The Impossibility of Fruit - with a Fruit Reduction...

Back in November the Chef that I work with at Pomodoro was approached about a ten course dinner for a party of fifty on New Year's 2009. He had for the longest time been lending me culinary books and magazines in hopes that I could give him ideas, and so with the advent of this party he turned to me to see what I could come up with. In the next month we probably came up with about twenty different things - several of which were iterations of my initial suggestions when the party was first mentioned - but one idea in particular that I thought was quite interesting he shot down pretty quickly. I had suggested that we do an organized fruit plate with a fruit reduction and a touch of either whipped cream or sorbet. His response was that a fruit reduction with fresh fruit would ruin the fruit because the reduction would be too sweet, moreover the logistics involved for cutting fruit for fifty people and arranging them on the plates and getting them to the people before the fruit oxidized would be a nightmare. I let the matter rest as far as the party was concerned - but when I went home I decided to see if I couldn't come up with a combination that would work, at least on a small scale setting.

For a good combination I needed to make sure that the fruits that I used were not too sweet and to focus on making the reduction as little sweet as possible. The year previous I had made a reduction of pure pomegranate juice with a little lemon (because I thought it would need to be more tart? I was a little naive at the time). It was incredibly tart - to the point that it was all your mind could process. So this time I decided to make a reduction of Pomegranate and Apple juice with a touch of allspice and clove. This made for a deliciously caramel flavored sauce with a touch of tart to balance the sweet. The fruit that I added were Bananas (something that I have never thought of as sweet), pears (apples could be substituted as they go well with caramel), and cranberries. The cranberries were mostly for color, but the sauce didn't clash with them at any rate; the pears went well with the sauce - though they were slightly under-ripe; the bananas were where the true beauty of the combination showed - they were quite possibly the best bananas that I have ever eaten. On top of it all I added a little whipped cream with vanilla to smooth it all out. My conclusion is that one can mix fruit with a fruit reduction if great care is taken into consideration when choosing which flavors to mix. With a little creativity just about anything can be made to work.