Panna Cotta with Poached Apricots

Okay so today's recipe is poached apricots in fig leaf syrup with a vanilla panna cotta and an elderflower fritter. This is something that kind of blends that English garden together, super seasonal with the apricots. It's a cracking dish but all the elements can be taken into different directions if you want to. It should be a good one. Right let's start with these apricots. First thing I'm going to do is use a pair of fish pliers and just grab the stone, pull the stone out, pop them into my stock syrup. This stock syrup is 40% sugar, 60% water and it has a little splash of white wine in there as well. I'm also going to infuse that with some fig leaves so the leaves that come off of a fig tree have an amazing perfume. I love them, use them all the time. These apricots are just right in season. There will be soon vanilla cots so they're the apricots that have a sort of slightly vanilla-y flavour to them. I love poached stone fruits. In they go. This is that fig leaf from my garden actually, a little fig tree in my garden. Put some fig leaf in there as well. Sugar, water, white wine, apricots, fig leaves, lid on, let that do its thing. Do not let that boil, let that just come to a slight tick over and just let it and nurture it and care for it and once those apricots are giving and the skin wants to come off, we are good to go. Next thing to make is a panna cotta, a vanilla panna cotta. Very important that the setting on a panna cotta is right. If it is, it's one of the most delightful things. Panna cotta just means cooked cream, very simple. Best cream you can buy, that's very important. It's never going to be more than the sum of its parts so the best cream you can buy. Pop that on, it's never to boil, that's important. I use 11, I know, 11% sugar so that's 110 grams into a litre of cream and that sugar is vanilla sugar so when we've used all the pods up, we drop the dry pods into the sugar, we keep hold of that and we use it for delicious things like a panna cotta. I'm going to add a single fig leaf in there as well, I just want that essence to come through to marry with the apricot on the end dish so just one leaf, we're going to take that out and then of course it's vanilla. This is that beautiful Tahitian vanilla, I love. All you need to do is scrape down with a knife and then just push that vanilla out like so and you get all those amazing seeds. I reckon vanilla is one of the best ingredients in the world, so humble, sits there, minds its own business, just knows that he's a proper gangster ingredient. He brings the fire, it is the one. So plenty of vanilla in there, they'll all separate as that comes up to warm. What we don't want to be doing with this is boiling that cream actually, just bring it up to nice and warm. That's going to be our panna cotta. Okay so into this is going to go some gelatine, now that gelatine needs to steep in cold water so this is five leaves for a litre of cream and they come like that, you buy them as they are, it goes into ice water and they just soften, they soften down up to a point where they can then go into the warm panna cotta. They will only melt into a warm temperature so you need to make sure the panna cotta is warm but don't boil it. Okay that gelatine is steeped nicely, squeeze that out and that can then go into our warm panna cotta. Now that's warm enough to melt that, I'm going to turn that off and let that cool down and just let that fig leaf, let that vanilla infuse, let all those flavours come together and the gelatine to blend in nicely. Now there's quite a nice little trick with this to make sure we keep that vanilla where it's supposed to be and I'll show you how that is. Thank you very much. Cream's warm now, tastes amazing, fig's there, we need to pass that off. Now to get rid of any bits of gelatine, get rid of all those vanilla seeds and get rid of the fig leaf which I'm going to keep for something else. Just spread that around, get that out. Now you'll notice that I've passed that over a bowl with ice and the reason for that is so that my panna cotta or bavoire, depends which way you look at it, French or Italian, very similar to a bavoire that the famous chef Kerem, the predecessor to Escoffier, came up with. So a bavoire is essentially just set cream with gelatine but we're going to stick with panna cotta for today because it sounds a bit more romantic. So the reason I've got this over ice and I'm moving it like I am is so that the vanilla, if you just pour this straight in the mould, the vanilla is going to drop to the bottom so you basically need to create a viscosity with the cream that's thick enough to hold on to those vanilla seeds so that when you turn it out that vanilla seed is all the way through the bavoire or the panna cotta. I would do this the day before, probably needs a good four hours to set, six if you're me, probably overnight is better. This is a great dish to get done the day before a dinner party and if you buy great cream, you infuse it nicely, you will have a wonderful dessert. Don't do what happened to me, I went to a dinner party with some lovely friends of mine, I don't go to many dinner parties but I did and she cooked a lavender panna cotta. She's going to know who she is when she sees this video. It was absolutely awful, it tasted like potpourri. Got to be careful with lavender. There you go, there's the moral of the story. You're going to come back to that when it's thick. While that panna cotta is chilling down, we're going to put this in a variety of moulds. This is the one I want to use, slightly fluted one but ultimately it should be a Dario. That's kind of the classic for it but you want that, get the moulds, put them in the fridge, better to do it that way round, chill the moulds then pour in your panna cotta. Let them sit uncovered, they want at least six hours, overnight even better. Okay that vanilla is now all suspended in the thickness of that cream and that's really important. So now we can get that straight into our moulds, very generous panna cotta in there. So this is bronze leaf gelatin, if you use silver and gold you probably just need to look up and adjust the amount of gelatin you're using. Can you see how that vanilla is still present at the top of the panna cotta? If you didn't cool the panna cotta like that it would be sunk to the bottom and that's really quite important. In the fridge, six hours, let's go. Okay so these apricots have come up to a very very slow boil, just one little bubble at a time. Keep a cartouche on there then you'll see if you cool them down this skin will just peel away nicely. It's a little bit of a job, the riper the apricot the better the peeling will be and let them cool right down in that liquor and they'll just reabsorb, they'll become really soft and giving and unctuous, beautiful and then store them in the in the syrup, that's really important too. So just peel that skin away while the panna cotta is setting and then we can move on to plating the whole thing. And then I'm just gonna finish that a little bit of olive oil as well. It's so good, the temperature's nice. Try the cream first because I've got this slightly underripe but the whole dish from a guest perspective, imagine going to a restaurant and they serve you that.