Steamed Brioche With Apple Puree and Rose Water Foam : TGRWT #17 Apple and Rose

Well this is combination of a flavour pairing suggestion of the TGRWT #17: apple and rose and a recipe from my 'A Day At Bulli' with other recipes thrown in when I had to work around issues. I must admit that I got rather excited by this idea.... great a chance to use my Lecithin to create a foam! And if you ever have a chance do look up the El Bulli recipe that I riffed on - Steamed Brioche with Rose Scented Mozzarella do so... the dish looks amazing and I just hope that someday I will be able to create something that looks that fabulous. What did I create? A humble peasant version as you can see from the above photo. Still, I learnt lots, like I cannot make brioche (hot hands I think) and try not to stray too far from the recipe.

The result of my culinary experiment - a fabulous combination of apple and rose but my straying from the recipe ruined the brioche. I think I could have upped the ante on the rose taste... should have used rose essence and not rose water and if i had some edible rose petals around the dish could have been presented a whole lot better. This is definitely something that I will try and perfect - just think it would be a great show-stopping dessert. Just need to work at that brioche recipe.

Brioche

225g flour
15g yeast
2 eggs
90g butter
1 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
3 tbsp milk (I ended up just putting a dash of milk in because of the consistency of the dough)

The brioche recipe came from Celtnet.co.uk; I abandoned the El Bulli recipe early on when it required a sourdough starter which I couldn't be bothered to wait for (first mistake). Essentially I followed the celtnet recipe until the time it came to cook the brioche then I reverted to the El Bulli recipe. I used a stoneground 5 seed flour (second mistake) thinking that it might add some different tastes to the dish (it did but they were the wrong tastes and the dough was just too dense). Plus to top it all I used dried yeast (third mistake) and even though the dough did rise I think using fresh yeast would have produced better results.

producing the brioche dough

Apple Puree

5 apples peeled, cored and chopped
32.5g sugar
187ml wine
1/2 vanilla pod

I used the recipe for apple puree from the hydrocolloid recipe collection of Martin Lersch available on his blog Khymos. I just found the recipe for apple gel and took the apple puree recipe from that. A note on the choice of apples. I chose to use Pink Lady apples because of their wonderful aroma.... perhaps they were too delicate - yes it was appley but the sugar content was too high. Some sort of cooking apple would have worked better.

The apple puree cooking with the vanilla pod

Rose Water Foam

250 g milk
2 tbsp rose water
1.75g Lecithin

Rose water foam ingredients

I just used the recipe from my El Bulli book (page 305) and exchanged rose essence for rose water. I just added the rose water to the milk until it started to smell like roses (I know pretty haphazard but this was one of the successes). Essentially I just whizzed up all the ingredients with my immersion blender and them skimmed the top of the surface of the liquid to create the foam.

Now to putting it all together....

I rolled out the dough and broke of pieces of dough about the size of a hen's egg. See below. I rolled each of the pieces into spheres that I squashed a little to make this little rounds of dough.

Next I steamed the dough balls over a water with some rose water added... the aromas were fantastic.

The brioche were steamed for 16 minutes then lifted out and laid on parchment paper to cool a little. I hollowed out the brioche (see below for my first attempt).

I filled the hollowed out brioche with the apple puree which I had previously warmed. Stuck them under the grill for 30 seconds and plated up scooping the rose water foam over the brioche.

I know it looks like a baked potato that is erupting but the apple puree and rose water foam was a great combination