So that's not actually the title of this recipe, well it's 99% of it, but the mint should be replaced by zuta levana. Of course I have no effing idea what zuta levana is, despite the foodie nerd I am, but in my research I found it was kind of a cousin to mint. Besides its such a small component of this dish so who the hell cares.
Anyway, this is technically a summer dish, which naturally summer is over. This my friend is part of the reason it took so long to get to this. When you can't get a main ingredient for a dish in your local store and then the first shipment you get from Florida is completely inedible and you have to wait for a second shipment, time can get away from you.
In theory, this dish is super simple, but when you have supply issues, simple becomes two weeks. Go figure.
Ya'll know what prosciutto looks like, so I took what I got from the store and rolled it up into a sausage and then wrapped very tightly in plastic wrap and froze much longer than originally intended but the recipe recommended overnight.
So I mentioned earlier having to get two shipments of a primary ingredient. That ingredient happened to be the passion fruit. The top picture is what I received on the first attempt. Not a single piece of those fruit were edible. Most of them were dried, rotted and generally unusable for what I needed to do. So I fired off a not so nice email to the vendor, who I purchased through thanks to their partnership with Amazon. THey got back to me quickly and sent out the stuff in the bottom photo. Night and day if I do say so myself.
Once I had dealt with the passion fruit it was time to make the passion fruit simply syrup that was needed for a future component. Passion fruit shell, water and sugar.
Earlier I had pureed the flesh of the passion fruit, now it was time to mix that with some water the passion fruit simple syrup and a gelatin sheet. From here this mixture would be whipped, albeit poorly and as a failure, to stiff peaks in order to make the "sponge".
So the top part is what the whole thing was supposed to look like. Sometimes, I run into issues because I cut these recipes from 8 servings to just 1 since it's usually just me eating them. The issue with this one was that the amount of liquid for the sponge wasn't enough to be whipped by my mixer so I did it by hand, but that took forever and the sponge didn't turn out the way I would have hoped.
I pulled the prosciutto out of the freezer and sliced it thin to be dehydrated into chips.
Once the prosciutto had dried sufficiently I prepped everything for plating. Two prosciutto chips for the top and bottom went around the sponge and I garnished with a little bit of mint. The fourth item on the cutting board is thyme which went on the plate as a bed for everything.
This was a really really good one bit dish that I served with a Gewurztraminer wine from Albert Mann. This is a french white wine from the Alsace region that is very fruit forward and paired nicely with the fruit sponge. This is certainly a dish that could be adapted very easily throughout the year for the fruits that are in season as the saltiness of prosciutto plays very nicely with many different fruits.
Til next time when I go back to the French Laundry cookbook for a dish that from what I've read could be quite intimidating.
