Vanilla Panna Cotta with a Verjuice-Gooseberry Compote

A delicate, barely set vanilla cream topped with a glorious sunset-orange compote of Verjuice and Cape gooseberries. Verjuice enhances the tartness of gooseberries, and the contrast of cool and creamy with sharp and sweet is sublime. You can prepare this dessert well in advance and merrily assemble it at the last minute.

Vanilla Panna Cotta with a Verjuice-Gooseberry Compote

This is another in a series of new recipes I've developed using Verjuice (available at Woolies). If you don't have Verjuice, poach your gooseberries in a light sugar syrup (see Cook's Notes at the end of this page).

Like this recipe? Try my Fresh Plum Jelly with a Lemon Panna Cotta Topping.

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Wine recommendation by Michael Olivier. He says: "Asara Vine Dried Sauvignon Blanc 2014 - a stunner of a natural sweet wine."

It looks like: Packed in a 375 ml Alsatian Flute.  In the glass a golden straw - and please serve it in a decent sized glass..

It smells like: Soft dried apricots and sliced lime poached in fynbos honey. 

It tastes like: Rich and unctuous: desiccated pineapple rehydrated in fynbos honey. Guava, yellow Canary melon.

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Vanilla Panna Cotta with a Verjuice-Gooseberry Compote

For the panna cotta:

300 ml cream
300 ml full-cream milk
5 Tbsp (75 ml) caster sugar
1 vanilla pod, or a few drops of good vanilla extract
4 tsp (20 ml) tepid water
2 tsp (10 ml) gelatine powder

For the compote:

200 g Cape gooseberries
½ cup (125 ml) Verjuice
2 Tbsp (30 ml) caster sugar (or more, to taste: see recipe)

Put the cream, milk and caster sugar into a saucepan.  Split the vanilla pod lengthways, scrape out the seeds and add them to the pan (or add the vanilla extract, if you’re using that).  Bring gradually to just below the boil, over a low heat, stirring now and then.

When the sugar has dissolved, take the pan off the heat and gently press a sheet of clingfilm directly onto the surface of the mixture (this will prevent a ‘skin’ forming).  Set the cream aside to infuse for 45 minutes, or until it has cooled to blood temperature.

Put the water into a small teacup or ramekin, sprinkle over the gelatine and set aside to ‘sponge’ for 3 minutes.  Now place the cup in a pan of simmering water (the water should come halfway up its sides) and leave it there for a 3 minutes, or until the gelatine has melted and the liquid is clear.  Whisk this into the cream mixture, then strain the cream through a fine sieve into four wine glasses.  Chill for at least 5 hours, or until the panna cotta has set, but is still very wobbly.

To make the compote, put the gooseberries, Verjuice and caster sugar into a saucepan and bring to a gentle simmer, skimming off any white foam as it rises.  If the gooseberries are very tart, you may need to add a little more sugar.   Simmer for about 7 minutes, or until the fruit is just beginning to collapse.  Remove from the heat, tip into a bowl, cover, and refrigerate until very cold.

When you’re ready to serve, remove half the whole gooseberries from the bowl using a slotted spoon and set aside.  Use a potato masher or fork lightly to crush the remaining berries.  Spoon a layer of the crushed fruit over the top of the panna cottas, and top with the whole berries you put aside

Serves 4.

Cook's Notes: 

If you don't have Verjuice, poach your gooseberries in a light sugar syrup.  Here's how: put ½ cup (125 ml) water into a saucepan and add 4 Tbsp (60 ml) caster sugar - or more, to taste, depending on how sour the fruit is.  Bring gently to the boil, stirring occasionally. When the sugar has dissolved, add the gooseberries and continue with the recipe (paragraph 4, above).

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Fresh Plum Jelly with a Lemon Panna Cotta Topping

A barely set, sharp-sweet jelly made with fresh plums, topped with a creamy panna cotta mixture. This is a grown-up version of that most beloved and comforting of childhood puds, red jelly and ice cream, and I came up with the recipe because I couldn't think of what else to do with the bulging bag of ripe plums I hauled home last week.

