Galette of Rhubarb, Crystallised Coconut, Rhubarb Sorbet
Specialty Equipment: water bath, vacuum machine, moulds, juicer, dehydrator, sugar refractometer, ice cream machine
Specialty Ingredients: gellan F, sodium citrate, T45 flour
Days: 1
Dish as in The Fat Duck:
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The preferred base of a crumble of Masterchef contestants is rhubarb. Everytime the word crumble is spoken, it is, 9 out of 10 times, preceded by the word rhubarb. What’s the deal with all the love for these long, slender stalks? My encounters with rhubarb have always, so far, been pretty bad. Either the rhubarb was completely broken down into a slimy, fibrous mess or intact, but extremely tart with an acidic kick that makes lemons look sweet. The Crab Biscuit dish restored some of my faith in the vegetable, but I was still a bit reserved about the ‘galette’.
You often hear chefs talk about underused pieces of meat, like cheeks, organs and many more, saying a talented chef can make something beautiful out of them. Filet is for lazy chefs. Fruits and vegetables are never mentioned this way. I’d like to add rhubarb to this line of thinking. A recipe that can make rhubarb tasty has to have some talent injected into it.
I started with the sorbet base, which is made from rhubarb juice, fructose and grenadine (I had some left from the Crab Biscuit). Just like the red cabbage gazpacho I didn’t juice the vegetables, but chopped it up in a food processer and pressed the liquid out in a hair net. The ‘problem’ with the recipe is that a sugar refractometer is needed to give the exact sweet/sour balance. Maybe I’ll have one in the future, but for now I just blended the grenadine/fructose mix in the rhubarb juice until it had a good balance.
Next up was the poached rhubarb. With some minor changes, it is made exactly like the poached rhubarb from the Crab Biscuit (macerating and then poaching them on a low temperature).
You then have to cut the rhubarb in 2cm pieces. Sounds easy? I had a very hard time cutting them in equal size pieces. Luckily I wasn’t cutting them in the prep kitchen of The Fat Duck, which would probably make me the receiver of some verbal abuse, so I could just use them as they were (think of it, why didn’t I just corrected the pieces larger than 2cm?).
I have 1 rectangular mould (I’m beginning to think moulds of different shapes and sizes are the key to a good restaurant), so that was my only hope of a dish resembling the plate as presented in the restaurant. The poached rhubarb is finished with a reduction of the poaching liquid (gelatine is added to it). You can fill a mould until the rhubarb is very compact, with very few, or even, no air pockets. That would make the poaching liquid kind of redundant, so I left some gaps where the soon-to-be jelly could sneak into.
The sorbet is garnished with a strip of dried rhubarb. You have to cook thin slices (I used a mandolin) until they become translucent. This step makes the slices fragile and reshaping them into a strip a nightmare. After two pieces I didn’t cook them until completely translucent, but until they loosed their raw appearance and became pliable. I also dried a strip that was not cooked.
Cooked until just pliable (left, best result), cooked until translucent (middle, second best), left raw (right, worse).
The base of the galette is an olive oil biscuit, the same from the Macerated Strawberries dish. Luckily I saw this dish also needed the biscuit when making the strawberries, so I froze some and only had to roll it out and bake it.
The crystallized coconut is made by grating it, vacuum pack it with simple syrup, frying it until just brown and finishing it in an oven.
The coconut fluid gel consists of gellan F, sodium citrate and coconut puree (see other posts).
The poached rhubarb is topped with a yoghurt mousse and caramelized puff pastry. The yoghurt mousse is made from sweetened bio yoghurt, orange flower water, icing sugar and fromage blanc. I have no idea where to get sweetened yoghurt or what it is exactly, so I used normal full fat bio yoghurt (sweetened yoghurt is not just yoghurt with some sugar added to or is it?). The fromage blanc has to be hanged in the fridge in a piece of muslin to extract excess moisture.
Finally the arlette. It is puff pastry rolled out with icing sugar, much the same way you would use flour to roll out dough. The sugar prevents it from sticking and caramelizes the pastry. It’s important to have two baking trays (with at least one heavy one), so you can prevent the pastry from rising. Cutting them in rectangles is, just like the poached rhubarb, quite hard or I’m just really bad in cutting stuff in precise shapes. The puff pastry has a tendency to crack at the edges, leaving you with rough edges. I had more than enough puff pastry, so I got some good pieces out of it. I didn’t hear any imaginary yelling this time.
Plating the dish. A line of coconut fluid gel with some crystallized coconut. The poached rhubarb comes away smoothly from the mould and has to be stacked on the biscuit. On top are some piped rounds of yoghurt mousse and a piece of arlette. The recipe instructs to cut down the dimensions of the arlette with 1cm in comparison to the poached rhubarb. On the images I found on the internet and in the book the arlette is bigger than the base. I must say it looked a bit wrong, the smaller piece of puff pastry. I made every piece of arlette about the same size, but thanks to my inadequate cutting I had a slightly bigger piece, which looked better. It’s still on the smaller side of the scale.
The last components are the sorbet and the dried rhubarb.
First off, the photos don’t do the dish justice. I never know how to light a dark kitchen without ending up with a yellow photo (from the artificial light). The colors are way off in the photo. I already knew from the Crab Biscuit the poached rhubarb is good, but I wasn’t prepared for the sorbet. Wow, it is absolutely one of the best scoops of ice cream I ever had, if not the best. The crystallized coconut also stood out. Crunchy, caramel like coconut flesh with a coconut kick. The sugar and heating probably boosts the flavor immensely. All in all, one hell of a rhubarb dish. If I link that to the beginning of the post, the chef behind the dish must be talented.
