With raspberries in season, a great topping for ice cream is raspberry coulis. It’s tart and delicious and dead simple to make!
Murphys Raspberry Coulis
Ingredients:
- Small punnet (125 gm) raspberries
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 1 teaspoon fresh lime juice
What to do:
- Combine all the ingredients in a blender or food process and puree until smooth.
- Pass through a fine sieve using a rubber spatula or the back of a wooden spoon until only the seeds are left.
- Discard the seeds.
- Enjoy!
Yield: 150 ml coulis
It will last around 3 days if refrigerated, but I suggest you eat it straight away!
I could never have come to understand the first thing about cooking until I began to stew a fruit compote on a regular, daily basis. Once you add sugar, all compotes will keep in a tiny leCruset pot on the back of the stove, AND you should do this if for no other reason than to appease (read, ‘clear’) the palatte of the chef. Foodies these days know litle or nothing about the timeless practices of gastronomy. While scientifically ‘nutritional,’ dumping raw sugared-raspberries on everything is gastronomic nonsense. {BTW, My principal French Instructor, was John Snowden, head Chef of the French Army during WWII., so I feel I have the right to speak my mind about this topic!}
Start by stewing your more substantial **and expendable** fruits & nuts, (including old grapes, cranberries, apricots, figues, prunes, etc,) in a little clarified butter and grapeseed oil. At this point, you can add a splash of wine or liquor, in such a way that it sizzles. Add about 1/3 the volume of natural raw sugar, and a little molasses, and stir constantly until the crystals dissolve into a fairly consistent syrup. You can then add more (read, ‘finer’) qualtiy spirits, such as Tripple Sec, Kirsch, Remy, etc. That liquor or wine which you added initilly, deeply permeates the fruit, while establishing a secondary flavor. That liquor which you added Last, establishes the top-note, and may be virtually undetectable in the end if the cooking progresses much beyond that.
Needless to say, cooking part of the sauce in this way creates a darker, (more earthen) colour, but you now have a base-flavor (read, fruit ‘stock’) against which you can build a really lively and interesting array of sauces. If you screw up, you just repeat parts of the system day after day, and the best thing about cooking in this way is that you can instantly appease anyone who wanders into the kitchen, (often literally frightening them away from the stove,) with a spoonful of something so wonderful they can’t possibly imagine what it may have to do with the forthcoming meals… ???
Yesterday, I made an Mango coulis, with an apricot-banana undertone & a lot of organic lemon zest. While not very sweet, (due to the Triple Sec & lemon,) it was soooo perfect over a slice of Pineapple-upside down cake, with Buttered Pecan Ice-cream, that I was nearly tempted to write the recipe out.
Try scooping the ice cream into balls and dipping it in the coulis, and rolling them in chopped nuts & refreezing them for later.
Wow. Thanks for sharing!