Apples "Benedict"

 Macoun Apple

warm spice cake / thyme / quinoa / brown butter ice cream

So I love New England. I love my home state of Connecticut and all its amazing produce as well as traditions. Apples are just such a staple of CT and I have been going apple picking every fall for as long as I can remember. I love the McIntosh and Macoun apple varieties more than any other and they are the most popular in New England. So I have been trying to create a new dessert that showcases these apples but a dessert that is also classic in flavors as well as presentation. Apple crisp is the perfect example of a truly New England dessert. It has become such a familiar dessert that you will see it on almost every restaurant's menu around fall. I decided one day on a whim to make it for staff meal at ON20 and it just came to me that I had to make a warm apple dessert that was traditional in flavors and familiar in presentation. A modern take on a classic dessert.

I decided to make the apple dessert look like a dish that was just as traditional and approachable as apple crisp... Eggs Benedict. The dish starts of with a muscovado sugar-spice cake that is baked in cast iron egg coddlers. The cake is the base of the dish and is spiced with typical seasonal spices, nutmeg, cinnamon and clove. The cake serves as the toast component. I then decided to cook slices of Macoun apples and sous-vide them in an apple cider caramel. It is very easy to cook the apples to "mush" when baked in an apple pie or apple crisp, so the sous-vided of the apples ensures that they still have a nice soft, but crisp texture. The apples are also infused with the strong flavor of the buttery, apple cider caramel. The apples taste like they have been cooked for a very long time but feel like they have been barely cooked. They make up the "canadian bacon" portion of the dish. The "poached egg" is actually a brown butter ice cream that is filled with the apple cider caramel. Due to a high ratio of glucose, the caramel "oozes" out of the completely frozen brown butter ice cream. The ice cream looks like it has been poached and this is because it has been... "poached" in liquid nitrogen. The cake is served warm with the cold ice cream on top. These differentiating temperatures of hot apples and cold ice cream, have the same nostalgic impact of that of an apple crisp. It is also served with a thyme creme anglasie that is poured table-side. This is the "hollandaise" component. Visually, it looks like breakfast but stylistically, it is a traditional dessert.

 Staff Apple Crisp