Winter Pavlova with Pears, Mascarpone & Caramel Sauce

A luscious confection of vanilla-scented poached pears, a brittle meringue case, flurries of cream and a scandalously rich caramel sauce. This isn't a dessert you can rustle up in an instant - it takes time and effort to prepare - but I hope you will give it a bash, because I reckon you (and your guests) will be delighted by the result.

Winter Pavlova with Pears, Mascarpone & Caramel Sauce.

Classic Pavlovas have a slightly squidgy centre, but this is a rather dryer version, because I'm a fan of crackly meringue that's as white as snow and crumbles to a sweet dust in your mouth. Admittedly, this isn't easy to achieve when you're baking such a large volume of whipped egg white, because much depends on your oven, the freshness of your eggs, the humidity in your kitchen, and the other vagaries of the sugar/egg relationship.

I'm not a natural when it comes to any type of meringue - damn, it's tricky to make - but after much experimentation I've found that a slow drying-out process is the way to go.

What makes this dish special is the lovely taste of home-poached pears.

You can use any variety of pears for this recipe, provided they are small, sweet and just ripe. Yes, I know this is a tall order, because most pears are perfect for 20 minutes before they collapse into a floury mush.  But there are ways around this - please see my Cook's Notes at the end of this page.

If you're in a hurry, feel no shame in using excellent South African tinned pears. Your finished Pavlova won't look as glamorous, sure, but it will still taste glorious. And please keep the syrup for poaching other fruits. I put some cut-up guavas into the left-over syrup to cook, and my daughter described them as tasting of 'flowers and happiness'.

Winter Pavlova with Pears, Mascarpone and Caramel Sauce

5 extra-large free-range eggs
a pinch of cream of tartar
250 g caster sugar
1 x 250 g tub fresh mascarpone
1 cup (250 ml) fresh cream
1 tsp (5 ml) vanilla extract
¼ cup (60 ml) flaked almonds, lightly toasted to golden-brown in a dry frying pan

For the poached pears: 
5 small, ripe pears
2 cups (500 ml) water
1 cup (250 ml) caster sugar, or light brown sugar
1 whole vanilla pod [optional]
a thin slice of lemon, peel on

For the caramel sauce: 
1 cup (250 ml) caster sugar
5 Tbsp (75 ml) water
½ cup (125 ml) cream
3 Tbsp (45 ml) butter

First make the Pavlova. Heat the oven to 160 ºC. Separate the eggs, placing the egg whites in a spotlessly clean metal bowl. Add a pinch of cream of tartar. (Keep the yolks for making mayonnaise!)

Using an electric beater or a food processor fitted with a balloon whisk, beat the egg whites until they are standing up in stiff, dryish peaks.

Now trickle the caster sugar into the egg whites, a few tablespoons at a time, beating well between every addition. Take your time over this. When you've added all the sugar, continue beating for another 3-5 minutes, or until the meringue is extremely thick, firm and shiny (with no sign of grittiness when you rub a blob between your fingers) and easily holds its shape without drooping. (See Cook’s Notes for more tips)

Line a metal baking sheet with baking paper (put little blobs of meringue on six points under the paper to stick it down). Draw a circle on the paper, using a dinner plate as a template.

The meringue should be very thick & glossy. 

Spread a third of your meringue mixture over the paper, in an even circle. The easiest way to do this neatly is to place a pile of meringue in the centre of the circle, and then - using a palette knife - gently press down and out to create a neat, swirling circle.

Now place generous dollops of the remaining meringue around the edges of your circle (see picture; left).

Place the baking sheet on the middle rack of your oven, and immediately turn the heat down to 110 ºC (oven fan off). Bake for for an hour and a quarter then switch off the oven (don't open the door!) and let the meringue case dehydrate for for at least 8 hours, or until it is crisp and dry.

In the meantime, prepare the pears. Fill a large bowl with cold water and squeeze in the juice of half a lemon.  Using a potato peeler, neatly remove the skin from the whole pears, leaving their stalks intact. Drop each pear, as you've peeled it, into the bowl of lemony water.

The syrup is flavoured with vanilla & lemon. 

To make the poaching syrup, place the water, sugar, vanilla pod and lemon slice in a saucepan, set over a medium heat and bring to the boil. When the syrup begins to bubble, stir it gently until all the sugar crystals have dissolved. Simmer the syrup for a further 5 minutes.

Place the whole pears in the syrup and bring up to a gentle simmer. Cover the pot with a lid, turn the heat down to its lowest setting, and poach the pears for 5-8 minutes, or until they are just soft.

