Chef Andy Snow: Beets, oil and cornstarch, dessert. We are going to show you what happens when you combine the art of cooking with the smarts of science. A little thing called molecular gastronomy. We are going to make a dessert, but we are combining some science with it. I am going to prepare for you today, a gelato with an almond crunch, finished with some spun sugar. What we need for this dish is, gelato, we have raspberries and blackberries, almond crunch. This is made out of almond oil and maltodextrin, freshly spun sugar and this we are going to make out of isomalt sugar.
We are going to make this, which is a almond crunch and what we are going to do to make that, is we are going to use some maltodextrin in almond oil. We want to combine this together and then we want to toast them up, so they become brown.
Male Speaker: Maltodextrin and his family is dextrin family, a group of low molecular weight carbohydrates that are derived from starch. They are water soluble and are used as water based glues and thicken your eatables.
Chef Andy Snow: We want to mix it with your hands, so what you trying to do is, you are looking for a texture and consistency, very similar to the pie dough, when pie dough, kind of crumbles when it's right and you can see, this is starting to crumble now; starting to clump together, but still breaking apart. So it is pretty close to be in ready, it may be just a touch more. So, put a little drop or two more in there and we will stir it up. So, what we want to do over at this point. Now, that is clumping together, toast it off.
So, we bring it over, good sauté pan and all we do is, put it over a very high heat, place it into the sauté pan and then we just want to kind of keep on moving a little bit, so it doesn't burn and it will toast right it up. So, this stuff is pretty cool, as you can see, it's toasted on the outside, it's crumbly, it turns into the powder and I when you eat it, it just dissolves. So, now we are going to move on, this is pretty cool too. What we are going to do with this, this is the isomalt sugar.
Male Speaker: Isomalt is a sugar alcohol that serves as a natural sugar substitute. It is an odorless, crystalline substance, that originated from beets and lax with caramelizing properties of sugars.
Chef Andy Snow: So, we are just heating it up now and what I am using here is, it just a whisk, like you use it at home, but it's been snipped off, so all the rounded part is gone. And what we are going to do with this as when it gets hot, I hold it up, as you can see the strands peeling off of there. I am going to take the strands; I am going to pull them with my hand.
I don't want it to be too close, because this stuff is very hot and if u get a big drip over on you, you will know it. So, I pull it off and basically what I am ending up with, something very similar to cotton candy. It's a little bit thicker than that though. So, you end up with something like that. Kind of random shaped, it is pretty neat. We will start off by putting our gelato in the center of the bowl, put it in like that. We will then take some berries for color. We will give it a little squeal of this raspberry puree and then we are going to put some on the malto around it as well.
And the other side, a real big part of the dish, it just really compliments it a lot, because now you got this almond flavor, but the coolest thing about it is, it is almond flavor in something that they never eaten before, they are like "We don't know what it is", just like "What is that ?" . So
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