Quantum pastilles
serves
2
Recipe extract taken from Is This a Cookbook by Heston Blumenthal, published by Bloomsbury $49.99, out now
"I’ve always been fascinated by how our experience of food and flavour is influenced by our expectations, by what perspective we choose to take, and I’ve constantly been creating dishes that reflect that fascination. Looking back, I realise I always had what I now think of as a quantum perspective on gastronomy. I just didn’t know to call it that. These pastilles have their origin in my search, about 20 years ago, for suitable veg for savoury pâte de fruits. I settled on beetroot but struggled with setting it to the texture I wanted, so I kept increasing the acidity until a funny thing happened. Beetroot became blackcurrant. Or so it seemed. It was so uncanny I began serving it at the restaurant as a red pastille. That’s the quantum perspective right there. Is the pastille beetroot or blackcurrant? We taste things all the time and let our mouth and nose judge what we are putting in our mouths. It’s a question of perspective." Recipe extract taken from Is This a Cookbook by Heston Blumenthal, published by Bloomsbury $49.99, out now.
Ingredients (6)
- 510g vegetable juice of your choice
- 100g glucose syrup
- 13g tartaric acid
- 350g unrefined caster sugar
- 12g yellow pectin
- Granulated sugar, to coat
Don't forget you can add these ingredients to your Woolworths shopping list.
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1.Pour 500g of your vegetable juice into a pan and add the glucose syrup over a high heat. While you are waiting for it to come to a boil, combine the remaining 10g vegetable juice with the tartaric acid in a small bowl. In a separate small bowl, mix together the caster sugar and pectin.
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2.When the mixture is boiling, scatter the sugar/pectin mix into the pan and keep an eye on the temperature you are aiming for, which is 108°C. This can take approximately 30 minutes. If you have a refractometer, aim for 69°Bx.
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3.Once at temperature, stir in the tartaric acid mixture and remove from the heat. Carefully pour the mix into pastille moulds and leave to set at room temperature for at least 12 hours.
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4.Once set, carefully remove the pastilles and roll them in granulated sugar until coated on all sides.
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5.It’s very important to use yellow pectin (also called pectine jaune) to make these pastilles, not regular pectin powder. Alternatively, you could use 180g jam sugar (with added pectin) instead of the caster sugar and pectin mixture.
Recipe Notes
You can use any vegetable, but beetroot, butternut squash and Romano peppers work well because they flip convincingly to blackcurrant, apricot and rhubarb respectively. You’ll probably need to juice about 1.2kg fresh, peeled vegetables to yield 510g juice. The beetroot pastille, then, is a perfect symbol of what quantum gastronomy is all about. I was so excited by this that last year, I began serving these and other flavour-flips at The Fat Duck as part of the final ‘Like a Kid in a Sweetshop’ course, packaged in a foil-and-paper tube as a nostalgic nod to sweets of my youth. Why not try them and see what you think?
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