Fresh Plum Jelly with a Lemon Panna Cotta Topping

Plums are reaching the end of their season in South Africa and are very good and sweet, not to mention cheap.

Every year I make the same mistake of falling into a swoon when I see plums piled in shining pyramids in my local shop, and I buy far more than my family is ever likely to eat. That's why there are plenty of recipes for plums on this blog (I've listed them at the end of this post, in case you too are faced with a mountain of plums that need to be eaten right away.)

The jelly had a lovely deep plummy taste, but my family felt that the vanilla seeds in the panna cotta overwhelmed the delicate jelly. I quite liked the combination, but because I've learned to listen to my family's (usually constructive) criticism of my recipes, I've left the vanilla pod out of the recipe below and instead added a strip of lemon zest to the panna cotta mixture. If you'd like to use vanilla anyway, omit the lemon strip and add a whole vanilla pod, halved lengthways, to the milk and cream mixture.

The plum pulp is not used in the jelly; I suggest you put it in the fridge to add to a smoothie, or whizz it up in a blender and pour it over ice cream. You can, if you like, add a few whole spices to the plums as they cook - a small stick of cinnamon, perhaps, and a clove and star anise - but what I wanted was a blast of pure plumminess with no interfering perfumes.

How much sugar you add to the plums depends on how sweet they are to begin with. I recommend that you start with three-quarters of a cup, then taste the syrup and add more if you think it needs it.  Measure the gelatine powder exactly, using level teaspoons.  For best results, start the jelly the day before.

This is pretty served in long-stemmed wine or martini glasses. Don't be tempted to put this in a jelly mould, as the recipe doesn't contain enough gelatine for the mixtures to hold their shapes when unmoulded. (You could add more gelatine, I suppose, but you'd run the risk of ending up with a nasty bouncy texture.)

Fresh Plum Jelly with a Lemon Panna Cotta Topping 

For the jelly:
12 ripe, juicy red plums
¾ cup (180 ml) water
¾ cup (180 ml) white sugar
a thumb-length strip of lemon zest, white pith removed
2 ¼ tsp (11.25 ml) gelatine powder
3 T (45 ml) tepid water

For the panna cotta topping:
300 ml whole milk
300 ml cream
5 T (75 ml) caster sugar
a thumb-length strip of lemon zest, white pith removed
1½ tsp (7.5 ml) gelatine powder
2 T (30 ml) tepid water

Rinse the plums, cut them in half and put them in a large saucepan (no need to remove the pips). Add the water, sugar and lemon zest. Bring gently to the boil, stirring now and again to dissolve the sugar. When the mixture boils, turn down the heat and simmer for 10-15 minutes, or until the plums are just starting to collapse. Lightly break up the plums, using the back of a spoon, but don't mash them. Turn off the heat and set aside  for a few hours, preferably overnight. This will allow time for the deep red pigment in the plum skins to colour the syrup.

Line a large sieve or colander with a piece of cheesecloth (or a clean dishcloth, or some thick kitchen paper) and place it over a bowl. Tip the plums and their juice into the sieve and allow the juice to drip through into the bowl below.  Don't press down on the pulp or it will become rather cloudy. Discard the pulp, pips and lemon zest.

Measure out a cup and half (375 ml) of the plum syrup. Put the tepid water into a teacup or ramekin, sprinkle the gelatine powder over the top and set aside to sponge for five minutes. Place in a pan of simmering water - the water should come half-way up the sides of the teacup - and leave until the gelatine has melted and the liquid is clear (about three minutes). Remove the teacup from the pan and allow to cool for a few minutes. Stir the gelatine into the plum syrup. Divide the mixture between four wine glasses and refrigerate until set (about three hours).

