Photo: Tequila Granita with Lychee and Yuzu Cream Recipe
This recipe is one of our summer desserts at Tru using lots of unusual ingredients. Lychees are a fleshy white meat fruit that you must peel off their red shell to eat. Their inside seed pod reminds me of a June Bug, one of the only bugs I'm afraid of. Yuzu is a Japanese citrus fruit and we buy just the juice to cook with. It's very tart like lime juice. The dried rose buds I buy at Whole Foods and they remind me of when I went to sing at the world fair at Expo 67 in Montreal with my family. There was a Japanese exhibit and the woman in Kimono and white painted faces were giving out "lucky rose buds" only they pronounced it "lucky lose buds."
Ingredients
Granita:
- 1 1/2 cups fresh lime juice
- 1/2 cup tequila
- 1 1/2 cups simple syrup (made from boiling 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water)
- 2 sheets gelatin, soaked in water
Yuzu Cream:
- 2 1/2 cups cream
- 3 1/2 tablespoons sugar
- 1 1/2 tablespoons yuzu juice
Garnish:
- 1 grapefruit cut into supremes
- 10 fresh lychee, peeled and halved
- 8 rose petal ribbons, recipe follows
Directions
Make the Granita: Whisk the liquids together in a bowl. Take off 1/2 cup of the liquid, add the gelatin and warm it to melt the gelatin. Combine all the liquids and freeze
overnight. Scrape the next day into a frozen container.
Make the Yuzu Cream: Combine all ingredients and whip until very, very soft peaks form. It will continue to thicken as it sits.
In a soup plate or flat bowl place a mound of granita in the center. Surround it with a thick ring of yuzu cream. Top the granita with grapefruit segments and then lychee pieces on top of that. Place a rose petal ribbon over the top.
Rose Ribbon:
- 2 cups sugar
- 3/4 cup water
- 1/4 cup glucose
- 1/2 cup dried rose buds, with the core of the bud removed
Preheat the oven 350 degrees F.
In a saucepan, combine the sugar, water and glucose and heat to 305 degrees F. Carefully and gently stir in the rose petals and pour onto a silicone baking mat lined baking sheet and let cool.
Gently and slowly warm the rose mixture in the oven until just soft. Pull to form very thin ribbons or abstract shapes. Store with limestone on foam rubber in an airtight container.
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