Pommier by Alexandre Gauthier

05.25.2015
pommier - Alexandre Gauthier

Alexandre Gauthier, La Grenouillère restaurant’s chef, shares with us the recipe of Pommier (Appletree) as en echo to the new eau de toilette Florabellio.

As a tribute to the Fall, dried leaves to be picked up with your fingers one by one. Also an unintentional tribute to Italian artist Giuseppe Penone.

 

INGREDIENTS

15 g wood chips, 680 g sugar, 50 g inverted sugar, 30 g birch water (birch sap), 1.8 g ice cream stabilizer, 10 cooking apples (Clochard or similar variety), 3 red apples (Royal Gala or Pink Lady), 3 Boskoop apples, 3 Bosc pears, 30 g apple juice, salt, 250 g peanut oil, 30 g fresh marjoram, marjoram oil, wood-flavored syrup.

 

RECIPE

Toast the wood chips for a few minutes in a 190 °C (375 °F) oven. When they start browning, take them out. Heat 80 g sugar, the inverted sugar, the birch water, and 500 g water. Add the chips and let sit for 3 hours. Strain in a fine sieve, heat again and sprinkle with stabilizer. Bring to a boil. Freeze. 

Peel the red apples and Boskoop apples, making very large peelings : once dried, they should look like dried leaves. Make a syrup with the remaining sugar and 500 g water.

Dip the apple peelings in the syrup before drying them in a dehydrator. Also cut some similar peelings from the pears, dip them in the syrup and dry them in the same manner. The pear peelings should curl up into stick shapes to provide the stems for the leaves.

Thinly slice the apples and dip the slices in the syrup before baking them between two sheets in a 100 °C (212 °F) oven until dry. Keep them in a drying oven.

Make an apple sauce with the cooking apples, the apple juice and a pinch of salt. Cover the pan at the beginning of cooking, then remove the lid so that the liquid evaporates as much as possible. Once the apple sauce begins exhaling a slightly smoky fragrance, take off the heat.

Process the fresh marjoram with the peanut oil very finely in a Thermomix®. Strain through a sieve without rubbing. Refrigerate.

On brown plates, drop a tablespoonful of apple sauce. Sprinkle with a few dried leaves made of apple and pear peelings.

Add some more apple sauce and paste more leaves onto it. In the middle of the structure, drop one quenelle of sorbet and cover with apple leaves. The whole dish should show a lot of volume, like a heap of dried leaves. Add a few drops of marjoram oil and wood-flavored syrup, and serve.