We all know strawberries and cream. We are equally familiar with strawberries coated in chocolate. In a recent workshop on hydrocolloids we explored the playful and delicious idea of coating amazing strawberries in a sweet cream custard. We made the custard with sweet cream, milk, sugar and salt. We omitted the traditional eggs and used iota and kappa carrageenan as our texturizers. The carrageenans allowed us to dip the cold strawberries into the hot custard and have it set around the fruit. The dipping takes practice. The key is dipping and letting the base set around the fruit and then dipping again. We repeated the process 4-5 times until the fruit had a quarter inch or so custard coating. In the photograph you can see a berry that lost its coating because it was left in the hot custard to long. The custard started peeling back off the fruit.
We refrigerated the strawberries to fully allow the custard to set. When it was set we had a sweet cream decadent coating around fully ripe berries.
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