Chiboust Day

Today was chiboust day. Chiboust is pastry cream stabilized with gelatin and lightened with Italian meringue. Traditionally it is used as a filling for the Gateau Saint-Honore, but we used it to make individual tartlets. The first was a tart shell filled with a layer or two of sliced strawberries and topped with coconut chiboust. We served this with prune armagnac ice cream, a strip of coconut financier, and coconut foam. Everything was excellent but the coconut foam; we were serving it from one of those metallic whipping cream dispensers (there's a real name for those, but it's not coming to me right now) and the chef accidentally used the soda charger rather than the plain whipping/frothing charger so the foam came out too liquid and somewhat carbonated...oops! 

We also made a chocolate chiboust tart made simple of a rectangle of baked chocolate tart dough with chocolate chiboust piped on top. We served that with a sour cherry compote, chocolate and ancho chili sherbet, a cacao (or cocoa) nib and caramel tuile, and a piped chocolate decoration. Everything was delicious, especially the sherbet, although I'm not sure I liked the cherry compote and the sherbet together. The chocolate decorations were made by taking tempered chocolate and adding enough cocoa powder to it to thicken it to a pipe-able consistency. As the chef explained, basically we are taking couvature chocolate--chocolate with extra cocoa butter added to make it more fluid--and getting rid of the couvature by adding in more cocoa solids. So perhaps if you tempered a Hersey's bar--you can temper any chocolate, by the way--it would have nearly this consistency to start. Once the tempered chocolate is sufficiently thick, it's just a matter of piping it into interesting shapes. We made long rods of chocolate and some squiggly snakes but you could do anything you want. Because they are tempered they set up hard and with a even color and because they have extra cocoa powder they are slightly more bitter than the chocolate you started out with (in this case semi-sweet chocolate). Lovely and delicious!

Chocolate decorations