Fruit lasagna: 1st week

03/03/2011: This is our 4th week of learning Food Innovation and Design and our 1st food experiment of our own design. Beforehand, we prepared an experiment proposal to be presented to Chef Zaid and to be used as reference and guideline for the experiment.

Introduction to the experiment:
The fruit lasagna is not exactly a lasagna, but instead it is a dessert that is themed upon the Italian dish. all of the savoury based ingredients are replaced with sweet based ingredients. For example: the lasagna noodle is replaced with bread, bolognese sauce replaced with apple pie filling and bechamel sauce replaced with custard cream. For today's experiment, we used this:


Task implementaion
Before the task
Before we started the experiment, we made sure we had all the necessary ingredients for the experiment and prepare them. Unfortunately, most of the necessary ingredients were unaccounted for and we had to reimprovise.

According to the original plan, the lasagna noodle was supposed to be replaced with bread and the avocado was supposed to be accompanied with bananas to replace the cheese but since we didn't have bread and bananas, we made do with just avocado and real lasagna noodles.

Ingredients:
For filling
Apples 4, sliced and diced
Sugar 1/4cup
Brown sugar 1/4cup
Blueberries 8
Raspberries 4

For custard
Custard powder 1/3cup
Sugar 1/3cup
Milk 1/3cup x 7

For lasanga noodle
All purpose flour
Eggs 2

Other ingredients
Avocado 1, grated

During the task
1. Two of the apples are sliced and two of the apples are diced and then each two apples are cooked in a pan with 1/4cup sugar(for diced apples) and 1/4cup brown sugar(for sliced apples) until they turn golden brown

2. To make the lasanga noodle, mix flour with 2 eggs and knead with hands until it it mixed evenly. Let it rest and then put the dough through a pasta flattening machine until it becomes nice and flat.

3. To make the custard cream, the custard powder is cooked in a pot or pan of milk with the sugar(ratio 1:7:1) over a slow fire until it looks like:



4. Here's where we MAY have goofed up a bit: Cut the lasagna noodles so that they can fit into 2 pie tins

5. Add in the fruits (the apple pie filling and the berries) into the pie tin but only filling half the height of the pie tin

6. Immerse the fruits with custard cream (but only until the cream fills half the height of the pie tin)

7. Add a second layer of lasagna noodle above the immersed fruit and repeat steps 5 and 6 on the second layer until the fruit and custard reaches the brim. Afterwards, either cover the top with another noodle or just sprinkle the top with grated avocado and then put the prospective lasagnas into the oven until the top turns brown-ish



After the task

As it turns out, while some fruits and vegetables taste better after a bit of caramellisation, avocado does not. In fact, it makes the lasagna taste......WRONG.....

In addition to that, the texture didn't hold up on a spoon and remember the part where the words goofed up were written? As it turns out, we forgot to boil the lasagna noodles before we used them.

Recommendation:

1. If we're ever going to use lasagna noodles again, we'll have to remember to boil it first.

2. Since most of the ingredients were unavailable, bring ingredients from home.

Conclusion

Well, it seems that our little experiment didn't come out according to plan but Rome wasn't built in a day. We still have other days to make up for this experiment. We just hope that we will find the right ingredients and the right methods in the near furture.