The Secret Ingredient: How restaurants reinvent desserts
Desserts used to be built around a clear set of ingredients: eggs, chocolate, berries, cream, and fruits. Today, pastry chefs are increasingly going beyond the usual and experimenting with vegetables, seafood, fermented foods, and even what used to be considered waste. Izvestia looked at what unusual ingredients are found in restaurant desserts today and how they are gradually changing our usual idea of sweets.
To everyone's surprise
You can often hear the opinion that everything has been thought up in gastronomy for a long time, and yet the chefs and pastry chefs of the new generation do not stop there and bring something previously unfamiliar to modern cuisine.
—Modern restaurant guests and confectionery buyers are increasingly looking for new experiences, they want to taste desserts with unusual flavors or textures in order to get a new visual and tactile experience and share it on social networks," Yuri Goloperov, chef of Lark Café (Moscow), told Izvestia. — Reflecting these sentiments, pastry chefs are using new technologies, using sublimation and elements of molecular cuisine more often, and working with regional products that are still unfamiliar.
Lark cake with mango mousse and honeysuckle filling
As an example, our interlocutor cites his cake "Lark", which is included in his new gastronomic set "Flight of the Lark". It consists of ganache with mango and passion fruit, sponge cake with waffle crumbs and a filling of honeysuckle berries. The idea to take note of the Siberian berry appeared after the chef discovered it for the first time during a taiga gastrozhin. Its filling is perfect for a new sweet dish that harmoniously combines the flavors of the taiga and the tropics. Dessert is served on a saucer floating in the air due to a magnetic field.
Our expert's list of the most promising unusual dessert ingredients includes cloudberries, pitahaya, viburnum, spirulina, jerusalem artichoke syrup, miso, kombucha, hibiscus, chrysanthemum, lavender, turnip, kohlrabi and daikon.
Vegetables to add
It's not the first year that pastry chefs have been experimenting with cereals and vegetables in desserts. These products have become the same full-fledged ingredients in sweet dishes as berries.
"Every vegetable has sugars that need to be handled correctly, and then they can be competently integrated into the dessert,— says Artem Grachev, pastry chef at Savva Restaurant (Moscow). — One of the most plastic products is beetroot, with which you can do almost anything — smoke, marinate, dry, cook candied fruits, fresh fruits, sauces, sorbets, ice cream and much more.
In the new set "For our own", consisting of the most famous and popular dishes in the history of the Savva restaurant, there is also a beetroot dessert created back in 2015. The root vegetable in it is presented in three textures: beet powder, smoked beetroot and parfait based on fresh beetroot. The dessert also includes a chocolate sponge cake and raspberry gel, and is complemented by berry sorbet and dark chocolate chips. As a result, the dish combines a whole set of flavors: sweetness, acid, smokiness, saltiness and bitterness from dark chocolate.
Beetroot parfait
According to our interlocutor, beetroot works very well with different spices, so you can make interesting jam with spices from it. He also recommends making homemade balsamic sauce from the root vegetable, which can complement not only desserts, but also main dishes. For it, you will need one liter of beetroot juice, 30 g of sugar, 20 g of wine vinegar, 5 g of star anise and cardamom, 10 g of ready-made espresso coffee and a pinch of salt. The spices should be heated in a hot frying pan to reveal their flavor. Then combine sugar, salt and beetroot juice, bring everything to a boil, add spices and espresso and boil the mass by 70%. Then pour in the vinegar and boil for about 30% more.
"Tomato is the heart of Italian gastronomy, although it is certainly not the most obvious ingredient for local desserts," admits Maria Vorobyeva, brand pastry chef at the Italian restaurant Pinci (Nizhny Novgorod). — But I wanted to fantasize with him and rethink the familiar Italian culinary symbol in a confectionery format. And since body desserts are very relevant now, I decided to make "Al pomodoro" in a bright and recognizable form of this vegetable.
In our interlocutor's dessert, the tomato reveals itself from an unexpected side: not as an ingredient in pasta or sauce, but as a fruit with natural sweetness and subtle acidity. The sweet decoy is made from whipped tomato basil ganache based on white Belgian chocolate, with strawberry gel with tomatoes and dried strawberries in the core.
Dessert "Al pomodoro" with tomatoes, dried strawberries and strawberry gel in the filling
The tomato really reveals itself very interestingly in sweet combinations, says pastry chef Vorobyova. It works great with strawberries and other berries and, due to its natural acidity and juiciness, can add depth and freshness to the dessert. The main thing is to find the right balance of taste and texture so that the tomato does not argue with other ingredients, but complements them. It can be used as confit, filling, sauce, sorbet, or even as an accent in cream.
