Previously, on tastingmenu.wordpress.com –
* https://tastingmenu.wordpress.com/2023/05/09/french-laundry-cream-of-walnut-soup/
* https://tastingmenu.wordpress.com/2020/12/07/beef-roasted-a-la-matignon/
Life gets a little weird sometimes. Recently, I discovered that I needed to travel to my parent’s home to look after them until their daily help returned from an overseas trip. It didn’t help that there had been a home security incident just before I arrived there.
So during the week while I was working remotely from my parent’s home, I was thinking of what to make – a little special something to change the atmosphere of anxiety at the residence . So I had leftover unused French Laundry poaching liquid sitting in the freezer and I was thinking about what to make with it. And of course, there was the Verjus Sorbet And Poached Peaches recipe following the Cream Of Walnut Soup in the The French Laundry Cookbook (p. 269). Following Chef Keller’s encouragement about making a recipe one’s own, I thought to myself, why can’t I have a little humor and apply the recipe/technique to my own version of “Peaches And Cream” where the cream component could be frozen vanilla yogurt ‘ice cream’. It would turn out that locating a frozen yogurt close to the residence was rather difficult, but I finally found a commercial pint for the dessert.
So to begin this dessert, I would need to blanch the some large ripe, FIRM, peaches (with knife nicks made to the bottom of the fruit) so I would be able to remove/peel the skins easily after shocking them in ice cold water.
I would then need to stand a peeled peach upright on the cutting board (stem facing upwards) and then making equal vertical cuts down around the peach in a triangle formation. I would need to repeat that
with the other peach. So there should be 6 cut pieces. (I supposed I could gnaw the peach flesh around the pits as a snack so the fruit wouldn’t go to waste). The recipe instructions aren’t clear; but my interepretation was then to use a 3/4″ cutter to cut a circle out of each slice to remove the pit indentation of the fruit. But because I didn’t have pastry cutters at my folks residence, I would poach the peach slices as is. And now I was ready to poach the peaches.
With the remaining cup or so of the thawed poaching liquid poured into a cooking pot, I would bring that to a simmer and then add 3 T of honey to the poaching liquid.
Into that simmering liquid would go in the peaches and then a paper towel (yes, that’s what Chef Keller said!) would go on top of the peaches in the liquid to keep the slices submerged. My wife saw I was about to add the paper towel and strenuously objected. So I would have to poach the peaches as is.
The peaches would need to cook at just under a simmer for 45-60 minutes so they were cooked through but NOT mushy. That cooking pot would need to be taken off the heat so that the peaches could cool to room temperature. Once the peaches were cooled, they needed to be moved out of the pot and into another container. The poaching liquid would then be reduced to 1/2 c, cooled to room temperature and then poured OVER the peach pieces in the reserved container. The mixture would be chilled in the refridgerator until just cold enough for serving.
In thinking how to serve this, I had searched for “langues de chat” or financiers, but all I could find were madelaines. So to serve I would need to lay down a triangle of madelaines, top each vertex with a poached peach slice, drizzle some of the reduced poaching liquid over the peachs and the top it with a quenelle frozen vanilla yogurt in the middle of the ring.
The poached peaches dessert was a hit. The only comments that I heard was that the commercial froyo was too sweet. I tended to agree. I wanted a bit more of the yogurt “tang” to contrast the sweetness of the poached fruit. The interesting thing was, I got a request to have this as the dessert for the thanksgiving omakase meal! So I will have to make an effort to find a better vanilla frozen yogurt before that major holiday meal…..
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