Tiramisu

Tiramisu, take one. Do you need a pick-me-up? Me too. In Italian, tiramisu literally means pick-me-up, and I can see why. Think lady fingers soaked with coffee, layered in a light, creamy filling, a little splash of wine or liquor if you choose, a little sugar, top it off with a dusting of cocoa powder or even shaved chocolate. That is a pick-me-up. The best part? There is no baking and it is the ultimate make-ahead dessert for your next cup of coffee with friends. Full recipe is in the description below. Print that out and follow along. First, we need to prepare our soak. You need one and a half cups, 360 milliliters of strong coffee or espresso. I'm making some strong coffee. Okay, if you made espresso, skip this step. I am adding two teaspoons of espresso powder. It says right on the lid, perfect for tiramisu. That is four grams. Two tablespoons of granulated sugar, that's 24 grams. And then I am using a really nice quality bourbon vanilla. Traditional tiramisu would call for a marsala wine or a sweet wine. You can use amaretto, you can use rum, really any kind of liquor that you want. I'm not a big fan of a boozy flavor in my desserts, so I'm just using a really nice quality vanilla. I'm putting one tablespoon in, that is 15 milliliters. Give this a stir. The smell from this wafting up to me is, oh my goodness, smells so amazing. Once you have this stirred, we want this to cool to room temperature, so just set it aside. Next, you need to set out your mascarpone. You need 16 ounces or 452 grams. It's like a solid form of cream. It's just so smooth and amazing stuff. Once you have your mascarpone in the bowl, give it a stir just to smooth it out. And then we'll set this aside. We want this to be at room temperature. We do not want this refrigerator cold when we go to use it, so just put it aside for now. Put a saucepan on a heat source with just a little bit of water in the bottom. This will be a double boiler. I'm gonna just bring that to a gentle simmer. While this is heating, we will start preparing our zavion. Zavion is an Italian custard. It is eggs and sugar and sometimes liquor. Again, I'll be using just vanilla. And then you just heat it over a double boiler. It's a dessert all by itself. It can be served over fruit or with cake or biscuits. It's delightful. This is the foundation for our tiramisu cream. I'm convinced that this is what makes a great tiramisu, so let's get started. First, you need five egg yolks in a bowl. I am recommending strongly that you use a metal bowl. This is a great heat conductor. The steam from our double boiler here is what will be heating our egg mixture. It just rises up and heats it gently. And then when you remove this from the heat, this bowl cools down very quickly. If you're using a glass bowl, the glass bowl heats up, eventually stays really hot, and then it continues to cook your mixture after you pull it off the heat. Ask me how I know. So use a metal bowl if you have one. It is definitely best for controlling the heat while you're cooking these eggs. Let's get our egg yolks going. Now put a half cup of granulated sugar into your egg yolks. This is 100 grams. And I am using fine sugar. I would highly recommend this. It is super, super fine. It's just a beautiful texture. And the key to having a beautiful sabayon is having it really fine and smooth and light. And we want to make sure that the sugar dissolves. This gives it the best shot if you're using a fine sugar. You want that sugar to dissolve so that it's not grainy in texture. Grab my whisk. Put one tablespoon of bourbon vanilla in. This is 15 milliliters. And again, you can put marsala wine or amaretto, coffee liqueur, anything like that if you would like in at this time. And this is a pinch of kosher salt. Now before you ever put this onto the heat of this water, you want to whisk this really well. If you just briskly whisk this, that's hard to say. Whisk this briskly for three or four minutes. Again, that sugar has to dissolve or you'll have a grainy texture. And that's a yucky texture for a custard. We'll do this for a minute or so. And then we'll put it onto our water when it is at a nice simmer. This process takes about anywhere from seven to 10 minutes. A metal bowl, closer to seven minutes. A glass bowl, 10 to 12 minutes. And what we're doing is heating the eggs up. This is pasteurizing the eggs. They need to at least be at 160 degrees Fahrenheit or 71 degrees Celsius in order to make them safe to eat. This also gives us structure so that our cream doesn't fall flat when we put this all together at the end. So there's a lot going on here. This is an important little step, but I would not skip it. It's the best part of the cream. Our water is just about ready, so I'm putting this on. You need to choose whether you're whisking for seven to 10 minutes or whether you're using a mixer. I will be using a mixer, so I'm gonna grab that and then just put this on. Okay, the water is simmering gently. I'm putting the eggs on our bowl, our saucepan, and I'm gonna start out just mixing on low speed for a little while. I will increase it over time. Again, this takes anywhere from seven to 10 minutes and you need to either whisk or mix with your mixer constantly. After five minutes, I will check the temperature. I'll be watching for this to hit the ribbon stage. It'll be light in color. This mixture is darker now. It'll start to get pale. It'll be mousse-like. It'll be thicker and it'll hold its shape a little more. I'll show you what the ribbon stage looks like. You can make a figure eight and it holds its shape for about two to three seconds. So when we get to that point, I'll show you. I'm starting to see little trails, so it's starting to look more and more done. It's looking more like mousse. It's light in color. It's fluffing up very nicely. It's been about five minutes, so I'm gonna check the temperature and just see how it's doing. This is at 160 degrees. I wanna show you what the ribbon stage looks like. I'm gonna move it off the heat source. This is what it looks like when you swirl your mixer around. You should be able to make a figure eight and see it on the top for just a second or so. This stuff is beautiful and done. Now that our mixture is off the heat source, I am just aerating it a little bit. I'm basically just running my mixer through it a little bit to cool it down. I'm just gonna mix it for like a minute. It just helps to incorporate a little bit of air and cool it down some. Now, we will set this aside. We want this to come to room temperature. I have a piece of plastic