My chef, who is also me, cried out, "You're mad! Mad, I tell you! You've never even had poached pears and you have only the vaguest idea of what a poached pear is! Also, what theme restaurant?"
"I call it 'Foods You Can Bruise: The Interactive Restaurant Experience'," I told the chef. You know, I think of him as the son I almost had. "It will serve never-before-seen fusion cuisine, made with only the freshest ingredients, except where we can get away with it."
"Maybe you should call it something like 'The Lowdown,'" said the chef.
"Silence, chef-self! The longer the name, the longer the line out the door! The First Rule of Restauranteering never fails... to fail! Now, while I write the description for the menu, find a poached pear recipe on the Internet that can be turned into an ice cream!"
Ingredients
Preparation
Put a tiny bit of brown sugar in the pear seed cavities and put them cavity-down into a dish. Put a tiny bit of salt on each pear half, then spoon some maple syrup on top and put a little more brown sugar on top of that. Cover with plastic wrap and microwave for 8 minutes or until soft. (You could probably add cloves or something to the mix, but do I look like a clove-haver?)
Your pears are now microwave-poached. While you were waiting for them to be poached you put the cream and the milk into a saucepan and heated it to almost boiling. Now chop up the pears, put them in a bowl, and pour the milk/cream mixture over it. Add the sugar and the cinnamon. Stir. Add a little tangerine or orange juice and stir some more. If it doesn't taste sweet enough, add some more maple syrup or be ready to add more honey. If you want, add a tiny bit of vanilla and/or lemon oil. Then cool it, daddy-o.
Now it's ready to go in the ice cream machine. At some point during the ice cream making process, add some honey to the mixture. You now have poached pear ice cream!
Notes
I made this last night and it's delicious, but I made it way too sweet, which overpowers the taste of pear; indeed, overpowers your very sense of taste. I don't know why I kept putting sugar into it when it already had so much of so many kinds of sugar. The delta between the published recipe and what I actually made was 1/4 cup of white sugar and maybe 1/8 cup of brown. The recipe as published should be sweet but not too sweet. Let me know if I actually removed too much sugar. Oh, also the stuff I made had no cinnamon because I forgot to get cinnamon.
This is the metadessert recipe for which I asked Alton Brown's advice. For the record, he said that both honey and cinnamon would work well, but to be careful with the honey because it can affect the way the ice cream sets.
Thu Sep 25 2003 11:17 PST Poached Pear Ice Cream:
"What I need for a dessert for my expensive theme restaurant," I told my chef, "is a combination of some chi-chi dish like poached pears, and a dish of the people like ice cream."
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