peregrine

tgrwt 18

blue cheese has never been my favorite dessert flavor. i have seen it in desserts before, namely ice cream and flan, but using it has not been one of my successes. for that reason this tgrwt, hosted by aidan brooks was love/hate from the start. the rules were simple: use the two flavors together in a dish and see how the flavors pair. now to add my rules: no ice cream, no custard, no walnuts, pears or nut/fruit bread. use “local” (english) victoria plums and local nanny williams blue goat cheese.

i did not really know where to go with this so i started by tasting the plum and cheese together to see what the combination was like. right away i could see how they fit together and complemented each other. the more challenging part was to make the two work with a sweet element. i wanted to keep the flavors simple and try to stay as close as possible to just plum and blue cheese but after tasting the two with normal white sugar muscovado sugar made a better contribution.

the flavors were decided, now for the textures. natural and minimally altered textures were the goal. the plums were peeled and vacuum infused with acacia honey. raw muscovado was sprinkled on and muscovado syrup set with gelatin for the jelly. the nannay williams was grated and used unaltered. for a little additional crunch powdered croquant was used with a little cheese to make a caramelized cheese. a little whipped muscovado jelly and plum puree was added to finish off the dessert.

i did enjoy the combination of the plum and the blue cheese. nanny williams is relatively mild but it still has the astringency of blue cheese, the plums were quite bitter and acidic but when the muscovado was added the three made an interesting combination of sweet, sour and astringent.

Tags: blue cheese, croquant, moscovado, plated dessert, plums, tgrwt