Let the pears cool completely. 

Fish the pears out of their poaching liquid and set aside on a plate to cool. Cut them in half lengthways, leaving a stalk on one half. Using a teaspoon or your thumbnail, gently pop the oval core out of each pear half, tearing it up towards the stalk to remove the fibrous threads.

Put the mascarpone into a bowl and beat it thoroughly until smooth. (It helps to leave it at room temperature for a few hours, until softened.) Whip the cream to a soft peak in a separate bowl, add the vanilla, and gently fold this into the mascarpone.

To make the caramel sauce, spread the caster sugar evenly over the bottom of a dry, thick-based frying pan, and sprinkle over the water.  Cook over a medium-high heat until the caramel is dark, rich golden brown, swirling the pan to distribute the dark-gold areas (see Cook's Notes)  Whisk in the cream, and then add the butter. Stir well and set aside to cool.

To assemble the Pavlova, fill the centre with two-thirds of the cream/mascarpone mixture, and arrange the pears on top, stalks pointing up. Place blobs of the remaining cream on top. Drizzle over the caramel sauce, and scatter the almonds on top.

Serves 6-8.

Cook's Notes

1. The meringue must be really, really stiff and glossy, or it will collapse in the oven.

2. The caramel sauce I've used here is loosely based on Gordon Ramsay's recipe. This is arguably the trickiest part of this recipe, as caramel is temperamental: not only does it burn with alarming speed, but it also has a tendency to crystallise for no apparent reason,  If your caramel suddenly turns thick and grainy after the sugar has melted, it cannot be rescued. Tip it into the bin, and start again in a new dry frying pan. Don't stir the caramel, and use a pastry brush to sweep any grains of sugar off the sides of the pan as it is heating.

3. To catch pears at their peak, place them in your fruit bowl alongside other fruits, which will hasten the ripening process. Check them twice a day by firmly pinching the flesh just below their stalks - when this is just soft enough to yield to the touch, peel and poach them, as described above. You can keep the pears, whole their syrup, for many days, until you're ready to make this dessert.

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Chicken with Bacon, Leeks and Cider, & how I met Gordon Ramsay, and found him polite

A luxurious dish with a silken sauce.

This is the one of the recipes I demonstrated at the Good Food and Wine Show last week.  I was pleased to receive an invitation to cook at the show, but gnawed my nails to the quick when I learned, rather late in the day, that 24 people from the audience would be cooking along with me in the Woolworths Real Food Theatre.  The dishes I'd chosen to demonstrate were too fiddly for a cook-along, so I abandoned them and instead selected three favourite recipes I knew could easily be done and dusted in 45 minutes.

As the main attraction, I settled on this easy crowd-pleaser, a recipe I developed for my cookbook Scrumptious: Food For Family and Friends. 

Before give you the recipe, I must tell you how star-struck I felt to meet Gordon Ramsay at the show, after watching his hugely entertaining demo, to which I was invited (by his sponsor, Checkers) as part of a media contingent.

I mention this because I complained bitterly on this blog three years ago when the 'VIP' ticket my husband bought me as a birthday present turned out to be a proper turkey.  It wasn't a good experience, and left such a sour taste that for several years I couldn't face going back.

So when I finally met the man, after a short wait in an over-excited book-signing queue, I was determined to get in my ten cents' worth. While he signed my copy of his new book Gordon Ramsay's Ultimate Cookery Course, I told him I was a food blogger, and his famous furrowed brow creased like an accordion. But I followed that up smartly by telling him I'd recently had my first cookbook published, and was thunderstruck when he leaned forward across the counter to grasp my hand in both of his, warmly congratulating me, as if I had recently won a Nobel Prize. Seizing the opportunity, I slapped a dog-eared copy of his autobiography Humble Pie on the counter and asked him if he'd be so kind as to write a message to my sons across the cover.  "Neither of my teenage sons was interested in cooking until they read this," I told him. "But now they are very interested. Can you please write something rude on the cover for them?"

He looked pleased, and asked, "What do you want me to write?"

"You f..king donkeys!" I replied, knowing my sons would be genuinely thrilled to be called such a thing (a famous line from certain Ramsay reality shows).

"I can't write that!" he said, clearly appalled by my suggestion. "Not for teenagers, I can't!"

"Oh, go on," I urged him.  "They will love it!"

With a bashful look - I can't think of any other word to describe his expression -  he scrawled a message across the book cover, but he censored his beloved F-word with an ellipsis.

