White Chocolate Panna Cotta

Panna Cotta often gets passed over, forgotten as the unspecial combination of milk and gelatin. But this White Chocolate Panna Cotta isn’t your forgettable humdrum dessert, with a Tangerine fluid gel and tangerine Caviar, this is special.

Let’s get the pleasantries out of the way: Happy New Year everybody! Yes it’s 17 days late and we’ve been MIA in this site for a while (with good reason), but nonetheless I wish you all reading this a wonderful new year full of happiness and fantastic food!

To wit….this!

Face to Face here!

We have been developing this recipe for Fairchild Botanical Garden’s 2019 Chocolate Festival. It’s our first time at the festival and we really want to make a statement! So if you’re thinking of going, come see us! We’ll be there Saturday Jan. 26 at 2pm demoing and giving out tastings of this beauty!

So you’re going to make it, what should you expect to taste? First thing? A freight train of tangy citrus from the Tangerine Fluid Gel. And it’s so welcome because the White Chocolate Panna Cotta is so rich and subtle that it needs a very sharp, contrast to make it work.

And why not tangerines? They feel like the more forgotten family member of the Florida Citrus family. But good Tangerine flavor can’t be matched here.

Afterwards, you get the smooth creaminess of the White Chocolate, that pairs beautifully with milk (white ganache anyone?)  and let me tell you, it’s good!

The Tangerine Caviar is it’s own little world btw, when made right they pop! as you bite into them, releasing even more of the tangerine juice. They add a really fun textural element to the dish without being heavy or detracting from the experience.

Making The White Chocolate Panna Cotta

This part is super easy, and if you want to stop here, I dont blame you. The Panna Cotta by itself is bomb. And you can top it with whatever you want.

A few tips in making it:

• Bloom the Gelatin in the milk- this takes about 5 minutes.
• Scald the cream: this is a good general rule when working with heavy cream in a pot. It actually changes the molecular structure of the cream to make it more stable and less prone to breaking.
• Give it time to set: Since it’s Gelatin and slow to act, expect to be waiting around 5 hours for a firm mixture.

(These will be at the bottom of the recipe card as well if you want to skip this section)

Making the Tangerine Gel and Caviar

To make lives easier, we used 100% bottled tangerine juice. If you have a juicer and a high end particle strainer and the time- have at it. Otherwise, go get some organic Tangerine ( i.e: citrus) juice.

Tangerine Fluid Gel

The Fluid gel is a mixture of Gellan (Kelkogel) and Tangerine Juice. That’s it.

Gellan is a seaweed derivative that has wonderful thickening and gellifying properties. Used in very low amounts between .5% and 1% of the base liquid weight, it forms a fluid gel in minutes.

To make the fluid gel, first create a vortex: (put the liquid you want to gel in a blender or use an immersion blender, and then add the powder to avoid clumping together.

Tangerine Caviar

Until now the dessert is very much set, this little detail just dials it up to 11.

This part is tricky, in the 3 days I spent developing this dessert, a good 45 hours went into troubleshooting why my caviar did not gel correctly. for it to work, 3 things are needed

• 1 base Liquid that you want to gel (this is the tangerine juice for instance)
• Sodium Alginate (which you are blending with the base liquid.
• Calcium Lactate and water: When you combine these two together, they form a water bath that reacts with the Sodium Alginate.

The Science:

Sodium alginate, when blended with the flavorful liquid, will thicken it slightly- but it wont do much more until it reacts with calcium. So when droplets of Tangerine + Sodium Alginate mixture fall into the Calcium water bath, a thin film starts to coat the tangerine juice in reaction to the calcium.

Normally it works ok, but the alginate wont work in liquids that have high acidity (low PH). The acids don’t allow the alginate to develop that skin in the calcium.

To counteract this, use Sodium Citrate, a salt specifically designed to lower acidity in liquids. However, using too much will make the liquid salty and unpleasant. A workable use I found was to add 1% of the Liquid in Sodium Citrate and Dilute it with 10% distilled water (hard water reacts to the sodium alginate and will offset the process too.

Once everything is blended in the flavorful liquid, leave to set in the fridge for 2 hours or overnight. It removes the air bubbles allowing for a clearer caviar.

I’ll wrap this already obscenely long blog post by saying thanks for reading and I’m so happy that we’re back developing recipes and tools you can try at home.

Below is the recipe in detail and I thought it would be helpful to list the tools that I used in making this recipe work.

Happy cooking!

-Maury

Tools we used to make the recipe

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