KC 241 – Buttermilk Panna Cotta

Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man slowly destroys his sanity, and the counters. I’m your Relentless Wrecking Ball, Jon O’Guin, and today’s recipe is going to be simple, elegant, and absolutely DRIPPING with dairy. For those prepared to panna some cotta (which is exactly the WRONG way to say that), here’s a link to the recipe below. Everyone else, let’s dig in.

Drink it Up

I quickly want to dispel some harsh rumors that may be swirling around, given my statements on Thursday on how my life is spiraling out of control, a chaotic maelstrom of madness with no end in sight. The falcon-eyed among you may have noticed that at the end of that post, I stated the next recipe was going to be using Beef and Peas, and yet here we are making a recipe with neither of those elements. Well, Mr Lombardi, I want to fight back against these RUMORS that we’re not making that recipe because a wave of deadlines pushed me back until I no longer had time, and had to start cooking at 9 PM on Sunday. Those claims are SLANDER.

I started cooking at TEN PM on Sunday.

That’ll show YOU, WON’T IT?!

Also, the ground beef was getting old enough that the family once again entered “I refuse to eat anything you make with that” territory. I think. I am legitimately struggling to process time right now, between the projects I’m working on, and the ever-shifting stupid fucking needs of our animals. (I apologize for the profanity: I have spent the last 2 hours being meowed at by a cat that is CERTAIN that, despite its feeding schedule being one scoop of food every three hours from 6 AM to 12 AM for 6 months, that NOW it deserves to be fed at a exponentially accelerating rate in the evenings. Why should it wait for midnight when it can scream at me for 20 minutes straight to feed it at 10:30? I have also had to deal with a chicken that refuses to take its medicine, and has been steadily moving forward its own bed time, a point it is willing to scream about if not promptly attended to. And. given my anxieties around things like ‘unforeseen medical complications” and ‘disappointing/failing loved ones”, it turns out that struggling to get animals to act according to medical necessity is low-key agonizing for me, and that has mixed with the other demands on my time as a sort of…ongoing cacophony of screaming that obliterates reason, time, and joy. You know, standard 2020 stuff.

HAIL Great Chaos, Mother and Father Being! Titan of What Is And Could Be! Let your madness bless this year with calamity!

 Luckily, all the dairy I bought on that trip (which was at LEAST 13 days ago, so…you know what, I think my family has a point on this one) was still good, so I was able to make this recipe. Maybe. We’re still in the “chill overnight” step, so maybe tomorrow I’ll learn that I completely failed. Oh, yeah, there’s a chill overnight step. It’s like, 90 percent of the recipe. WE should probably talk about it now.

A Manna, A Panna, A Planna

So, what exactly IS panna cotta? Well, it’s a dairy-based dessert whose name translates to “baked cream”. (“Cotta” is the root that biscotti comes from, as we alluded to in our British compendium post) , so technically, to take our poorly structured tagline from the intro, you cotta some panna.

It’s an Italian dish…ish? The weird thing is, while something LIKE Panna Cotta showed up in an Italian dictionary in the 1870’s, it did so identified as latte Inglesse, or “English Milk”. It’s not until the 1960s that the phrase “panna cotta” starts showing up in cookbooks. Some people believe it’s the result of an Immigrant family who moved into the Piedmont region, which is one of Italy’s most productive dairy regions, and developed the dish, while others claim it’s a classic that just wasn’t broadly discussed, due to its simplicity.

(Editor’s note: At this point, Jon gave up trying to get things done, and passed out, assuming Morning Jon would handle it. Morning Jon, it turned out, would not exist. A mixture of stress, allergies, and bodily issues over the last couple days all came together to knock his ass out for 10 hours straight. He then lurched out of bed, struggling with a stuffed nose and aching arm, panicked that the post wouldn’t get out on time…and then realized he was pushing himself this hard to…due to changing what he was cooking, and not remembering holidays…put out an Italian recipe on Columbus day. An idea that he IMMEDIATELY backed away from. After all, Jon was dunking on what a shitty dude Columbus was over a month ago. So he decided that, rather than feed his stress more to accidentally honor Columbus day, he’d take a sick day, and hope that the berserk fury that drove him to snap at the cat last night would instill it with respect for the proper order of things. A belief that surprisingly panned out: the cat ate at 9, 12, and then begged for an extra meal at 2 AM, but compared to the 90 straight minutes of crying the night before, that was vastly superior.)

