Cardamom Puffs with Pear Taffy Filling

Given the name of the blog, it seemed odd to have not posted anything involving pears. Problem solved.

This experiment was born from a confluence of two factors. First, I wanted to play more with stuff on my shelf full o' food chemistry fun. Second, I really like the tastes of pear and cardamom together. This was an attempt to do that, but as I'll note below it wasn't completely successful. More on that later. First a description of technique.

You may be wondering what a 'puff' is. The basic idea here is borrowed directly from Grant Achatz at Alinea. Take an intensely flavored liquid (in this case a cardamom syrup), blend it with Methocel-F50 (a gelling agent derived from plant cellulose and available from Dow Chemical) to form a foam, and then dehydrate the foam to form a meringue-like 'puff.'

To make these cardamom puffs, I first made a cardamom syrup with 10-15 green cardamom pods, 2 cups of water, and a cup of sugar. I let it steep for about two hours after bringing to a boil and dissolving the sugar. Then I took 210g of syrup and blended it with 5g of Methocel-F50 in the blender. I then transferred it to the stand mixer, and whipped it at high speed with the whisk for about 10 minutes. Once it resembled whipped cream or meringue, I put it in a Ziploc, and piped it onto acetate sheets sprayed with cooking spray. I then put these in the dehydrator for about 5 hours at 150 degrees F.

The idea was for the cardamom puffs to be filled with pear taffy, which meant I also needed some pear taffy. For this I turned to Achatz again, following his recipe for red pepper taffy. This involved mixing pear juice (from fresh pears via juice extractor), sugar, liquid glucose, isomalt, corn starch, and salt. These were cooked together to 235 degrees, then mixed with a bit of butter, and cooled on a Silpat.


Next I hollowed out the puffs and filled them with the taffy (see photo above).

The taffy came out nicely. It's very smooth and tastes clearly of pear. The puffs are not as good. They're sweet and sort of a cool way to present the taffy, but the cardamom flavor just isn't as strong as I'd like it to be. Not sure if I could help this with some more cardamom, more steeping, or if maybe it's just too subtle a flavor.