thepassionatecook: Tempura-baked apple slices in frothy cider chaudeau (SHF II)

Jennifer has chosen a great theme for the 2nd Sugar-High Friday - apples. That's the best thing that could have happened. When I was living back in Vienna, we lived close to a restaurant which had then just been awarded their 1st Gault Millau toque. Their cuisine is quite traditional, no fancy-shmancy mini-portions on a tiny plate, no over-ambitious efforts to marry the long-standing with more exotic ingredients. Just unpretentious food like your grandma would make, only much better. It was there that I chose for dessert a dish my Mum would frequently make at home when I was little. It was served on the frothiest, creamiest sauce I have ever had in my life. I even asked for the recipe but was too tipsy at the time to remember anything of it, but I've been craving for this sauce for the longest time.
Then I visited my Mum one day and, helping her in the kitchen, found a recipe on a pack of icing sugar - reading through it brought back intense memories of what I had eaten at that restaurant, I could almost taste the flavours I had fallen in love with back then! So I cut it out, put it in my handbag, then transferred it to my recipe folder and forgot all about it. Now, more than five years later, I stumbled across it once more when looking for recipes with apples. So now here's my chance to finally bring it back to life and give it the chance it deserves!
The dessert I am talking about is a traditional Austrian dish (I seem to almost always go for specialities from back home when it comes to choosing my contributions to international food blogging challenges):"Gebackene Apfelspalten auf Most-Chaudeau" - finger-thick apple slices baked in a semi-sweet tempura batter, served on a frothy cream made with "Most" (fermented apple juice similar to cidre, but without the bubbles), egg yolks and sugar, whisked over steam to achieve a thick consistency. The batter I used for the apple slices is Austria's answer to tempura - most often we use beer for a savoury crust for fish or mushrooms, but here I used sparkling water and added sugar and cinnamon. It's very easy to whip up, so this dish is the sort of thing my Mum used to make when three hungry wolves were waiting around the table and there was no time to go shopping.
With the addition of the frothy, sweet and very fruity sauce, this is an utterly delicious dessert, I can't get enough of it. Make sure the apples you use are of the tart, not the sweet kind to complement and off-set the sweetness of the sauce. If you don't like cidre (or can't get any where you live) you can use apple juice for the chaudeau instead - it's really the taste you're after, not the alcohol.

Tempura-baked apple slices in frothy cider chaudeau
(serves 4)

For the baked apple slices*:
4 tart apples (I used Boscop)
1 tbsp calvados
½ lemon
1 tsp cinnamon
50 g caster sugar
2 tbsp sunflower oil
2 knobs butter
2 tbsp cranberry jam (raspberry and red current work equally well)

For the batter:
130 ml sparkling mineral water
100 g flour
1 egg yolk
25 g butter (melted)
25 g caster sugar
small pinch salt
1 egg white (beaten creamy, but not stiff)

For the chaudeau:
220 ml cidre or cider (semi-sweet)
juice of ½ lemon
½ tsp cinnamon
3 egg yolks
100 g icing sugar

Prepare the chaudeau first. Combine all the ingredients in a heat-resistant bowl and place on a pot over simmering water. Whisk continually until the mixture turns pale and thickens. Keep warm.

Peel, core and slice the apples horizontally. Rub with the lemon, then sprinkle with calvados. Mix the sugar and cinnamon together and cover the apple slices evenly with the mixture. Leave to marinate while you prepare the dough.

For the batter, mix the water, flour and yolks until very smooth, but not for too long, as you need some of the airy bubbles to stay intact. Add the rest of the ingredients, reserving the beaten egg whites. When everything is combined, fold in the egg whites.

Heat the oil and butter in a deep non-stick pan. Run the apple slices through the batter to cover them completely, then add to the pan and shallow-fry until soft inside and crispy and golden outside. Pat dry with some kitchen towel, garnish with some cranberry jam in the middle, sprinkle with icing sugar and serve immediately, on a generous portion of the chaudeau.

*Recipe for apple slices (not the chaudeau) adapted from Plachutta's "Die Gute Küche"

Comments

That's excellent. We at loveSicily did something quite similar, but a different interpretation. I think that's the best think about this events, seeing all the variations on a common theme.

Posted by: ronald | Nov 12, 2004 at 11:40 PM