This impressed me.

Anyway, moving on to my recipe. I love this luxurious coq-au-vin-style dish and make it quite often for friends when I'm looking for a comforting recipe with a complex flavour, but don't have time to fiddle around with a lot of chopping or stock-boiling or slow cooking. You can made this dish in half the time by chucking everything together in a pan and hoping for the best, but I've designed the recipe so that it creates its own deep-flavoured stock and sauce as it cooks, drawing wonderful earthy flavours from the bacon, mushrooms, leeks and chicken.

Any dry cider will do for this recipe, but you will get a superior result from a carefully brewed craft cider. I've used, on various occasions, two excellent South African ciders -  Everson's and Terre Madre - and was interested to note the subtle differences in the final result.

There is not a speck of flour in this recipe, yet the sauce reduces quite quickly to just the right state of silken thickness. You can't achieve this in a small, crowded pot, however, because there isn't enough surface area for the sauce to reduce in a hurry.  Make it in a large, shallow pan, such as an electric frying pan, or a paella pan if you have one.

If you can find fresh tarragon, use it by all means, but I find that good quality dried tarragon is just as pungent.  You can find good-quality freeze-dried tarragon at Woolies and in better supermarkets.

If you don't use alcohol in your cooking, use a not-too-sweet apple juice (such as Appletiser) instead of cider.

Recipe from Scrumptious: Food for Family and Friends (Random House Struik)

Chicken with Bacon, Leeks and Cider

two free-range chickens, or chicken pieces of your choice
3 large leeks
3 Tbsp (45 ml) butter
1 Tbsp (15 ml) olive oil
250 g back bacon
3 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
500 g tiny button mushrooms
3 cups (750 ml) dry cider
2½ tsp dried tarragon
a 10-cm  sprig of fresh thyme
1½ (375 ml) cups cream
salt and pepper
4 Tbsp (60 ml) finely chopped curly parsley

Remove any visible fat from the chickens and cut them into 16 portions (or ask your butcher to do this for you). Cut a lengthways slice halfway through the leeks and rinse, fanning out the leaves, under cold water. Finely slice the leeks (you’ll use the white and pale green parts only). Heat the butter and olive oil in a very large, shallow pan, add the leeks and bacon and fry over a medium heat for 4-5 minutes, without allowing the leeks to brown. Add the garlic and fry gently for another minute. Remove the leeks, bacon and garlic using a slotted spoon and set aside on a plate. Be sure to remove every trace of leek and garlic, as these will blacken during the next step and make the sauce bitter.

Brown the chicken pieces on both sides, over a high heat, and in batches, for 3-4 minutes, or until the skin is crisp and golden (add a little more butter or oil to the pan if necessary). Set aside on a plate. Drain off all but 1 tablespoon of the fat, add the mushrooms and fry over a high heat for 2-3 minutes, or until they begin to turn golden. Pour in the cider and bubble briskly for 3 minutes, stirring and scraping to dislodge the sediment on the bottom of the pan. Return the chicken (skin side up), leeks and bacon to the pan and add the tarragon, thyme sprig and a big pinch of salt. Reduce heat and bubble, uncovered for 25-35 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked right through. Turn the chicken pieces over three or four times while they cook. Remove the thyme sprig, stir in the cream, season to taste with salt and pepper and cook gently for a few more minutes, or until the sauce has slightly reduced and thickened.

Scatter with parsley and serve hot with mashed or crushed potatoes and a green salad or vegetables.

Serves 6-7. 

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Book Review: Ramsay's Best Menus, plus I make Gordon's Italian Meatballs

When Aletta Lintvelt, Food24's new food editor, asked me to review a cookbook from Kalahari.net, it took a split second for me to choose the new Ramsay book. I'm a great fan of Gordon Ramsay's, you see, and I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to cook a dish from his latest book.

I had the chance to see the world's most famous chef in action last year at the Cape Town Good Food and Wine Show (read about this event here, and about why am a Ramsay admirer) and thoroughly enjoyed his presentation. I recall him cooking a sticky chicken dish of some sort at the demo, and that's the first recipe in the book I tried. I didn't like it at all. But more about that later.

Click here to read my review on Food24 and to find out what I thought about Gordon Ramsay's meatballs.
   

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A food bloggers' master class in Cape Town, with chef Neill Anthony

You meet a lot of interesting people on Twitter, but you don't always have the chance to meet them in real life. When I 'met' Neill Anthony recently and learned that this talented young chef, who trained in kitchens of Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wareing and others, was making waves as a personal chef Cape Town, I wasted no time in putting him in an elbow-lock (virtually speaking, of course) and tweaking his ears until he agreed to present a master class for local food bloggers.

