Basque & Navarre · Dessert
Idiazabal con Membrillo Casero
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, an earthy, grounding base, on a drift of smoke.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg ripe quinces, hard and fragrant, grey down rubbed off
- caster sugar, the same weight as the finished pulp, roughly 900 g
- juice of 1 lemon
- 300 g Idiazabal, a well smoked wheel, in thin wedges
- 60 g walnuts, cracked
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceMashing & puréeing
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: nuts
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Quarter the quinces without peeling or coring and cook them in barely enough water to cover, 30 to 40 minutes, until a knife slides through the flesh with no resistance. The cores and skins hold most of the pectin. 40 min
- Lift them out, pull away cores and peel, and pass the flesh through a mouli. Weigh the puree and add an equal weight of sugar plus the lemon juice.
- Cook over low heat in a heavy pan, stirring and standing clear of the spits, for 45 to 60 minutes, until the paste has turned from blush pink to deep brick and a spoon leaves a track that closes only slowly. 60 min
- Pour into a lined tin to a depth of 3 cm, level the top, and leave uncovered at room temperature until it has skinned over and is firm enough to cut cleanly.
- Slice 5 mm thick and serve with wedges of Idiazabal left out of the fridge for an hour, and the cracked walnuts alongside.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
Mashing & puréeing 114 recipes
- Smooth to the degree the dish asks for, judged on the tongue rather than by eye: no lumps, no fibres, no grit, unless texture is the point.
- No gluey elasticity: a spoonful drops cleanly off the spoon rather than stretching in a rope behind it.
- The consistency holds: it mounds on a spoon and stays there, neither slumping flat nor standing so stiff that a spoon has to cut it.
- Nothing separates on the plate: no water or fat weeping out into a ring within a minute of serving.
- The colour is even throughout, with no streaks of unincorporated fat, liquid, or seasoning at the edges of the bowl.
Where it goes wrong A starchy ingredient met a high-speed blade, so the cells burst and released their starch: what should be light comes out as an elastic glue that lifts off the spoon in one mass.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Moscato d’Asti
- Also Right
- Late-harvest Riesling
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling elderflower
Citrus desserts need a wine sweeter than they are, with acid enough to keep up: light, frothy, and low-proof wins.
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