BTW
The ‘real’ color of the sorbet.
UPDATE
As you can read in the comments there is some rhubarb unaccounted for in the sorbet recipe. I don’t know if it a simple error or there is a part of the recipe missing.
Hi,
Great page!
the Chips (from rhubarb and similar) can be made easier:
buy or make a high-sugar-pulp
like a strawberry-topping
cut the rhubarb, roll it and put it into a container that is as high as possible for your vacuum-machine, fill up with topping so that the rhubarb is covered vacuum it at least 3 times, (attention, in the beginning it will bild up foam)
place the strips on a silikommatt and dry it at max 60°C
with the vacuum, you fill up all air-holes with sugar, witch will become crystalline again 😉
if you need to crystallize something that has to be salty (not sweet) you can make a isomalt-sugar with a liquid like a clear stock or similar, and vacuum the slices (like asparagus, aubergine) and dry them.
bevor decorate a great dish, you can aromatize it with some oil and spices 😉
greethings from swiss-chef
Albino
Thanks for the info man, really useful. Sometimes it seemed the liquid I dipped it in didn’t ‘catch’ all the surface area, which a vacuum machine would solve.
Two questions on the vacuum. Are pulps necessary or could you also use a simple syrup? Would the pulp make the dried rhubarb lose its white color?
BTW, I was always wondering, especially after your comment on vegetables, if a dehydrator alone can dry stuff until crisp or that you always need a crystallizing agent, like sugar. It seems to me, at least my dehydrator, can dry stuff, but not until something is crispy.
Two questions on the vacuum.
1) Are pulps necessary or could you also use a simple syrup?
– not necessary. a simple, or aromated syrup is just fine.
2) Would the pulp make the dried rhubarb lose its white color?
yes, it becomes (in case of using Stawberry) a rosa-red color.
BTW, I was always wondering, especially after your comment on vegetables, if a dehydrator alone can dry stuff until crisp or that you always need a crystallizing agent, like sugar.
– if the veggie you use has plenty of sugar (also in form of carbohydrate) it will become crisp,
but if not, you need to bring in something like sugar or (sweet-less) some isomalt
It seems to me, at least my dehydrator, can dry stuff, but not until something is crispy.
it’s not the problem of the dehydrator, it’s the problem of the remaining, “carcass” of the fruit/veggie
it would not be possible to make a crisp aubergine without this technic.
sent you 2 pics 🙂
Hey,
great page! Congrats to your work.
Could you explain why in the book is mentioned that you’d need 2.5 kg of rhubarb? You only juice 1.25 kg of it for the sorbet, so what do you do with the rest of it? Maybe my english is just too crappy, but that’s a point I did not really understand…
Thanks + good luck for everything!
Paul
He Paul, I just went with the descriptions, and can’t really explain the ‘left over rhubarb’. It’s indeed strange, cause the recipe says ‘juice 1.25kg of the rhubarb’, implying you have to do something with the rest.
Maybe send an e-mail?
Hi, I am actually just making this now and had the same issue with the extra rhubarb in the sorbet. I am wondering whether there is a paragraph missing and you actually add some of the raw or perhaps cooked rhubarb in? Otherwise I’m not really seeing why it is necessary to “blitz the mixture”. Anyway seeing as you say it works as written I will just go with that. Thanks!
Hi,
I just came across your blog (albeit a bit late) and am loving it! In regards to the puff pastry couldn’t you have used the pastry mould that you held the rhubarb in to cut it?
Ben
He Ben, the cooked pastry is very, very brittle and the edges of the mould are far from sharp, so when you push down on the pastry it cracks at the edges and you end up with rough edges and broken pastry.
I found the only way to go is a sharp knife, warm pastry (reheat it when it cools too much) and swift cutting action.
Also found you can’t pre-cut the pastry, because the edges won’t stay straight during cooking.
Hey man, I just came accros you blog. Late but…
Great work I have to say, Great people involed in the comments… I find it unbeliavable
So, I have a solution on your cutting right the puff pastry… you just have to half cook it… or lets say it has to be cooked mut before geting the crispy point, than you cut the desired shape and finish ot of on the oven\
Regards, Niko
Thanks for your comment. Your method sounds really handy, I’ll try it some time. I’ve gotten better, but am nowhere near the thinness of the restaurant version. Maybe homemade puff pastry works better than store bought?
Hey,
Just thinking about the coconut fluid gel, not too keen on buying coconut puree either, what was your alternative?
Cheers,
Elliot
Hi,
Don’t know why I didn’t mention it in the post. Think I used coconut milk from a can.
For those that are wondering what to do with the other 1.25kg of Rhubarb, his other book (Heston Blumenthal at Home) has many similar recipes to the big fat duck cookbook, and in that book the other 1.25kg is cooked up with the grenadine and sugar. I don’t know how it affects the flavour, but the result is that the actual sorbet is much less likely to be an actual red colour – if you reduce by the right amount it’s more likely to be more of a brown, which is a bit less attractive. Flavour is amazing though.
Separately, I highly recommend freezing the sorbet with dry ice. Blitz the dry ice in food processor and mix into the freezer mix in a stand mixer, it’ll freeze in seconds and remain totally soft scoop at -20C.