Passion Fruit, Crème Fraîche and White Chocolate Cream Pie

In the second of my series of Valentine's Day food for lovers, I present to you this wickedly creamy and rather delicate pie, gently scented with fresh passion fruit (granadillas, we call them in South Africa) and enriched with white chocolate.

Isn't 'passion fruit' a perfect name for this most erotic exotic of fruits?  The name, however, refers not to the juicy fruit of this South American vine, but to its beautiful, orchid-like flowers, which are said to resemble symbolic elements of the Passion of Christ.

According to this Wikipedia article, Spanish Christian missionaries in the 15th and 16th centuries adopted the unique physical structures of this plant, particularly the numbers of its various flower parts, as symbols of the last days of Jesus and especially His crucifixion. For example, the tendrils represent the whips that were used in the flagellation of Christ, while the flower's radial filaments represent the crown of thorns.

(And as for the word 'granadilla', I believe this is derived from the Spanish 'granada', meaning pomegranate. I have no idea why South Africans say 'granadilla' and not 'passion fruit'; I put this question to my friends on Twitter the other night, and even that clever bunch couldn't come up with an answer. I'll do some digging and get back to you.)

I love the heady sharp-sweet taste of granadillas, but I find them quite intense, even aggressive, so I've used them sparingly in this tart.  Because I wanted a soft, voluptuous tart, I've avoided cream cheese and instead used crème fraîche, a slightly sour, thick cream with a lovely light zinginess.

Granadillas are in high season now in South Africa, and I was anticipating a bumper crop from the three vines I planted against a sunny wall last year. Alas, the vines have produced, between them, three fruits: let's call them A, B and C. A fell off and rotted in the flowerbed, and B and C are as hard and green as tennis balls, though not anywhere as big.  So, supermarket granadillas it was.

This is fairly easy to make, but do measure all the ingredients - especially the gelatine - very precisely, using level cups and teaspoons, to ensure a perfect, whippy texture.

Lining the base of the tin with clingfilm allows you to lift it easily onto a pie plate (see Cook's Notes, below)

Passion Fruit, Crème Fraîche and White Chocolate Cream Pie

For the biscuit crust:
one packet (200 g) Tennis biscuits, or similar crumbly coconut biscuits
100 g unsalted butter, softened

For the filling:
200 g white chocolate
20 ml (4 tsp) tepid water
2 tsp (10 ml) gelatine powder
one 250-gram tub crème fraîche (I use Lancewood, or Woolies)
½ cup (125 ml) fresh passion fruit pulp
½ cup (125 ml) condensed milk
the finely grated zest of half a lemon
20 ml (4 tsp) fresh lemon juice
1 cup (250 ml) whipping cream

To top:
a little fresh passion fruit pulp

Break up the biscuits and process them to fine crumbs in a food processor (or crush them with a rolling pin). Place in a bowl, add the soft butter, and stir well to combine. Wet the base of a non-stick 24-cm springform cake tin and cover with a sheet of clingfilm. Tuck the edges of the clingfilm under the base, and place it in its ring. (If there are  wrinkles, gently stretch out the clingfilm.)

Press the biscuit mixture evenly onto the base of the tin and place in the fridge while you make the topping. A good way to get a nice even crust with a sharp edge:  lay a small shot glass on its side, rim touching the side of the tin, and roll it lightly round in a circle.

Break up the white chocolate and place it in a glass or metal bowl over a pot of simmering water. Allow to melt gently (and take care not to allow steam into the chocolate, as it has a tendency to 'seize').

Put the water in a little bowl, sprinkle the gelatine evenly on top and set aside to sponge.

Put the crème fraîche, passion fruit pulp, condensed milk, lemon zest and lemon juice into a mixing bowl and whisk until smooth and well combined. Stir the chocolate and scrape it into the mixing bowl (work quickly here, or it will set). Whisk until quite smooth.

Put the sponged gelatine into the pot of simmering water (the water should come half way up the sides) and allow to melt. When the liquid is clear, remove the bowl and set aside to cool for a minute. Whisk the melted gelatine into the other ingredients.

Whip the cream to a nice firm peak. Stir a large spoon of cream into the crème fraîche mixture to slacken it, then very gently fold in the rest of the cream.