And then Tuesday Jon got to deal with a power outage that consumed a peninsula.

So, Monday evening Rested Jon here. Let’s get this bad-boy wrapped up! And you might be saying “Jon, we can’t ‘wrap it up’, we haven’t even started.” To which I say: You haven’t read the recipe yet. “Basically done right after you start” is this dish’s JAM.

C.R.E.A.M

Panna Cotta is, fundamentally, a pretty simple, if somewhat strange dish. It’s basically just…dairy pudding/jell-o. It’s so simple that I studied 4 recipes from different sources for this recipe, and realized they were basically all dicking around the same idea, with JUST ENOUGH changes to call their recipe unique.

It starts with Gelatin, which most recipes bloomed, but one buiked. What does that mean? Well, Gelatin starts off as…let me rephrase that: when you get it at home, gelatin starts as a powder. That powder absorbs liquid, and forms a gel structure. Most recipes find that trying to just mix the gelatin straight into another product causes the gelatin to act funny: it clumps, doesn’t dissolve fully, generally acts a bit of prick. So most recipes soak it in water beforehand, which helps prevent this. This is called “blooming” the Gelatin, because it’s such a surprise to Australians.

To be fair, a society that has to deal with as many large and aggressive spiders as Australia WOULD find this formation initially much more surprising.

Bulking, on the other hand, is when your gelatin pounds creatine. (It actually refers to a system of mixing Gelatin thoroughly with salt and sugar, since distributing it out before adding the liquid reduces its ability to clump, since it has nothing to clump WITH. I went with blooming, because it’s a process I’ve done before, and because it’s more visually interesting.

I use the term loosely.

While the gelatin sits for 5ish minutes absorbing the water (exactly how much water to add to the 1.5 teaspoons all the recipes recommend was one of the points of variance, but “between 2 and 3 tablespoons covered almost all of the options), it’s time to get a flavor base!

See, you can’t make this entire dish with buttermilk for…several reasons, actually, including “it would be way too tangy” but there is a Chemical/physical reason you wouldn’t want to: Buttermilk curdles much easier. The acidity present in buttermilk, when exposed to heat, would cause it to separate faster. Cream, on the other hand, has a ton of butter-fat, and thus can heat much higher than other dairy products without curdling. So it forms a useful base in which to dissolve the sugar, salt, and other flavoring agents. I say “other flavoring agents”, because this is where you start to see the “riffing around the same idea” approach of the recipes: Everyone basically had about 3 cups of dairy, they just had moderately different ratios of cream vs buttermilk. Some went cream-heavy, some went more buttermilk-y. Some used lemon peel to infuse a bit more acidity and florality to the cream, while almost all of them used vanilla. While they suggest fancy options like “scraping the seeds from a vanilla bean” or vanilla paste, I’ll rely on our stand-by of…our stand-by of…where the shit is the vanilla extract? Uh oh. Did I start a recipe without one of the ingredient-oh, here it…oh.

A perfectly healthy look liquid, right?

That’s not good. That’s…REALLY BAD. It is 10:30 at night, I do not have time to go to the store and get a bottle of vanilla. This would cool down, and I’d have to start over, and-oh, we had a second whole bottle.

If this were a frame from a horror movie, there would be something frightening/ominous in the stairwell on the right.

Why the hell didn’t we just throw the gross one away, then? That’s much less terrifying.

So, vanilla-based panic placated, you mix cream (I used 1.5 cups, going for a ½ cream, ½ buttemlik balance), ½ cup of sugar. One recipe calls for 7 tablespoons of sugar. Which is…1/2 cup minus 1 tablespoon. So again, this is the kind of precise fiddling you see a lot of the recipes do. And I’m not saying it’s all for show! I’m sure that missing tablespoon DOES change the flavor of the final dish. I’m just noting that we very clearly have a baseline we are working around

Once the cream is heated up to about 140 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s time to add the gelatin, which you were definitely supposed to have stirred at some point.

It will look like you made a mistake .

