Burch & Purchese Dishes 6 - Burnt Orange Cream

We at Burch & Purchese are always interested in new techniques and flavours, and this dish highlights both of these. The dish is based around orange with notes of bitter, toasted/burnt and spice. Two isomalt based sugars are produced, one with a prominent orange flavour. This is made with dehydrated orange peel. The two cooked sugars are blitzed to fine powders and kept separate in hermetically sealed containers until needed. The lighter sugar is dusted onto a sil-pat with a sieve, it is dusted onto a rectangle shaped chablon which is removed before baking. After spending four minutes in an oven at 180C the sugar is removed from the oven and left to cool on the mat. Once cooled it is dusted with the orange sugar again using a chablon, again it is rectangle but this time it has diagonal indents which create an offset stripe on to the original sugar. This is then put back into the oven for two minutes before removing and rolling over a tube. The tube is reserved for later use and we begin to make the cream filling. As we mentioned earlier we are interested in using new techniques and flavours, and this cream has both. An orange infused 'sauce anglaise' is made and once cooked is poured into a baking tray and placed into a very hot oven for around 25 minutes. The oven is pre-heated to 220C and as you can imagine, this burns the top of the custard and leaves a black crust. The other interesting thing to note is that the custard curdles with over cooking and separates the fat from the water. This is alarming for any pastry chef but the outcome is correct and can be rectified to produce a smooth and silky cream infused with the burnt overtones. The 'burnt' custard is passed through a fine sieve into a thermomix, including all of the black crust and separated mixture, a leaf of gelatine is added and the mixture is blitzed. A pale, homogeneous mass is formed which is smooth and has a flavour of burnt orange which is sensational. This mix is left to chill and then piped into the sugar tubes at the last minute before serving. To accompany this stunning component are blackened slices of orange, toasted brioche, confit orange zest, Burch & Purchese spice mix and drops of coffee extract. The dish encapsulates our desire for innovative, technical and delicious components. The brioche and sugar tube provide a crunch for textural difference and the cream is sublime, the coffee and spice lift the dish to a new dimension and we hope you find this informative and that you find the dish visually appealing.