Cold Desserts, Day 4

1. So today was fruity day. We focused on making sorbets, which was a nice change. You don't feel as guily eating it! Our group was assigned to make a lemon sorbet from our recipe book, so we did not really control the flavor. It was pretty simple to make, just lots of lemons to juice. The mix tasted really good before we put in the mixer. Unfortunatly, when it was churned it was REALLY sour. I am a huge citrus person, but this stuff was like a warhead candy. Tomorrow, we will likely melt it down and try to fix it. That is the big advantage to sorbets, they can be melted and re-churned.

The lemon sorbet is in the machine, and the containers that it will go into are on top. It takes about 8 minutes to churn, depending on the sugar content.

Here is the sorbet being packed into containers.

Here is the inside of the machine, post-sorbet.

2. Since we were not able to choose our sorbet flavor, we choose to make a second optional sorbet. I LOVE cassis (black current) and we had puree in the fridge, so I went for that. Sorbet mixture takes only minutes to make, so it was way worth it. I think I ate a weeks worth of cassis sorbet today. So good!


The cassis puree. I was so happy to see this stuff in the fridge.

Here is the mix, pre-churning. It is almost black.

Churning....

The finished sorbet.

3. We then made the meringe for our baked alaskas. We made a lot of meringue. You cant tell from the picture but that is about 2 1/2 gallons of merinuge. It was a little overkill...

We un-molded our alaskas onto a sheet pan and put them in the blast chiller to get them extra cold prior to covering them.

We piped meringue onto each of the alaskas, then froze them again.

Then we torched them and put them on a plate with some toasted coconut. I am the one weilding the torch.

Here is the one that we spilt open for grading, then ate. You can barely see the difference, but there is coconut ice cream on the outside and passion fruit yogart on the inside.

4. We then switched to working on our bombe. We put the layers together, and put it in the blast chiller. We made a hard chocolate gaze (like the stuff that balboa bars are dipped in) to pour over it, and decided to sprinkle toasted coconut on top. Working quickly, we pulled it out of the chiller, pourd glaze on it, strinkled it with coconut, and popped it back in.

At this point other groups cut into their bombes. the wholeclass was under the misconception that the bombes had to be served today, which later turned out to be false. (Obvioulsy the chef was not very clear about this) We decide to watch the first few be cut before we did ours.

The first group cut theirs open with no issues.

The next group was not so lucky.....

It obviously wasn't hard quite yet!

This is the point at which we learned that the bombes could be served tomorrow, so we opted for that. So once again, you will see our bombe tomorrow! (Not that it is that exciting)

Four days down.