Drop the glop in, and stir to dissolve. After 30-seconds to a minute, take the pot off the heat: we only want the heat to help the gelatin dissolve: the next step is waiting for this to cool down. I took the time to spray my ramekins. Ramekins, in case I never explained that before, are those little dishes you get like, Crème Brulee in. Little glass pyrex or plastic Tupperware dishes also do the job. You can use six ¾ cup ramekins, or four1-cup ones, since you’ll have a little more than 3 cups of liquid in the end. I went with fewer, larger ramekins, because I could not find smaller ones. You want to spray/grease them, or the panna cotta will REALLY stick to them once it’s cooled. Even greased, you will likely need to run a knife around the edges, or heat up the bottom of the dish to get the panna cotta out.

Now, at this point, you strain the cream mixture into a large measuring cup, or a bowl with a spout. This will hopefully catch any gelatin clumps, or the lemon peel if you used it. Mine was spotless, because even in a panic, I am perfect.

My cream stream looks like a wizard.
…I didn’t realize how bad that sounded until I wrote it.
I DID know that it also looks kind of like a Klansman, for a second version of “wizard”

Then you add the buttermilk, and stir to combine. Once mixed together, pour into the ramekins, and refrigerate for at least 4 hours, but larger ramekins will take longer, and you can keep them in there for a day or two, if you want to make the recipe ahead. The one thing you’ll want to do is cover them with plastic wrap. It doesn’t have to be pressed down, you’re not worried about a “skin” forming, you’re worried about particulate: uncovered liquids absorb a LOT of stuff from the air.  You may have seen people suggesting you just leave bowls/tubs of water in front of fans to absorb the smoke a couple months back. The same thing can happen in your fridge, except replace “smoke” with “that weird smell because you didn’t throw away the 2-week-old beef yet”. Uncovered dairy products will absorb smells, affecting their flavor.

The next day, it’s time to pop out and eat these suckers.

Shown here partially eaten, for as much temporal confusion as possible.

And they are…surprisingly good. Flavor-wise, they’re like a vanilla frozen yogurt: sweet, lightly tangy, with a nice backbone of vanilla. Texture-wise…they’re like nothing I can really think of. They wobble, like Jell-o, and have just enough structural resilience than you can rest a spoon on top of them, but the bottom/edges also go a little gooey, almost like a vanilla pudding. It’s very light, and if anything, I think their main problem is a lack of variety. They really want to be served with like, macerated berries, or a drizzle of honey or something. Just something to give a textural/flavor contrast. On their own, they’re too...ethereal and plain. Like…imagine a single high note HELD on a pipe organ. It sounds fine, but after a second or two…it needs to change. So these are pretty good low-effort desserts that just need a little something to perk them up.

THURSDAY: WE GAB ABOUT GOOP. GELATIN, AGAR, WHATEVER. GOOP. FOR GOOPING. NO GWENYTH INVITED.

MONDAY: I SWEAR, IF IT’S NOT THE INDIAN BEEF AND PEA DISH, I AM GOING TO HAVE A COMPLETE BREAKDOWN.

And now it's time for the

Recipe

Buttermilk Panna Cotta

Makes 4-6 panna cotta, depending on ramekin size

Ingredients

2 tablespoons cold water

1.5 teaspoons powdered gelatin

1.5 cups heavy or whipping cream

½ cup sugar

2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon salt

1.5 cups buttermilk

Ramekins and cooking spray for chilling.

Preparation

1. Sprinkle the gelatin over the cold water in a small dish. Set aside to absorb, about 5 minutes. Stir once after a few minutes. Grease the ramekins

2. In a small or medium saucepan, over medium heat, combine the cream, sugar, salt, and vanilla. Whisk until the sugar dissolves; continue heating, stirring often. Do not boil the cream, but heat until bubbles start to break the surface, or, if using a thermometer, the cream reaches roughly 140 degrees.

3. Add the gelatin to the cream, and whisk until gelatin has dissolved. Allow to cool to lukewarm temperatures, stirring occasionally to prevent setting. Strain if you’re concerned about clumps, and combine with the buttermilk, stirring to combine. Pour into greased ramekins. Cover, and refrigerate at least 4 hours, up to 2 days.

4. Remove from the fridge, and serve, either in the ramekin, or by loosening the panna cotta with a knife run along the edges, and inverting onto a saucer. Serve immediately, topped as desired.