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Candy Cap Bavarian Cream

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Candy cap mushroom bavarian cream

Candy cap bavarian cream was one that I enjoyed teaching my pastry chef to make recently. 

I’m not a pastry chef, but I’ve been through enough rough spots (pastry chef giving notice and moving back to Naples Italy, pastry chef being neurotic and flaky, pastry chef being unskilled and needing guidance, did I say pastry chefs being neurotic and flaky?) that I can hold down the program if necessary until a restaurant finds another person to fill the position. 

A great standby I rely on is basic custards made out of the classic pastry mother sauce creme anglaise. They’re fairly straight forward once you’ve made the simple custard base, from there all you have to do is decide how it will be flavored. The Bavarian cream to me is kind of a forgotten pastry technique, I don’t really see them on menus too often. It’s a cousin of panna cotta, mousse, and creme brulee, just with a bit more whisking involved.

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What you end up with is like a soft, gently set mousse that literally melts in your mouth, fluffy, airy, delicate and rich all at the same time. Citrus is a classic flavor of Bavarian creams, but I wanted to find another way to highlight candy caps, as well as cost out a recipe with them to see if I can afford to put them on the menu. (If you don’t have candy caps, you can order small amounts here).

With the market price of candy caps at roughly 250$ wholesale, knowing how far the dried mushrooms can be stretched and how much the finished product can be sold for is the financial part of being a chef I am always trying to get better at, the better I am with numbers, the more I can justify having the interesting products I want on the menu. Thankfully high school math word problems prepared me for situations like this.

If candy caps cost 250$/lb and I can sell desserts for 7-10$/portion, how do I make it work shooting for an overall foodcost of 30% or lower on the dish?

Well, I know can buy packets of dried candy caps that are 1/2 ounce or 14 grams for 20$ +shipping. Looking at the cost of the mushrooms is initially scary from a food cost viewpoint, but candy caps are so powerful, you just need to know much it takes to flavor something, and not go overboard.

I’ve made this recipe a couple different times, and each time I ratchet down the amount of candy caps. I started with an ounce of them. At first the flavor was very strong and maple tasting, but the more candy caps are in something, the more bitter it can be, which is due to the amount of physical mushroom in finished product.

Candy cap mushroom bavarian cream

Once the batter is made, you can spoon it into whatever vessel you like. This one is topped with black walnuts praline.

Just like a truffle, the key to using these intelligently is to use their scent to flavor things, not the physical pieces of mushroom. I found that a single gram or roughly 1.79$ of mushroom (including shipping costs) will flavor 8.5 orders, and you can probably make bigger batches with varying percentages to cut cost even further, since the scent of the candy caps is what flavors the dish.

A fun food cost equation with candy caps 

8.5 orders X 7$ per order =59.5 net profit

Total cost of the dish is 1.79 (mushrooms) + 10.50 (est. labor+other ingredients)

12.29/59.5=.20655462 or roughly 21% overall food cost, which is under the 30% margin we’re shooting for. Yay.

Wasn’t that exciting?!

Candy cap mushroom bavarian cream

I like to serve these with something crunchy, like a tuile cookie.

Candy cap mushroom bavarian cream
Print Recipe
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Candy Cap Bavarian Cream

Yield: 4.5 cups of custard, roughly 8 ½ cup ramekins
Prep Time45 mins
Cook Time4 mins
Setting Time6 hrs
Course: Dessert
Cuisine: French
Keyword: Bavarian Cream, Bavarois, Candy Cap Mushrooms
Servings: 8

Ingredients

  • ½ cup heavy cream + 1 cup
  • 3 leaves of gelatin or one packet of prepared gelatin
  • ½ cup of sugar divided into two ¼ cups
  • 5 egg yolks
  • 3 egg whites
  • 1 tablespoon ground candy cap mushrooms

Instructions

  • Soak the leaf gelatin in ice water for 2 minutes or until just softened. Whisk the egg yolks with ¼ cup of the sugar, the ground candy caps, and reserve.
  • Heat the 1/2 cream with the gelatin until steaming, then whisk half into the egg yolks thoroughly, then add the other half.
  • Return the egg mixture to the pan, heat on low and whisk until the mixture thickens slightly and lightly coats the back of a spoon, do not over heat or the mixture will curdle.
  • Transfer the mixture to a bowl to cool, whisking occasionally to help chill it, then whisk the egg whites with the remaining ¼ cup sugar until stiff peaks form.
  • Meanwhile whisk the full cup of cream to stiff peaks. Fold the egg whites and cream into the yolk mixture, then spoon into ramekins, cover with plastic, and refrigerate overnight to set.

Notes

If you use prepared gelatin in a packet, add it to the warm cream directly from the packet, and whisk until combined, then proceed per usual.

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Previous Post: « Midwestern Vignarola, 2017
Next Post: French Morel Mushroom Salad »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Dotty bacon

    May 20, 2017 at 7:30 pm

    Intriguing: mushrooms in a desert. I would surely try it to eat, not to make. Great meal at Lucias today, blessings and thanks! dotty

    Reply
  2. Ronald Fan

    May 21, 2017 at 12:09 pm

    Great post. Beautiful pictures (as usual) and intriguing ingredient for the everyday reader. Some inside baseball math and solid recipe for the professional.

