A New Project
Well, with time on my hands I decided to start developing a new recipe to match a vision I have in my head. The last time this happened, Melissa got sick of chocolate truffles.
Imagine a pumpkin sorbet. Orange, right? Now picture a vibrant green swirl running through it, like caramel swirl. But this swirl is a sage syrup.
So now you're either intrigued or nauseated. But here's my theory. With pumpkin, I mean sugar pumpkin (the kind you put in pie), so it's got inherent sweetness. And pumpkins and other squashes are technically fruits, so the sorbet thing isn't a big stretch. Sage of course goes well with fall squashes, and it works surprisingly well in sweet dishes.
My first attempt was, well, edible. I tried making sage syrup in the same manner that I make herb oils, which in turn comes from The French Laundry Cookbook. It's a two-day process where you let the herbs macerate in the oil overnight (after you've run everything through a blender for six minutes), and then strain them. This gives you a vibrantly green, intensely flavored oil. I should note that Jeremiah Tower disapproves of this method in his new cookbook. So on one hand you've got the man often labelled "the father of California cuisine" and on the other you've got one of the very best chefs in the country today. Take your pick.
Anyway, I made a syrup, reduced it way down, let it cool, and treated it like oil when making the herb oil. This gave me a green (though not intensely so--sage doesn't give up as much color as other herbs) syrup. I steamed the sugar pumpkin (which means now I have pumpkin stock to use for something else; someday I'll use it in my other blog) Then I turned it into puree and turned that into sorbet.
So far so good. The problem came when I went to fold in the syrup for the swirl. It was way too thin. Now I have a pumpkin sorbet with the occasional barely visible grayish green splotch. I guess I really need to get a sage caramel or something. But there's a problem with this. I can't just throw the sage into the syrup and reduce like mad; the sage then ends up leaching a cooked, vegetal character into the syrup (I've done this with other things). Never mind that then you have sage particles. I could try doing the sage syrup, making it the same way I did, and then reducing that down to caramel. It might end up with the same problem, though. Look for future updates here.
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