Not that he needed much tweaking.  Neill was enthusiastic about the idea from the beginning, and together we planned a class that would challenge and inspire people who were keen to pick up top tips from some of England's finest kitchens. I didn't want any ordinary cooking demo - most of the best food bloggers and home cooks have long since mastered the basics, and beyond - but rather a class that would help already-competent cooks hone their skills and sharpen their recipes.

We were not disappointed. What I found so fascinating about watching Neill at work was his precision, his concentration, and his razor-sharp attention to detail.  He has the lightest, nimblest fingers, and his work space is as clean and shining as an operating table.  (A bit of an eye-opener for me, the world's messiest cook.)

And the food? Well, it was heavenly. What really opened my eyes was how Neill created such beautiful, clean-flavoured dishes using so few ingredients.  And I mean really few ingredients: I shopped for the event, and I kept having to check and recheck my shopping list because the trolley seemed so empty.

After the demo, we all sat down to enjoy a beautiful three-course meal, with wines that Neill had bought along from Silverhurst. He also bought a big bottle of award-winning Willow Creek olive oil for each attendee (thanks, Willow Creek and Silverhurst!).

On the menu, hand-made ravioli and tortellini with a baby spinach, ricotta and liquid egg-yolk filling, served with a butternut purée and an onion and milk froth; Norwegian salmon with baby beetroot, and whole white beans and puréed beans with tarragon; and a boozy prune and brandy soufflé.

But I'll let the images tell the story. Below, you'll find some lovely pictures from the demo, taken by Barry White, a professional photographer, who - following instructions from his wife and boss, my dear friend Judy Levy - kindly tolerated us invading the White/Levy household.  Judy and Barry have agreed to host future master classes at their beautiful home in Oranjezicht over the coming months. (Watch this space for details, or send me an email if you'd like to be on my mailing list: hobray at gmail.com.)

We're planning to hold similar master classes once a month, featuring Cape Town's top chefs. We'll also be inviting artisanal  food producers to showcase their wares and demonstrate their recipes. (And another thank you to Verlaque Fine Foods, who gave us some beautiful bottles of their brilliantly flavoursome 'Splashes', balsamic reductions and preserves, and Sam Linsell of The Smoking Shed, who handed out samples of her fantastic smoked wares, which include an ethereal cold-smoked tuna; deliciously crunchy cashews and macadamias;  and - for everyone to take home -  blocks of cold-smoked butter and little packets of smoked sea salt.)

Disclosure: Verlaque Fine Foods, who provided product give-aways for this demo, is one of of my clients. Print Friendly

Good Food & Wine Show: the good, the bad, and the Gordon

I never miss a Gordon Ramsay show on TV if I can possibly help it, so there was no way I was going to miss the opportunity to see the world's most famous chef in action at Cape Town's Good Food and Wine Show. At R750 (about $100), the 'VIP' tickets were staggeringly expensive, but my husband surprised me by presenting me with one as my early birthday present.

Ever since I read Ramsay's fascinating autobiography, Humble Pie, a few years ago, I have greatly admired him, and have followed his career with interest. Yes, I know he swears like a sailor and can be unspeakably rude to colleagues, minions and foes, but I dig Gordon anyway. Not only because he's knee-wateringly sexy (let's get that one out of the way, shall we?) but also because he's tenacious, talented, kind-hearted, hard-working and -  most important of all -  utterly fearless.

Fearlessness is a quality I desperately admire in people who have it. I'm not a fearful person (fearlessness is not the opposite of fearful) but I would love to have total conviction, and an unswerving faith, in my own abilities. 'Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens,' design icon George Lois once said, and that is a sentiment that rings very true for me. I would also love to have big enough balls to tell annoying people to fuck right off (I am getting better at this, the older I become).

It's Ramsay's loathing of mediocrity that is his greatest asset, and I have no doubt that this is why he has become, in the culinary world at least, a global super-star.  Both my teenage sons (who usually read only encyclopaedic fantasy epics) raced through Humble Pie and regularly watch his shows with relish and a lot of guffawing. I heartily endorse their admiration of Ramsay because I would like them, both kind-hearted and clever boys, to be fearless in their adult lives.

