RyuGin’s signature dessert, as Hideaki Sato served it to us at Tenku RyuGin in Hong Kong in February 2014: a candy strawberry filled with strawberry powder frozen to −196 °C. The guest breaks it with a spoon, and strawberry jam at +99 °C is poured over it at the table. Hideaki says he suggested this dessert to chef Seiji Yamamoto five years before our visit.
The restaurant never sent us its quantities, so there are none here. The method follows, step by step, the kitchen video RyuGin published itself. It is a dessert for a professional pastry kitchen: you will need liquid nitrogen, a cream siphon, a food dehydrator, a heat lamp and a small air pump.
The restaurant’s own kitchen video of this dish: RyuGin collection: 苺アメ2011 −196 °C ~ +99 °C (YouTube)
- Cut the green tops off the strawberries with a thin slice of fruit and keep them. Cut the strawberries into small pieces, toss them with sugar and leave for 2 hours, until they give their juice.
- Cook the strawberries in their juice until the jam thickens. Keep it hot: it is poured over the dessert at about 99 °C.
- Blanch the strawberry tops for a few seconds in boiling water and lay them on paper. Dip each one in wild strawberry liqueur, dust with sugar and dry in a food dehydrator for about 6 hours.
- For the frozen powder, slice more strawberries, vacuum-pack them with sugar and cook the bag in a water bath at 80 °C for 10 minutes. Chill the bag in iced water.
- Blend the strawberries in a Thermomix at 80 °C with the milk, the cream and the softened gelatin. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve into a bowl set over ice and let it cool.
- Pour the cold base into a cream siphon, charge it and spray the foam into a container of liquid nitrogen. It freezes into brittle pieces. Break them up, lift them out and grind them to a fine powder in a chilled chopper. Mix the powder with the feuilletine flakes and keep it in liquid nitrogen until you fill the candy.
- For the candy, dissolve the food colouring and the cream of tartar in the water. Pour it over the isomalt and the sugar in a pan and boil to about 163 °C.
- Pour the candy onto a silicone mat inside a frame. As it cools, fold it, pull it and twist it until it turns glossy and satiny, then cut it into pieces.
- Warm a piece of candy under a heat lamp until soft and knead it into a ball. Push it onto a copper tube connected to an air pump and blow it gently, shaping it with your hands into a hollow strawberry.
- Free the shell from the tube with a wire ring heated in a blowtorch flame, leaving a small opening at the top.
- Fill the shell through a funnel chilled in liquid nitrogen with the frozen strawberry powder. Seal the opening with a little soft candy and press a dried strawberry top onto it.
- Serve at once. The guest cracks the candy with a spoon, and the hot strawberry jam is poured over it at the table.
The dish in the photograph was cooked by the restaurant for this story. Photo: Oleksandr Slyadnyev.