Wednesday, January 12, 2011

ON FAILURE: Pains of the Giant Peach

(it rhymes with James and the Giant Peach. Isn't that clever?!?!)



It looks like a peach with some sort of sauce on top.

But it isn't. Can you improve on a peach?

Shall we look inside?



The peach has been hollowed out and filled with some shortbread biscuit (mixed with butter to firm it) and a sort of ganache of white chocolate, mint and coconut.

It should have worked, but why didn't it?

Firstly, there were errors in execution:
- The peach wasn't as ripe as I wanted. The flesh was still too firm.
- The ganache wasn't thick enough. So it never set like I wanted it to. It stayed like a sauce. Ideally, the eater should be able to pick up the peach and eat it like a normal piece of fruit, ganache oozing out like peach juice. Efforts to "set" it with agar agar were disastrous (first attempt at using agar agar).

But there was also an error in concept:
- The peach may not be the best choice for fruit. When the stone was removed, a whole in the top opened up. 1) That doesn't look good and 2) The sauce has more chance of running out.
- While the ganache was nice, the integration with the fruit wasn't there. Eating it felt like eating a stuffed peach, not a "new fruit".

Back to the drawing board, but with new knowledge in hand.

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