For the very first recipe we publish as Flor, I’d like to start from the end. It may feel like a bit of a spoiler for those who haven’t visited us yet, but that’s alright I guess. Now you have something to look forward to.
When we were thinking about our first menu, it felt important to me to build our dessert around fruit. Partly because I love fruit and its versatility in the kitchen, but also because it is such a wonderful product of nature, and I want to celebrate that as much as possible. The question, of course, was which fruit to use. Winter is always a little tricky.
While looking for inspiration, I came across a curious passage in The Last Bite by Anna Higham. She recounts how, on her first day at Lyle’s, she spent twenty minutes after service talking about pears with the chef, and how essential it felt for them, as a British restaurant, to have pears on the menu. That immediately made me reflect on my own background in the kitchen, and on a pear dessert that once left a strong impression on me.
When I was a stagiaire in Piedmont, I was asked to come up with a dessert. It was the middle of winter, and I wanted to work with a very special, ancient local pear variety called Martin Sec. These pears are small and extremely hard, but when cooked they develop a beautiful aroma and texture. I kept the approach traditional, poaching them in local Pelaverga wine and serving them with Seirass del Fen ice cream, a local salted ricotta aged in hay. I was incredibly happy when the chef decided to put that dessert on the menu. At the time, it meant everything to me.
Since serving pears raw and perfectly ripe isn’t a realistic option in our kitchen (at least not yet), I began looking for different ways to cook them. One idea was to poach them in cream infused with what we had on hand: bergamot peels from our friends at Todolí, dried chamomile I picked in the mountains last spring with my father-in-law, and a little fresh thyme. This technique gave us a very satisfying result: a pear that is evenly cooked, juicy, fragrant, and with a pleasant, consistent texture. We serve it with a rich sheep’s milk ice cream made by Cristian at Gelato Lab, and an old-school oat biscuit.
For me, though, the best part of this process is what happens to the cream after poaching the pears. By then, it’s more flavorful than ever, having absorbed not only the perfume of the bergamot and chamomile, but also the richness of the pears themselves. The result is beautiful. Almost intangibly delicate, it tastes of elegance.
Before opening Flor, I wanted to repeat a tradition I read about in Manresa’s cookbook: A bowl of wrapped house-made caramels that guests could help themselves to as they left the restaurant. Such a generous, thoughtful gesture. I wanted to give our spin on it and make it our own, and using the leftover pear cream felt like the perfect way to do it. We adjusted the caramel recipe to balance the sugars, and the result was exactly what we were hoping for.
By coincidence – which took things a step further – during our last summer vacation in France, my girlfriend and I found an Italian pear-shaped ice container from the 70s in a vintage furniture shop in Bordeaux. We couldn’t resist buying it. When Flor was about to open, it suddenly clicked: there could be no better way to present our pear caramels to our guests.
A pear caramel, served in a pear.
Pear Poached in Cream, Sheep’s Milk Ice Cream and Old-School Oat Biscuits
To cook the Pears:
- · 645g Cream, 38% fat
- · 130g Sugar
- · 4g Salt, Maldon
- · 2g Thyme, sprigs, fresh
- · 4g Chamomile, sprigs, dried, from Aitana mountains
- · Peel of half Bergamot
- · 5ud Pear, Comice variety, ripe
Add the Cream, Sugar and Salt and heat it gently to dissolve. Do not heat the Cream too much.
Meanwhile, peel the Pears and place them in a vacuum bag with the Thyme, Chamomile and Bergamot Peel.
Pour the Cream on top, vacuum seal at 100% and cook in a steam oven set at 80ºC for 1:30H.
Let cool to room temperature and transfer to the fridge to infuse overnight.
On the next day, gently remove the Pears from the Cream. Strain the Cream and keep it to make the Pear Caramel.
To make the Pear Juice and Perry Vinegar Caramel:
- · 1200g Pear, juice, strained
- · 1200g Sugar
- · 200g Butter
- · 16g Salt, Maldon
- · 300g Vinegar, perry
Reduce the Pear Juice to 600g over high heat, whisking constantly. Pass it through a sieve.
Add the Sugar to the Pear Juice in a clean pot and bring it to high heat. Cook the caramel to 120ºC, whisking constantly with a whisk.
Take it off the heat, add the Butter and Vinegar and stir.
Simmer the Caramel for 5’ more and then transfer to a 1L container. Keep at room temperature.
To make the Old-School Oat Biscuits:
- · 675g Butter, cubed
- · 600g Sugar, demerara
- · 450g Oats, old-fashioned rolled
- · 450g Flour, wheat, all purpose
- · 23g Salt, fine
- · 23g Soda, baking
Add the Butter and Demerara Sugar in the bowl of the KitchenAid set with the paddle attachment. Start blending on slow.
Meanwhile, mix all the other ingredients in a separate bowl.
Raise the speed of the KitchenAid to make sure the Butter and Sugar are well incorporated.
Stop the machine. Remove the mix from the sides of the bowl with a silicone spatula.
Add all of the mix of the other ingredients at once and blend again until a dough is formed. Do not overwork the dough.
Separate equally into 6 balls of 370g each.
Roll each ball between two sheets of parchment paper with a rolling pin, working from the centre-out and rotating the sheet often. Do not roll it too thinly.
Transfer to the blast-chiller for 10’. Meanwhile, set the oven to 180ºC with full-fan.
Remove the parchment paper from the top of each tray.
Place the trays in the oven and bake for 13’, or until nicely browned.
Remove the trays from the oven and let them cool at room temperature over resting racks.
Roughly break it, place in a plastic container and keep it closed at room temperature with a silica bag.
To make the Sheep’s Milk Ice Cream:
- · 660g Milk, sheep’s, Val de Cinca Rebaño Propio
- · 134g Cream 35% fat
- · 130g Sucrose
- · 50g Dextrose
- · 20g Milk, skimmed, powder
- · 3g Stabilizer
- · 3g Salt, Maldon
Day 1:
Bring the Milk to 40ºC.
Meanwhile, mix all the remaining ingredients. Shear in the dry mix in the lukewarm Milk.
Bring everything to 75ºC and keep it at that temperature for 2’, whisking constantly with a whisk.
Blend with a hand-blender to homogenize well.
Strain in a bowl set over another bowl with ice water and chill rapidly to 4ºC. Keep it in the fridge overnight.
Day 2:
Churn the mix in the ice cream machine. Remove the mix at -9ºC and blast-freeze.
Serve at -12ºC.
To plate the dessert:
On the right side of a bowl, place a tiny spoonful of the Pear Juice and Perry Vinegar Caramel. Right beside it, place another tiny spoonful of the Old-School Oat Biscuits, broken into a crumb.
Now, portion each pear into 6 neat wedges, removing its seeds, stems and other hard parts.
Place each wedge on top of the Caramel, then place a quenelle of ice cream on top of the Biscuits crumb. Spray 3 times with Vin Jaune vinegar and cover with a nice piece of Old-School Oat Biscuits.
Pear Caramels
- · 183g Sugar
- · 1,4g Salt, Maldon, plus some more to sprinkle over the caramel
- · 66g Glucose, syrup
- · 400g Cream, reserved from poaching the Pears
Add all the ingredients in a pan and bring it to 117º/118ºC over high heat, whisking constantly with a whisk.
Immediately transfer to a shallow squared container, sprinkle with Maldon Salt on top and transfer to the blast chiller to cool.
Once cold but not frozen, neatly cut it into 1,5 X 2,5cm pieces. Wrap them individually in greaseproof paper and keep them in the Pear-Shaped Container.
