Chocolate and mushroom mille-feuille or a fennel tart, are the dish du jour for many chefs the world over today, as the lines between sweet and savoury elements in a dessert are increasingly getting blurred. Given the adventurous palate of the consumer, chefs are skipping predictable ingredients and flavours and creating the unexpected.
Fusion is the buzzword in cooking and desserts are not untouched by this technique. Marrying unique flavours and textures by using avant-garde ingredients is becoming common. Be it salted caramel, lemon grass, spices, vegetables or even herbs, pastry chefs are now borrowing extensively from the other side of the kitchen and integrating these ingredients into their desserts, thus giving flavour profiles a whole new meaning. Salt balances the sweetness and brings out the burst of other flavours in desserts. Savoury ingredients are thus the first choice for chefs when it comes to innovation.
In India too, chefs are getting experimental and pushing boundaries. Desserts are no longer something to be just eaten after a meal, but instead are a painstakingly created piece de resistance with unusual or uncommon ingredients galore.
Matcha Green Tea
For the longest time, health-conscious people have been sipping green tea as they count their calories. Pulverised into a fine powder from leaves, Japanese green tea in its new avatar has now caught the fancy of chefs too, who love its vibrant hue and bitter-sweet punch in desserts. For instance, the Pistachio and Green Tea Chiffon — comprising a pistachio and green tea chiffon cake with yuzu cream, vanilla sable and orange jelly — is a simple, but flavourful dessert which makes use of matcha green tea. Available at The Fatty Bao in Delhi, Chef Manu Chandra bakes his chiffon cake with matcha green tea infused in the batter, which imparts a prominent, yet unusual flavour to the dessert.
Bacon
If you thought bacon pairs well with eggs for breakfast only, think again. Salty bacon is used by chefs to give relief to the palate from the sweetness in a dessert. Chef Alyssa Chesson of Bono Boutique Ice Cream, in Bandra, Mumbai, has put it to use to enhance the flavours of her gourmet ice cream. The milk chocolate and bacon ice cream she offers is replete with bacon streaks, which bring out the creaminess of the milk chocolate in the ice cream.
Jowar
The once-forgotten poor man’s food — millets are back in our kitchens and how. Of course, used mostly to create savoury dishes such as dosa s , idli s, and pancakes. But Chef Xerxes Bodhanwala has gone a step further and used the versatile jowar flour to bake a gluten-free and vegan cake along with chocolate — the JCC or Jowar Chocolate Cake, as he calls it. Available at Red Fork, Bengaluru, jowar flour, beetroot, 55% dark chocolate and coconut oil are combined to make this light cake and it is served with beetroot chips, coconut beetroot butter, citrus fruits and puffed jowar . One impressive-looking dessert that comes to your table.
Lamb mince
Although a coveted ingredient for carnivores in savoury dishes from samosas to matar keema , the thought of this being used in a sweet dish or dessert immediately conjures a strange image. A ‘sweetmeat’ in the literal sense, Chef Robin Batra at Trident, Mumbai BKC, boils the lean meat in milk three times to completely remove the strong odour of the meat. Post that, the softened meat is minced with saffron. This mince preparation is finally slow-cooked in khus, paan , cardamom, milk and ghee and the resultant gosht halwa is rather popular.
Avocado
Rich in antioxidants, the creamy and fleshy avocado that is touted as a super food is commonly seen in salads or guacamole nowadays. But Chef Sharad Dewan makes use of it as a purée in a dessert. Used as avocado cream, in an Avocado and Matcha Tiramisu, this fruit is cleverly integrated to enhance the texture and lends itself well to the other ingredients with stronger flavours. Available at The Park Kolkata.
