Panna piu fredda che cotta

Today, CarolAnn and I made panna cotta with a caramel sauce and caramel glazed hazelnuts. This was a two part lab, so on the first day we made the panna cotta.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup whole milk
• 2  teaspoons unflavored gelatin
• 1 cups heavy cream
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• Cooking spray

First, we greased the ramekins and set them aside. Then in a saucepan we bloomed the gelatin by sprinkling 2 teaspoons of gelatin onto the milk and letting it sit for five minutes. We then moved the saucepan to the burner and began to heat her up, stirring frequently.

We checked to make sure the gelatin was dissolved after two minutes by rubbing a bit of the milk mixture between our fingers. Satisfied with how dissolved it was, we added the sugar to the mixture, dissolving it but not letting it boil.

After about 5 minutes, we took the saucepan off of the heat and whisked in the vanilla, salt, and heavy cream. Then we poured the mixture into ramekins and allowed them to cool overnight in the refrigerator.

The next day, we made the caramel sauce and the glazed hazelnuts.

For the caramel

• 2 cups sugar
• 1/2 cup water
• 7 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
• 2 teaspoons sea salt, crushed

For the caramel hazelnuts:

• Whole hazelnuts, toasted and peeled
• 3 tablespoons water
• 4 ½ tablespoon sugar
• 1 pinch salt

First we melted the butter in the cream in a saucepan.

Next we poured the cream and butter mixture into a measuring cup to sit. After we cleaned out the saucepan we then put the water, sugar, and salt into the pan and made a grainy paste by mixing it all together.

Then we put it over medium/high heat. When the mixture hit 250 degrees F, it began to boil rapidly and turn translucent.

We kept heating the mixture until it reached 320 degrees F, and until it reached the color we were looking for. We then removed the pan from the heat and poured the hot butter and cream mixture into it, stirring until there was no more to add. We poured the caramel off into a measuring cup and let it sit to cool to room temperature.

While the caramel sauce cooled, we made a batch of caramel to coat our hazelnuts which at the time were in the oven toasting at 350 degrees F for 12 big ones. We repeated the process for making the beginning of the caramel sauce by melting sugar and water over medium heat.

Once the sugar started turning brown, we removed it from the heat. By this time, our hazelnuts were toasted, so we inserted toothpicks into them to dip into the caramel sauce. After dipping them we set them over the sink to drip into icicles. Once the hazelnuts were ready, we removed our panna cotta from the fridge, and used a knife to loosen them in the ramekins, set them in a water bath for 3 seconds, inverted and shook ’em out into bowls.

We then dressed it with the caramel sauce and glazed hazelnuts.

We checked to see how the inside of the panna cotta turned out:

-Why is the darker caramel, less sweet?

Darker caramel is less sweet because the more sugar that breaks down over the heat, the more caramelin, caramelen and caramelan molecules there will be (these give caramel it’s brown color), and the less sweet sugar molecules there will be.

-At what temperature did YOU see caramelization chemistry occuring? How did you know?

We saw it occurring around ~320 degrees F, we could tell because the mixture started turning brown and looking more complex than it had before.