Red Berry and Tomato Gazpacho with Yellow Tomato Sorbet and Tomato Chips

This is Suzen’s and my first attempt at making a plated dessert from Payard Desserts by Francois Payard with Tish Boyle.

It’s a sweet success, visually and to the palate. What is a plated dessert? It’s one of those complicated, multi-part desserts that you get at a restaurant but could never make for yourself at home. Except now you can thanks to Payard Desserts.

Three parts are used to compose the complete dessert:

· Yellow Tomato Sorbet
· Red Berry and Tomato Gazpacho
· Tomato Chips

The tomato chip was blogged a couple of days ago, but the recipe is repeated here for your convenience.

The base for this dish is the gazpacho, which has a deep berry flavor. This is a dessert, supposedly, but you can confidently serve this dish as a first course. The Yellow Tomato Sorbet is an addition for color and contrast: the sorbet is sour despite some sugar content, while the berry-laden gazpacho is sweet. The berry flavors do dominate the tomatoes, although the balance is sure to shift every time you make this dish depending on the relative sweetness of the berries and tomatoes. And those tomato chips are for visual amusement, not really for taste.

Here are the recipes for the three parts of this dish, and the final instructions for assembly.

Oh, technically, tomatoes are a fruit, not a veggie. So, a salad with tomato is really a dessert which is why, I suspect, the French often finish a meal with salad/dessert.

Yellow Tomato Sorbet

Yield: 6 cups

Ingredients:

1 cup plus 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon sorbet stabilizer [or substitute corn syrup]
1 ¾ cups water
4 cups yellow tomato puree [4 cups of small yellow tomatoes processed in a blender or Vitamix is fine]
2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon simple syrup

Preparation:

In a small bowl, combine ½ cup of the sugar with the stabilizer or corn syrup. In a small saucepan, combine the remaining ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar with the water and place over medium-high heat. Gradually whisk in the sugar and corn syrup mixture and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat the let cool.

In a medium bowl, combine the saucepan contents, the tomato puree and the simple syrup. Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours.

Process the base in an ice cream machine according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Transfer the sorbet to an airtight container and freeze until ready to serve.

Tomato Chips

Yield: lots, depending on how you skin the tomatoes

Ingredients:

6 medium ripe tomatoes
Confectioners’ sugar for dusting

Preparation:

Preheat the oven to 175°F. Line a half-sheet pan with a silicone baking mat [parchment paper does NOT work well]. Fill a bowl halfway with ice water.

Using a paring knife, make a small X at the bottom end of each tomato. Bring a large pot half full of water to a rolling boil over high heat and immerse the tomatoes in the boiling water for about 30 seconds. Remove them with a slotted spoon and immediately plunge the tomatoes into the ice water. The skins should start to come off the tomatoes.

Remove the skins with your fingers [try to remove them in one piece]. Pat the skins dry with paper towels. Reserve the skinned tomatoes for other use [as in gazpacho].

Arrange the skins on the prepared sheet pan and dust them with confectioners’ sugar. Bake for 1 to 2 hours, until dry. The skins will crisp up they cool. Store in an airtight container until ready to serve.