Loco for Coconut
The second dessert adventure from Amaury Guichon’s “The Art Of Flavor” is a coconut. But it’s not like any coconut you’ve ever cracked into. Follow along with this complex burst of flavour straight from the tropics.
One of the challenges presented by the recipes in this book (aside from the technical skill challenges!) is that there are at least 6 individual recipes for each dessert and none includes a “yield”, so you really don’t know how many it will make until you get done! This one made 8 coconuts for me. (I had quite a bit of leftover baba, which is a fine problem to have, incidentally)
One of the big challenges for duplicating these in a home kitchen is the lack of equipment. A blast chiller would’ve been a real time saver for the coconut since each component needed to be frozen completely before moving on to the next step.
It starts with a lime baba, which is basically a sweet that’s then soaked in a lime and rum syrup. Somehow I’ve lost many of the photos so you’ll have to trust me on this. I used key lime juice.
Next up is the tropical compote which includes mango, passionfruit and pineapple – this gets placed in a sphere mould and then the frozen lime baba is inserted into the middle and then that all goes in the freezer.
Once you’ve struggled like crazy to get the frozen sphere out of the silicone sphere mould it’s inserted into the coconut mousse (I had to use a half sphere for this step since I don’t have a bigger sphere mould) then once that side is set up, pop them out, refill the mould with coconut mousse and pop the frozen half spheres into the filled half spheres to create a complete sphere, then freeze again.
See what I mean about all this freezing? The coconuts need to be very solid before dipping them into the chocolate dip and brushing it with a pastry brush to get that coconut look. Then freeze that. when ready to serve, cut the top off with a sharp knife and I heated the knife with a kitchen torch to make the jagged edges. decorate with edible gold and chocolate leaves and pop it into the fridge for about an hour to soften all the components before serving.
It’s truly a summertime delight!
