The rise of rhubarb

We've now had more than two consecutive sunny, warm days, so I'm declaring it spring. Plus, with the time change (not to mention the official first day of spring), it feels like the psychological darkness of winter is behind us. In case you were wondering, I am not a skier.

The only bad thing about warmer weather is that all our refrigerators started breaking: this past week we've had one broken ice machine, two broken refrigerators, a now a third refrigerator is acting funny. And every one of those was a separate service call, which kind of makes me want to go outside and bang my head against the brick wall.

To keep up with the weather, we're working on a new dessert for Après. It's time to phase out our citrus desserts, plus the apple dumpling (which really hasn't been in season for about five months, but cool weather always feels apple-y, so we did it). There's really only one spring fruit-like ingredient: rhubarb, one of the weirder dessert ingredients around. It's hard to be inspired by something that looks like celery and has a sour flavor and stringy texture. And yet, there is that amazing color...

To guide the development of our rhubarb dessert, I laid down two ground rules. First, the whole point of using rhubarb is that it's seasonal, so we are not going to pair it with non-seasonal ingredients, which includes strawberries (or, saints preserve us, raspberries, which won't be in season for months and months). Second, the final dish has to feature the appeal of rhubarb, which means we had to find a way to coax a nice flavor out of it without covering it up.

My initial thought was to dress up a rhubarb tartlet, which seemed classic and simple. I thought almonds might be a nice pairing, and I found a recipe for almond gelato which was essentially frozen almond paste--Jill's favorite food--so I figured that couldn't be a bad garnish. I made a nice delicate tart crust, and some pastry cream flavored with a dash of cardamom, but I was stumped on how to make the rhubarb into a pretty tart topping, since usually it breaks down into a stringy mush when it's cooked, and no matter how many warm childhood memories you have about rhubarb, stringy mush is not appetizing. I did some web searching and found a crazy recipe for cooking rhubarb stalks "sous vide", which is a technique used by fancy chefs like Thomas Keller to cook everything from vegetables to meats at a low, controlled temperature "without air" (basically sealed in a plastic bag, and placed in warm water bath). This allows delicate ingredients to retain their original shape while softening and cooking through, and it's super-easy if you own a temperature-controlled water bath. Which I don't. But I tried to approximate the method using a big pot of water and checking the temperature every few minutes, and it turns out that the pilot light on our stove does a perfect job of maintaining the water at the correct temperature for the rhubarb recipe.

Surprisingly, it worked great! I put rhubarb stalks in a ziploc bag with some water, sugar, and vanilla bean seeds and an hour later we had nice, soft rhubarb that held its shape and soaked up a little sweet vanilla flavor. When I put this in my tart shell on top of the cardamom pastry cream, and added a scoop of almond gelato on the side, it looked pretty good. Then we all grabbed spoons and tasted it, and there was an awkward moment while everyone basically said "huh." It wasn't bad, but it wasn't really good. We batted around ideas for a while--maybe the crust was too thick, or there was too much pastry cream, or the ice cream was overwhelming, or we needed a layer of rhubarb compote in the tartlet, but after half an hour, we came to the conclusion that it just didn't taste like much of anything. The components were all good, but the rhubarb flavor got swamped as soon as we tried it with anything else.

Then, as we were cleaning up from the taste test, we saw the ziploc bag with the rosy rhubarb poaching liquid in it, and we figured we might as well taste that (that is a good summary of one of my life's driving philosophies: might as well taste that). Bingo! It was fantastic! Like lemonade, but pinker! Like pink lemonade, but real-er pink! I drank a whole glass of it, and now we have a entirely new concept: rhubarb soup! I remembered a recipe by Pierre Hermé (whose cookbook jacket calls him "The Picasso of Desserts", which might win him the chef ego contest, although the competition is fierce) for strawberry-rhubarb soup, and I found some other ideas online to tweak my sous vide recipe to make the liquid come out as flavorful as possible. Now I'm working on the presentation and accompaniments: a scoop of homemade crème fraîche, a cardamom-almond lace cookie, and if all goes well we'll be debuting the dessert this week.

We got a nice review on one of Westword's blogs: http://blogs.westword.com/cafesociety/2010/03/sugar_high_apres_dessert_bar_a.php. Congrats to Travis for manning the ship during our first reviewer visit (that we know about)!

To close, I took a picture of a creation made by one of our servers who lent an able hand during an afternoon of marathon ice cream sandwich making. He couldn't bear to throw away the scraps of cookie and ice cream that were left, so he made himself a sundae (which is probably not going to appear on our menu, but you can always disassemble an ice cream sandwich to make your own version):