If you like pretentious cocktails and impromptu wet t-shirt competitions; have an aversion to group stretching; haven’t had a lobotomy recently; and like getting your groove on in sandy places, then these are for you…
Coconut sorbet, Roast pineapple gelato, and Lime & mint sorbet
If, on the other hand, you are presently applying an ice pick to your ear in an attempt to remove the subliminally planted escape from your mind, then you may be in need of this…
Turkish delight ice cream with pistachios & Persian fairy floss
And if, after all of that, you do happen to make it through to the morning, then I highly recommend this for breakfast…
Coffee granita
To be honest, this week was in fact a little bit whelming. Maybe I’ve been overdoing it? Maybe it’s just been one of those flat weeks? Or maybe I was left a little distracted after sharing lunch with a certain kitchen god for whom I have the utmost respect? Whatever it was, I’ve been left with the impression of nice. Just nice.
The roast pineapple gelato was reasonably delicious, but I’m not sure how big a difference the roasting process made. Perhaps I was a little impatient and needed to keep going until they began to caramelise? It’s just that it's a little hard to judge when you’ve never roasted a whole pineapple before…
The coconut sorbet was also lovely and refreshing, but was perhaps a little tainted with distain. Those brown hairy balls are hard to conquer at the best of times, but after you finally crack the first one only to discover it’s rancid, and then spend a lot of time and effort grating the second, it’s hard to keep feeling the love. I think this is one that will grow on me though, and I suspect that while it does feel a little pale on the palate, it probably has the right amount of oomph if you were to eat more than a spoonful.
What I was most disappointed with was the lime mint sorbet. I am yet to be convinced that using glucose syrup/liquid glucose is a good thing, and I can only assume that the recipes I have encountered have come from regions where glucose syrup is rather different to what we have here. Its inclusion is designed to soften the sorbet, but so far all I have succeeded in doing is produce a texture akin to a sticky, syrupy slushy. This is not always a bad thing, but I like to eat my sorbet with a spoon, not drink it through a straw, something which made this lime mint sorbet especially disappointing, because the flavour itself was spectacular. It was punchy and delicious and would have been wonderful as a smack of icy crunch, I just felt its kick got a little lost in the syrupy sweetness of the slush.
But things weren’t all bad (and remember, as far as we’re concerned, bad is also quite a relative term), as the pistachio-studded Turkish delight ice cream was positively plush, and the coffee granita featuring a vibrant and tangy Kenyan Ndimaini from Market Lane was pretty close to absolute heaven.
So I guess this week you gained a little insight into how we work, and saw that, rather unsurprisingly, a large part of what we do is experimentation. To my mind, you have to give everything a go at least once. After all, how will you discover those perfect recipes, those combinations of things that work (and equally those that don’t), if you never try anything new?
To many happy hours indeed...