In the meantime, make the topping. Put the milk, cream and caster sugar into a saucepan and add the strip of lemon zest. Turn on the heat and bring very gently up to just below boiling point, stirring now and then to help the sugar dissolve. When you see the mixture begin to seethe in a threatening way, remove from the heat and set aside for half an hour so that the flavour of the lemon can infuse (cover the surface of the mixture with a piece of clingfilm to prevent a skin forming).

Prepare the gelatine and water for the panna cotta as described above.

Stir the warm gelatine liquid into the the cream/milk mixture (discard the lemon zest). Strain the mixture through a sieve over the cold plum jelly. Refrigerate for another three hours, or until the topping has set to a lovely wobble.

I dusted a little pearl powder (similar to cake glitter, and available from baking shops) over the surface of the panna cotta, and I would have added a few little silver balls, if I'd had them.

Serves 4.

More of my recipes using fresh plums:

Fresh-Plum and Almond Cake

Glazed Roast Pork Neck with a Gingery Fresh-Prune Relish

Spiced Plums with Tamarind

Christmassy Plum and Tamarind Sauce

Festive Phyllo Crackers with a Spicy Plum and Almond Filling Print Friendly

Vanilla-and-Mace-Scented Panna Cotta with Warm Blueberries

An enormous box of plump Ceres cherries and three punnets of dewy blueberries and luscious litchis arrived at my door on Saturday.  Hand-delivered, nogal, in a coolbox, by my new mate Trevor, who farms  blueberries in Stellenbosch and who also packages fruit for export and for top-end South African supermarkets. If this wasn't enough to make me emit hamster-like squeaks of delight, in walked Trevor's wife, Cindy, who is the Number One Fan of this blog, and whom I have never met in real life.  We fell into each other's arms like long-lost family friends (which, in a tangential way, we are).

Life is so curious. Some months ago I received a lovely chatty email from Cindy, a stranger, telling me that this blog had 'ruined' her first-ever holiday in Mauritius. Cindy, while reclining on the beach, picked up an issue of Femina (a South African women's magazine) and was intrigued by a feature piece about my blog. "I became quite desperate to see what the blog was all about," she told me in her email, "so I  toiled up to Reception and, once there, spend twenty Euros for the four hours' worth of Internet access on the hotel computer.  It was somewhat difficult for me to concentrate, after drinking two cocktails before 11am (then again, we were on the Serenity Plus All Inclusive Package!)

"So I phoned my 18-year-old son, whom we'd left back home in Stellenbosch, and asked him to check out the site and get back to me.

"Dumb thing to do. He got so inspired that he started cooking like a maniac and every night held a party for different friends to enjoy the fruits of his labours.

"I had left cash, and my credit card, with them in case of emergencies. Apparently cooking your recipes constituted an emergency.  I was dazed with the speed with which SMS alerts arrived from my bank notifying me of transactions.  I spent the week on tenterhooks and got home to find the following:

• A sleeping son
• A cross daughter (she put on weight licking out the bowls)
• An almost empty fridge
• An entirely empty booze cupboard and drinks fridge
• 3 cross cats who had been ignored in the thrill of it all
• My birthday  bottle of homemade Limoncello mysteriously gone missing
• My credit card balancing on a huge pile of faked signature slips
• A letter from my char that read " Hallo ther Ciny I is ver cross met eksra werk wat Nick se kosmaakery bring. [I am very cross about the extra work caused by Nick's food-making]. I take my hollidey neks week please 2 WEEK thankyou RACHEL".

"I suppose I should look on the bright side and beg you not to stop blogging because it's cheaper than buying Nick recipe books," she concluded.

I was delighted and flattered by Cindy's warm email (let's face it, blogging is vanity publishing) and we became virtual friends, via email and Facebook.  Shortly after that, Cindy sent her email to Femina magazine, and won a handsome suitcase when it became the star letter of the month.  Now here's the curious bit: my husband saw Cindy's name on an email in my inbox, and immediately recognised her name.  It turned out that they knew each other well, and were at school together at Bryanston High School during the late 1970s.