Pour the filling onto the prepared crust (pile it all in the middle, and then gently press down in the centre with the back of a big spoon so that the filling spreads evenly outwards to 'kiss' the edges of the tin. Cover with clingfilm and refrigerate until set (two to three hours).

Warm the sides of the tin (as described below) and release the cake. Slide a palette knife between the crust and the clingfilm, turning the pie as you go and using gentle levering movements, and then slide the cake onto a platter. Pour a little fresh granadilla pulp on top. Slice the pie using a knife dipped in hot water.

Makes one 24-cm pie; serves 6-8


Cook's Notes 

These are a repeat of the instructions on the post about my Buttermilk Cheesecake with a Strawberry Topping

There are various methods of loosening a gelatine-set dessert from its mould. Professional chefs use a blowtorch, which is briefly flicked over the outside of the tin, but this is a risky business, as a few seconds too long can liquefy the outside of the cheesecake and, besides, it's useless if you're using a plastic jelly mould. A better way is to dip a kitchen cloth in boiling water, and press it to outside of the cold tin for a few seconds. But the best way of all, I've found, is to use a hot pack designed for soothing acheing muscles.

If you don't have a Happy Hugger, here's how to make one yourself. (I keep one of these in my kitchen drawer for the sole purpose of loosening jellies!). Steal a long cotton sock from someone's drawer. Fill it with rice or barley, and tie a firm knot in the open end. Place the sock in a microwave oven for 2-3 minutes, or until very warm to the touch. Press the hot pack around the edges of the tin, for 30 seconds at a time, moving it around the edges as necessary. At the same time, release the spring-form lever (or lift the cake ring)  in small increments.

 When you cut the pie, use a hot knife (heated over a flame, or in a bowl of boiling water) for slicing.

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Tinned peaches with cold Ideal Milk: long live tinned food!

If you grew up in South Africa in the 1960s and 70s, you might well fall into a dead faint at the mention of tinned Koo peaches and Ideal Milk. This was the definitive pudding of my childhood: big, sweet, golden cling-peach halves swimming in nectar and doused with ice-cold evaporated milk, poured straight from the tin. Into a little scratched plastic bowl. Eaten, tummy-down, on the sun-baked floor of the stoep, or on the slasto (crazy-paving).

[Note: September 2013: A shortened version of this post was published as a column in the Sunday Times on Sunday 22 September. Click here to read it].

If you don't remember that, you will surely remember those pale wobbling jellies made from Ideal Milk, gelatine and tinned fruit.

This may sound to you like shudder-inducing, trashy food, in these days of seasonal, organic greens and carbon footprints and exhortations to live greenly. But it wasn't: it was just the best taste ever invented, along with Coca-Cola, Simba Salt-and-Vinegar Chips, Smarties, All-Gold Tomato Sauce, Zoo Biscuits and Eskimo Pies.

Canned, bottled and frozen foods have had a lot of bad press, which I think is an impertinence on the part of foodies and TV chefs. First, it's easy to shun preserved food if you have a fridge and electricity and live in a land of milk and honey. But for millions of poor folk in Africa - and elsewhere - a tin of food is an unimaginable luxury.

Righteous indignation aside, there is another reason why preserved foods deserve a little respek.

Turn your nose up at a tin of soup, okay, but don't overlook the fact that the ancient technology of preserving surplus food - starting with sun-drying, and moving on across the millennia to salting, pressing, brining and pickling - is what allowed our ancestors to get sleek and healthy, live to a long age, and give birth to strong, big-brained children. Where would the Greeks and Romans be without olive oil? Or the nations around the Atlantic without salt cod? Or South African pioneers without biltong?

You might shun preservatives and additives and irradiation, but without your distant ancestors having had the savvy to preserve what they harvested for the lean months ahead, you probably wouldn't be here at all.

I'm not saying for a moment that preserved food is better or healthier or worthier in any way than fresh. But I chafe at the notion that eating anything that wasn't plucked, still beaded with dew, from your own garden, or from the organic farm next door, is an act of eco-terrorism.

In the characteristally sneering words of A.A. Gill, trashing Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's* greeniness: 'Growing your own vegetables is a bit like making your own fridge or whittling a car. Possible, but stupid.... The idea that ideal people should strive to live like 18th-century crofters is intellectual silage.'