So, that's why I wanted to see the man in action.  And his show this morning was great: he was funny, warm and polite.  But, my goodness, he had to work hard to get a belly laugh out of a rather subdued Cape Town audience.  Half his rude jokes went right over their heads, and when he asked how the audience liked the T-shirt he was wearing (our national soccer team's official jersey) he raised - disgracefully - only a feeble cheer from a mostly pale-skinned housewifely audience.

I wasn't blown away by Ramsay's humdrum choice of demo dishes - a potato-and-haddock soup, sticky chicken and tarte tatin - and would have loved to have seen him demonstrate something more edgy and challenging, and something we haven't seen made on TV a hundred times.  But this was a minor disappointment, compared to what came next.

When the show ended, we VIP-ticket-holders were told to stay in our seats, while the rest of the audience - the cheap seats - filed out.  Oh, goody, I thought.  Now for the expensive part of our tickets!  What would this be?  Another short demo? A Q&A session?  Perhaps - gasp - a free stream of expletives?  But it turned out that we were held back in class only to receive our  'free', pre-signed copies of Ramsay's book Easy.  By the time we got outside, the queue for book-signing queue was 150 deep.  At this point, I wandered away to sample a few goodies at the nearby stalls.  When I rejoined the queue, some time later, I stood patiently in line and eventually found myself in a band of infuriated VIP ticket holders who'd been told they couldn't meet Ramsay, or have their books personalised, because they were 'too far behind' in the queue.  The security guards were heckled, feet were stamped, fists were shook and I enthusiastically joined the fracas, because I wanted to ask Ramsay to sign my copy of Humble Pie. Eventually some organiser or manager pitched up, reluctantly peeled her cell phone away from her ear, and snottily told the people who'd parted with R750 to 'calm down'.  Standing next to a sign saying 'VIP Book Signings' she said, without a trace of irony, 'You got what you paid for'.

The long and the short of it?  If you'd bought a cheap seat (and let this be a lesson to me my husband) you got the long end of the stick, and a face-to-face meeting with His Ramsayness. If you were rattling your jewellery in the prime seats, you got a poke in the eye.

But what of the rest of the show?  I don't mean to sound like a grumbler, but I am always disappointed by big food events like these, because of the dearth of really interesting, innovative food producers. I see that my sentiments are shared by my fellow blogger, Sam of Drizzle and Dip, who posted this about the event.

I'm not interested in stalls peddling knives, gimmicky vegetable turners and expensive casserole dishes, and I cannot understand why bath salts, soaps and crappy powdered stocks are featured at a good food show.  There is always a surfeit of stalls selling olives, olive oil, tapenade, chilli sauces and pickles, and never enough emphasis on small producers of excellent artisanal cheeses, sausages, breads and the like.

Having said that, there were a few stalls that really stood out for me, and I came back with two bags laden with some outstanding local produce.

Though I'm not mad about bottled sauces, I have to applaud Pesto Princess for their delicious, knock-your-socks-off pastes and pestos.  One of the best products in this show, in my opinion, is Pesto Princess's gorgeous fresh Chimichurri, a zingy Argentinian paste of coriander, parsley, chilli, garlic and lemon.  Their fresh chermoula and berebere pastes are as fresh, sparky and delicious, I bet, as anything you'll taste in Morocco or Ethiopia.   In second place is an exceptional, award-winning hand-made camembert by La Petite France. With its velvety skin, melting texture and exquisite creaminess and flavour, this is a cheese worth lying under a train for.  I also bought a side of a most beautiful and delicate smoked trout from Harty's of Somerset West, and several packs of excellent home-made sausages -  Toulouse, Swedish, Chourico and a devilish 'Diablo' -  from Rudi's of Gordon's Bay. And I was delighted to see tasty, tender pork neck on sale at the Ranch Meat Centres stall. I've been hunting for a good supplier of pork neck since I moved to Cape Town, spurred by the fact that recipes for pork neck are by far and away the most visited pages on this site.

I wish I could give you details for all these producers, but most of them are so small that they don't have websites.  The official website for this show doesn't list suppliers' details (the dragons of mediocrity have invaded that garden) but I did collect some cards, and will happily send you email contact details for these suppliers if you want them.  (I'm not going to post them here, for fear of their email addresses being harvested and spammed). My email address is hobray at gmail dot com.

PS I did request an interview with Ramsay, but all the slots were taken.  The invitation to the media briefing, promised to me by the reigning pee-ar, never arrived.  Those pesky dragons again.

POSTSCRIPT: I see that visitors who paid big money to attend the Gordon Ramsay event at his Maze restaurant were also upset.  Read the organisers' response, and comments from readers. Print Friendly