hell, if I coulda used leaf gelatin, like an adult, it could have been a zero.  Oh well.

The Sorbet: I found a recipe online for this, but it didn't work.  Like, at all.  Far, far too much sugar, not enough water.  It was just berries and sugar, pureed together, and frozen.  My ice cream freezer got it down to 26F, and it was still more liquid-y than a McDonald's shake.  I ended up adding water to the base until the egg-float trick worked, and we were in business.  It froze beautifully, but next time I should just go with what I know.  Here's how I would have made the sorbet, if I would have been brave enough to trust my own skills.

Step 1:  Clean, trim, and puree fruit, and strain.  (You don't always have to strain, depending on the fruit, but for strawberries, definitely.)

Step 2: Make and chill simple syrup (50/50 sugar and water, boiled to dissolve)

Step 3: Add syrup to the fruit puree until you have a liquid with the proper density to float an egg at the level in which the part of the eggs fat end that sits on the surface is between the sizes of a nickel and a quarter.  Closer to a nickel, your sorbet will set up firmer, but be harder to scoop.  Closer to a quarter, your sorbet will scoop beautifully, but be a little more prone to premature melting or getting soft on you during servive.

Step 4: Correct the seasoning with a little acid as needed (I used a squeeze of lemon), and freeze.  (Remember to have a frozen container to transfer it to.)

Wait, what the hell was that with the egg?  Education time!  How sorbet sets up is a function of sugar content.  This is easily measured by checking out the density of the sorbet base.  Sure, you could break out your $250 refractometer (a device that checks sugar contend by checking how a liquid refracts light), but you haven't got one of those.  Leastways, I haven't got one of those.  There is also a device called a syrup density meter that is a lot cheaper, say $45.  It floats in a syrup and shows you the exact sugar content.  However, this is also a pretty expensive gizmo that you will almost never use, and it does the exact same thing as an egg.  So go with the egg.  (The only place I ever used a syrup density meter was at cooking school, and the only kitchen I've ever been in that had a refractometer was Grant Achatz's, and he's an outlier, for sure.  These are not tools most chefs keep handy.)

Anyway, total ass pain, 4/5.  Making it wasn't bad, but then having to make it all again kinda sucked.  Especially because I don't have a real ice cream freezer, I just have one of those cheap Cuisinart ones with a hopper that you freeze before using.  Pro-tip: if you want to use one of these, get two.  You will be damn glad you have that extra hopper when some ice cream you're freezing doesn't quite set up as fast as you need it to, and you can switch them out.  And two of these things is still cheaper than the cheapest ice cream freezer you can buy that's not hand-crank.  (And life's too short for those damn things.)

And now, the ultimate!  The comedy of terrors!  The single most problematic component I've had to deal with, ever: The Tempered White Chocolate Collar.  I'm gonna come clean.  I've never actually tempered chocolate before.  I've been in the room when someone else was tempering chocolate, but I never had to be the guy that did it.  Still, I was emboldened by Nate's recent post on the subject, and decided to give it a whirl.  There were several things I should have thought about, but didn't.  

1) Every source in the world says that white chocolate is very difficult to temper, and isn't a good idea for beginners.

2) Nate's tempered white chocolate was used to decorate truffles.  This doesn't have the same requirement for structural integrity as a hollow cylinder with a circumference. of 3.25" and a height of 4.5".  That's a lot of surface area that needs to be pretty damn rigid.  

3) The video I watched on how to make chocolate cylinders used dark chocolate, not white.

4) There is a grade of chocolate called 'couverture', meaning 'covering,' and I probably should have been using that from the jump, instead of being too lazy to go to Whole Foods, and instead, just using Ghirardelli, which is what was in front of me.

5) Good lord, does chocolate get everywhere!

So anyway, I disregarded all that.  My plan was to make cylinders out of acetate (available at Michaels, but it's in the scrapbooking section, which is counter-intuitive), then temper the chocolate, then pour it into the shells, and then let it harden, and bob's your uncle!  That is not how it went down.  What I failed to understand was that white chocolate has different (and more precise) tempering temperatures than dark chocolate, and they are generally lower.  Furthermore, there are different tempering temperatures for every brand of white chocolate.  

So anyway, attempt one was a flop.  The chocolate was never in temper, and as a result, didn't harden.  Determined not to freak out, I went to Whole Foods, got a few pounds of Callebaut, like I should have in the first place, and tried again.  However, I was under the gun, time-wise, so instead of Nate's easy-but-slow circulator technique, I just used the microwave method from The Spruce Eats, following the additional guidelines I found on The Chocolate Doctor, two very helpful websites I discovered via frantic googling.  Even then, the info wasn't perfect.  They had me cooling the chocolate to 27C, which is about 81F, and then checking it's temper by smearing a bit on some acetate and seeing if it sets.  This is a crucial-ass trick I wish I had known about when I started.  

Anyway, long, messy, agonizing story short, it finally hit temper at 25.5C, which is about 78F, which was about how warm it was in the kitchen.  This is warm-room-temp chocolate.  Meaning it's viscous AS HELL.  So unlike the flowing dark chocolate that Youtube was showing me, I had gloppy, rapidly congealing white chocolate.  I'm willing to get that Sheree didn't do what I was doing.  Her chocolate shells were delicate.  You could put a fork right through them.  Mine were quite thick, and resisted all but the stiffest of blows from a fork.  I'd love to know what she did that I didn't, but I think, at the end of the day, experience and talent are the major differences.  

So anyway, I give myself a C+ for my first attempt at tempered chocolate.  At least they looked okay-ish.  Total ass-pain: 5/5.  If it was possible to get a 6, I would.  Oh, and the clean-up was biblical.

But anyway, how about the Results?:  It was pretty good!  I definitely wish I had a better read on the white chocolate shell, because they were way too thick, but they were in perfect temper!  I think I won't be attempting too many more 5-star desserts in this series.  I'm just gonna keep it to cakes and pies for a little while.  Reverse-engineering really does require more technical mastery than just following a recipe, and man, did this expose some holes in my game.

-JS