— Corn is ideal for desserts, and, for example, in Thailand it is mixed with frozen coconut milk and served as ice cream, — Nikita Gavrilenko, pastry chef of the Beluga restaurant (Moscow), shares his observations. — I really liked the classic combination of corn and cream sauce, which I noticed while working on one of the meat dishes that was eventually not included in the menu. And it occurred to me to repeat this combination in a summer dessert.
Corn ice cream with caramel and young corn cobs
Our interlocutor makes ice cream from young corn cobs, using a self-made sundae as a base. The sweetness of the cereal is complemented by caramel, and the dessert is sprinkled with salt and ashes from burnt hay, which makes its taste even more recognizable.
Leftovers are sweet
Working with products that were previously considered waste is gradually becoming an important part of modern restaurant gastronomy, including in the pastry shop.
— It is important to take care of the product, reduce the amount of waste and at the same time use the raw materials rationally, — says the pastry chef of the Sayera restaurant (Yaroslavl) Dmitry Stukan. — This affects both the cost and the final price of the dish — in the end, everyone wins. The simplest example is citrus peel. It contains a huge amount of taste, color and aroma, and throwing it away means losing a very important part of the product.
Basque banana Peel cheesecake
The charcoal grill in the restaurant prompted our interlocutor to experiment with the peel of citrus fruits, pineapples and bananas. Experiments have shown that banana peels smoked for three days in combination with dairy products give the effect of vanilla, while maintaining a very light, distant taste of the original product. As a result, he began to add this ingredient to a Basque cheesecake with a gel based on fresh orange, lime and orange peel. The dessert has a sable with miso paste on the bottom, and frozen orange segments and sour cream on top. When trying a dessert, you should try to capture all its components at the same time in order to feel the harmony of different elements (acidic gel, creamy sable, soft cheesecake and cold citrus fruits) in one spoonful.
It's difficult to work with banana peels at home, but you can do a lot with citrus fruits, our interlocutor continues. For example, it's easy to make candied fruits from their skins. To do this, peel the crust from all the insides and cut off the white part, leaving only the peel. Then put it in a saucepan with water, bring to a boil and mix three times with salt. After that, pour water over the zest again, add sugar and vanilla, bring to a boil and cook for about 30 minutes. The result will be soft, fragrant candied fruits with a marmalade texture.
You can also make a gel from citrus peel. To do this, squeeze the juice from any citrus fruits and add sugar. Prepare the zest in the same way as for candied fruits, but cook without sugar for about 40-50 minutes. Then punch it with a blender, add the squeezed juice with sugar and punch it again until smooth. The output will be a bright acidic gel.
Lots of sweets
The culinary experts' bold experiments have shown that various seafood products are very interesting and appropriate in desserts, although sweets with them are still rare in modern confectionery.
"From the point of view of taste balance, sea reptiles have properties that perfectly complement sweets," Pavel Tarasov, chef of Atlantica fish restaurant (Moscow), told our publication. — I wanted to surprise the guests, so I made oyster ice cream, which changes the template perception of this dessert. The brain expects sweetness, but gets salt, iodine, and umami texture.
Oyster ice cream with aloe, apple and black caviar
The delicate creamy gelato with the addition of natural oyster juice and clam pulp is also complemented by the acid of the green apple, which removes the excessive fat content of the cream, and the Japanese herb shiso brings fresh mint-basil notes. There is also aloe in the composition of the sweet, which gives the dessert a herbaceous freshness. Finally, a serving of black caviar enhances the salty marine theme and creates an interesting textural contrast.
"Seafood in desserts really has the right to life, but behind each dish there is a lot of work to find the right balance of flavors," says Yuri Kryuchkov, chef of the fish restaurant More Seafood bar (Vladivostok). — In our kitchen, we are constantly looking for new combinations and flavor combinations that may seem unexpected at first glance, but eventually reveal themselves very harmoniously, and our Napoleon with sea urchin caviar is just an example of a successful experiment.
Branded Napoleon with sea urchin caviar
Sea urchin caviar acts in dessert not just as an unusual ingredient, but as a natural flavor enhancer, the expert explains. The hedgehog has a pronounced umami profile, which combines creamy, salty and iodic shades. Because of this, it works especially interestingly with the sweet base of the dessert.
Previously, our interlocutors had already experimented with similar combinations. For example, ice cream with bottarga, dried fish caviar, was prepared for a gastronomic dinner as part of the pollock festival. This decision also seemed risky, but as a result, the ingredients complemented each other perfectly, emphasizing the taste of both the ice cream and the bottarga.
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