Wanted: Someone to eat my baked goods Requirements: appreciates delicious food, gives honest feedback, lives in Adelaide, South Australia, unconcerned about their pants size. School is almost over, my 18,000 word research paper is about to start, I haven?t performed improv in several months, I am starting to miss my friends at home, I have to write 4000 words worth of essays in the next week and frankly, I need an outlet to let out some stress. Thus, like Izzy from Grey?s Anatomy, I cook and bake like crazy. Oh sure, it sounds great, but my cat Nugget constantly has flour or bacon fat on her tail. It?s a bitch to clean off. This time, I went all out and made a poached pear tart with pistachio frangipane and dark chocolate ice cream. Go hard or go home, people. I knew I wanted to continue to play around the flavors from the Salopian Inn dessert that rocked my world a few months ago, so I found this recipe off of Epicurious.com, and it worked quite well. I poached the pears (beurre bosc pears) with a vanilla bean in a 2007 Banrock Station Moscato, which is made in South Australia. It?s a really good wine for the price ($9 at Wooly?s), and I love Moscato, so you won?t hear me complain about the leftovers. Poaching, for those not in the know, means to cook something in a simmering liquid. Simmering is to keep a liquid at or just below boiling point. Boiling means bubbles, and if you don?t know what bubbles are, then my friend, go to a bakery. So I peeled, halved and cored the pears before poaching them in the Moscato until they were soft. Then I took the pears out and reduced (simmered) the remaining wine until it was thick like a glaze, a delicious yet molten lava glaze that burns to the very core of your soul if you get impatient and stick a finger in it before it cools. Yeah. Don?t do that. Frangipane is simply an almond pastry cream that gets baked, but the result is so delicious. It gets tall and fluffy like a light dough with an irresistible sweetness. Me likey. This recipe is basically the same, except it replaces almonds with pistachios. I recently purchased this pistachio spread, which is just ground pistachios, so I used it instead of whole nuts.
For the base, I went for frozen puff pastry. I can and have made puff pastry, which is a long process of wrapping a dough around butter, rolling it out, folding, rolling again, etc, to create a bunch of little layers of butter and dough. When the dough is baked, the butter melts and the layers of dough expand, which makes the puff pastry flaky and tender and full of buttery goodness. The tricky part is the butter melts at a low temperature, so it has to constantly be put back in the fridge so the butter can re-solidify in between each rolling. I didn?t exactly have a spare six hours (what? She has a life outside of food?? Not really, just homework.), so store bought worked for me.
I used a four inch cookie cutter for the base and cut two circles of dough, then used a 3 ? inch cutter to cut a hole in the middle of one of them. When cutting puff pastry, be sure to push straight down on your cutting instrument, don?t twist it like you might for cookie or biscuit dough. Puff pastry has so many layers, if you don?t cut it cleanly, the final product will sort of resemble the Elephant man, or at the very least, a severely inbred baby. Just say no! I attached the ring on top of the full puff pastry circle with some egg wash, or an egg beaten lightly with a little water. I poked holes in the center of the ring so the dough would not rise as much, creating an outer lip. Then it went into the oven until lightly baked but not brown. When the pastry shells cooled, I put a few spoonfuls of pistachio frangipane in the center and topped with a few slices of poached pear and chopped pistachios.
I had made a quick dark chocolate ice cream base the day before, so while it was baking. I churned me some ice cream.
I?m an impatient chef, I will tell you this now. So these aren?t as pretty as they could be, but they are still working it for all their worth. I threw them back in the oven to cook the frangipane and brown the pastry shell, then let it cool before brushing the tops with the reduced wine glaze.
Finally, I topped it off with the ice cream, and I don’t mind saying it was a certified mouth boner. That is to say, it rocked.
Definitely a recipe to keep in the arsenal, and I imagine the pistachio frangipane would work well with a number of different fruit. Alright. Gotta go. It’s time to bake something else! ~LTG
