Park Avenue Winter's Volcano Flambé, a $20 dessert that begins with the diner donning an (optional) white lab coat and pair of headphones.
Courtesy of Park Avenue Winter
Jordi Roca, of El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain, is working on a dessert that evokes the emotions team FC Barcelona soccer star Lionel Messi feels scoring a goal. As an MP3 player narrates Messi’s attempt, (“Messi is alone on goal! Messi shoots!”) you eat elements of the dessert, including scented meringue filled with passion fruit cream and chocolate pop rocks, culminating in a white chocolate soccer ball.
Albert Adria, who is the pastry chef at molecular gastronomy temple ElBulli in Catalonia, Spain, uses words like “dirt” and “blood” when he talks about dessert. For his falling chocolate trunk, the mossy earth is lime and mint yogurt, the dirt is almond praline and puffed quinoa, and the tree is filled with frozen chocolate powder.
The hardest part of making the chocolate pot de crème “egg” at Le Bernardin? Peeling the skin from the inside of the eggshell. Pastry chef Michael Laskonis breaks one or two eggs per dozen removing the skin. Shells that survive are filled with chocolate custard, then warm caramel, maple foam, and a smattering of Maldon sea salt. Though the egg appears nowhere on the menu (the restaurant serves it as a ‘pre-dessert’) 50-100 eggs are hatched each night.
Courtesy of Le Bernardin
Francisco Migoya, an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America, is working on a chocolate "terrarium." Milk chocolate mousse and matcha cake are coated with chocolate spray, painted green, and topped with almond and cocoa ‘soil.’ Meyer lemon and espresso curd and litchi jelly play the role of flowers.
Francisco Migoya
At Copenhagen’s Noma, pastry chef Rosio Sanchez prefers refreshing to sweet when it’s time for dessert. The head of her snowman is filled with sea buckthorn; his stomach is stuffed with carrot sorbet. Meringue forms the base.
Ditte Isager / Courtesy of Phaidon Press
Momofuku pastry chef Christina Tosi believes the milk at the bottom of your cereal bowl is the best part of breakfast. So she concocted a dessert made from the stuff – cereal-milk flavored panna cotta, topped with carmelized cornflakes, and served with slabs of chocolate peanut butter bark and an avocado puree. What, you don’t have avocado on top of your cereal each morning?
www.trissalicious.com
