Panna Cotta Pandemonium

Recently I had to make a plated panna cotta dessert for a cast of thousands. Ok, not thousands, but about a hundred people.

For those of you saying "panna whatta??" don't feel bad. I didn't know what it was until I went to Cookin' School. I believe it translates from the Italian as "cooked cream," to distinguish it from "ricotta," which means "recycled cream" and Ray Liotta, which means "pretty eyes." But I don't speak Italian beyond "limoncello," so I'm not sure.

I do know panna cotta is essentially heated cream, a flavor base, usually something acidic like buttermilk and also gelatin. Yes, sorry veggie friends, as scrumptious as panna cotta is (made right, it's creamy but light and seems to float on the tongue), it does involve The Hoof. Or at least collagen sucked out of dead cows and/or pigs. I want to try to create a vegan version involving rice milk and agar agar, but keep forgetting to buy the agar.

Anyway, when I worked in Vegas, we made a lotta panna cotta for banquets. We would cook up a huge vat of it and portion it into silicon molds, cool it and freeze it. Because of the gelatin in it, you typically serve panna cotta as a stand-alone component, rather than in a glass or bowl, because it usually has enough structure (imagine a slightly firmer flan and you'll get the idea).

One trick I learned in Vegas was that, to make zillions of little panna cottas easier to transport and arrange on platters, you put a little piece of joconde* on the bottom of the frozen panna cotta while it's molded, so when you flip it out right-side up, you have a little base for it already in place.

(*"oh no, first she started with the fancy Italian words and now she's using obscure French terms! Let me ess-plain: jocone is just a classic kind of cakey thing, a very thin layer of nut-based cake often used for roulades (think of a giant version of a Swiss Roll or Yodel) or other desserts calling for, well, a very thin nut-based cakey thing.)

Because the only silicon molds I have at work are the two little financier* molds I own that I brought in, I made the panna cotta in sheet pans with the idea to flip it out of the pans and then cut it.

(* crap! More French!! Calm down. Financiers are just very traditional nut-based cakey cookie things, usually made with fruit inside.)

All was well with step one, the making and molding, such as it was, of the panna cotta, as well as step two, the freezing. The joconde started out beautifully. I was using a new brand of almond flour that I thought felt really moist as I was measuring it out, but it baked so nicely that any concerns I had disappeared. For a time.

When it came time to flip the joconde upsdide down onto parchment sprinkled with sugar (so it wouldn't stick) and peel off the paper I'd baked it on, the nightmare began. The joconde was super, super moist. Even fully baked, it was not the dry spongey cake I knew. It was a wet, soppy sponge that clung to the parchment, to my fingers, to my spatula. It was everywhere, in pieces ranging from the size of a dollar bill to a single crumblet.

Mon dieux! Merde! Zut alors!*

(* Crap!!)

I had too many other things to do and no time to remake it, so I took the panna cotta sheets out of the freezer, dropped the joconde crumbs on top of them, sprayed a piece of parchment paper heavily with cooking spray, covered the joconde mess with that and then grabbed "the Persuader"* and rolled it flat using as much pressure as I dared to without hurting the panna cotta.

(* Darth Chocolate, one of my favorite chefs at school, called the french pin The Persuader, which still amuses me to this day. And a french pin is just the kind of rolling pin that looks like a plain dowel with no curved ends or handles.)

And it worked. The joconde flattened out and took to the panna cotta. All was well. Crisis averted. Here's a shot of my panna cotta army, or at least about a third of it, as they were being taken out by the servers:

And here's a closeup of one of them... I'm particularly happy with my blueberry sauce, which I made on the fly with no recipe and a determination to use neither cornstarch nor gelatin. It was a gorgeous deep, deep purple-black color that reminded me of a shade I once dyed my hair in college... "Midnight Eggplant," as I recall.