Anyway, it was lovely to meet her at last and for two days we have been feasting on fruit. I had no idea that blueberries were grown so extensively in South Africa - Trevor tells me that he sources blueberries from at least 18 different South African growers, and that the bulk of his own crop is exported to the United Kingdom.

I've only ever used blueberries in smoothies and muffins, so I promised Cindy that, to repay her in part for her  unswerving support of my blog, I'd come up with some blueberry recipes.

So, for starters, here is a delicate vanilla-and mace-flavoured panna cotta with blueberries.

Panna cotta so easy and quick to make that an 8-year-old could manage it, but it's vital to use just enough gelatine to achieve a light, trembling, barely set texture. I have used leaf gelatine in this recipe, which in my experience produces a more delicate jelly than powdered gelatine. You can - at last - buy leaf gelatine in South Africa (I bought mine in a Spar in Johannesburg; it's also available in specialist food stores) but if you can't lay your hands on some, you can use powder. I believe that, in general, two sheets of leaf gelatine are the equivalent of one teaspoon of gelatine powder (in which case this recipe would require 2 teaspoons, or 10 ml), but as I haven't tested this particular panna cotta using powder I can't vouch for the results.  I will make it again tomorrow using powder and give you a definitive measurement.

POSTSCRIPT: Here is that measurement: Use exactly 1½  tsp (7.5 ml) gelatine powder in place of the gelatine leaves. 

Vanilla-and-Mace-Scented Panna Cotta with Warm Blueberries
320 ml  full-cream milk
320 ml rich pouring cream
1 whole vanilla pod
1 blade of mace (or a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg)
100 ml white granulated sugar or caster sugar
4 leaves of gelatine (7 cm x 11 cm rectangles), or 1½  tsp (7.5 ml) gelatine powder
250 ml (1 cup) tepid water, for soaking

For the blueberries:
375 ml fresh or frozen blueberries
3 t (45 ml) white granulated sugar
the juice of half a lemon
4 T (60 ml) water

First make the panna cotta. Put the cream and the milk in a small saucepan. Split the vanilla pod in half, scrape out the seeds, and add the pod and seeds to the saucepan, along with the blade of mace. Bring gently to the boil, whisking now and then. Allow to simmer for a minute, then remove from the heat and lay a piece of clingfilm [saran wrap] directly over the surface of the liquid to prevent a skin forming.  Set aside for 15  minutes to allow the flavours to infuse.

In the meantime, fill a small bowl with a cup of  water and add the gelatine leaves, pressing down so that they are submerged. Set aside. Strain the cream/milk mixture through a sieve into a bowl and discard the flavourings.  Pour the mixture back into the pan, add the sugar and bring back to a gentle boil, stirring all the time to dissolve the sugar. After a minute remove from the heat. Scoop the gelatine leaves out of their water and squeeze out any excess water.  Put them into the hot cream and whisk lightly to dissolve the gelatine  Lightly oil 4 deep ramekin dishes or dariole moulds and pour the cream into them (you can also make this in a single dish or jelly mould).

Allow to cool on the counter for 20 minutes, and then refrigerate for at least 5 hours.

When you're ready to serve the dessert, put the blueberries in a sauce pan, add the sugar, lemon juice and water and bring gently to the boil, stirring frequently so that the sugar dissolves. As soon as the mixture begins to bubble, turn off the heat. Set aside to cool for 10 minutes.

Remove the panna cottas from the fridge. Fill a shallow bowl with very hot water and dip each dish in the water for 30 seconds (shorter if you're using metal moulds).  Use a sharp knife tip to loosen the sides of panna cottas and release the vacuum.  Now unmould them onto little flat plates. (The easiest way to do this is to place each little dish face-down on your - clean! -  hand and with the other hand smack its base sharply so that the jelly plops out onto your palm.)  Slide onto plates and serve with the warm blueberries.

Makes 5 small panna cottas.  Print Friendly