    I’m assuming gelatin leaf is gold bloom?

    Reply
    • Alan Bergo

      May 25, 2017 at 10:06 am

      Thanks. And yes, gold bloom.

      Reply
  3. Vicky McKay

    October 1, 2018 at 1:09 pm

    Regarding the tuile cookies – would almond work with the flavor profile?

    Reply
    • Alan Bergo

      October 1, 2018 at 1:48 pm

      Almond would be great.

      Reply

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Consider the salad, here, a little mix of ephemera Consider the salad, here, a little mix of ephemerals, and other tender young plants and herbs. 

The instinctual knowledge involved in choosing different plants at their peak to serve together raw, with thought put into how the textures and flavors will work on someone’s palette, to me, is one of the highest forms of culinary artistry. Something most people will never taste in their life. 

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Last entry. I’ve saved the smallest, fern gulliest plant for last. 

False Mermaid Weed (Floerkea proserpinacoides) is a good little plant Sam Thayer showed me. It’s tiny, as in all the photos are from me on my belly, in a wet ditch. It’s so small it’s hard to get the camera to even focus on it (see pic with my finger for scale). 

Mermaid weed likes wet areas, like ditches and spots that hold a bit of water (perfect mosquito habitat😁). 

Like chickweed, Floerkia greens are like nature’s Microgreens. They’re in the Limnanthaceae, (a new-ish group of brassicas) and like the Toothwort form earlier this week, you’ll taste a strong mustard-family flavor in a mouthful of their tender stems. 

They’re literally wild mustard sprouts, and, unlike other wild sprouts (garlic mustard 🤬) they stay sprouts, and, they actually taste good. 

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I’m lucky enough to have some large colonies near me so I do clip a few handfuls each year-my annual reward for removing some of the garlic mustard nearby, that, along with atvs, dirt bikes, and contamination from local water pollution, is one of the biggest threats to this tiny green. 

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Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) are one of the most beautiful harbingers of spring I know, as well as one of the most delicious. 

They’re in the Borage family, along with the namesake plant, Comfrey (which I only eat a few flowers of occasionally) and Honeywort. 

The flavor of the greens, like borage, has a rich flavor some people might describe as mushroomy or fishy, but after a just a few moments of cooking (30-60 seconds) they get mild and delicious, with a subtle bitterness. It’s a good bitter though-nothing like dandelions or garlic mustard that aren’t fit to be in the same basket, let alone on the same plate. 

The shoots are sweet and delicious, much more mild than the greens. As they can grow to be over a foot long, they’re almost more of a vegetable than a leafy green, depending on when you harvest them. 

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Narrow-leaved Wild Leek / White Ramp (Allium burdickii) 

If you’re in a ramp patch you might occasionally see some with white stems (pic 1,2). These are a cousin to the more common variety with much larger leaves and red stems (pic 3,4,5)

Allium burdickii is not as common as the red-stemmed variety, and in every ramp patch I’ve been in, the white ramp is heavily outnumbered. 

Where I harvest, I like to leave them alone, and mark the areas where they grow with sticks or middens on the ground so I can go back in the fall and help them spread their seeds. I also try and remove garlic mustard when I see it-a much more imminent threat in my mind to ramps than foragers out to gather some leaves. 

2020 was a banner year for ramp seeds, and you can still help the plants right now (pic 7) as some seed heads are still full and would love for you to give them a shake as you walk by. 

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🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 #4: Erythronium leaves E 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

#4: Erythronium leaves 

Erythronium (Trout Lily) are another ephemeral that I see widespread in my ramp patches, there’s at least 32 species world-wide, with at least one endangered species in MN (Dwarf Trout Lily). 

They’re a beautiful, delicious plant I eat every year, but I can’t recommend serving them to the general public. Plenty of people say these are edible, but also emetic if eaten in “quantity”. 

I can tell you, at least with E. albidum and E. americanum I’ve eaten, that some people are much more sensitive than others, so if you want to make a salad to serve people, make sure they’re comfortable eating it, and use a few leaves as a garnish. 

Funny enough, I didn’t learn about these from a foraging book. Like knotweed, I learned about them from one of my favorite chefs: Michel Bras, one of the most influential chefs of the turn of the 21 century. 

Any chef that works with wild plants owes a debt to Bras. His book, although a little dated now, still teaches me new things all the time. While flipping through the book I also caught a recipe using tansy flowers 😳 that I’d probably pass on. 

The whitefish crusted with sunflower seeds is a dish of mine from 2012, and an example of how I eat the leaves: a few at a time, as a garnish. 

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🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Plant #3: Cutleaf Toothwor 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

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Its small at first, but grows to a worthy size for eating as it flowers. It’s related to cabbage and mustard greens (Brassicaceae) and eating just a few leaves will give you a potent, spicy pop of mustard-family flavor reminiscent of horseradish. 

Eaten in combination with other things, like in a salad, the flavor becomes submissive and you’ll barely know it’s there. 

Some people eat the spicy roots shaped like canine teeth, but for the work I hardly think they’re worth it. 

A great wild spring green for the salad bowl-eat them leaves, tender stem, flowers and all🤤. 

#cutleaftoothwort #cadamineconcatenata #ephemeral #springedibles #foraging #wildfoodlove
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