wrap here. You need to push this right down onto the surface of the sauvignon. It will form a skin if you don't. It kinda gets grainy and dry. So push that right down on. It's already starting to pull the beauty of a metal bowl. I could not do this if I was using a glass bowl. So, enough said about that. Put this aside. So this is the last part of our filling. We'll be making some whipped cream. You need one and a half cups of really cold, heavy whipping cream. That's 360 milliliters. One teaspoon of vanilla for flavor. That's five milliliters. I have two tablespoons of granulated sugar here. That's 24 grams. I will be putting that in when I get this to the soft peak stage. Start out slow because it's very splashy and messy. I've made a giant mess. I'm good at that. This is soft peak stage. There's little tiny peaks rising up, but they fall very quickly. So now we will gently start adding in our granulated sugar just a little bit at a time. You do this so that you don't deflate the cream. You just dump it all in at once. It would kind of deflate it. So just incorporate it a little bit at a time. This is extra fine sugar also so that it dissolves faster and easier. If you can't get extra fine sugar at the store, you can make your own by pulsing granulated sugar in your food processor. There's the last of the sugar. We're taking this just to stiff peak stage. Then we will stop. Getting the cream from the edges of the bowl. That just sticks right up there. So this is done. And we are ready to assemble our tiramisu. So it's time to make our filling. First, grab the things we prepared earlier. We have our mascarpone, our zabillon, which I will peel off the plastic wrap. And we have our lovely custard in there. And our whipped cream. So we'll combine this first. We'll pour our zabillon into our mascarpone. Look at this lovely stuff. It smells so nice. Beautiful. Now you just want to fold these together until they're smooth. Once you have that incorporated, next it's time to add in our whipped cream, which we will do in thirds. We're trying to keep some air and lightness in there so we don't want to put it all in at one time. So just put one portion in. So pretty. Just fold it in. The more gentle you are, the more you'll maintain the air that we whipped into this. Our final bit of our whipped cream in. This is a light, fluffy, beautiful, creamy filling. Just exactly what our tiramisu needs. Once you have the whipped cream all incorporated, you should have a really nice, smooth, light, fluffy mixture here. Now it's time to do our first layer of ladyfingers in our pan. I have everything here that I need to assemble our tiramisu now. You'll need a shallow bowl for your soak. I'll be pouring this in here. You'll need your ladyfingers. You'll need your cream filling, and I have a cutting board here and a knife because depending on the pan that you're using, at some point you need to trim, cut the ends, the sides, and so you'll need a sharp knife for cutting as well. I have a kind of an odd-shaped pan, but I liked it because it has square corners, which is kind of hard to find. Most baking pans have rounded corners. It's just less cutting if you use a square pan. Eight-by-eights typically are square. If you wanna use an eight-by-eight, cut this recipe in half and you will be in good shape. This recipe will do a nine-by-13. This one happens to be an eight-by-12. So let's get started. I'm gonna pour my soak into my shallow dish here. So here we go. It's time to start soaking our ladyfingers. Don't actually soak them, though. They get soggy and yucky. So I do like a one-second dip. These are store-bought. You can submerge the whole thing for about a second and then just pull it back out. Place it in your pan. You can also do this kind of soak if you want, one side and then the other, whichever is easier for you. And continue just layering them in your pan. I would not recommend you putting a bunch in here because they do get soggy. And you just wanna do them one at a time. So we have our first layer in. This is what it looks like at this point. Now it's time to add some filling on. Just wanna add half. Now smooth it out with an offset spatula. Now we'll add the rest of our cream filling on. Once you have your last layer of cream filling on, smooth it out very nicely and then cover this with plastic wrap. And this goes off to the fridge for at least eight hours and you can actually leave this in your refrigerator for up to two days. Do not put the cocoa powder on before you put it in the refrigerator. It will draw moisture from the filling. It'll start to get moist and mottled. It'll look really strange when it comes out. It just takes on a different texture. We want that really nice and dry, beautiful texture. So we'll dust it right before we're ready to serve it. So off to the refrigerator. Well, our tiramisu spent the night in the refrigerator. We're going to remove the plastic wrap and now it's time to dust it with cocoa powder. I'm using Dutch processed cocoa. Since we're just sprinkling it on the top and we're just eating it, it's not dissolved or blended into anything. This is less acidic and it has a dark, rich, beautiful flavor. Make sure you give it a good dusting. Make sure you're covering all of the white. Don't worry about the dish. It's kind of messy, but you can just take a damp cloth or paper towel and just wipe your dish down. Well, it's time to cut into our tiramisu. Have a look, have a bite. The best way to get clean cuts is a hot knife. I ran this under hot water and then clean it in between every slice that you make. So here goes. Sometimes the first piece to get out is a little tricky. I did it. It was not the easiest thing, but if you're having company, you get the first one out. The rest is super easy and it's just beautiful. So I'm going to go ahead and try a piece. I'm sorry. I made you eat tiramisu. From the chocolate part, it just went down my throat. I probably say this about a lot of the desserts that I make, but this is so, so delicious. The coffee-soaked biscuits, the flavor just shines through. The cream that we made is absolutely delightful. The cocoa on top just plays so nicely with all the flavors. This is a must-make dessert for you, and it's a make-ahead. So make this a couple of days in advance. Pull this out of the fridge. You'll impress the socks off of whoever you're serving it to. Well, we did it. This was fun. I enjoyed my time with you. If you enjoy this kind of dessert, I have lots of amazing recipes for you to check out. I look forward to baking with you in the next video.