Smooth Sauce of Red Berries
15 October 2007
I find this sauce of red berries - i.e. raspberries, strawberries,... - is a tasty and decorative garnish to many desserts such as parfait, panna cotta or just ice cream. Unless serving just uncooked fresh berries I much prefer the option of a smoothened sauce to just heated but otherwise unprocessed raspberries or strawberries, which always leave their little stones behind between your teeth.
This sauce can conveniently be prepared well in advance. I often make more than necessary and then freeze the rest in adequate portions (if there are any leftovers after all...); it is a nice thing to have at home for unexpeted guests or in case you just feel like grabbing some vanilla ice cream and topping it with hot raspberries. As the sauce is particularly nice served warm there is no need for slow defrosting; just place the whole ice block in a pan and gently heat it up.
How To Do It
| serves 4 as a dessert topping |
| 400g berries |
| 2-3 packages of vanilla sugar |
| 2 cinnamon sticks |
| 100ml port wine |
| a dash of special reserve balsamic vinegar |
| some lemon juice (depending on acidity of berries) |
Slowly cook the berries with the vanilla sugar, the whole cinnamon sticks, the wine and optionally the lemon juice. For the vanilla sugar make sure you take the one with real bourbon vanilla, not just aroma; the flavour is completely different. As I love the taste of vanilla I usually use as many packages of vanilla sugar as necessary to sweeten the berries to my taste and I do without any normal sugar. If the berries are very sweet in the first place season them with some freshly squeezed lemon juice to add some acidity. The wine is of course just optional; I quite like adding some port wine or alternatively just a dash of rum, especially in autumn and winter. If you want to give the sauce a fresher taste and do not add any wine just make sure there is enough liquid in the pan to keep the berries from burning. Add some more lemon juice or just some water if necessary.
Let the berries simmer until they virtually disintegrate; like this you will not even need to blend them. Remove the cinnamon sticks first and press the berries through a fine-mesh sieve until all the fruit has gone through and you only have the stones left. Keep in mind that depending on the type of berries the stones are smaller or lager; for example for strawberries you will need to use a very fine sieve to filter them out. Unfortunately using the blender instead of a sieve does not really help - the stones will remain.
Finally you can further refine the sauce with a bit of special reserve balsamic vinegar - if it is a really nice aged one this will give the sauce an extra twist, particularly in combination with raspberries.
