It seems fitting after an inspiring morning of reading about precisions that I should have so much trouble making the simplest of things at work that I've made a thousand times before: pate de fruit. Pate de fruit seems like a natural evolution from early fruit and sugar preserves, jams, and jellies, the most basic of French confections--I remember buying them as a treat from our Saturday markets in La Ferte along with candied orange peels and coffee macaroons, and eating them in the backseat on the ride home.
They're often served as a petit four after the meal--a fruit puree sweetened and set with pectin so that it has a slight, soft chew, like a piece of firm jam, then cut or moulded and covered in granulated sugar. We make all sorts of flavours at work: litchi, quince, lime, raspberry, apricot, but it was a strawberry recipe I attempted--and failed.
It's not only embarrassing when one fails at simple things--I was glad that the kitchen was quiet and there was barely anyone to witness my mess--but it's a complete waste of prep time before service. I made two attempts, making two different mistakes.
First batch: I whisked constantly, but allowed the gas flame to curve around the back of the pot and lick the edge. And so the edge of the pot burned. If this happens, don't worry, just change pots quickly before you start to scrape the burned fruit into your mix, and turn down the flame so it's just under the pot and not around it. This batch is O.K, though I lost a little mass in the first pot, which meant it wouldn't quite fill the frame I'd set up for it. This means I'm not yielding as many pieces as I should be, that's bad. Note, an induction stove, if you have one, is a good safe way to cook the pate de fruit.
Second batch: I added the sugar in small amounts. But not small enough. The mixture cooled down too fast and started to set in the pot. By the time I "poured" it onto my framed silpat, it was strange and lumpy and needed to spread with a palette knife to smoothen out. Needless to say, that batch was trash.
So, even the simplest of experiments can feel something like wearing a pair wings glued together with wax.
There are many pate de fruit recipes--some use thermometers, some use time, and some use a sugar concentration measurer-but the basic format of all the recipes I've followed is generally the same: one begins with either fresh fruit, cooked down and passed through a tamis, or frozen puree, melted down. To this, a combination of pectin and sugar is added. And finally, some lemon juice or citric acid, and maybe some booze.
Harold McGee lists three things to set a pectin when making a jam: add a large dose of sugar, whose molecules attract water molecules to themselves, thus pulling the water away from the pectin chains and leaving them more exposed to reattaching to each other. Second, boil the mixture to evaporate water and bring pectin chains even closer together. Third, increase acidity, which neutralises electrical charge and allows the aloof pectin chains to bond to each other into a gel. Most pate de fruit recipes involve all three steps but use commercial powdered pectin. Pectins vary, as does the acidity of the fresh or frozen fruit, so keep this in mind when changing fruits or pectins or acid and using the same recipe. Boiron, who makes a lot of high-end fruit purees, has a great chart of pate de fruit recipes for all of their fruits.
Once the pectin is added to the fruit mixture, it's important to keep it above 80 degrees and moving so that it doesn't start to set too early. This means adding the rest of the sugar in your recipe in small additions and giving the mixture time to get hot again before adding more--adding it in too large of batches will cause the temperature of the whole mass to drop quickly, setting the pectin in lumps that will not melt back down again even if you get the mixture boiling.
Once the mass comes to temperature, or time, or sugar concentration, acid is usually added and the whole thing is poured out and allowed to set overnight. A thin coating of granulated sugar will make the surface less sticky and easier to work with. At work we cut it on a guitar, a clever set of wires that cuts anything of the right texture into perfect strips or squares, but a knife will work too, or pouring them into heatproof moulds to begin with and then just popping them out the following day. Or just forget about the whole thing, break your piggy bank, and order them on-line from Fauchon...
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