panna cotta: a delightful disaster

I forgot to take pics of the fondue, which is too bad because the texture of the melted cheese was perfect, despite my having used potato starch instead of cornstarch as the thickener/emulsifier.  I did, however, manage to take pics of the panna cotta, which turned out... okay.  It was edible, even tasty, but the texture was a bit too thick, and my presentation skills proved to be utterly lacking.  So enjoy some pics of rank ugliness, but trust me when I say that the dessert tasted better than it looked.

Panna cotta before being garnished:

Below:  the blueberry sauce had a mind of its own and ran all over the place, but the sugar doily underneath it held up well enough:

I served the above to the troops, but for myself, I sprinkled some hard, caramelized sugar onto the surface of the panna cotta.  Behold:

What I was originally aiming for was a "cheat" crème brûlée that used panna cotta and not custard.  Custard, which has egg yolks in it, requires a delicate touch; panna cotta, by contrast, is far easier to make, and the resultant texture is similar to that of a custard.  Unfortunately, because panna cotta is made with gelatin, you can't use the kitchen-blowtorch method to produce a glassy layer of caramelized sugar:  the panna cotta itself will liquify under the intense heat of the torch, as I discovered to my dismay.  

So what's the alternative?  One method is to lay down a circle of sugar on a Silpat silicone mat, torch the sugar, let it cool, then see whether you can pick the resultant caramelized doily up in one piece.  Another method is to follow Martha Stewart's guidelines for in-the-pan caramelization.  This involves cooking a half-cup of table sugar plus 1.5 tablespoons of water in a pan at medium-high heat until the sugar turns amber-colored.  You have to be quick at that point:  once the sugar goes amber, you've got maybe 30-45 seconds before it goes black because it's now burning.

Alternative Method #1, blowtorching sugar on a silicone mat, led to a successfully caramelized sugar doily, but the doily proved too fragile to lift off the mat in one piece.  It crumbled into little pieces.  Alternative Method #2, the Martha Stewart approach, led to a batch of burned sugar the first time I did it:  I didn't realize how quickly the sugar would go from brown to black.  My second attempt was perfect, though:  I got the sugar to the amber stage, then poured out thin circles of it onto the Silpat mat, each circle about the size of the palm of my hand.  The sugar hardened into nice, glassy little circles... but then the problem was that the circles—which I had thought were thin—turned out to be a couple millimeters thick.  I had essentially made hard candy.  Fuck.  

Well, according to the Martha Stewart recipe, this is what "caramel crumble" is supposed to do, so the next step would be to crush the hardened sugar into powder.  I used my mortar and pestle for that, but I still had some rather large flecks of hard caramel.  Pressed for time, I simply poured my torched caramel and my pan-cooked caramel into the same container and decided I would not place the crumbled sugar onto the panna cotta:  I didn't want my charges to complain about how hard the caramel was to chew.  I would leave the sugar aside as a decorative option if the troops wanted it.

Before I got the Martha Stewart method totally down pat, I had tried to pan-cook a combination of table sugar and turbinado.  The combined sugars behaved weirdly in the pan, drying up before caramelizing (I ended up having to add more water), but I did eventually manage to make three sugar doilies out of them:  they were the correct texture, but they weren't properly caramelized, so they missed the mark in terms of taste.  I decided I'd place these doilies onto the panna cotta, though, because they'd crack easily under the pressure of a spoon, just like a regular crème brûlée.

I also prepped a blueberry sauce and some strawberries.  Unsure how to combine all these elements into a coherent presentation, I simply lumped everything together atop the panna cotta, which is what led to the aesthetically horrifying results you see above.  Maybe next time, I'll try laying the blueberry sauce around the edge of the panna cotta and placing the fanned-out strawberry right in the center.

There's a lesson here for beginner cooks:  they say you're never supposed to feed your guests something that you're making for the very first time.  This is why the fondue was a success while the dessert was a failure:  fondue is something I've made tons of times, but I've never tried to make a cheat version of a crème brûlée before.  I learned a lot while making my misbegotten dessert, but my charges—the ones who gamely ate my food—were the ones who paid the price for my inexperience.  Lesson learned:  don't do that ever again.