The Porky Gourmand

Great title! This pineapple chop dessert is made up of oven roasted pineapple, fried pastry cream, caramel sauce & whipped creme fraiche. The twist in this dessert is in the way the pineapple is cut. It is cut to look like a meat chop. Chefs have a sense of humour….

In a previous post I told you that I got Thomas Keller’s French Laundry cookbook, the book has lots of great recipes and pretty pictures. After spending a lot of time looking at the pictures and dreaming about the food in it, the book left the coffee table and went into the kitchen. Great cookbooks by great chefs can be quite intimidating, most of these chefs have 20-30 years of experience in cooking, compared to my few years of bumbling around in the kitchen. Is it possible to replicate to replicate their cooking?

A Kakuzi pineapple & the French Laundry cookbook, let the bumbling begin……..

First task was to cut the pineapple into chops. Started by chopping off the head & the bottom, then cut the pineapple into halves & then removed the core. Once cored, I cut off pineapple “flesh” on one side but left the skin on. As you can see the in the picture above, the result is a pineapple “rack” which I then cut into four chops.

Browned the chops in butter for a few minutes, then transferred into oven to roast for about 40 minutes. The aroma of pineapple & butter from the oven was intoxicating….. lovely.

The nuggets above are made is frozen pastry cream/creme patissiere. The pastry cream is made from flour, egg yolks, sugar & milk, these ingredients are cooked into a thick cream. In the book, the cooked pastry cream is supposed to set solid in the fridge after a few hours, mine did not. That is why I froze it….. I don’t know what I did wrong. Anyway, I breaded & then deep fried frozen nuggets for two minutes. In the recipe Thomas Keller uses panko, I used bread crumbs. The spanish do a deep-fried pastry cream called Leche Frita

After the pineapples were done, I tried to make the caramel sauce for this dish. The way it was supposed to be done is that you caramelise sugar in a pan, then whisk in butter. But I messed it up, I got the sugar to caramelise then added diced cold butter, then walked away for a second. When I was back it looked like the sugar had seized up & the butter had clarified. FAIL!!! Well I said I was a bumbler, I should stop saying that & speak positive. With a positive attitude this won’t happen…….. Oh well.

I still dunked the cooked chops into this faux sauce, for a bit of colour & flavour. Also whipped some creme fraiche.

Four plates for my four guinea pigs. This is the final dish sans the caramel sauce, the garnish on the creme fraiche is the tip of a pineapple leaf.

So how did it taste? Beautiful! The pineapple is intense, sweet & buttery. The Fried pastry cream was brilliant & it went so well with the creme fraiche, what a revelation……

My brother tried to eat his plate real slow, to prolong the experience. I still have the other half of the pineapple, I could do this again tomorrow…

G’day!