HEY CHEF, WHAT CAN I DO WITH VANILLA BEANS?
by Jacqueline Raposo
Welcome to Hey Chef, a series where we ask pros around the country for tips on how to use ingredients we love. Today, whole-pod vanilla.
High-quality whole vanilla beans are not always easy to find, but when affordable ones come our way there are few things more fun to play around with. Gently sliced open and freed of from their pods with the flat edge of a knife, vanilla beans add incredible depth and richness to the most simple of desserts, like easy chocolate puddings or whipped cream spooned over fruit. But to help us get outside our comfort zones, these four chefs dish up savory and smoky-sweet ways to get the most out of those precious little pods.
Infuse Homemade Ricotta
Pastry chef Miroslav Uskokovic worked under Jean-Georges Chef Joe Murphy (and former chef Johnny Iuzzini) before creating his own menus at George Mendes’ Aldea and, currently, at Union Square Hospitality Group’s Gramercy Tavern.
[Photograph: Maryse Chevriere]
I love to make ricotta and I love vanilla ricotta. I have it on the menu: a house-made vanilla ricotta we serve with a poppy seed cake and sherbet. We slowly bring the milk and cream up to a boil—with vanilla seeds and pods—and we let it steep for an hour. Then we add some acid to make it curdle and then strain it, but we leave the vanilla pods in the curd so they’ll continue to steep overnight. We’ll save the whey and give it to the savory cooks; they use it a lot, especially to cook polenta.
We also make our own house-made extract, so whatever pods we have left we mix them with vodka. We don’t have a proportion, but probably for a liter of vodka we use around 40 pods, which kind of get preserved in alcohol, so we just keep on adding vodka and pods as we go, and let it sit for at least a week or two. Gramercy Tavern is a big restaurant and there are constantly pods accumulating, so were usually have four bottles going at a time. We use outstanding beans, so we don’t waste any of them and try to use as much as we can. We make a vanilla salt, too, infusing Maldon salt and using it as a garnish or seasoning throughout the year.
(ORIGINAL ARTICLE)
VANILLA RICOTTA