Of course I don't like tinned pilchards, or canned Vienna sausages; I'm lucky enough to be able to afford good food that's fresh and tasty and not crawling with flies or seething with salmonella. But don't ask me to pour scorn on preserved foods.

There are some ingredients that, when tinned, have no ambitions to be anything like the fresh versions of themselves, but have a special and distinctive character of all of their own. They're not looking to be a substitute for the fresh thing. They're Tinned and Proud Of It.

Take, for example, solid tuna in oil, white asparagus cuts, chickpeas, tinned green and black olives, Italian plum tomatoes, salty little anchovies wrapped around capers, protein- and fibre-packed beans, and smooth apricot jam. And then there are the tinned South African fruits (the best of which are cling peaches, pears and guavas): perfect, blemish-free, delicious sweet nuggets that are ten times better tinned shortly after picking than delivered, bruised and mushy, to the local supermarket.

But back to Ideal Milk. This is a famous South African brand - and popular in several other African countries - that has a distinctive milky flavour that I can't describe to you, suffice to say that it tastes like mother's milk to me.

Evaporated milk is made by drawing off the water content of the milk, which enriches and slightly thickens it. When it's chilled - six hours in the fridge, or an hour and a half in a domestic freezer - it can be beaten to double its original volume into a thick, creamy swirl. It adds a smooth creaminess to soups, mashed potato and white sauce, makes wonderful jellies, fridge tarts, fudge and icecream, and coffee drunk around a camp fire just doesn't taste the same without it.

It's also a good substitute for cream, and the new lower-fat version (which has about half the fat of Ideal Milk) is good if you're watching calories.

There is only one suitable implement for opening a can of condensed or Ideal Milk - a tin puncher the likes of which I haven't seen in a shop since 1987. It has a sharp triangular tongue that punches a notch in the top of the tin; you need to make one hole on either side.

Try this lovely quick lemon sherbert: light as thistledown, and doesn't need to be stirred while it's freezing (unless you want a perfectly silken result). You can't use a small domestic ice-cream-maker for this, because the mixture is too fluffy.

Lemon Sherbert

1 tin (410g) ice-cold evaporated milk (it must be refrigerated overnight)
1 cup (250 ml) caster sugar
the grated rind of a lemon
juice of 1-2 lemons, to taste

Put the evaporated milk and caster sugar into a large bowl and beat, using an electric hand-held beater, until it has doubled its volume and very fluffy.

 Beat in the lemon rind and lemon juice. You might need to add more lemon juice, if you want a tart sherbert. Pour into a cold metal or plastic dish and freeze for a couple of hours, stirring now and then. Lovely with an amaretto biscuit.

Serves 4.

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Peach and Orange Mousse

Mild, peachy comfort food for invalids, children and grown-up children.

1 Tbsp (15 ml) powdered gelatine
3 Tbsp  (45 ml) water
1 tin (410 g) yellow cling peaches (apricots are good too) and their juice
the finely grated zest and the juic of one fresh range
1 tin (400g net mass) ice-cold evaporated milk

Put the water into a small bowl and sprinkle the gelatine over its surface. Set aside for five minutes, or until it has solidified into a 'sponge'. Now sink the bowl, just up to its rim, into another, bigger bowl or pot of boiling water, and stir until the gelatine dissolves. Or you can warm it until it has dissolved in the microwave (about 20-30 seconds on High), but don't allow it to boil, which may destroy its setting properties.

Put the peaches, their juice, the orange juice and the orange zest into the goblet of a liquidiser or blender. and process to a fine purée. Stir in the dissolved gelatine. In a separate bowl, whip the evaporated milk until doubled in volume. Gently fold the puréed fruit mixture into the beaten milk. Pour into glasses or a rinsed jelly mould and refrigerate for 3 hours, or until set.

Note: Leaf gelatine is now available in South Africa, and I think it produces a nicer and better-tasting jelly. As a general rule, use two sheets of leaf gelatine to one teaspoon (5 ml) gelatine.

* I have no quibble with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall; he's one of the few TV cooks I really admire, least of all because he's sincere and practises what he preaches. And, of course, his 'River Cottage' series isn't aimed at Africa's hungry masses (although African subsistence farmers could certainly benefit from his expertise. How about it, Hugh?).


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